Time as a Real Abstraction

Abstract

This chapter is the first in Part II that begins to make the case that refiguring politics, or new political thinking, requires alternative thinking about time and history. I suggest that we treat time as a real abstraction, social fact, and historical force. In the first half, I propose that there is a dialectic between social formations and temporal frameworks. I specifically look at the normalization of clock time in the modern period—how capitalism presupposes and produces abstract clock time. But I also look at the emergence, under the same conditions of untimely (anachronistic and nonsynchronous) phenomena, experiences, and practices that political thinkers must take seriously and which realist epistemologies cannot grasp.