ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the significance of time as a dimension of argumentation in medical law. It proceeds from an understanding of time as social, plural and rhetorical. Like space, time is social in that it is not an everpresent, neutral medium within which events simply take place (Gurvitch 1964). Rather it is actively produced by various social practices, similar to the creation of space discussed in Chapter 3. Most famously perhaps, the spread of the railways in the nineteenth century led to a uniform official time in European states (Eriksen 2001: 43). Time is plural in that these practices are specific to different contexts, locations and activities (Sorokin and Merton 1937). The economy, the nation state and individual consciousness are all marked by diverse temporalities.1 Time is rhetorical since the ‘production’ just mentioned is in fact a strategic process of persuasion, i.e. that a specific time frame should govern in a specific context. The success of a given temporality is substantially due to its plausible representation, whether visually (e.g. the clock) or verbally (e.g. the origin story of the nation) (Bridgeman 2007; Bell 1995). Time is, thus, both a resource and a stake in social struggles of all kinds (Baynham 2003: 351). As Ost puts it, decisive power rests with those who are in a position to impose their construction of time on other social groupings (1999: 22). For instance, the temporal nature of much industrial conflict is obvious. Disputes over the length of the working day or flexible work practices come to mind (Thompson 1967). Domains such as health care are also sites of ‘intertemporal struggle’ (Hope 2009: 75). The creation of the NHS, for example, can be seen as an attempt to suppress the rapid and erratic temporality of the market place in order to secure the basic health needs of the population.2 As we saw in Chapter 1, scarcity of health care resources was to be managed instead through the waiting list, a spatio-temporal form which itself gained a certain plausibility from its association with queuing during the Second World War (Moran 2005; Syrett 2007: 47-48).
