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Unbinding Temporalities ｜ 解綁時間性
During the 1920s, the Bergson-Einstein debate regarding philosophical versus scientific knowledge of time marked a significant crossroads in the epistemological trajectory of time. Bergson’s philosophical approach to time, termed "duration," emphasizes its fluid, internal, and metaphysical features. To Bergson, the linear and spatialized "clock time" could not capture essential temporal experiences, such as memory, premonition, and anticipation (Canales 2015). In contrast, Einstein, through his groundbreaking theory of relativity, established the authority of science by viewing time as secular, measurable, and objective, and by contending that the perceived flow of time is a psychological phenomenon.
In the following century, shifting patterns in politics, economy, technology, and social relations have led to unprecedentedly deep understandings of both human and non-human time. Moving beyond the Bergson-Einstein debate, scholars have adopted variegated approaches to explore contemporary temporalities. A growing dissatisfaction with teleological, linear, and singular forms of temporality is now shared across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The timeframe bound to a hegemonic Western history becomes anachronistic.
Foundational sociological works treat time as socially constructed and represented (Durkheim 1961, Bourdieu 1963). Marxist critiques examine timed labor, time discipline, and "time-space compression" in the development of capitalism (Thompson 1967, Ong 1987, Harvey 1989, Ingold 1995). Postcolonial scholars investigate the violence inherent in the norms of Western and settler time (Chakrabarty 1997, Rifkin 2017). Anthropologists propose the term “chronocracy” to illustrate the temporal manipulation in the governing structure (Kirtsoglou and Simpson 2020), while geographers extend multiple spatiotemporal dimensions in the world through concepts such as "timescape" and "future geographies" (May & Thrift 2001, Anderson 2010). As Laura Bear (2016) notes, the rise of the "temporal turn" is not merely a result of intellectual debate; it resonates with an increasing sense of uncertainty and insecurity in modern life, where one frequently experiences conflicts in time. By elaborating on human and non-human engagements with time, extensive scholarship has worked on: the affect in/with time (optimism, expectation, aspiration, and the “not-yet”), the labor in/of time (waiting, speculation, planning, and projectization), the pacing of time (acceleration, slowness, delay, and pause), and the economy of time (debt, credit, and the “real time” and “just-in-time” production).
Alongside these developments, recent scholarship has foregrounded the entanglement of temporality with affect and queerness. Affect theory, for instance, has challenged the assumption that time is experienced only through conscious cognition, emphasizing instead its preconscious and embodied dimensions (Massumi 2002). Queer theory has similarly critiqued normative temporalities organized around reproduction, linearity, and progress. From Heather Love’s (2007) notion of “backward feelings,” which reorients attention toward the lingering injuries of the past, to the refusal of reproductive futurism (Edelman 2004) and the reclaiming of the future through a call for “queer utopia” (Munoz 2009), queer temporalities disrupt the alignment between time and teleological development.
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