ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews a number of perplexed or pessimistic accounts of the stalling of modem, progressive time. Carol Greenhouse has shown how, at the very beginning of the process whereby the secular, instrumentalised time of law and the State erupts into the recurrent time of archaic or theocratic society, there is also a powerful sharing of purpose and form between the two temporalities. David Harvey provides ample evidence of the operationalisation of the principles of speed in the contemporary economic world, organised as it is around the attempts both to stimulate and to master change. Modern temporality, it is often suggested, begins with the replacement, during the late medieval period in Europe, of the cyclical, recurrent or sacred time of religion, with a form of linear, progressive and secular time centred not on God but on the State. Real-time live broadcasting ought to provide precisely the conditions for the folding or plaiting together of different dates and calendars.
