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This introductory chapter explains the theme of this book, which is about universal philosophy. The book proposes a critique of the limits of the particular formalist, mathematical structure used by Gilles Deleuze and the manifold of continuous space–time of dynamical systems theory. It proposes a methodology and an ontology oriented in relation to formal, mathematical structures, but able to be coherently and consistently asserted apart from them in terms of what is called sensibility. The book also recommends a rethink of the concept of time–space relations espoused by several philosophers, including Luce Irigaray, Henri Bergson, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

This chapter analyzes the key terms in the debate on time. Many contributors to the debate on time in the digital era have diagnosed a paradigm shift toward a timeless present that has swallowed up the past. Indeed, network society displaces the sequential order of lived experience by way of a “real virtuality” that immerses people into a world of instantaneity. The chapter then engages with the temporal anxiety that people can no longer narrate history and their own lives as coherent stories. The ongoing debate on time and temporality revolves around a range of interconnected diagnostic tropes that aim to illuminate a fundamental recalibration of the conditions of temporality in the network era: acceleration, resonance, atomization, immediacy, the extended present, time–space compression, network time, and precarious times.

This chapter addresses the contemporary novel in the context of social theories of time and philosophical accounts of time. It also argues against the predominance of ‘retrospective’ models of narrative, such as Linda Hutcheon's ‘historiographical metafiction’, as a basis for characterising the contemporary novel. The time–space compression, accelerated recontextualisation and archive fever are the three notions of the contemporary. In addition, the role of a tense framework in the characterisation of contemporary fiction is assessed. The relationship between the characteristics of a novel and the idea of the present as an historical totality is one of the factors that will determine the contemporaneity of contemporary fiction, as if the very idea of the contemporary contained within it a double reference, on one hand indicating mere present-ness, and on the other the special power to represent the present.

This chapter reevaluates the longitudinal “shapes” of history and argues for a threefold approach. It considers the question of how to best frame the multi-dimensionality of the past without forcing things into preset stages or patterns that suit some cultural traditions and not others and without fragmenting knowledge into meaningless details that are unattached in time. It considers the time frames of history and argues for an interlocking or loosely braided three-dimensional history in which the three strands combine and intertwine continuously, though not necessarily evenly, within time and within time-space.

This chapter tackles the question of whether afterness can be thought to have a space, a Zeitraum, in which its movements can be thought. The German word Zeitraum, idiomatically translated, indicates a period of time but literally means “time-space”; it suggests that time not merely is related to space but also can be thought, somewhat curiously, as having a space. This chapter asks if the after is situated not only temporally but also spatially. More specifically, it considers whether afterness can have a space, and if so, how its space could be thought. Focusing on Hannah Arendt’s notion of “empty space,” a historical and experiential no-man’s-land in which what lies between the after and the before cannot be reduced to the presence of a “now,” the chapter explains how we may interpret afterness as both an openness and a form of traumatic survival.

This chapter builds a link between discussions of spaces, things and bodies, and children’s social lives. It explores how children’s practices are related to their encounters with other people in Kopčany and commences the discussion about the role of other people in how children organise their activities in time and space. These encounters and practices are conceptualised as relational performances of children’s relationships to other people in particular spaces and times. Thematically, the chapter investigates two overlapping but distinctive themes: low-level sociability, drawing on the figure of ‘stranger’; and children’s encounters within spatial and temporal settings and constraints, drawing on ethnomethodological perspectives.

Chapter 2 (“Double Standards”) recounts how the racial presuppositions of British railway engineers about “indolent time-mindless Orientals” percolated into scheduling and management schemes between 1850 and 1870. The result was a double standard of punctuality: a lax colonial punctuality and a stricter metropolitan one. Egyptian passengers protested against this double standard, but gradually many of them came to adopt it themselves and even to celebrate it. This process entailed developing a pointed critique of the alienating effect of European efficiency contrasted with Egyptian or Islamic time.

This chapter examines the geographical and organizational consequences of the emergence of software formats such as MP3 and internet distribution systems. It draws attention to the role of space and place in the operation of the music industry, and introduces the concept of the musical network as a device to understand the transformation of the musical economy through time and over space. It outlines the origins of this concept within a wider discussion of relational and network-based approaches to economics, and is concerned with the relationship between technological innovation, economic competition, and the contestability of markets for goods and services within an era of digital content.

This chapter discusses the methodology used to research the informal social interactions that create and constitute the personal communities of women in their fifties in the context of their previous lifecourse experiences. The research prioritised the collection of data on how these women ‘kept in touch’ with the members of their personal communities over time and space, including the use of different forms of ICT, face-to-face meeting and activities in ‘real’ spaces. The chapter examines: problems of recruitment; the effect of asking people to list their lifecourse experiences in a Table; the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis and the analytical and ethical difficulties involved in research which asks people to give accounts of emotionally significant relationships.

Several commentators have noted how important specific places are in the production of criminal events; others have suggested that there are certain meso-level social or community structures which influence individuals’ desires, motivations, and abilities to engage in, or refrain from, offending. Meisenhelder refers to the spatial dimension of desistance. Not all ‘places’ are equal in terms of their ability to either facilitate or confirm a would-be desister’s status as an ‘ex-offender’. The explanation given by some commentators is that the places where an individual lives out their life communicate some element of ‘who’ they are and ‘what’ they do. Using time diaries,in which cohort members recount to us how they spent their recent ‘typical’ Wednesdays and Saturdays, we explore the spatial dynamics of desistance.

This chapter argues that energy technologies should be understood in terms of asymmetric global resource transfers and environmental load displacements. The fossil fuel technologies inaugurated during the Industrial Revolution and the renewable energy technologies designed to replace them are similarly entangled with such societal asymmetries. Both represent social strategies of time-space appropriation within a highly unequal world-system generated by the polarizing logic of all-purpose money. The dependence of modern technology on asymmetric flows of embodied labour time, land, matter, and energy is effectively obscured in mainstream economics by the exclusive focus on prices and market mechanisms. Given the land-saving logic of the turn to fossil energy, it is pertinent to ask whether a turn to renewables would imply a return of land constraints. To perceive modern technologies simply as politically neutral instruments for harnessing natural forces, disregarding their demands on land and other resources beyond the technological infrastructure itself, is an example of fetishism.

This chapter explores the existing literature on globalization. Some understand globalization as an economic process seen as neoliberalization. Others focus on the cultural aspects of globalization, seeing it as McDonaldization. Yet others talk about globalization spatially, conceptualizing it as ‘time–space compression’, ‘space of flows’, and ‘de- and re-territorialization’. This chapter aims to understand globalization in its totality. But how to conceptualize these contradictory cultural, economic, and spatial realities in a tight nutshell? To answer that question, the author looks at churches, mosques, and other religious institutions that go global by using Facebook, YouTube, and the internet. She uses examples from cyberspace to indicate how these institutions resolve the cultural (religion) and economic (call for subscriptions, memberships, selling CDs, confessions, and sacred rites) through a cyber-material city, a transcendent space where culture always unfolds with the economy.

This chapter discusses the concept of time and space for the unemployed Filipino seamen waiting for work and Filipino seamen working in the global shipping industry. Some aspiring seamen wait for hours, days, months or years trying to find employment in domestic and global shipping industries, while Filipino seamen working in the global shipping industry move through different locations and moments of the global economy. Time seems unmoving for the unemployed Filipino seamen searching for work in the waiting area, but faster for the employed Filipino seafarers.

Chapter 8 comments on the role of markets in stimulating or neglecting the materiality of economic and financial productivity. The markets are shaped by culture, but also build a culture of resource management that has the potential to disconnect governance from materiality. In this regard, the culture of the market is one that encompasses the sociopolitical institutions upon which the market is built, but also a culture that reifies and spreads particular norms of economic authority and market-based resource governance. The chapter examines the ways in which the mismatch between the processes of the market and the material outcomes they seek to generate can lead to the potential for damage and perverse outcomes for the environment. Finally, the chapter addresses the nature of valuation in market processes, and the incommensurability of that mode of valuation with the material needs of the environment.

This chapter explores the postcolonial context of newly-mediated global intimacies generated by the call center industry, which generate unprecedented time-space relations. Telecommunication-based labor connects Indian workers with U.S. consumers in real time, exposing the unevenness of the compression of time and space.

Rhetorical readings of ten reality-based documentaries (2004-2011) reveal the “power temporalities” that animate U.S. representations of outsourcing. These programs circulate neocolonial, racialized, and heterosexual tropes to create a temporal lag between the U.S. and India. The threat of outsourcing to India is managed as the U.S. emerges as the telos toward which India develops—always safely out of reach.