Time-space and ethics work
Helen Colley
Manchester Metropolitan University
Education and Social Research Institute
Seddon, Henriksson & Niemeyer
Learning and work and the politics of working life,
Routledge 2010:
• Re-ordering of work in human service
occupations inc. education…
• …leads to occupational boundary work
• ‘Occupation’ vs. ‘profession’
• Gramsci’s notion of ‘passive revolution’
• But focus on space/place
• What about time?
Time, space and ethics
My four key premises:
1.Space-time / time-space
2.Time(-space)  ethics
3.Sociological vs. philosophical perspective
4.Accounting for patriarchal, racist capitalism
Outline of presentation
• Philosophical views of time + ethics
• Dialectical materialist view of time-space +
ethics – David Harvey
• How contemporary time-space re-orders
ethics of education work
• Examples of the boundary work this
generates – youth support work
• Questions about socially transformative
change
Thinking about time and ethics
• Taken-for-granted:
– background ‘flow’
– learn from past, form goals in present, pursue
them for future
– teleological analysis of identity and agency
• Exemplified in ESRC Teaching & Learning
Research Programme (esp. Learning Lives)
• Deeply problematic assumptions about
intentionality and agency (Bourdieu)
Thinking about time and ethics
Heidegger:
• Being-in-Time, Being-unto-Death
• the present as inauthentic
• spatiality/materiality/sociality as corrupting
• solipsistic orientation to ultimate future
(death) as autonomous, asocial ethic
• masculinist heroic mastery (Chanter, 2001)
Thinking about time and ethics
Levinas vs. Heidegger:
• time entails social interaction with Others
• metaphysics of presence, materiality, desire
• ethics of social solidarity
• elevation of feminine care as ethical ideal
• but fails to recognise historical oppression of
women – remains patriarchal
• generalised, abstract ‘Other’ erases material
experiences of inequality (Sikka 2001, Hewitt
1997)
Thinking about time and ethics
Massey:
• Cf. Foucault – vs. notions of space as
fixed/dead and time as dynamic
• change  mobilisation of both time and space
• relational view of space-time
• space-time produces/is produced by difference
• ethical/political stance views difference as
source of progressive social change
• but neglects capitalism (Castree, 2009)
What about the timesspaces in which we live?
- capitalist economic crisis
- austerity
- intensifying inequalities
- difference as source of wealth
The tyranny of capital’s time
Time is everything, man is nothing, he is
at most time’s carcase. Quality no
longer matters. Quantity decides
everything; hour for hour; day for day.
(Marx, cited in Mészáros, 2008)
Time-space in capitalism
• David Harvey and others…
• Time in three registers
– Historical time
– Abstract clock time
– Concrete process time
• Space in two registers
– ‘Production’ space (commodities)
– ‘Living’ space (social reproduction)
• All time-space is constituted through
praxis, not external to praxis
Abstract time
Abstract time seeks to annihilate historical time:
“For [capitalists], time can have only one dimension: that of the
eternal present. The past for them is nothing more than the
backward projection and blind justification of the established
present, and the future is only the self-contradictorily timeless
extension of the – no matter how destructive and thereby also
self-destructive – ‘natural order’ of the here and now,
encapsulated in the constantly repeated mindless dictum
according to which ‘there is no alternative’. Perversely, that is
supposed to sum up the future.”
(Mészáros, 2008: 21)
Abstract time v. concrete time
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Clock time
Measures labour
Qualitatively homogenous
Indifferent to material content
Imposed on experience
Focus on exchange-values
Driven by profit
Production space
Masculinist
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Process time
Measured by labour
Qualitatively variable
Defined by material content
Lived through experience
Focus on use-values
Driven by needs
Social reproduction space
Feminised
Time-space is gendered in patriarchal capitalism
Concrete time-space
• Cf. Levinas’ stereotype of feminine nurture
• Not ‘outside’ capitalist social relations
• Capitalism constitutes time-space as a means
of constituting itself – our social universe
• Concrete time-space always exists in
dialectical relationship to historical and
abstract time-space
• Time-space-ethics nexus of human service/
education work
Human service work
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Won by struggle: the ‘social wage’ – precarious
Gendered space – feminised
Concrete time has inherent ethical dimension
Work remains within capitalist social relations
Tension between concrete and abstract time
…especially in times of economic cutbacks
…when use-value (i.e. ethics) is re-ordered
from care to control
Time-space-ethics of education/human services
Circulation of value
(Spatial and temporal mobilisation)
Capital investment
Taxes/state debt
Commodity production
(Production space,
abstract time)
Reproduction of labour power
Social expenditure
(Living space, process time)
Exchange-value
Consumption
Use-value/ethics
Care
Control
Ethics work in time-space
• Ethics of occupational roles
• Partly  professions/practitioners
• But also  policy-makers & institutions who
pre-construct occupational roles
• Managerialist audit culture re-orders work, reconfigures roles
• …and thereby re-orders time-space-ethics
• …generating ‘ethics work’
Career guidance:
a de-boundaried teaching occupation
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Moved into new Connexions service in 2001
From specialist to generic infrastructure
From specialist to generic occupational role
From universal to targeted service (NEET)
Severely under-resourced from the start
Chaotic re-structuring in 2008
Severely hit by current austerity drive
Historical time-space
• Declining rate of profit since 1960s
• Welfare-to-work policies
• Collapse of fictitious capital in 2008, growth of
state debt
• Austerity drive impacts more sharply on ‘living
space’
• Exclusion of young people least able to
participate in production/consumption
Abstract-concrete time tensions
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High caseloads affect quality of work
Working the boundaries of ethical practice
Doing ‘ethics work’
Who to help?
How to help them?
Choosing the lesser evil – creative
accounting
Re-ordering ethics:
from care to control
• Few or no resources to resolve social,
economic and educational problems
• Main resources = for tracking & surveillance
• Deeply alienating – ‘working for the Gestapo’
• Conflicts with managers
• Ethical dilemmas, emotional stress
• Crossing boundary out of Connexions – by
choice or otherwise
A ‘politics of we’?
• Risk of isolated, conservative resistance, but
also…
• Solidarity with learners – trying to do ‘the right
thing’
• Solidarity with co-workers – supporting each
other
• Making time/ stretching time/ finding spaces
‘out of the gaze’
• Linking with wider, more radical networks
• Time-space-ethics as a nexus for struggle
Key questions
• Analyses of time-space-ethics – Massey and
Harvey (Castree, 2009):
• How to recognise capitalism’s time-space
regime?
• How does capitalism try to subsume timespaces of resistance?
• How can we retain the ethical integrity of
resistant times-spaces?
• How can they be put to work to generate
positive social change?
Helen Colley
h.colley@mmu.ac.uk