ABSTRACT
Chronotypes is a book of its time: it exemplifies the postmodern crisis of representation. No longer the mere framework within which social life is enacted, time is recognized as a productive medium that operates and regenerates time in interaction. It is concerned with the reformation of temporality and takes narrative as its central focus of attention. Previously taken-for-granted processes are brought into high relief with the aim to expose their constitutive character. The editors locate their collection in the contemporary turn towards reflexivity and identify with both post-modern concerns and the position that argues for an intensification rather than a transcendence of modernity. The comparatively recent emergence of time as a central theme of research is no accident,’ they write in their introduction (p. 2), ‘but rather a consequential extension of the postmodern turn: our present does not leave modernity behind, but rather aggravates its difficulties, intensifies its concerns.’ This ambiguity of position is reflected throughout the rather variable contributions to this publication of conference proceedings. A postmodern turn towards a reformation of temporality is emerging from a wide range of sources spanning the arts, the humanities, the sciences and feminist approaches within them.1 It involves a complex and far-reaching redefinition of time: a shift from understanding time as an external, objective framework within which life is enacted and a quantity to be measured, allocated, sold and controlled, to something local, something that is integral to the framework of observation, constitutive of the resultant meaning and generated in interaction. Postmodern temporality arises from these texts as coextensive with the event and as a dimension constitutive of particular events. There is widespread agreement that this reformation of temporality, therefore, cannot simply be added to existing approaches but rather changes theory and practice in significant ways:
Firstly, activity can no longer be referred to in unchanging, timeless terms. This applies to both the investigation and the subject matter of the investigation.
