The time that isn't there?: temporal un/consciousness in (feminist) research

Christina Hughes, Department of Continuing Education, University of Warwick, England

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 29th Annual Conference, 5-7 July 1999, University of Warwick

What I am about to tell you, or confide in you, today, will remain rather primary, loose. This is both deliberate and due to lack of time. But what time do I mean? The time that has not, or has not yet, been loosed by all that is too bound, too secondarily bound, thereby leaving so-called free energy chained up, in the crypt. But perhaps that energy is merely deprived of the space-time it needs to cathect, unfold, inscribe, play ... (Irigaray, 1993: 25)

Listen for a moment to all those phrases and words which register temporality: I'm late; you're early; time is running out; I haven't got enough time; rhythms; changes; what's the time?; clocking-on; retirement; how old are you?; development; progress; waiting; part-time; full-time; future; past; contemporary; slow down; doing time; deadline; life's too short; free time; maturation; life cycle; there's not enough minutes in the day; annual leave; progress; flexibility; how long have you got? stages; was; is; might; dead time; juggling; synchronise; pay day; life; death; history; memory; educate; learn; facilitate; I didn't have time; formation; the working week; habits; stability; construct; tell me your life story; my biological clock is ticking; becoming; not in my time; measure; generation; timetable; time off; school years; modern; post-modern; ancient; career; speed; too old; too young; time to go; I must manage my time better; you must manage your time better; (and worst of all) millenium!

Social science research, including research in adult education, is replete with time. We shouldn't, of course, be surprised at this. Temporality, as Klein (1994), indicates is a basic category of our experience and cognition. The very essence of communicating with each other means that our languages contain a rich array of temporal expressions. The problem is research just does not often self-signify in this way.

To explore the implications of this un/consciousness, I shall begin with a focus on research into adult participation. Here, I shall indicate how clock time has dominated our understandings of temporality. As a way of opening up spaces for other ways of knowing time I then give three snapshots of time theorised (for a more refined analysis see Adam, 1990, 1995!). The first outlines key philosophical and linguistic positions. The second discusses the concept of 'Women's Time' through the work of the French postmodernist Kristeva. Finally, I return to what is a more central concern of research into adult education -that of adult development. Here, I want to indicate the ways in which values and time are intermeshed. In the conclusion, I indicate how research might be developed through an enhanced consciousness of time.

So, What Time Isn't There?

Clock and calendar time structure education in a myriad of ways. Timetables, term dates, deadlines, schedules and the division of the curriculum are all aspects of the ways in which we can quantify time. In encouraging access to education considerable attention has been given to clock and calendar time through the provision of full-time, part-time, distance and flexible modes of participation. Feminist educators, for example, have long argued for the need to offer courses which take account of the demands of caring in women's lives. The assumptions behind these arguments are that educational clock time should fit in with the particular circumstances of adult learners.

Research into participation, in consequence, has documented the varying access to full and part-time forms of education experienced by different groups in society. Again, clock time dominates, illuminating time as a valuable and often scarce resource, or as a precious commodity which has to be shared amongst competing interests such as family and employment. It also indicates relations of power through the inequalities of time which different groups have for education.

Much research into participation also suggests that time is an exchange relationship. We exchange the time watching television for being in class. Or we exchange the time caring for our children to be in employment. The politics of what is, and is not, exchanged also resonate in research into participation. Caring for children and studying are a feature in many women's lives.

Time is also a form of regulation. Schooling instills the requirements of industrial time through demanding attention to the clock. In this functionalist analysis it ensures that children are socialised into employable beings. The same can be said for young and unemployed adults who are required to attend government training schemes lest they forget the art of getting up in the morning or in case they develop an alternative time consciousness.

Clock time is not the only way in which we can understand the role of education in adult's lives. Although concerned with employment, Davies' (1990) research is useful here as it indicates how the length of time it takes to accomplish a task is a measure used in many women's lives. Davies, for example, contrasts factory work with care work to illustrate their different temporal demands. Whilst factory time may be bounded by the clock in terms of start and finishing times, caring needs, and therefore caring tasks, cannot be bounded in this way. Education, similarly, has clock and calendar boundaries through the beginnings and ends of classes, tutorials and courses. It is, nevertheless, also a process. How long does it take to revise for an exam, write an essay or a conference paper? Process time and clock time therefore sit together, albeit uneasily, as temporal experiences of adulthood.

So, what time isn't there? As Davies (1990) and Adam (1990, 1995) illustrate so well, whilst time resonates social meaning and value beliefs we easily lose sight of these. Moreover, whilst clock time is a very dominant perspective:

Even the clock/task distinction ... leaves other dimensions of time allocation unaddressed. Neither clock nor task-defined time capture the allocation of psychic or mental time, nor do they address the forms of consciousness required within different allocations of mental time. (Edwards, 1993: 64)

As the opening quote in this paper indicates, time is not only experienced through a clock to be measured and calculated. Time can be energised or locked away. It needs space to cathect. Indeed, can we speak of time without referring to space? We also have an emotional relation to time which means we may experience it as opportunity and/or constraint, as a pressure and/or a luxury. Furthermore, the organisation of time in our daily lives has a relation to our sense of identities. To juggle time, for example, suggests that one is a time juggler. To be employed on a flexible basis defines one as a flexible worker. To engage in part-time study leads one to know one/self as a part-time student. But, as Adam (1995) notes, we cannot break the spell of clock time until we bring its taken-for-grantedness to consciousness.

Time, Language and Being

For those whose analytic approach to research is centrally concerned with language structure, say through semiotics and discourse analysis, what I point up here will not be surprising. For others whose concerns are less specific in terms of the attention given to language form, I hope it will act as a reminder, as it did for me, of the significance not just of the import of the way we say things but also the order in which this is accomplished. Klein (1994: 14) indicates the ways in which temporality is encoded in language as follows:

  • the grammatical categories tense and aspect;
  • inherent temporal features of the verb (and its complements), such as punctuality, durativity, etc;
  • complex verb clusters, such as to begin to sleep, to continue to smoke, etc;
  • temporal adverbials of various types;
  • special particles, such as the Chinese perfectivity marker le;
  • principles of discourse organisation, such as 'the order in which situations are reported corresponds to their temporal order in reality'.

Perhaps more significantly, Klein (1994: 1) indicates that whenever languages contain finite verbs (Chinese being an exception) 'the speaker has no choice: the expression of time is necessarily a consequence of the way in which language is structured'. Working with/in Derridean perspectives where language is accorded the privilege of the first born (Hartmann, 1981), this suggests an intense relationship between our talk of time and our senses of being.

Of course, the relationship between being and time (and time and being) is extensively explored in Heidegger's work (1977, 1980) to the extent that '... (Being) and time nearly coalesce' (Stambaugh, 1977: xi; see also Hartmann, 1981 and Fraser, 1989 for a discussion of the intellectual heritage of Heidegger in Derrida's work). Heidegger's approach illuminates the ways in which birth and death are the time frame through which we live. Yet it is death that inhabits our present and our horizon because it so marks the end of (our) time. Time is 'the boundary to life' (Adam, 1990: 30) but not in an external or fixed sense. Rather time permeates our very existence.

The emphasis on mortality in Heidegger's work is critiqued as allowing no entry point for women (Forman, 1989). Whilst Heidegger might illuminate aspects of living in time, that is from birth to death, he does not articulate the giving of time. Thus:

The notion of a death of one's own, as the condition expressed in the Heideggerian formula for authentic existence, is inconceivable for women if it is not rendered dialectically with birth, because for us the future as generative is as much a determinant in our lives as is our mortality. Put more fundamentally: our very awareness of death, given the existentials of our lives as women, cannot be viewed from the same perspective which for men makes death the ultimate source of courage and freedom. As a collective, women do not only live in time (from birth to death), they also give time and that act makes a radical difference to Being-in-the-World. (Forman, 1989:7)

Certainly, as many women academics know, the giving of time is a value upon which we are judged, by our colleagues and students. It is also a value upon which we judge ourselves. What time do women have?

Women's Time

A key tenet of feminist politics is that it provides a social movement for change. Accordingly, feminists concerned with whether, and how, women's lives have changed will draw on implicit and explicit notions of historical time. Are there, for example, more/different/better opportunities for women in the 1990s than in the 1950s or 1920s? Are the subjects which women study changing? Do women have greater choices of, and access to, educational subjects or careers? These conceptualisations of history as linear time, nonetheless, provide only one perspective by which we might understand women's lives. They measure and quantify within assumptions that temporality is progression (or indeed regression). The costs of foregrounding linearity are that insufficient attention is given to subjective aspects of being and, ultimately, to questions of identity. Embedded in the questions above is another question 'What does it mean to be a woman in 1914 or 1937 or 1999?'

Identity, time and space cohabit Kristeva's (1986) conception of 'Women's Time'. As Moi (1986: 188) indicates, Kristeva provides a classic statement in relation to this:

[Kristeva] explicitly addresses the question of feminism and its relations to femininity on the one hand, and the symbolic order on the other. According to Kristeva, female subjectivity would seem to be linked both to cyclical time (repetition) and to monumental time (eternity), at least in so far as both are ways of conceptualizing time from the perspective of motherhood and reproduction. The time of history, however, can be characterized as linear time: time as project, teleology, departure, progression and arrival. This linear time is also that of language considered as the enunciation of a sequence of words.

Kristeva talks of three generations of feminists, but is not using generation solely in the sense of linear time - our grandmothers, mothers, daughters. Rather, her usage emphasises generation in terms of occupying symbolic and corporeal space in the social order. The three generations to which Kristeva refers are, therefore, both linear - from first wave to third wave - and also co-exist. Feminism, both contemporarily and historically, exhibits aspects of all three generations addressed by Kristeva.

The generations to which Kristeva refers are very familiar to us. Presented here, as crude characterisations, they emphasise the duality of one form of difference - that between women and men. Kristeva's 'third way', to use contemporary language, is an attempt to join patriarchy and the maternal order through a focus on the sociosymbolic contract (Ermath, 1989).

The first generation, the suffragists, demanded equal rights with men. They sought space in men's worlds through a 'logic of identification with certain values: not with the ideological (these are combated, and rightly so, as reactionary) but, rather, with the logical and ontological values of a rationality dominant in the nation-state' (Kristeva, 1986: 194). Inherent in this form of feminism are conceptions of progression leading to the question 'How far have we succeeded in accomplishing the initial programme which had been mapped out by our feminist founders?'

Second wave feminists rejected this linear temporality, and indeed this 'logic of identification', in favour of a position which emphasised the 'specificity of female psychology and its symbolic realizations' (Kristeva, 1986: 194). In so doing, 'this feminism situates itself outside the linear time of identities which communicate through projection and revindication' (p 194). Rather, it situates itself with/in 'the cyclical or monumental temporality of marginal movements' (p 195). Its risk, however, is that it can degenerate 'into an inverted form of sexism' (Moi, 1986: 187).

The third generation of feminists have to confront some women's continued desire to have children with their desire for a professional life. This suggests that women have to reconcile 'maternal time (motherhood) with linear (political and historical) time' (Moi, 1986: 187). As Erman (1989: 44) notes 'What this "mixture" implies for linear time and its associated values remains unclear'. Through a focus on the linguistic order, the task for feminism is to deconstruct the concept of identity to allow space for individual difference. How? Perhaps by 'throwing the emphasis off what is finished, conclusive, static, identified and on to what is open, playful, mobile, relational' (Erman, 1989: 45). Can we change our values this much?

Whose Values in Time?

Life transitions, maturation and status passages provide the focus of research attention within assumptions of what is a 'normal' progression. Age, socially relative though it is, provides the marker of time whether this is categorised in years or stages. Much feminist research has pointed out how inappropriate malestream conceptions of life cycles are to women's experiences, emphasising that women's lives are not lived 'in time' with men's. Nevertheless, 'Irreversible time dominates in studies of the life cycle' (Adam, 1990: 99). And, it is this irreversibility that we hear in adult returner's voices as they are educated 'out of time' to normatively prescribed educational trajectories.

The strength of normative values is charted in much feminist work through the ways in which women express guilt for 'taking time' for themselves. Feminist pedagogic approaches attempt to work through this guilt by, for example, raising women's consciousness of the ways in which their conceptions of being 'out of time' are measured (falsely) against men's lives (see for example Fisher, 1989). Feminist educators are, in essence, attempting to overcome the negative conceptions of time as irreversible through a revaluing of times in women's lives. The key texts for this enlightenment are those of development psychologists Gilligan (1982) and Belenky et al (1986).

Development theory, whether Kohlberg's, Gilligan's or Belenky et al's, is concerned with progress. This progress is to an enhanced state of being. To chart an individual's progress requires an articulation of core values against which measures can be made. Time therefore is assumed to be progressive (as we move from one state of knowing to another) but the concept of progression holds within it certain constant values:

... the idea of progress contains at its core a key tension. On the one hand ... it is dependent on the idea of historical change; progress demands movement. On the other hand, it also assumes that beneath this change, there are certain historical constants - ideals that express what is best about being human. Without underlying values to give such movement meaning, history cannot be understood as representing progress; it remains merely change.' (Nicholson, 1999: 1)

As a developmental task, therefore, the educator's measure of success will rest on whether students have accepted particular (feminist) values as true ways of knowing the world. What constant values might we identify, therefore, in say Belenky et al (1986)? In their desire to move women from the passivity and dependency of silence to autonomy and self-directness, what I hear are the voices of Kristeva's first generation wrestling with a feminist ontology of connectedness. Let me be free of my sex (but still relational). The values of Knowles' andragogical man live on, therefore, as we celebrate when women have 'found' their voices and move to a form of independence as active thinkers generating their own knowledge. That silence is now being reclaimed as worthy in current pedagogic theory (see for example Lewis, 1993) suggests something of a re-evaluation of its epistemological status. Do I hear Kristeva's second generation shouting for space? May it be that silence is womanly?

(Re)searching Time

In bringing the snippets of this paper together, I want to conclude by indicating a few of the ways in which research in the various fields of adult education may become more time conscious. I began by noting that time and language have an inextricable link. Indeed, it would appear that our language is so imbued with time that we have ceased to know that it is there. Yet turning the familiar strange has always been a useful research motto. If, therefore, our beings are so awash with time what does this have to say about how we know the social world and how we know (and don't know) our(selves)? A focus on the forms in which research narratives convey temporality may be one place to look. Time talk is an indicator of past and future projections, of who I was and who I might like to be. Time talk indicates the co-existence of a multiplicity of time worlds. Time talk suggests the complexity of the social world which social science dualities strive to simplify.