ABSTRACT
There is a difference between the traveler who must check their baggage and the one who carries it on. The latter is always assumed to be traveling light, everything on their person ready at hand. These days traveling light is synonymous with traveling smart, but there is no real way to travel light when you are writing about time, let alone time and globalization. Writing about time and globalization is laden and heavy, but also distracting, and with a lot of disciplinary baggage. I know this from firsthand experience. My own work on time and globalization is concerned with the cultural
fixation on the speed of life and how the experience of speeding up is too often imagined as if it were a universal and global human experience. Beyond the popular imaginary, many critical treatments of globalization quite often lament the loss of time or time-orientation as a byproduct of accelerated processes of global capital. I have argued that this overwhelming focus on tempo has obscured the multitude of time-based experiences and the multiple temporalities that actually do compose the social fabric (see Sharma, 2014). Instead of an individualistic and universalizing treatment of time, I argue for a political sense of time understood as always already relational and in this way necessarily collective. Yet, my ability to conjure and outline further the contours and possibilities
of this political sense of time is quite often stymied, impeded by at least two pieces of oversized “baggage.” On the one hand, I am usually greeted by questions related to an individual’s own personal time management anxieties, their ability to manage, balance, or find more time. On the other, it is quite common to be asked to engage publicly in what others have said about time in every field, from physics to philosophy to philology. When I speak of time in academic settings I am simultaneously greeted with “do you mean Bergson’s duration, do you cite Kant, or do you mean Heidegger?” This is then quickly followed by a FitBit-adorned wrist shooting up into the air to ask, “what do you think of productivity apps?” While both sets of questions are great for conversation, they delimit thinking about the cultural politics of time. One line of questioning is completely individualistic and the other somewhat abstracted from everyday life. Neither line of inquiry can account for the differential and inequitable social experience of time.
