Is Time Really Plural?

Excerpt from Nitin Sinha's Against the Fetishisation of Plural Time: Rethinking Ways of Doing a Social History of Time.

Echoing the same type of concerns, other scholars have tried to find a way to reconcile two divergent strands of time studies: one of standardisation and another of differentiation. In all these approaches, however, one thing which is common is that the plurality of time is an unquestioned article of faith. There is a genuine conundrum here. Most of the scholars do concur that between the fourteenth and the nineteenth century, the nature of time fundamentally changed at various levels. It changed in the system of notation and measurement, it changed in its spatial expansion and uniformity, it changed in ways it was divided and narrated, and not least, it changed in how it was felt and remembered. All these changes point to a larger context of time becoming abstract. But at the same time, there are various cultures where multiple notations co-exist, and various social factors such as gender and caste abound that render experiential time multiple, and not least, various ways of relating to the past and the future are practised. The history of production of abstraction and the engendering of plural time coexists. 

Nitin Sinha,
Against the Fetishisation of Plural Time: Rethinking Ways of Doing a Social History of Time,
De Gruyter Brill, 2025.

It appears that while arguing for the case of pluritemporal modern time(s), historians have confounded two things: one is the various individual, cultural and social meanings ascribed to time, and two, time’s own feature, which, according to their views, is plural by its very constitution. This leads us to raise a few questions: does a particular system of time-notation coming into conflict with other systems render time itself plural? Is the difference in the technique of time measurement (which potentially can also occur when the same device is used) equivalent to saying time is plural? To what extent is the subjective felt experience of time and, through that, the fact of inhabiting different strands of time-sensibilities a pointer of time itself being a plural entity? Can it be argued that individuals and groups blurring the trajectory of the passage of time through memory to the extent that figuratively speaking people live simultaneously in the past, the present, and the future, reveal their relationship with time rather than time revealing its own peculiarities? Multiplicity and plurality are constituted in the field of social relations (including with non-humans). The latter, to me, is the object of historical research. 

The history of conflict among systems of time-notation and the messy imposition of one system upon others does not necessarily mean that time is plural. It indeed was measured and lived differently in different societies and continues to be done so even in our times. What this multiplicity does point to is the unevenness of power. It invites historical investigation to mechanisms through which one system prevailed upon the other. Exploration of power brings us directly into the domain of the social, which is where the practice-based historicisation of time belongs.

… historians studying the modern period have taken an easy recourse to champion plurality either through the history of imposition, conflict, and resistance to a particular system of time-notation or by privileging the deep subjective position in which, quite rightly, a person thinks and lives in multiple times. Both, the instruments that are utilised for measuring and ordering time and the regimes in which time gets slotted, are used to argue for plurality. This has led to some awkward historiographical slippages and inconsistencies. The questions of nature and seasonality, for instance, which are extremely significant for understanding time and temporal conceptualisations of the premodern period, are seldom addressed when thinking of the plurality of modern time. Going through time’s historiography on the issues of transition and synchronicity through the early modern to the modern period suddenly presents a rupturous node. It is akin to watching a game while realising that mid-way the rules have been changed. For talking about plurality, different yardsticks are adopted for each of these periods. Arguably, if the premodern period was marked by plurality because of the intermeshed sense of time derived from nature, season, tasks, clocks (or any other time-measuring device), and calendars in which the measuring device such as the last two were themselves dependent on nature, then the plurality of modern time does not require looking at these aspects but mainly at the unevenness of the global transformation around a cluster of technologies, the subjective perception of the passage of time, and historicity and its regimes. When talking of plural modern times, why are there so few histories of season and seasonality?

The romance with plurality is also partly political in nature. Fasolt rightly reminds us of scholarship itself being a political activity. For a long time, it was believed (and is still so) that modernity has straightened time, hence the premodern period must appear to us plural. Further, when the Eurocentric basis behind the logic of the straightened time began to be questioned, the global convergence was unpacked to reinsert plurality into time. So goes the argument: yes, there was western hegemony and imposition, but it was neither absolute nor entirely subsuming of other practices. These other practices resisted and forced the unitary European model to adapt itself. Global forces gave birth to local conditions but the local also forced the global to retreat and re-form. Hence, we see plurality.

The problem is that plurality is not only a recourse of the resistant and the marginal but has also remained a point of justification for the powerful in the past. In other words, power also creates or at least discursively organises time in plural ways. How are we then to account for such plural temporal pasts? Colonial history is replete with such examples. Colonialists argued that Indians lived in a different temporal order, shaped by slowness and superstition, which is why the full-fledged ‘western civility’ of law or technology was not suitable for them. On what basis can we call their use of pluritemporality (advanced West vs. timeless Orient) fake and ridden with power and ours (as a framework to write about that past) as loaded with the possibility of a radical re-reading of the past? They argued that natives were a slumbering lot before the whistle of the railways awakened or forced them to value time. We surely cannot take this plural temporal representation undergirded by political and cultural power of imperialism at its face value. Colonisers lived in the temporality of acceleration; the colonised were wrapped in the oasis of stasis. The colonised were consigned to the waiting room of history precisely because the colonisers found time and its plurality to be a significant order of justification. It is evident that colonial plurality was designed to perpetuate hierarchies whereas the new scholarly plurality is for radical equality. However, the latter also, in a discomforting manner, propagates the idea of discrete, autonomous, and fragmented units or formations of temporality, which potentially relativises and automizes time. Allegedly, two cultures, two societies lived or live in two times. Is it actually the case though? Besides raising the point that the colonisers and the colonised were not homogenous categories, questioning this dimension of plural time allows us to argue that plurality itself could be the product of encounters, engagements, and adaptations taking place within a single socio-political fabric of time. 

Let us return to Hartog’s concrete example of multiple presentisms. Of many he says, two definitely exists. One, is of the chosen one, that is, of those who are the ‘winners of globalisation’, who are connected, mobile, and agile; and two, of the suffering ones, best characterised in the figure of the migrant who ‘is locked in the endless present of migration’. In their self-perception, the winners and the losers may feel they are inhabiting two presentisms but are these worlds really disjointed? For Hartog, even if they share one present they live in two times: ‘When contemporaries share the same present while simultaneously being in another time, the gap, if it grows too great, can feed movements of withdrawal, refusal, and anger.’ To me, this mode of analysis actually does disservice to any form of political action (aided by intellectual understanding) by relativising and breaking time into autonomous units. Even simply discussed at the level of intellectual argumentation, Hartog’s proposition may appear fallacious. The time of the winners and the losers are presented here as two separate times. This begs the question: what is causing the endless ‘present of migration’ for the migrant? Can we really set aside the time of the precarious migrant from the time of the rapacious corporations? To put it rhetorically, the hyper-accelerated temporality of placing orders through apps on the mobile phone for food delivery (in a city like Berlin) is inseparable, dependent, and exploitative of the speed of the migrant, the precarious migrant youthful lot, who paddle away the delivery boxes on the bike using their own mobile phones for getting directions and keeping to time. The app owners, the app users, and the delivery bicycle riders inhabit one single presentism, and one time, structured of unaccountable capitalism, comfort consumerism, and precarious gig work. The function of ‘estimated time’ and complaints based upon ‘delay’ in receiving delivery is grounded upon one unitary notion of time. To better understand the operationalisation of social and economic power which creates conditions of winnability for some and precarity for the majority as part of a unitary and connected field of activity, the fabric of time, therefore, must appear singular.

Plurality can be a fellow traveller of the mechanisms of power. In its immediate context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries histories of imperialism, globalisation, and colonisation, it was the plural construction of time that buttressed domination. In other periods of historical pasts, the context of such interaction between linearity and plurality would differ. But the larger point is that time and its plurality, if any, therefore, should not be seen as a natural given but as a product of the historical process. Their romanticisation and valorisation can obfuscate the power dynamics behind them. 

One recent example of a plural time framework has advanced the idea of doing history without chronology. It rightly pinpoints certain problematic features of chronological time, which according to the author, takes us away from people and experience, which linearises the past, fixes the things that had remained relational, and creates the idea of progress. One cannot agree more with him when Tanaka says that ‘neither absolute time nor its application to society is neutral’. While these are definitely the attributes of modern time, which need to be given up in order to write a more egalitarian history of the past, and to give time itself a more egalitarian treatment, Tanaka also makes another related case which needs a brief discussion. He argues that chronological time perpetuates the idea of change and motion by replacing stability based upon recurrence of events. Chronological time, he explains, uses the hierarchical order of Newtonian time to prioritise change and movement over stability. Chronology, he thus proclaims, prioritises competition, ‘a race or even war’. This is where the political danger begins to lurk within the mammoth structure of plural time that is currently fetishised in academic writing. Why should History not be concerned with change and movement? How else would the histories of the voiceless and the subalterns be written if stability through the relativism of time and temporality becomes the objective of history writing? Did the powerful in the past not fight for maintaining status-quoism under the name of stability? If chronological time reordered the understanding of the past along the ideas of change, then did this also not empower people to identify structural discrepancies which favoured a few against the majority of the people? 

Let me pluck another example from a recent work to explain this. Through multiple examples, Gribetz and Kaye insightfully propose that time is diverse because it is socially differentiated. They argue, ‘Different people do not have the same access to time and attention, for many reasons, including race and speech disabilities.’ Obviously, using time in a strict uniform manner will, in these situations, create further differentiations and exclusions. Another aspect of this differentiation is gender for which they use the example of Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential debate with Mike Pence in which she was constantly interrupted. At a certain point when Pence had exceeded his time limit, Harris remarked, ‘I would like equal time.’ In this claim of Harris lies the foundational tension between plurality and singularity of time. If Pence’s constant interruptions reflected the social conditioning around time of regarding women’s time as less significant and hence susceptible to be usurped (and therefore the idea that time is differential according to social and cultural practices) then her claim to have the equal time is equally premised on time being a uniform equaliser that could potentially neutralise these differentiations. This instance is as much a reflection of social differentiation of time, as the authors argue, as it is of time’s universal measurable value. The conceptualisation behind plural or multiple time is inherently based upon a foundational tension between plurality and singularity which often goes unrecognised in the celebration of plurality.

To return to Tanaka, it is true, as he explains, that the history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is of war and competition based upon the idea of chronology but chronologies have also yielded to comparison to discern how power has accrued to some and has kept the rest deprivileged. Chronological time helps identify those who were left dispossessed and why. It would help us do histories of race and caste discrimination, to name just two, in a better manner if we are able to account for the structures that led to the accruement of power with the whites and the upper castes. This requires that the temporal scale of comparison ought to be linear and unitary in order to write the histories of dispossession and how time as a social constituent helped in creating this divide. There is obviously a need to divest time of any ethno-centric values that create orders and hierarchies amongst peoples and cultures in any intrinsic manner (that time itself is a conduit and victim of hierarchy) but in order to decouple time from the idea of linear progress we do not need to relativise time, and through its idiomatic use fetishise the past in turn, to the extent that the social unevenness of the past begins to take refuge in the plural formation of time. Time must remain in our conceptualisation an anchor and a host of change and transformation. 

A heavy culturalisation and relativisation of time in current studies is limiting in its scope. Multiple perceptions, plural engagements, and the intermeshing of various types and methods of time-notation and time-experience can still (and must) be mapped while assuming time to be non-plural. In following Edelstein et al., I do regard that temporal regimes and cultures are perpetually conflictual but for purposes of writing a social history of time I tend to remain cautious in presupposing time itself as a plural entity. Otherwise, the framework of plurality might lead us to relativise and atomise time and power to such an extent that the ensuing temporal regimes and cultures will always appear as fractured sovereign entities incommensurable for historians to firmly locate the interconnected processes of changed continuities and continuous changes. They will appear well-secured in their respective domains of the exercise of power without being dominant or hegemonic over each other. What shall the independent, itemised plural time(s) be measured to, and against? To make power commensurable, accountable, historical, and comparable between individuals, cultures, societies, and practices – as a mode of history writing – time should be treated as non-teleological but a non-plural entity while always questioning the location and impulse through which the multiple forms of engagement with it continuously unfold. Given the current planetary and social crises of which the global warming and global authoritarianism are the two most pressing ones, treating time, at least, as a universal ‘place holder’ is not that outrageous an ask. Plurality in time is an outcome of practices and their historicisation; plurality of time can become a significant but empty statement.

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