In the opening lines of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics Sarah Sharma jokes that her book took so long to write that it could be considered the first in the “slow book movement series” (page ix). It’s tempting to counter this with a speed-related joke about my own process of reading and reviewing In the Meantime, which took place almost exclusively on trains, buses and the London underground, as I tried to maximise my time in a busy month. But drawing binary oppositions between the fast and the slow is emphatically not the aim of In the Meantime. Looking for a more nuanced politicization of temporality, Sharma moves away from speed theorists who characterise modern life around fast/slow or time rich/time poor binaries (page 6). Instead, In the Meantime addresses “the micropolitics of temporal coordination”, calling for attention to the subtleties of how power is maintained and enforced through temporal structures.

In the book’s introduction, Sharma convincingly argues that focusing on the speed of modern life disguises the complexity of lived time (page 6). Critiquing proponents of speed theory, such as Paul Virilio, Zygmunt Bauman and Marshall McLuhan, she suggests that the speeding up imaginary needs to be critiqued in itself as “part of the problematic cultural context in which people understand and experience time” (page 8). As well as destabilizing fixations on speed, Sharma’s introduction problematizes alignments of the political with the spatial, as she argues that while space has been very well politicised, the same attention is needed to temporality. Sharma proposes Doreen Massey’s “power geometry” as a good model to take up in moving from geopolitics to “chronopolitics”. For her, power geometry is exemplary for its success in destabilizing masculine discourses of time-space compression and metanarratives of postmodernity in order to reveal experiences of time-space as differentiated rather than universal.

In developing her conception of temporality, Sharma notes the importance of time geographers including Torsten Hagerstrand, Allen Pred and Nigel Thrift and celebrates Mike Crang’s work on rhythm and the choreography of bodies. However, she states that In the Meantime, while indebted to time geography, ultimately “seeks to move beyond the spatiality of paths, itineraries and routes, and how bodies are orchestrated in space in order to delve further into distinctive temporal forms of power” (page 11). In doing this, Sharma focuses on the synchronicity of temporalities which constitute material relations. She asks questions such as:

“Whose time is spent in order to maintain the mobility and recalibration of others?”, or “How are bodies differently valued temporally, and what temporal processes are employed to make people productive for capital?”

Methodologically, Sharma draws on interviews conducted with people “whose labor is explicitly oriented toward negotiating time and the time of others” (page 15) and the book’s four chapters work through four groups of temporal labourers: business travellers, taxi drivers, yoga instructors, and advocates of slow living.

Entitled “Jet-Lag Luxury: The Architecture of Time Maintenance”, Chapter One considers how the temporality of the business traveller “unfolds within an elaborate infrastructure dedicated to his or her time maintenance” (pages 19-20). The chapter introduces the idea of temporal architectures, which I think is invaluable throughout the book in making tangible the politics of producing and maintaining time. Sharma describes how temporal architectures are composed of elements which include the built environment, commodities, services, technologies and the labour of others. The role of temporal architectures is to manage and enhance the time of privileged groups whose temporalities are particularly valued (page 139). In this chapter, Sharma describes how boutique hotels help business travellers to stay comfortable, bras designed for frequent flyers prevent professional women being held up by metal detectors, and high intensity lamps are installed in showers to wake up tired bodies on their way to conferences and conventions. These temporal architectures make business travel bearable, reducing its detrimental impacts on the bodies of valued workers. But, importantly, business travellers are oblivious to those whose labour maintains the very temporal architectures they depend on.

The next chapter, “Temporal Labor and the Taxicab: Maintaining the Time of Others”, Sharma develops the concept of temporal interdependence. Discussing interviews conducted with taxi drivers, she shows that they are expected to use their time to accommodate and enable the temporalities of others; working late in order to pick up returning business travellers or “making time” for people rushing to catch flights. However, unlike the temporal architectures created to support business travellers, taxi drivers have no such luxuries. Rather, “There is an expectation that certain bodies recalibrate to the time of others as a significant condition of their labor” (page 20). Far from specially designed bras and in shower lighting, taxi drivers forgo drinking during work because of the cost of parking to use the toilet, or guiltily bring their young children out on the night shift. Read against Chapter One, this section insightfully sets up the politics of temporal interdependence, revealing the unequal valuation but tight interrelation of people’s time within capitalist labour systems.

Chapter Three, “Darhma at the Desk: Recalibrating the Sedentary Worker” looks at how yoga instructors, who often claim to have escaped from capitalist time-space, ironically reinforce the entrapment of office workers within the temporal order of 9-5 labour. The empirical arguments of this chapter are perhaps less tangible, especially considering the absent voices of the office workers themselves, but the Marxist foundations and implications of Sharma’s approach to temporality emerge clearly across this section. The chapter explains how yoga gives workers an experience of “living in the moment” which actually acts as a form of social control. Neatly fitted into a one hour lunch break, work place yoga insists that feelings of temporal entrapment at work should be solved from within the work time-space itself. In soothing dejected desk workers, yoga reduces the feelings of dissatisfaction that might eventually lead to rebellion. Although few of Sharma’s yoga instructors would frame it this way, Sharma argues that “viewed through the lens of power-chronography, yoga, when practiced in the office, actually bends and bonds individuals to better fit within the various temporal requirements of late capitalism” (page 21).

The fourth and final chapter of In the Meantime, “Slow Space: Another Pace and Time”, addresses slow living movements and their increasing popularity. Here, Sharma argues that advocates of slow living are misguided in thinking that the problems of temporal speed up can be addressed by the creation of slow spaces. She proposes that those spaces actually depend “on the inequitable social relations of the fast and divisive world they rail against” (page 21). Sharma is particularly critical of the slow food movement which she argues has unthinkingly conflated slowness with the local and the ethical. What’s more, the slow food movement is naïvely inattentive to the temporal politics behind the lifestyle it praises. Advocates of slow food celebrate processes like hand squeezing oranges to make juice, driving long distances to source organic vegetables and eating exotic foods produced by ‘local’ communities in the Global South. But their fixation on slowing down the temporalities of middle class consumers ignores the politics of the consumption practices they advocate, masking, for example, the labor conditions of the ‘local communities’ which make their food or the global problems caused by longer drives to source produce. Although Sharma’s critique of the slow food movement is convincing, the opposition she draws here between temporal problems and spatial solutions remains quite nebulous and, for me, needs more careful development in this chapter.

The conclusion to In the Meantime summarises the ideas developed across the four chapters, but also introduces a new argument, asserting that “we need a radical politics of time and space that hinges upon temporalizing the spatial categories of democracy” (page 142). Sharma describes the temporalities of two civic spaces, a public library and a subway car in order to illustrate her concluding points, i.e.  that the concept of a temporal public requires seeing all social spaces as being in transit and that politicizing how we inhabit time can help to reimagine time as a “collective struggle” (page 142). Although these are hypothetically compelling arguments, there is not enough space to explore them in this thirteen-page conclusion. In particular, the idea of democracy is very hastily introduced without any real sense of what the term means here. More importantly, with little reference back to the proceeding chapters, Sharma’s concluding points feel somewhat disconnected and might have been better worked through in relation to the rich empirical material that her chapters presented rather than with reference to new case studies.

For me, the excitement of In the Meantime lies in the promise of the conceptual tools used to analyse the different politics of temporality. However, some of these tools are more helpfully laid out than others. For example, the idea of temporal architectures is clearly unpacked in a way which will allow readers to take up the concept in their own work. On the other hand, Sharma’s point about how the temporal is wrongly addressed through the spatial and it remains too vague to take up elsewhere. Another imbalance within the book is that Sharma unpicks certain conflations, such as the slow with the ethical and the fast with the capitalist, but ignores other assumptions, such as the link between technology and speed up. The balance between empirics and theory is also a little off for me. Some of the empirical sections feel repetitive while the book’s theoretical conclusions need more space to develop. There is also a lack of engagement with some notable theorists of time-space. For example, Sharma overlooks Deleuze despite the fact that Deleuze’s ontology sees time-space as composed of multiple interlinked spatiotemporal trajectories (DeLanda, 2002), a thesis which resonates with Sharma’s idea that interdependent temporalities constitute material relations. Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythmanalysis is strangely absent too, although its relevance to In the Meantime is obvious (Lefebvre, 2004).

Despite the slight disappointment of its conclusion, In the Meantime is a stimulating and original book that makes genuine progress towards understanding time and its politics in differentiated rather than universal ways. The book is easy and pleasurable to read while politically forceful and intellectually astute. It develops concepts which help to explore how power structures and struggles play out on the level of the temporal, and, for this, is a valuable text for geographers, cultural theorists, media theorists and many others concerned with time and its politics. 

References

DeLanda M (2002) Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Lefebvre H (2004) Rhythamanalysis: Space, Time and Everday Life. London and New York: Continuum.