ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the time of reading as an ethnographic practice in circumstances of social crisis as an illustration of a wider methodical reflection that asks how philosophy and social theory can help us to engage the everyday moral realities of living, working, loving and dying in new capitalism. The chapter introduces sociology as an art of living through the ethnographic lens of time. It seeks to validate emotions and feelings as sources of knowledge. One consequence of this orientation is a different way of writing and staying with experiences, emotions and ideas to listen to what they have to say to us. Just as attention to the time of reading allows us to relate to senses of existing in time that resist being fitted into functionalist paradigms of social relations, so the act of reading this chapter may seem ill-fitted to functionalist epistemic paradigms as it requires a more meditative, slow-thinking attitude. Meanings may emerge, and the reader may be unsure as to how what emerges can be slotted into other modes of knowing or analysing. An irreducible particularity of temporal existence becomes visible in this way; one with which we can enter into communication, from our individual and collective particular positions, but which may resist universalisation beyond the individual encounter.
