Abstract time yet again

Abstract time is (Anthony Giddens says) “pure duration, as disconnected from the materiality of experience.” This comes to be seen as “real, ‘objective’ time” because “it is expressed in a universal and public mode.”

This is helpful.

2 PM Pacific Time, June 18, 2008 means millions of specific things to the six billion people of earth. If we think of time’s “content” as inherent in time, we are faced with the impossible challenge of trying to express the millions of different contents. Groups, some large, may be sharing some specific event in that time (a flood in Iowa, an afternoon game at Wrigley Field), but that doesn’t make the challenge manageable. What everyone temporally shares, though, is the “abstract” reality of clock and calendar time.

Which is fine to that extent. This is still only “relatively” abstract. What makes Giddens’s remarks helpful is the connection he draws between this abstract time and the notion that it is “real” because “universal.” The problem is not abstraction; it’s hard to see how social events could be synchronized at all without finding what is common in the times of many individual people. The problem is the notion that this time (2 PM), as opposed to the particular “content-filled” time (the time of the ball game), is the more real because the more universal.

The universal is not necessarily more real, not at all. The “time of the ball game” is just as real a period of time as an “hour.” Giddens suggests, more strongly, that it is more real: Real time is humanly experienced, contentful and organized time. That seems too much, though, because “abstract” time really does control us; it too is real.