ABSTRACT
The traditional dominance of time over space has been contested by postmodern writers. Writers like Jameson have expressed an on-going concern about temporality through the theme of a mediatised culture which erases historicity. Osborne has focused on the configurations of temporality and the need to see these as both related to experience and as an independent register of historical development. This chapter examines a media-oriented culture which has manipulative and distortional effects in contemporary capitalist societies in the light of a practice-oriented view which distinguishes the context of utterance and reading, the sense of the communication from the conventions or codes through which it is expressed. A politics of time is exigent, a contestation of the cultural tropes of closure is required which persuades people of 'The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise'.
