The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events (Toposophia)

THE TIMESPACE OF HUMAN ACTIVITY

Toposophia Sustainability, Dwelling, Design Toposophia is a book series dedicated to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of place. Authors in the series attempt to engage a geographical turn in their research, emphasizing the spatial component, as well as the philosophical turn, raising questions both reflectively and critically. Series Editors Robert Mugerauer, University of Washington Gary Backhaus, Loyola College in Maryland Editorial Board Edmunds Bunkse Kim Dovey Nader El-Bizri Joseph Grange Matti Itkonen Eduardo Mendieta John Murungi John Pickles Ingrid Leman Stefanovic Books in the Series Mysticism and Architecture: Wittgenstein and the Meanings of the Palais Stonborough Roger Paden When France Was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France Christine Marie Petto Environmental Dilemmas: Ethical Decision Making Robert Mugerauer and Lynne Manzo

THE TIMESPACE OF HUMAN ACTIVITY On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events

Theodore R. Schatzki

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schatzki, Theodore R. The timespace of human activity : on performance, society, and history as indeterminate teleological events / Theodore R. Schatzki. p. cm. — (Toposophia: sustainability, dwelling, design) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4268-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4270-7 (electronic) 1. Act (Philosophy) 2. Space and time. 3. History—Philosophy. 4. Free will and determinism. I. Title. B105.A35S33 2010 304.2'3—dc22 2009051202

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For my grandparents, still present and still missed

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4

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The Timespace of Human Activity Activity Timespace and Social Life The Dominion of Teleology Activity and History as Indeterminate Temporalspatial Events

1 65 111 165

Bibliography

233

Index

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About the Author

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how a concept of activity timespace drawn from the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger illuminates the nature of human activity, society, and history. Although the book is a work of theory, it hopes to develop concepts that are useful in empirical investigation. Theorists interested in the nature of society or history have often treated human activity as central to their subject matter. This approach reflects the background convictions that society and history are largely human affairs and that what people do is central to these affairs. The present work stands in this tradition. It differs from other works belonging to it in attributing to human activity unfamiliar and unified kinds of time and space and in arguing that the resulting unified time and space are crucial to society and history. I call this unified time and space “activity timespace.” Activity timespace is the dimensionality of human activity. Often it is thought that something comes to have temporal and spatial properties by virtue of “occupying” or occurring “in” time and space conceived of as abstract realms or containers of some sort. Activity timespace is not like this—it is not a collection of points, shapes, or surfaces in a broader container, realm, or overall place. Nor is it something that arises from or is marked out by performances of action, as the spaces of a city or a house arise from streets, buildings, parks, walls, and floors. Timespace neither accrues to nor is built up through activity. It is, instead, a central constitutive feature of human activity, where by “constitutive” I mean helping to make up what something, in this case activity, essentially is. Because timespace is constitutive of activity, it, as I will explain, comes to HE GOAL OF THE FOLLOWING PAGES IS TO SHOW

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exist through, better, is opened by, activity itself. Closely complementing the concept of activity timespace is the idea that human activity should be understood as an indeterminate temporalspatial event: as an inherently temporalspatial happening (in a special, to be explained sense of “temporalspatial”) that is not, in an important regard, pinned down by what precedes it. This conception of activity has significant implications for the determination, not just of activity, but of social-historical change as well. As indicated, the concept of activity timespace and the idea that activity is an indeterminate event are drawn from the work of Heidegger. In particular, they derive from an interpretation of Heidegger’s analyses of temporality and spatiality in his magnum opus, Being and Time, and from an appropriation of the concept of the event (the happening of “the clearing of being”) that he developed in his subsequent work. As also indicated, the book holds that activity timespace and activity as indeterminate temporalspatial event are fundamental to society and history. Among the theses it propounds in this regard are that activity timespace is an important component of social space and time, that interwoven timespaces are a constitutive feature of social phenomena, and that history encompasses metamorphosing constellations of indeterminate temporalspatial events. The latter conception of history implies, among other things, that the activity events that help make up history both effect and help compose the interrelated practices, material arrangements, and social phenomena that form the determining contexts of these activity events and also help make up history. This conception of history yields, further, a propitious account of historicity, or the presence of the past (in current activity), according to which past phenomena circumscribe, induce-orient, and underwrite the public manifestation of—but do not cause or antecedently pin down—present activity. This is an important idea because dominant conceptions of the relation of the past to the present hold that the past affects the present by causing it or extending into it. As stated, human activity is widely recognized in social thought as fundamental to society and history. Theorists who acknowledge its centrality have not interpreted activity as a temporalspatial event, let alone as something indeterminate. Nor have they grasped the significance of the temporalspatial dimensionality of activity, in particular, the significance of interwoven timespaces or indeterminacy for the spatial and temporal aspects of social life, the constitution of social phenomena, or the nature of history. Of course, essentially all theorists who treat activity as central to society and history acknowledge (1) that activity is a temporalspatial event in the sense of something that occurs in time and in space and (2) that the times when and places where activities occur are significant for society and history. When I write that activity is a temporalspatial event, however, I do not mean that activity

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occurs in time and in space. As I will elucidate in chapter 1, I mean, instead, that time and space are inherently related constitutive dimensions of action and that the happening of action is the opening—or coming to be—of these dimensions: the opening of timespace. Activity is a temporalspatial event in the sense that is in the occurrence of activity that timespace comes to be. When, accordingly, I claim in chapter 2 that interwoven timespaces form an important infrastructure of social phenomena, I do not mean that the times when and spaces where activities occur interrelate and, as interrelated, hold significance for social life. Rather, I mean that social phenomena are held together by the interwovenness of certain inherently related phenomena that constitute action and that are opened in the happenings that are people’s activities. I indicated that activity timespace is an important aspect of the spatial and temporal dimensions of social life. Most scholars who have discussed social time or space have examined the bearing of objective time or space on social life. As I explain in chapter 1, by “objective” time and space I mean succession and three dimensional geometric space, respectively. I stress that activity timespace complements the objective temporal and spatial features of society. It is neither a substitute for nor a competitor to these objective features. Among scholars who write about social time or space, moreover, a smaller cadre has conceptualized social time and space as conjoined phenomena, that is, as social space-time. These conceptions parallel concepts of space-time in physics in linking space and time. Again, activity timespace complements many of the space-times they conceptualize, including objective versions. Activity, society, and history amalgamate timespace and its objective cousins: they are temporalspatial temporal and spatial phenomena. To forestall misunderstandings, I should add that the current book is not about time and space per se, objective or social. As stated, my aim is to show how a concept of activity timespace drawn from Heidegger’s work illuminates activity, society, and history. A concept of time and space does, consequently, run through and hold together the text. The text, however, is about activity, society, and history, not about time and space. Nor, for that matter, is it about Heidegger. I engage Heidegger’s work for the sake of deriving key ideas from it. The present treatise builds on two previous books of mine. The first volume, Social Practices, analyzed social practices and claimed, among other things, both that individuals, their minds and actions, are constituted in social practices and that practices are key to understanding social life. The book did not, however, spell out the latter thesis in detail. The second volume, The Site of the Social, took up this thesis and filled out what social life amounts to when it is conceived of as transpiring within nexuses of practices and material arrangements. The book also, thereby, corrected the first volume’s neglect of the

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role of materiality in human coexistence. The current book turns the accounts of its predecessors inside-out. It moves inside practice-arrangement nexuses to theorize the indeterminate temporalspatial activity events, as simultaneously effect-features and determining contexts of which practices, social phenomena, and the course of history at large occur. Building on the accounts of the preceding books, the book ties practices and social affairs back to activity as the happening through which practices, society, and history exist. The book is organized into four chapters. Chapter 1 develops and elucidates the idea of a unified timespace of human activity. It begins by briefly characterizing the category of time and space that is most prevalent in social and historical theory: objective time and space. Section 2 then examines the conceptions of social space-time promulgated by Henri Lefebvre, Don Parkes and Nigel Thrift, Christopher Gosden, and Torsten Hägerstrand. These conceptions, I claim, treat space-time as a conjunctive phenomenon: space plus time. They also differ on which components of space-time are objective phenomena. Following this, section 3 spells out the notion of activity timespace that I derive from Heidegger’s, Being and Time. Timespace, I write, is acting toward a way of being departing from motivating states of affairs at arrays of places and paths anchored at material objects (motivating states of affairs are states of affairs to which the actor reacts or in whose light she acts). Acting toward a way of being (an end) is the future dimension of activity, departing from states of affairs that motivate is the past dimension of activity, and acting itself is the present. Places and paths are, respectively, places to perform particular actions and paths from one place to another. In contrast to the social space-times discussed in section 2, activity timespace is a unified, nonobjective phenomenon. The unity of its components, I explain, lies in the teleology that governs human activity. In section 4, the idea of activity timespace is situated in wider philosophical contexts. Among other things, I counterpose to mainstream modern conceptions of objective time, whose common denominator is that time is succession, a still extant minoritarian tradition that conceives of a kind of time that is seated in human life and characterized by past, present, and future instead of by succession. The idea of activity timespace belongs to this minoritarian tradition. The chapter concludes by showing that, although timespace is the dimensionality of the activities of individuals, it is a social feature of these activities. Both the timespaces of people’s activities and the interweaving of these timespaces derive in part from the social practices people carry on. Chapter 2 explores the significance of activity timespace for social affairs. Its chief thesis is that interwoven timespaces form an infrastructure that runs through and is essential to social affairs. Much of the chapter examines the contributions interwoven timespaces make to the constitution of prominent

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sorts of social phenomenon, including coordinated actions, organizations, systems, conflict, and power. The examination often proceeds through the scrutiny of empirical examples, some of which are taken from the Bluegrass region of Central Kentucky where the author resides. The chapter also demonstrates the centrality of interwoven timespaces to the space-time compressions that the geographer David Harvey has made famous, although it also disputes the cogency of Harvey’s two-level conception of social space-time. The chapter concludes by describing the temporalspatial character of something widely presumed to be a spatial phenomenon alone: landscapes. The Bluegrass region again furnishes examples. The notion of timespace developed in the book highlights the teleological character of human activity. As noted, for instance, the unity of temporality and spatiality lies in teleology. By “teleological” I mean oriented toward ends: the teleological character of activity consists in people performing actions for ends. Chapter 3 argues that two phenomena that are often thought to undercut the thesis that teleology governs human activity—the bearing of emotions on action and the existence of ceremony and ritual—in fact do not do so. Rather, I claim, teleology, on the one side, and emotion and ceremony, on the other, are complementary. To explain this complementarity, the chapter first outlines the wider theory of activity presupposed in previous chapters. According to this theory, what people do is what makes sense to them to do for the sake of particular ways of being given particular states of affairs. This theory, I show, accounts for the common, philosophical, and social theoretical practice of explaining human activity with such “mental state” words as “desire,” “believe,” and “intend.” Turning to the bearing of emotions on activity, the chapter distinguishes three types of emotional activity. My discussion at this point engages contemporary accounts of emotion and action in AngloAmerican philosophy and explains that activities of two of these three types are teleologically governed. The chapter then addresses the view that ceremony and ritual are not teleological phenomena. I first revisit a prominent multidisciplinary debate from the 1960s and 70s regarding the teleological versus expressive (e.g., symbolic) character of ritual and magical activity. This debate, I suggest, points toward the conclusion that such activities are at once teleological and expressive. My discussion then appropriates an exceptional contemporary conception of ceremony and ritual due to the anthropologist Wendy James, according to which activities and practices generally, even today, are ceremonial in character. I show that the ceremonialness that her conception attributes to activities and practices coexists with the teleology that governs them. The final section of the chapter takes up the anthropologist’s Mircea Eliade’s account of sacred space in order to extend the exploration of the complementarity

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between teleology and ceremony/ritual. I show that nonteleological kinds of significance such as symbolic, religious, and aesthetic significance—which ceremonies and rituals, among other phenomena, are often thought to bestow on objects—can contribute to the spatialities (place-paths arrays) of the world only in conjunction with teleology. Chapter 4 draws on Heidegger’s notion of the event (Ereignis) to conceptualize human activity as an indeterminate temporalspatial event and human history as a realm encompassing such events. The chapter first elucidates the idea that human activity is an event, contrasting this idea with the mainstream view—inaugurated by the philosopher Donald Davidson—that desires and beliefs cause action. I claim that teleology and motivation determine activity, not by causing it, but in virtue of being temporal dimensions of the event of activity. The chapter continues by examining an important consequence of conceiving activity as an event with three temporal dimensions, namely, its indeterminacy: the fact that, prior to acting, nothing presettles what a person does or which teleological or motivational factors determine this. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observations on rule-following and recent psychological research on voluntary action—among other things—are cited in support of the claim that activity is indeterminate. I also show that a further consequence of conceptualizing activity as an event, namely, the indeterminacy of social life, undercuts standard accounts of how social phenomena determine action. I illustrate this claim through a discussion of the sociologist Edward Shils’s account of tradition. The chapter then takes up a rival account of human activity due to the philosopher Henri Bergson, according to which conscious life flows. Bergson’s account converges with my own in recognizing something close to the indeterminacy of activity. I argue, however, that the flowing of human activity evinces a segmentation that contravenes Bergson’s notion of duration. I also criticize a neoBergsonian account of social space-time flows due to the geographer Doreen Massey. The remainder of the chapter examines history conceived of as a realm encompassing indeterminate temporalspatial events. My discussion focuses on one key feature of conceptions of history, viz, their understanding of historicity: the presence of the past. I show that the understanding of historicity that characterizes neoBergsonian conceptions of history as space-time flows—the prolongation of the past into the present—violates the indeterminacy of activity. I maintain, instead, that the past is present in circumscribing, orienting-inducing, and underwriting the public presence of human activity. The book concludes with the suggestion that it is illuminating to conceptualize the presence of the past in activity, and the circumscription of activity by practices, as memory and practice memory, respectively. The foregoing description of the book indicates that my narrative makes extensive use of the word “activity.” Philosophers and social theorists who

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write about action and activity typically favor the word “action” over “activity.” I strongly distinguish between the terms, and in a way that might not be familiar. As I use these words, activity and action are related as event and accomplishment. Activity is an event, a happening. More precisely, it is an event of a specific sort, namely, performing (or doing). Action, by contrast, is what happens in the happening that is activity. Because this happening is performing, action is what is performed (or done); hence such familiar locutions as “the action performed” and “the performance of an action.” Action, in other words, is something that activity, the event, accomplishes. Actions are not, however, causal accomplishments, or results, of performances: they are not events distinct from, nor states of affairs detachable from, performances. For a performance is a performance of something, i.e., an action, and the action that it is a performance of eo ipso exists through the performance (unless the performance fails, is incomplete, or is interfered with). Actions, that is, inherently come to exist through performances. Another way of saying this is that activities are happenings through which states of affairs of a certain sort inherently obtain. When, accordingly, in the following I write of “activity” or “activities,” I mean the performance events through which it comes to pass that actions have been performed. Language does not always clearly track this metaphysical distinction. Suppose I ask you, “What did Pete do?” and you answer, “He crossed the street.” In this past tense example, the action, crossed the street, can be cleanly distinguished linguistically from the activity, crossing. Suppose, however, that you are asked, “What are you looking at?” and you reply, “Pete crossing the street.” Gerunds such as “crossing” and “talking” are ambiguous. They can denote what is done or the doing of it, the accomplishment or the event—or both. Interestingly, it rarely matters whether gerunds are heard or read as denoting events, accomplishments, or both. The same event-accomplishment ambiguity also infects many uses of the word “action” (and likewise does not usually affect the speaker’s or author’s point). The word “activity,” too, is polysemic and can be used to denote things other than doings, including wider pursuits of which actions are parts and the continuousness of a person’s state of being active. In the following, however, I try consistently to use “activity” and “action” for happening and accomplishment, respectively. Another linguistic feature of this book is the repeated use of such words as “usually,” “often,” and “mostly.” Words such as these are pervasively employed in empirical work. Philosophers, by contrast, sometimes criticize other philosophers for using them. These criticisms are apropos in certain philosophical contexts, for instance, when a philosopher aims to state necessary or universal truths. When they aim to do this, philosophers resemble mathematicians and theoretical scientists, who likewise eschew these adverbs

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in formulating theorems and proofs or equations and laws. My aim in the current book, however, is to describe what is, in particular, to develop a general, abstract account of extant human activity, society, and history. I am not particularly interested in what, if anything, necessarily holds of these phenomena. It may be that something I write about them is necessarily true, but this possibility plays no role in the following. Universal truth is something else. I do seek universal truths insofar as they are pertinent to my topics. Any general, abstract account of human life, in this case, of human activity, society, and history, is bound to seek universal features of these phenomena. Such an account, however, can document more than the universal features of its subject matter. Here is where expressions such as “mostly,” “usually,” “often,” and “generally” become important, even necessary. When features of human life of interest to a general, abstract account of it are (or are thought to be) universal, the investigator should write that they exist “always,” “universally,” “uniformly,” or some such. When, however, such features are not universal, the investigator should write that they exist “typically,” “usually, “often,” or the like. Many significant and pervasive features of human life are not universal. Of course, these linguistic imperatives apply only if an investigator of actuality does not aim at universality alone. A theory, as I use the term, is an abstract, general, and systematic account of something. What it claims about the world is not encountered as such in experience, it covers cases in general instead of this or that case in particular, and it methodically develops accounts of phenomena that show how these phenomena hang together. So understood, theories about human life can describe and make claims about pervasive, but nonuniversal features of their subject matters. Those who exclusively seek necessary or universal truths or who insist that theories contain laws (this is often thought to be a characteristic of scientific theories) might dismiss such so-called theories as something other than theories. The word “theory,” however, is not the issue. The important point is that human life, as Wittgenstein among others saw, is profoundly variable: an interest in describing extant activity, society, and history should at once be an interest in adequately charting or acknowledging their actual variations. One can, accordingly, imagine a type of account that (1) articulates or appropriates a conceptual framework that contains resources for capturing the actual multiplicity of human life and (2) formulates a variety of significant propositions that hold universally, generally, or of particular collections of lives. The following investigation is of this sort: it aims to articulate an abstract, general framework about activity, society, and history that both captures universal and general truths about actual human existence and can inform investigations of particular activities, social formations, and historical

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phenomena. Due to the variability of actual human life, it makes ample use of such words as “typically,” “usually,” and “mostly.” I should also add a word about the book’s methodology. The book combines textual interpretation, empirical substantiation, and theoretical argumentation. The concept of activity timespace that it develops and works with arises from an appropriative interpretation of Heidegger’s texts, which draws this concept out of them, above all, out of Being and Time. Heidegger conceived of that book as a work in phenomenology and claimed that its theses about human existence are verified in a recollective reflection on one’s own existence through which existence shows itself from itself to be how it is described in these theses. I believe that this procedure, carried out by each reader as he or she follows the text, can corroborate Heidegger’s account of activity, or more exactly (see chapter 1, section 3), Heidegger’s specification of the teleological-motivational structure of what I call “experiential acting.” The procedure also provides motivation for calling this structure “temporality.” Philosophical, social, and historical theorists who are not attuned to Heidegger and phenomenology might not be convinced through this procedure of either Heidegger’s specification of the structure of experiential acting or the denomination of this structure as temporality. As a result, I do not, in this book, pursue the sort of reflective experiential confirmation that Heidegger advocated. I am also wary of arguments (so-called “metaphysical” arguments) that purport to show, say, that time and space really are such and such. The value of my theoretical ideas is defended in another way, namely, by suggesting their usefulness for empirical investigation. This suggestion takes the form, moreover, of empirical substantiation. What I mean is that I give substance to many of my theoretical ideas about society or history being phenomena closely tied to activity timespace through careful empirical description informed by, and couched in the terms of, these ideas: I fill out what the ideas entail for concrete sociohistorical life by detailing examples. In this way, I suggest that my concept of activity timespace, together with the ideas about society and history based on it, are useful for empirical work; that is, I show that empirical investigators can gainfully use these concepts and ideas to conceptualize their topics and subject matters and to formulate descriptions, explanations, and interpretations of them.1 (As I wrote above, I hope that this book develops concepts that are useful for empirical investigation.) Indeed, in a social theoretical universe populated by multiple conceptions of action and multiple ontologies of society and history, this sort of pragmatic support is ultimately, I believe, the most meaningful way to defend particular conceptions and ontologies. Finally, as a work in philosophical social theory, the book also takes up the ideas of not a few philosophical, social, and historical theorists (most

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prominently, Henri Lefebvre, Wendy James, Donald Davidson, Edward Shils, Mircea Eliade, David Harvey, Henri Bergson, and Doreen Massey) and offers divers arguments for or against their ideas and for my own. I indicated in the summary of the book that many of the empirical descriptions in chapter 2 (and in other chapters as well) are taken from the Bluegrass region surrounding Lexington, Kentucky (in the USA). Before beginning, I might briefly introduce this region. The Kentucky Bluegrass is an expanse of fertile rolling hills in central Kentucky that is punctuated by streams but lacks a substantial river or lake. At the center of the region lies the city of Lexington, with a metropolitan population of approximately a third of a million. The area is otherwise composed of farmland, small towns, and hamlets. Farms of different types populate the countryside, including commercial stock farms, family farms, baby farms (small farms owned by urbanites primarily for pleasure), trailer farms, and two sorts of horse farm, the so-called gentleman farms and small for-profit farms. The countryside is dominated by the horse farms, of which there are more than one thousand encompassing roughly 100,000 acres of land. The gentleman farms particularly dominate the landscape due to their great size and extensive shaping of the land. A prominent feature of these farms is their park-like lands that are divided into paddocks, pastures, and copses of different sizes by miles of plank fences.2 Other prominent features include (see figure 1 and 2 and the book cover) elaborate entrances opening on to stately tree-lined driveways that lead to elegant main residences, efficiently designed, experimental or traditional barns and residences that are distributed through the property, and small networks of private lanes. The layouts and compositions of these farms are often alike, and even the state-run Kentucky Horse Park located outside Lexington among the horse farms looks much like another farm. The overall effect is of a manicured, aesthetically pleasing tapestry of enclosures, shady lanes, hillsides, copses, and stately mansions, through which weave undulating streams and meandering, sometimes tree-lined roads that link farms, villages, and city. Gentleman farms are called this because their owners own them more as an avocation than as a profession. The owners include scions of old local families, wealthy American urbanites or celebrities, and, increasingly, foreign nobles and businessmen. Many owners do not reside primarily at their farms, instead using them as retreats from city life and their principal professions. Profit does not ride herd on these farms’ operations. It is, nonetheless, important to them: horse farms are big business, stud fees ranging as high as $500,000. The farms are primarily run, however, for pleasure, in pursuit of a kind of landed gentry lifestyle, or out of a love for horse racing. The Bluegrass region contains the largest collection of gentleman farms in the United States and, probably, the world. An important dimension of the gentry lifestyle pur-

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sued and displayed on these farms is fealty to particular aesthetic tastes and ideals;3 the appealing appearance of these horse farms, and thus that of the wider landscape these farms dominate, is conscious and deliberate. This fact has considerable significance. Not just the Bluegrass region, but the state of Kentucky as a whole, is associated by nonKentuckians—inside and outside the United States—with horses and horse farm landscapes. Both the city of Lexington and the state of Kentucky promote this identity through the mass production of horse and horse farm images, among other things. Lexington also, with some justification, calls itself the “horse capital of the world.” (It is patently the thoroughbred breeding capital of the world.) This identity was not incidental to the choice of Lexington as the first city outside Europe to host the quadrennial FEI World Equestrian Games (in 2010). The bona fide beauty of the landscape draws large numbers of visitors to the region, both tourists and buyers of the thoroughbred, standardbred, and other types of horses that are bred, raised, and boarded on the farms. To serve these visitors, a number of horse farm tour companies offer guided tours of the environs. Tour buses and vans pick up tourers either at the aforementioned Kentucky Horse Park outside Lexington or at hotels and other points downtown to escort them though selected farms and landscapes, usually for three to four hours at a time. Another prominent landmark in the Kentucky Bluegrass is Keeneland Race Course, located a few miles outside Lexington (see figures 3 and 4 and the book cover). Completed in 1936, Keeneland’s buildings are built in a style resembling those of the horse farms, out of the same limestone blocks out of which some farm mansions and barns are constructed. Much of its grounds—including its main entrance and parking areas—exhibits the same sort of park-like ambiance that the farms do. As a result, the facility seamlessly fits into the Bluegrass landscape; even the view from the grandstands is of surrounding farms. Keeneland holds two three-week meets annually, one in the spring and one in the fall, drawing daily crowds up to 20,000 people. The track is also the home of four prominent annual horse sales, which attract horses and buyers from around the world. Two of these sales hold records for highest price paid for a horse in their category. Earlier, complementary versions of some of the ideas presented in this book are found in two essays of mine, “The Time of Activity” (Continental Philosophy Review 39 [2006]: 155–82) and “Timespace and the Organization of Social Life” (in Time, consumption and everyday life, edited by Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilk [London: Berg, 2009], 35–48). I thank Continental Philosophy Review and Berg Publishers for permission to use this earlier material in revised form. Different bits and pieces of the book

Figure 1. A Typical Bluegrass Road

Figure 2. The Archetypical Bluegrass Horse Farm. Drawing by Karl Raitz, “Negro Hamlets and Agricultural Estates in Kentucky’s Inner Bluegrass.” Geographical Review 64, no. 2 (April 1974). Used with permission.

Figure 3. Betting Windows at Keeneland

Figure 4. A Sunday Crowd at Keeneland

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have also been presented in diverse forums: the International Society for Phenomenological Studies, a conference, “Narrative: the Conference,” held at the University of Louisville, an annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, the Institut für Geographie at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, an Organization Studies Summer Workshop on Mykonos, a Symposium on Rhythms and Patterns of Consumption at the European University in Florence, a Deans Forum at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, the Department of Philosophy and College of Education at the University of Cape Town, the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky, and the Comenius University in Bratislava. Numerous people in these settings offered valuable feedback. For their comments or support, I particularly want to thank Steve Crowell, John Haugeland, Robert Pippin, Nigel Thrift, John Paul Jones III, Benno Werlen, Roland Lippuner, Hari Tsoukas, Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Peter Vale, Bernhard Weiss, Jeremy Wanderer, Chris Zurn, and Emil Visnovsky. I am especially indebted to Heather Jacklin, not just for input, but also for intellectual stimulation and for organizing and shepherding a trip to South Africa. I am also deeply indebted to Jeff Malpas for his astute, insightful comments and suggestions about the entire manuscript. At home, I wish to recognize Michael Striker for suggesting that I read Eliade and former Dean Steven Hoch for course releases that made the production of a complete draft possible. I am also indebted to my wife, Nora (Rosie) Moosnick, for herself and for not requiring that I always exhibit the kind of flexibility that academics enjoy. Hardly last or least, I thank my children, Helena and Louis, for being who they are and bringing joy to every day of my life. This book is dedicated to my grandparents. It is remarkable how people who died long ago can still loom so large in one’s life.

Notes 1. This formulation reflects ideas about the relations between theories and empirical research that cannot be examined presently. For discussion, see my essay, “Dimensions of Social Theory,” in Reimagining the Social in South Africa: Critique and Post-Apartheid Knowledge, ed. Heather Jacklin and Peter Vale (Durban: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2009), 29–46. 2. For discussion, see Karl Raitz, “Gentleman Farms in Kentucky’s Inner Bluegrass: A Problem in Mapping,” Southeastern Geographer 15, no. 1 (1975): 33–46 and Denis Domer, “Inventing the Horse Farm,” Kentucky Humanities (October 2005): 3–12. 3. See John Wright, Jr., Lexington: Heart of the Bluegrass (Lexington: Lexington Fayette County Historical Commission, 1982), chapters 5 and 6.

1 The Timespace of Human Activity

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my concept of activity timespace. Because activity timespace is a conception of time and space, the chapter also contrasts activity timespace with certain prominent notions of time, space, and, especially, space-time. At the start, it is worth repeating a caution mentioned in the preface, namely, that activity timespace is not a configuration of temporal and spatial properties that either accrues to activity by virtue of its occurring “in” time and space or is built up through activities. Rather, timespace is constitutive of activity and ipso facto comes to be—is opened with—activity itself. The present chapter begins by discussing a pervasive category of time and space: objective time and space. Objective times and spaces are immensely important to human life and society. As indicated in the preface, moreover, activity timespace is not meant to replace or to compete with times, spaces, and space-times of this general sort in analyses of human life and society. Activity timespace, instead, complements these phenomena: human life and all that it helps make up, in particular, society and history, exhibit times, spaces, space-times—and timespaces. Because my aim in this book, however, is to call attention to the phenomenon of activity timespace (and to argue that it is crucial to society and history), section 1 does not analyze objective time and space in any detail. This category is elaborated only so far as is required (1) to set up a contrast with the notion of timespace and (2) to enable me occasionally to bring in objective time, space, and space-time when later analyzing society and history. Section 1 also very briefly touches on the ideas of subjective time and space and socially constructed time and space. HE AIM OF THIS OPENING CHAPTER IS TO SPELL OUT

—1—

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Following the discussion of objective time and space, section 2 examines several important conceptions of social space-time found in contemporary social theory, in particular, those promulgated by Henri Lefebvre, Don Parkes and Nigel Thrift, Christopher Gosden, and Torsten Hägerstrand (chapters 2 and 4 discuss conceptions due to David Harvey and Doreen Massey, respectively). I analyze these conceptions in some detail because, historically, social theorists have treated time or space as separate. Since activity timespace, by contrast, unifies temporality and spatiality, it proves instructive to examine previous social theoretical attempts to link time and space systematically. Because these conceptions mix objective and nonobjective times and spaces, this section forms a transition from my discussion of objective time and space in section 1 to my analysis of activity timespace in section 3. It also sets out ideas about social life that help set the stage for subsequent chapters. Section 3 develops the concept of activity timespace. Because this concept derives from the work of Heidegger, the section is an extended interpretation of his ideas. I begin by briefly considering the notion of timespace that Heidegger utilized in the middle phase of his career, in the form that it takes in the Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938). Although this notion, I claim, is inconsequential for analyses of human activity, society, and history, I show in chapter 4 that the closely related concept of the event—which is likewise spelled out in that book—is immensely important for these analyses. I then argue that, although Heidegger’s earlier work, Being and Time (1927), does not explicitly conceive of timespace, a concept of timespace with great import for understanding human activity, society, and history is contained in it. Following my interpretation of Heidegger, section 4 discusses different categories of timespace and the wider intellectual traditions in which my Heideggarian concept of activity timespace stands. The chapter then concludes by explaining that, although activity timespace is, strictly speaking, a feature of the activities of individual people, people’s timespaces interweave, in part because people carry on social practices in common. In chapter 2, this insight funds an analysis of the centrality of interwoven timespaces to human coexistence, the coordination of action, and the constitution of social organizations, events, systems, conflicts, and power. Before starting, I should mention that, although timespaces are multiple, I often use the word “timespace” in the singular. When I do this, I write of timespaces in general or in mass. For instance, I just wrote that activity timespace is a feature of the activities of individual people. What I mean is that particular timespaces are features of these activities. The use of “timespace” in the singular does not imply that timespace is a singular thing.

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1. Objective Time and Space By “objective” time and space I mean time and space conceived of as persisting independently of human perception, understanding, and action. The geometric arrangement of a town or of a landscape is an example of objective space, whereas a succession of instants or the time it takes for Europa to circle Jupiter are examples of objective time. Humans do, of course, apprehend, produce, and act on objective time and space. For example, they can build a town or destroy parts of a landscape, just like they can pay attention to the passage of moments and affect the orbital time of Europa with a sufficiently powerful device. But the spaces and times they apprehend, like the changes they induce in them, persist independently of their apprehension and activity. Such persistence is the mark of an objective reality with which people can interact. Indeed, objective time is the time of objective reality. Note that objective reality is not the same as physical reality; coordinately, objective time is not the same as physical time (e.g., the time theorized and studied in physics). Objective time and space are features, not of physical entities, events, and processes alone, but of anything that persists independently of human apprehension and activity. This includes experiences and actions themselves. I conceive of experiences and activities naturalistically, meaning that they are part of the world and not, as is often thought at least about experiences, alongside or outside the world. An experience or activity is an objective matter that (can) unfold independently of the experiences and actions of people other than the person who has or performs it. Although, for example, watching a jogger and jogging around a track depend on the perceptions and activities of the watcher and jogger, the watching, jogging, and times the activities take typically occur or unfold independently of the perceptions and actions of further people. The category of objective time pervades intellectual work and daily life, not just in the West, but throughout the world, and for some time. It is also the category of time whose appropriation and refinement in the rationalization of Western modernity crucially contributed to the development of capitalism, industrialization, and the pervasive commodification of contemporary life. The development of the clock as an instrument of objective time measurement was crucial in this regard. Of course, not all theorists of time treat it as an objective phenomenon. Various thinkers, for example, have either treated time as a subjective or psychological phenomenon or supplemented conceptions of objective time with conceptions of a psychological pendent.1 In this vein, many theorists have claimed about physical time, in particular, about the time discussed in cosmological theories and special and general relativity theory, that it is relative to observer. The notion of temporality that I appropriate from Heidegger is also of the subjective type, at least when “subjective”

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is broadly construed; more precisely, it is a descendent of subjective conceptions (see below). Other thinkers analyze time as a social construct. In my view, their analyses, too, are of the subjective type, broadly construed; or, again, more precisely, they are descendents of the subjective type.2 Analyses of time as a social construct also typically presuppose objective time (see the below discussion of Nowotny). Despite these alternatives, objective time is an eminently familiar phenomenon that pervades modern thought and life. It is also the category of time that dominates social theory and analysis. Most analyses of time in philosophy also concern objective time, and many divergent and contradictory accounts of it exist. In the modern era, for instance, theorists have famously disputed whether objective time is absolute, relational, or relativistic: a pure advance along which events fall, a set of relations among entities, or an ordering relative to frame of reference. Theorists have also disagreed about whether the entities that occur in time, or relations among which constitute time, are objects, events, processes, or something else. Venerable issues about being and becoming have always attended analyses of time, just as issues concerning four-dimensional manifolds and reversibility and irreversibility have recently become pressing. As for objective space, modern philosophers have likewise disputed whether space is absolute, relational, or relativistic. Absolute space is space conceived of as an object, a container or arena in which events occur and objects exist. The status of absolute space as an entity implies that it persists even when nothing happens or exists in it—as, for example, a container or arena that harbors all possible spatial locations where events can occur or objects exist. Relational space, by contrast, is space conceived of as a set of relations—e.g., longer than and wider than—and of properties based on these relations, for example, height and width. Relational space is objective because the relations among entities that constitute and underlie it persist independently of human apprehension and activity. What these relations, and thus relational space, cannot exist independently of, are objects. Relativistic space, finally, is space construed as relative to frame of reference. When frames of reference are something other than human experiences or perspectives, space so construed is objective in character. When frames are identified as human takes on the world, for instance, observations of events or performed measurements of spatial positions, relativistic space is subjective. The present book disregards debates about the proper analysis of objective time and space. Eschewing these debates is inconsequential for present purposes, however, for their resolution is more or less irrelevant to social analysis. It makes no difference to understanding social life, for instance, whether the entities that occur in time, or relations among which constitute time, are objects, events, processes, atomic events, or something else. Similarly, it makes

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no significant difference to social analysis whether objective space is absolute or relational.3 As for relativistic considerations, they are mostly irrelevant to understanding and explaining social affairs. This is because social affairs occur at a celerity to which these considerations make scant difference. Given the importance of relativity theory in science, let me briefly expand this intuitive point. Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski relativized physical space-time to frame of reference. In this context, “space-time” denotes an assignment of time and space coordinates to events. Einstein’s special relativity theory is based on the idea that simultaneity is relative to reference frame: what is simultaneous in one such frame is not simultaneous in a second frame that is moving relative to the first. This relativity to frame of spatio-temporal position—and, thus, of space-time—implies that the spatial-temporal coordinates of an event vary across frames. According to Einstein, the space-time coordinates that are assigned to one and the same events by frames of reference that are moving relatively to one another, will differ. When frames of reference move slowly in comparison to the speed of light, however, these differences are infinitesimal and noticeable or detectable only with sophisticated equipment. This is decidedly the situation, for instance, when frames of reference are associated with human observers. The negligible magnitude of relativistic effects at low velocities is the reason why relativistic space-time and the considerations that led physicists to accept it are largely irrelevant both to social affairs and to describing and explaining these affairs. This point also holds of the times bound up with general relativity theory and cosmological theories (though it should be noted that, as of 2010, absolute space-time might be making a comeback in cosmological theory). Of course, some processes that bear on social life do occur at sufficiently high speeds that relativistic considerations are pertinent to explaining them, for example, the arrival of sunlight on the earth, satellite communication transmissions, and—maybe—neuron firings in the brain. To be sure, moreover, special and general relativity theory have made a difference to social affairs since their discovery. Nonetheless, relativistic considerations can almost always be bracketed when understanding and explaining social phenomena, including the social phenomena that depend on or are tied to the aforementioned high velocity processes. The few social phenomena whose understanding and explanation might be facilitated by reference to relativistic matters include the technical-institutional development of exotic weapons, the operations of global telecommunications systems, and travel in outer space. Even in these instances, however, relativistic considerations can be bracketed: each of them can be understood and explained keeping the relativistic features of events and processes unmentioned in the background.

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Thus, although relativistic phenomena physically underlie human affairs, there is little point—at present—in treating the times and spaces pertinent to social life relativistically. In ignoring debates about their proper analysis, I do not mean to suggest that objective time and objective space are unimportant features of social life. On the contrary, an impressive line of scholarly investigations has demonstrated their immense significance for social affairs (e.g., the role of calendars in organizing action, the costs involved in overcoming distances, the psychological and cultural effects of timespace compressions). What’s more, most conceptions of objective social space-time examined in this book identify important temporal and spatial properties of social affairs. Although I stated in the chapter introduction that the current book does not investigate objective time and space in much detail, it does periodically refer to them in later analyses of society and history. I need, consequently, to specify more precisely what objective time and objective space are in the following. Almost all modern conceptions of objective time, the time of objective reality, treat succession—before and after—as essential to it. They concur that wherever events, objects, instants, phases, or anything else occur before and after one another, there is time. Indeed, absolute, relational, and relativistic are three conceptions of the nature of succession, that is, three conceptions of before and after orderings. Similarly, rhythms and both linear and cyclical times are composed of successions. For the purpose of exploring human activity and society, consequently, it suffices to make this common denominator definitive of objective time: objective time is (objective) succession. I write “(objective)” succession because some theories treat succession as a subjective—or relative—phenomenon (see below discussion of Kant). Anyone who objects to this winnowing can simply interpret any statement in this book about objective time as a statement about, not objective time, but succession. The inexorableness of objective time qua succession can be elucidated through a brief discussion of Helga Nowotny’s account of time. Nowotny analyzes time as a social construct. Her account, consequently, officially opposes the idea that time is objective. According to Nowotny, time is a “symbolic product of human coordination and ascription of significance, collectively shaped and molded at a deep level.”4 What she means is (1) that time is a concept that is produced through particular interpersonal relations and social practices in conjunction with artifacts such as sundials, calendars, and clocks and (2) that this concept in turn organizes interpersonal relations and practices by providing symbolic means of coordination and orientation. At base, moreover, the production of time involves the association of “mobile continua” with one another, one of the mobile continua serving as point of reference for the other(s). Examples of such continua are the cycle of seasons

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and the cycle of agricultural festivals. Time is produced through the association of these two cycles, the return of the seasons serving as reference point for the staging of the festivals. This analysis of time as a social product applies to what Nowotny calls “social times.” Social times are the times of social groups and provide common means of coordination and orientation for group members. Examples are clock and calendar time, as well as the standardized world time of an interconnected global humanity. This analysis, however, does not directly apply to other “times” that Nowotny discusses or mentions. Nowotny writes that all conceptions of time must accommodate linear time and cyclical time, meaning irreversible change and repetition: the relation between these is fundamental to the “temporal architecture of a civilization.”5 As indicated, however, linear time and cyclical time are composed of successions. A variety of more specific times that Nowotny broaches—individual (or proper) time, public time, laboratory time, market time, monastic time—are also made up of successions that embrace or evince different constituent events, intervals, regularities, rhythms, speeds, and scales. They are all configurations of objective time as I am construing the latter, regardless of how far the patterning of constituent events in a given case rests on instituted social times. Similarly, because the complexes of practices, concepts, experiences, artifacts, and interpersonal relations which social times emerge from and in turn organize transpire as and embrace considerable succession, they, too, are phenomena of objective time. Indeed, the mobile continua through the association of which social times are produced are repetitions and thus successions. Social times, consequently, presuppose objective times. In short, although Nowotny’s claim that time is a social construct opposes the claim that time is objective, the times that she analyzes are objective phenomena that arise amid, transpire in, and are composed of objective times (successions). I believe that similar comments hold of most analyses of time and space as social constructs. Objective time is central to social life and analysis. I construe “objective space,” meanwhile, as three dimensional space. In three dimensional spaces, points are designated by a trio of coordinates and can be graphically plotted along three perpendicular coordinate axes. Objects, events, processes, and anything else whose location can be specified by three coordinates and plotted along these axes, exist or occur in objective space. Properties that can be defined by and, given coordinates, calculated with the theorems of Cartesian geometry are spatial properties. And absolute, relational, and relativistic yield three conceptions of the nature of these locations and properties. Construing objective space as three dimensional space suffices for the present purpose of examining activity timespace and its significance for social life.

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As indicated, objective time and objective space are not the only categories of time and space. I just discussed one version of the idea that time is a social construct. I have already referred, moreover, to the category of subjective time and space. Time and space are conceived of as subjective when they are thought of as utterly or inherently dependent on conscious subjects, above all, their experiences and perceptions. Conceptions of subjective time and space have been historically important. Perhaps the most prominent exemplar is Immanuel Kant’s thesis that time and space are a priori forms of intuition. Kant granted that what stand in temporal and spatial relations and possess temporal and spatial properties are objects of experience. He claimed, however, that objects of experience stand in these relations and possess these properties because the (transcendental) subject imposes these relations and properties on them; more exactly, because the subject imposes these relations and properties on the intuitions (a type of mental representation) that supply the substance of its experiences of objects, these experiences being at once objects of experience (i.e., objects as the subject experiences them). Objects of outer experience bear both temporal and spatial relations, whereas objects of inner experience, i.e., experiences themselves, bear temporal relations and properties alone. According to Kant, accordingly, to be a temporal or spatial phenomenon is to be represented in the experiences of the (transcendental) subject: it is a status utterly dependent on such subjects. Notice that the supposition that time and space are subjective does not imply that reality in itself is subjective. It implies only that any reality that is independent of the subject cannot be in time or space. Kant, it should be noted, construed time as succession. What qualifies his theory as a theory of subjective time is his thesis that succession is a relation imposed on experiential objects. It is not a relation that exists independently of the possible experiences of the transcendental subject. Similarly, Kant treated space as Cartesian space, whose subjective quality likewise consists in spatial relations and properties not existing independently of the subject’s possible experiences. A line of neoKantian thinkers extending to the present day has embraced Kant’s conception of time and space. Idealist philosophers à la Bishop Berkeley construed time and space even more subjectively, treating them (like almost everything else) as phenomena that exist only as perceived. A celebrated interpretation of special relativity theory, meanwhile, treats physical time and space as subjective. This interpretation construes the reference frames to which time and space are relative as human experiences, thus relativizing succession and location to perceptual perspective. On this interpretation, both the locations and before and after orderings of events depend on observers. As suggested, finally, twentieth century analyses of time and space as social

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constructs are a type of subjective conception, at least on a broad construal of subjective. More precisely, they are descendents of the subjective conception that typically substitute human activity or practices for mind and thereby preserve the dependence of time and space on human beings (cf. the above discussion of Nowotny). A quite different tradition of thinkers has embraced the idea of a kind of time, and/or a kind of space, that is seated in human life. The times and spaces involved qualify, strictly, as objective, subjective, or descendent from subjective as I am using these concepts. It is worth, nonetheless, marking this tradition off from the dominant versions of these categories of time and space. A prominent reason for this is that the times involved are not successions. Heidegger’s accounts of temporality and spatiality fall into this tradition. As I will explain in section 3, Heidegger treated temporality as marked, not by succession, but by dimensionality: past, present, and future. Spatiality, moreover, is not objective, but instead composed of regions: arrays of places and paths near to and far from activity. I will refrain from saying more about this alternative tradition until section 4.

2. Social Space-Time Much has been theoretically written about time or space as phenomena that characterize, intersect, or are constructed by society or history. Traditionally, moreover, theories have focused on time or space alone. Only lately have theorists begun to think about space-time, that is, about time and space as a combined or joint phenomenon. My concept of timespace is an example of this way of thinking. Despite this development, the dominant practice remains to theorize either time or space. This inertia is noteworthy given the significance of Minkowski space-time for modern physics. This unified four dimensional manifold has not spawned the sort of parallels or analogs in the human disciplines that have sometimes ensued from important theoretical advances in the natural sciences. Thinkers interested in space-time have sometimes criticized this tendency to treat time and space separately. The geographer David Harvey, for instance, writes that It is not at all clear . . . whether or not it is permissible or even possible to treat space and time as separate qualities. The number of books that concentrate on time alone (even a whole journal is now devoted to Time and Social Theory) suggests that the separation is widely accepted but little serious consideration is given to the grounds for or consequences of such a separation.6

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Similarly, the philosopher-sociologist Henri Lefebvre claimed that an ancient tradition separates time and space as two entities or two clearly distinct substances. This despite the contemporary theories that show a relation between time and space, or more exactly say how they are relative to one another. Despite these theories, in the social sciences we continue to divide up time into lived time, measured time, historical time, work time and free time, everyday time, etc., that are most often studied outside their spatial context.7

As I explain below, Harvey and Lefebvre nonetheless uphold one important kind of separation between time and space. Contemporary accounts of social time-space are marked by three key features. The first is that they tend to conceptualize time and space as objective phenomena in the sense discussed. Time is always a version of succession, usually clock or calendar time (time as measurable succession), whereas space is often some version of three-dimensional space. The second feature is that contemporary accounts of space-time conceptualize space-time as a conjoint phenomenon, that is, as a conjunction of separate phenomena, i.e., time and space. By “separate phenomena” I mean phenomena that are not intrinsically connected. Even when a social process, say, capitalist production is viewed as intrinsically both temporal and spatial in nature, its times and spaces are viewed as separate phenomena. To speak of the space-time of the process is to conjoin its spaces and times, to indicate that the process is at once temporal and spatial. Timespace, as a result, lacks inherent unity. The third key feature of recent accounts of social space-time is that they acknowledge multiple space-times. The significance of this acknowledgement lies in the widespread presumption both inside and outside of academe that space-time, or rather, time and space (space-time is an esoteric concept) are each one overall phenomenon. What leads these accounts to advocate plural space-times is that they treat individual space-times as the collections of temporal and spatial properties that attach to or arise from specific nexuses of social processes or phenomena. As I will explain later in the chapter, activity timespace exhibits the third, but not the first two, of these key features of recent accounts. The conjunctive nature of space-time does not contradict Harvey’s and Lefebvre’s admonishments to take time and space together. What Harvey and Lefebvre criticize is the tendency to examine and write about either the temporal or the spatial features of social processes. Social investigators, they claim, should examine these features together. This claim notwithstanding, the times and spaces that Harvey and Lefebvre have in mind—as I will discuss—are separate phenomena between which there are no intrinsic connections. Myriad contingent connections do, of course, exist between the temporal and the spatial properties of social affairs; because of this, taking

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these properties together is both theoretically satisfying and empirically revealing. To investigate these properties together, however, is simply to join them. Incidentally, my intention in pointing out this feature of Harvey’s and Lefebvre’s accounts is not to criticize them. Rather, in this section I note this and other features of previous social theoretical attempts to think time and space together in order to set points of comparison for and thereby throw light on my concept of timespace. Because an event occurs in time and space, it can be treated as occurring in a space-time that conjoins position in time and location in space. Classical Galilean timespace is an example. This timespace consists of a three dimensional Euclidean space plus absolute time. There is no inherent connection between position in absolute time and position in three dimensional Euclidean space. An event has a location in this time and a location in this space, and its location in Galilean timespace is the conjunction of these. In addition, events that occur in three dimensional Euclidean space at a given point in time are simultaneous, and the set of points in this four dimensional spacetime where a moving entity is located or a noninstantaneous event transpires is the path of the entity or the course of the event. This conception of space-time is well represented in social thought by the time-geography of Torsten Hägerstrand and his associates.8 In its signature representational technique, this approach treats space as a two dimensional plane, across which people move. The two axes of space are complemented by a third axis, that of time. This three dimensional system allows the locations a person occupies in space over time to be plotted in an immediately graspable graph. The resulting three dimensional lines represent the paths that people take in their lives, and intersections of these lines represent the simultaneous presence of people in the same spatial locations and can be taken to stand, among other things, for face-to-face interactions. Whatever theoretical problems this approach to social life might face, it is a very powerful visualizing tool that makes objective social space-time and the objective spatial movement of people over time tangible. It also obviously appropriates Galilean timespace, treating the space of social life as a two dimensional Euclidean space and the time of social life as clock-calendar time. Time and space are separate. An action is performed somewhere in Euclidean space and at a particular time. Its space-time location is the conjunction of these. The only thing that links the two is that an action always has a location in both. Galilean space-time, or rather the combination of three dimensional space and clock-calendar time, is pervasive in social thought. Even though Einstein and Minkowski undermined Galilean space-time in physical theory and relativized space-time to frame of reference, social theory has stuck with

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Galilean-inspired space-time. The failure of Einstein-Minkowski timespace to inspire social theoretic pendants is noteworthy because Einstein-Minkowski space-time differs from Galilean space-time in treating space-time as a four dimensional manifold instead of as a construction from one dimensional time and three dimensional space. Einstein-Minkowski space-time is unified in a way Galilean space-time is not. A second prominent contemporary account of space-time is Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis. According to Lefebvre, everyday life, and social phenomena more generally, are composed of rhythms. Unfortunately, it is difficult to pin down exactly what Lefebvre means by one of his key terms, “everyday life” (la vie quotidienne). So what is it? A mixture of nature and culture, the historical and the lived, the individual and the social, the real and the unreal, a place of transitions, of meetings, or interactions and conflicts, in short a level of reality. In one sense there is nothing more simple and more obvious than everyday life. How do people live? The question may be difficult to answer, but that does not make it any the less clear. In another sense nothing could be more superficial: it is banality, triviality, repetitiveness. And in yet another sense nothing could be more profound. It is existence and the ‘lived,’ revealed as they are before speculative thought has transcribed them: what must be changed and what is the hardest to change.9

Everyday life is related to the phenomenological notions of lifeworld and lived experience; Lefebvre even appropriated Heidegger’s expression “being-in-theworld” to characterize the condition of the “corporeal subject.”10 In another sense, everyday life is day-to-day life, how people live. It thereby embraces repetitiveness as well as the mundane, prosaic, or ordinary. In this sense, everyday life contrasts with “extraordinary life,” which connotes singularity, uncommonness, and majesty (the sublime?). Everyday life is, thus, something like normal day-to-day life. The whole of reality, finally, of which everyday life is a level, also includes, most prominently, the capitalist system. Like Habermas after him, Lefebvre held that capitalism has colonized everyday life: through commodification, among other things, and more generally by imposing linear and mechanical rhythms onto the cyclical patterns of pre-capitalist life. As indicated, everyday life and social reality more broadly are composed of rhythms. Indeed, any social phenomenon that persists through time, be it a government, family, horse farm, horse farm tour, sports league, or economic system, is composed of intersecting rhythms at rough equilibrium. Every more or less animate body and a fortiori every gathering of bodies is . . . polyrhythmic, which is to say composed of diverse rhythms, with each part . . . having its own in a perpetual interaction that constitutes a set or a whole. (89)11

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Note that this claim entails that everyday life and social phenomena are stretched over past, present, and future. Because they are composed of rhythms, they are never fully present at a given moment; they are never a set of once and for all formed things and images. The state of things at any moment is simply an abstraction from a temporally extended reality. A rhythm is intrinsically a spatial-temporal entity. To begin with, a rhythm is a repetitious expenditure of energy. As such, it is necessarily stretched over time. Any expenditure of energy, moreover, occurs somewhere, at particular location(s). It follows that “all rhythms imply the relation of a time to a space, a localised time, or, if one prefers, a temporalised space” (89).12 A rhythm, consequently, has a time, i.e., the pace or measure of its repetition, and a space, i.e., the locations where it takes place. Its measure is the regular long or short intervals and regular stops, blanks, and resumptions that constitute its repetition. Lefebvre distinguished between two types of rhythms: cyclical and linear. Cyclical rhythms, the rhythms of “beginning again” (90), originate in nature; examples are the rhythms of seasons, migrations, agriculture, and festivals. Cyclical rhythms are not opposed to becoming, since each beginning can be something new. Linear rhythms, by contrast, define [themselves] through the consecution and reproduction of the same phenomenon, almost identical, if not identical, at roughly similar intervals; for example a series of hammer blows, a repetitive series into which are introduced harder and softer blows, and even silences, though at regular intervals. The metronome also provides an example of linear rhythm. (90)13

According to Lefebvre, linear rhythm, the repetition of the same, originates in human activity or social practice. It opposes becoming because it is constituted by return. Rhythms, incidentally, can also be characterized by nonrepetitive patterns such as birth, growth, peak, decline, and end. Cyclical and linear rhythms, finally, combine in myriad possibilities: These last rhythms (school children, shoppers, tourists) would be more cyclical, of large and simple intervals, at the heart of livelier, alternating rhythms, at brief intervals, cars, regulars, employees, bistro clients. The interaction of diverse, repetitive and different rhythms animates, as one says, the street and the neighbourhood. (30)

Lefebvre illustrated the idea that rhythms have their own space-times by describing the city scene he observed through his apartment window in Paris. The rhythms bundled together beneath him included those of pedestrian movements, automobile movements, the variation of these movements over the course of the day, the repetition of dawn and dusk, the opening

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and shutting of shops, the opening, closing, and shuttering of windows, and so on. Each of these rhythms has its time—its regular intervals, stops, and beginnings—and its space, the locations where its rhythmical movements take place. Together, these rhythms form an ensemble of interconnected time-spaces, each composed of the time and space of a particular rhythm. Similarly, a society can be conceptualized as an open whole of interacting timespace rhythms of material bodies, living bodies, and social bodies (42–3). Lefebvre envisioned a social theory that would analyze everyday life rhythms, economic, political, and cultural rhythms, the capitalist rhythm of production and destruction, the capitalist attempt to impose linear rhythms on the cyclical rhythms of life and history, and, more generally, the imprintation of social rhythms on those of nature. Lefebvre thought of time objectively. One might think that because he presented rhythmanalysis as a kind of phenomenological, or better, empirical experiential inquiry (15),14 the rhythms that such an analysis examines would be subjective, dependent on human experience. In fact, though, the internal alternations and patterns that make movements rhythms are inevitably intervals and instants. This is explicit when Lefebvre claimed that quantity characterizes the regular intervals, stops, blanks, and beginnings of a rhythm’s measure (8–9): “. . . each rhythm has its own and specific measure: speed, frequency, consistency” (10). Temporally, as a result, rhythms are objective. Nowhere in rhythmanalysis did Lefebvre indicate what he meant by “space.” Many readers of this book alone will conclude that space is objective: the space of a rhythm is the locations where its movements or energy expenditures occur. This conclusion needs to be reconsidered, however, in light of Lefebvre’s other writings, above all The Production of Space, which offers an expansive account of social space and its production. According to this account, the social spaces produced within given societies, or modes of production, have three components: spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space, or more familiarly described, perceived, conceived, and lived space. Perceived space is the physical space in which human activity is performed. Over time, this space has increasingly become the product of human activity. Conceived space is the nonsymbolic and nonimaginary representations of space that are conceived of and used by certain groups in society, e.g., architects, planners, engineers, and philosophers. Lived space, finally, is physical space symbolically, emotionally, and passionately apprehended in people’s ongoing lives, e.g., a church as the focus of people’s relation to God. If this typology is read into rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre did not say whether it should), it turns out that rhythms of both the body and nature take place in perceived spaces, whereas rhythms of human activity take place in amalgamated perceived-lived spaces. Representations of space might have a

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hand in forming the perceived and lived spaces involved, but rhythms do not literally take place in spatial representations. The perceived space of rhythmed activity is the ever increasingly produced physical space of activity. This space is perceived and acted in by both actors and those who observe their activity. It is an objective space: sidewalks, doors, and automobile interiors are physical objects that qua physical remain what they are independently of human apprehension and action. People, however, also live through perceived spaces of rhythmed activity: these spaces are meaningful physical spaces. Their meanings are relative to human activity and cannot outlive it: sidewalks as paths to work, doors as ways to get outside, car interiors as places of one’s own—these matters obtain only so long as people act in certain ways. Lived spaces, consequently, are subjective, or more precisely, descendent of subjective since they depend, not on human experiences alone, but also on human activities. It follows that the spaces that people act in when walking on a sidewalk, going into the yard, or driving a car are simultaneously perceived and lived; the space of rhythmed activity is a perceived-lived amalgam. This space is also simultaneously objective and subjective. The sidewalks and crosswalks where pedestrian rhythms take place, for example, are both objective sites of human activity and paths to work, shopping, lovers, and rest. Of course, an analyst can take such amalgamated objective-subjective spaces as either objective or subjective alone by exclusively focusing on either their perceived qualities—thus as produced physical spaces of activity—or their lived qualities—thus as symbolically qualified places that people apprehend and relate to. As noted, rhythmanalysis reads as if the spaces of rhythms are objective perceived ones. Nothing in this book contradicts, however, the more elaborate account of social space developed in The Production of Space. Assuming that the spaces of activity rhythms are a perceived-lived amalgam, the space-times of such rhythms bind objective temporal properties to objective as well as subjective spatial features: the measurable intervals and instants of their internal measures joined with physical spaces qualified as meaningful places and paths. The same concepts of space and time inform Lefebvre’s notion of the moment, which at first sight might seem to refuse them. Lefebvre defined moments as intense, festival-like attempts, born of and contained in everyday life, to achieve a total realization of a previously impossible project, activity, or way of being.15 Such attempts criticize everyday life by essaying to realize previously invisible possibilities. Such attempts, in turn, are critiqued by the prosaic character of the everyday, by its “patient and sober accumulation” of what has been. Among the examples of moments that Lefebvre mentioned are play, rest, and poetry. Lefebvre wrote (1) that moments have their own durations that are neither part of a broader evolution nor discontinuous with the past and (2) that they

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create a space and a time that are both socially governed and individual/interindividual in nature.16 It seems to me that the notion of time that informs Lefebvre’s discussions of moments is objective time17 and that the notion of space involved can be taken to be the perceived-lived amalgam discussed above. A moment is a datable segment of objective time: it can be located before and after other events. What is done during a moment, moreover, can be located in the same matrix of before and after. A moment, however, is a new start: an attempt to realize a hitherto invisible possibility. As such, it embraces the suspension of some extant rhythms and the attempted institution of new ones. It thus involves a unique configuration of successions that differs from previous configurations without being discontinuous with them in broader objective time. Similarly, a moment embraces a “reorganization of surrounding” space: it is a new start spatially as well as temporally. I see no reason not to interpret the space involved as the above amalgam of perceived and lived spaces. Ben Highmore rightly notes that “. . . moments provide a promise of the possibility of a different daily life, while at the same time punctuating the continuum of the present.”18 Understanding this, however, does not require calling on notions of time and space other than those needed to understand Lefebvre’s account of rhythms. In sum, Lefebvre shunned the prevalent tendency of treating space-time purely objectively. At the same time, his account extends the even more pervasive practice of treating space-time as a conjunction of separate times and spaces. Space-time has no inherent unity beyond the fact that the spaces and times that compose space-times are properties of one and the same rhythms. As Lefebvre himself wrote, “the triad ‘time—space—energy’ links three terms that it leaves distinct, without fusing them . . .” (12)19 Lefebvre’s conception of lived space resembles the concept of spatiality found in Heidegger. I turn now to two further accounts of social space-time that point, in very different ways, toward the Heideggerian conception of activity timespace discussed in the following section. One account does this by self-consciously abandoning the assumption that time and space are objective phenomena; the other does so by drawing on Heidegger to develop an objectivist version of activity timespace.20 The first account is the geographers’ Don Parkes and Nigel Thrift’s splendid and comprehensive account of the formation and dynamics of place.21 Parkes and Thrift write that places result from the coalescence and coordination of multiple activities, events, and practices. A horse farm, for instance, might result from the coalescence and coordination of family activities and events, breeding and training practices, owner-employee relations, county government agencies and land use regulations, wider economic practices, racing events, celebrations, and the like. Space and time, too, number among

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the factors that determine the formation and transformation of place. Their roles in these two processes are crystallized in Parkes and Thrift’s notions of timing space and spacing time. Space is timed when space, that is, the spatial properties of events, practices, and material arrangements are maintained or transformed through the manipulation of time. An example is manipulating the horse training schedule so that stallions do not pass one another in the lanes between paddocks that connect barn and field, i.e., so as to control the spatial distribution of horses. The spacing of time, meanwhile, is the adjustment of either the intervals between events or the rate of recurrence of events. It is a purely temporal affair (“space” here connotes magnitude, or “extent,” of interval). Distinguishing Parkes and Thrift’s account from most others in social thought is their recognition that objective time and space are not the only types of time and space that help determine place. The authors appreciate the pertinence of experiential time and space to place, drawing on figures such as the geographers Yi-Fu Tuan and Anne Buttimer to conceptualize experiential time and space.22 The temporal and spatial factors bound up with the formation, maintenance, and transformation of a horse farm, for example, include not only objective factors such as clock-calendar time, the biological rhythms of sleep and gestation, and distances between as well as the relative orientations of buildings; they also include experiential temporal and spatial factors such as perceptions of long and quick times, judgments of too early and too late, and senses of crowdedness and spaciousness. By acknowledging the contribution of experiential time and space to the formation and dynamics of place, Parkes and Thrift produce a much richer account of social timespace than do theorists who treat social timespace purely objectively, as a combination of succession and three-dimensional space. At the same time, Parkes and Thrift join with all other theorists of spacetime in treating space-time as a conjunctive phenomenon.23 This is most evident in their initial discussion of the formation of place. In Figure 1.24 on page thirty two, the authors group together objective and experiential spatial elements, on the one hand, and objective and experiential temporal elements, on the other, and explain that different combinations of elements from the two (four) sets come together in different social situations. “For any [person] a combination of the four space and time elements produces a structured space-time which is place.”24 This purely additive account sees no inherent unity in the different categories. Other passages where the aggregative character of Parkes and Thrift’s approach emerges include their comments, first, that “. . . the dimensions of space and the dimension of time may be joined quite legitimately into four dimensional notions, as in motion” and, second, that “with movement, space and time become coincident, as space-time.”25

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Movement, as change in location over time, is both a spatial and a temporal notion. Motion, moreover, combines space and time and is, thus, a spatialtemporal phenomenon. In sum, Parkes and Thrift treat space-time as the conjunction of spatial being and temporal being. Although extensive connections exist between the temporal and spatial properties of spatial-temporal phenomena, these connections obtain between separate matters. The final account of space-time to be examined presently, that of the anthropologist Christopher Gosden, conceives of space-time as the space-time of human activity, as a feature or dimension of this activity. I discuss it because it is heavily indebted to Heidegger and also because the current chapter presents a nonobjectivist conception of activity timespace. The central concept in Gosden’s account of social life is that of a system of reference. A system of reference is a network of actions separated in time and space. This concept is designed to highlight the interconnectedness of actions. Gosden’s discussion also emphasizes that time and space are dimensions of action networks: “Space and time are not . . . abstract qualities providing the medium of social action, but rather . . . dimensions created through . . .”26 systems of reference. Space and time are features of social life cum linked human activities. Examples of spaces are landscapes, dwellings, and other forms of material culture treated as physical phenomena, physical arrangements of the world. Physical arrangements are spaces in the sense that human beings proceed amid them. Coordinated with these physical spaces, moreover, are bodily skills that people acquire by learning to act in them and that subtend performances of actions there. The bodilyness of the skills corresponds to the materiality of the spaces. In fact, bodies and physical spaces form complexes: “Each generation is socialized within a particular landscape and this becomes something that we are . . . ,” “material settings are thus internal to our social being, not external” (82, 16). A system of reference reworks spaces, such that physical spaces are a product of the system; conversely, the physical world acts on humans, constraining what they do and shaping their skills and opportunities. Spaces play three roles in human life (82). They constitute, first, room-formaneuver, open areas through which people can proceed and deploy their skills. Spaces, second, set bounds on movement, physically constraining what people do. These first two functions are material in nature, a matter of physical opportunities and restrictions. The third function of spaces is to serve as “stage setting.” Gosden writes nothing about this third function, instead stressing the materiality of spaces and of the complexes that spaces form with bodily skills. He suggests only that by “stage setting” he means that spaces are the settings where humans interact; in human life, he maintains, materiality—interactions between humans and world—and mutuality—relations

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among humans—are inseparable. From a Heideggarian point of view, however, the stage-settings of human activity are not just the physical sites where humans interact. More pervasively and intimately, they are regions through which people proceed, place-path arrays anchored in physical arrangements that human activity lays down and is attuned to. The time, meanwhile, that characterizes systems of reference has two components. The first is time-scale. When Gosden, for instance, provocatively writes that there are as “many forms of time as there are types of practice,” he immediately continues by stating that “[t]hese time scales derive partly from the nature of the materials being worked with: pottery, metal, and wood all have different time-scales contained in their production, necessitating different structures of action” (125). His distinction, moreover, between habit time and conscious time is very much a contrast between something that he alleges is long, i.e., the duration of habits in human societies, and something that he supposes is short, i.e., the duration of consciously attended to and manipulated structures and arrangements: “both habitual and consciously directed action have their own time-scales” (188–9). It is obvious that time-scales are lengths of objective time.27 The second component of the temporal dimension of systems of reference pertains to the structure of human activity, not to stretches of objective time. Gosden writes: “I used the term ‘reference’ to explore how every act is connected to a whole series of other acts in space. We can now see that this structure is also temporal, linked together by forms of anticipation and memory” (122). Again, “Action creates space, in this case the area to be covered by a garden, and space enables the deployment of skilled action. Time is also involved, not just in terms of the weeks that it will take to prepare a garden, but in the anticipations of the future harvest and the chain of actions the garden’s produce can promote” (19). The second type of time that characterizes a system of reference comprises the nexuses of memories and expectations that inform the actions composing the system. Because expectations often arise from memories, Gosden redescribes the nexus of memories and expectations in activity as the use of the past to construct the present and future. He calls this use “recursiveness” (187; cf. 122). Time as recursiveness is webs of memory and expectation determining activity. It is also a version of activity time: time as a dimension of activity. Time qua recursiveness differs from time qua time-scale. For the use of the past—that is, memory and expectation—has no inherent connection to the intervals of time that separate events which occur before and after one another. Memory and expectation are matters, instead, of past, future, and present. According to Gosden, memories and expectations are ordered and connected in social practices. Practices enable, enjoin, and sustain connections

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between past and future that inform activity, particular orderings of time qua recursiveness. In teaching practices, for instance, memories of the use of particular techniques form expectations about likely student responses to suggested new rules, thereby determining decisions that teachers presently take about the design of their courses. Practices contain numerous such couplings of past, present, and future. Gosden claims that different times are harbored in different practices. He means two things: that the actions and processes that occur in different practices belong to different time-scales (contrast the practices of teaching, curriculum reform, research, and advising or those of grooming, city-county planning, tourism, and fox hunting) and that the actions involved are informed by different couplings of memory and expectation, past and future. It turns out, however, that the second sort of time, Gosden’s version of activity time, is a disposition of objective time. For it is a connectedness between (1) present activity and (2) present mental conditions (i.e., memories and expectations) that refer to (3) past or future states of affairs, that is, states of affairs that occur before or after present activity. Recursiveness is thus a configuration of activity, conditions, and states of affairs in objective time. As discussed, furthermore, space for Gosden is physical space. Unlike Lefebvre and Parkes and Thrift, therefore, Gosden conceptualizes timespace as objective. Like all theorists, moreover, Gosden construes timespace as a conjunction: “Possibility and limit exist in four dimensions: space, time, mutuality, and materiality, all of which are both socially created and creating. I see these four dimensions as being shaped into different time-space systems, designating the spatial and temporal unfolding of social action” (78). Time-space is a conjunction of time-scales, memory-expectation couplings, and physical spaces.

3. The Timespace of Human Activity The current section presents my Heideggarian account of an activity timespace that is nonobjective and unified. I begin by considering the conception of timespace found in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy.28 I do this for two reasons. First, this is the only conception of timespace that Heidegger explicitly articulated in his corpus. Second, in chapter 4 I appropriate Heidegger’s closely related notion of the event, and in the Contributions Heidegger spelled out his concepts of timespace and of the event coordinately. As I will explain, however, the conception of timespace found in the Contributions proves to be a dead-end in the present context—it offers little for the analysis of activity, society, and history. I should add that readers largely unfamiliar with Heidegger, especially with his later works, can skip the following somewhat

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arcane subsection on the Contributions without unduly compromising their understanding of later sections and chapters. Before beginning, I must also indicate that the fact that “time” precedes “space” in the expression “timespace” does not imply or signal a priority of time over space. The choice of “timespace” over “spacetime” instead reflects the prevalence of the expression “space-time” in physics and in discussions of objective space and time that are informed by physics. The choice thus aims linguistically to enshrine the great difference between activity timespace and physical space-time. Timespace in the Contributions to Philosophy In the Contributions to Philosophy, timespace plays a key role in Heidegger’s metaphysical picture of humanity and being. From Being and Time onwards, Heidegger thought that the most significant feature of human existence or life is its relation to the clearing of being (or beyng). The clearing is that open realm in which entities of any sort can be or show up, that ultimate and allinclusive place where anything that is exists. This includes, for example, the universe and objects of thought: not just tables, geological substrata, and actions, but the entire physical universe and thought objects as well, exist, show up, in the clearing. In the Contributions, timespace is a central feature of the clearing. Because timespace is also that feature of human being by virtue of which human life stands into the clearing, it is a critical feature of human being, too. Timespace is at once a key feature of the clearing and the most basic feature of humanity. This picture can be elucidated by contrasting it with the alternative picture Heidegger outlined in Being and Time. The notion of the clearing plays a fleeting, but central role in Being and Time. In that book, Heidegger maintained that human existence and the clearing—which he also called the there (Da)—coincide, are one and the same. Human existence is the clearing, that open place where entities can be or show up: Dasein (the word refers to functional human beings) “is in such a way as to be its ‘there.’” 29 In this regard, the distinction between human existence and the clearing is an analytic distinction between the open as related to (more specifically, as opened by) human being and the open as where entities show up. Heidegger further held that temporality is the most fundamental feature of human existence. For it is that feature by virtue of which human existence and the clearing coincide: the open that temporality is is at once the open of the there. The clearing, in other words, is nothing other than temporality. By the time of the Contributions, Heidegger had abandoned the idea that humanity and the clearing coincide. Human being and the clearing are now

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conceived of as distinct. Instead of coinciding with the clearing, humans are now said to stand into it, or to be opened up to it. Accordingly, human being is no longer that by virtue of which people coincide with the clearing. Instead, it is that by virtue of which they stand into it. This difference is signaled in the various post-Being and Time texts in which Heidegger defined human being, not as existence (as in Being and Time), but as ek-sistence (Ek-sistenz), a word that emphasizes being opened up to. In the Contributions, timespace replaces the temporality discussed in Being and Time as a fundamental structure of human being. Like temporality, it is a kind of open. Again like temporality, it is at once the open of human life and the open that belongs to the clearing: it is that aspect of being human by virtue of which humans stand into the clearing. This position parallels the one in Being and Time. In that book, humanity and the clearing coincide because the open that belongs to the temporality of human existence is at once the open of the clearing. There is one open that is the open of human life and the open of the clearing. This remains Heidegger’s position in the Contributions.30 What changes is that, in the latter, there is more to the clearing than humanity standing into it, more to the clearing than the open that belongs to it. It is because of this more that, by virtue of its being, humanity stands into, and does not coincide with, the clearing. The most significant piece of the more is articulated in the notion of the event (Ereignis).31 The clearing happens, and the word “event” denotes its happening quality. The happening of the clearing is as fundamental as is anything in Heidegger’s post-Being and Time thought. Indeed, timespace is that by virtue of which humans stand into, not so much the clearing, as its happening. Of course, the event must be distinguished from an event. Events are multitudinous, the event, by contrast, singular. The event, the happening of the clearing, is the happening of the timespace in which events happen or take place: it is there being places and times for events. The event is singular in the sense that myriad events occur in the same timespace and thus belong to the same one happening—the same one there is—of that timespace. In any case, it is because timespace is the basic feature of human life that humans stand into the event of the clearing whose open is timespace. Another piece of the more is found in the idea of truth. Heidegger claimed, for reasons that cannot be explored here, that truth is unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). Unconcealment, or being in the open, is in turn tied up with concealment. According to Heidegger, moreover, what above all conceals itself whenever entities are unconcealed, whenever the clearing occurs, is being (read: the clearing itself). Truth, consequently, is unconcealing—or better, clearing—self-concealment (lichtende Selbstverbergen) on the part of being. Thence the expression “truth of being,” which pervaded Heidegger’s writ-

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ings beginning in the early 1930s and meant the clearing self-concealment of being. Because being conceals itself, it never coincides with the open of the clearing, the open of timespace that is also a fundamental structure of human life. Human being, as a result, cannot coincide with the clearing: being eludes it. It is because the clearing happens and is the clearing of self-concealment that the fact, that timespace is at once a basic feature of human life and the open of the clearing, entails that humans stand into the clearing (its happening) instead of coinciding with it. At the same time, the clearing, or rather, clearing self-concealing cannot happen unless humans stand into it. Timespace is a basic structure of human life. If there were no humans, and thus no timespace, there would be no open, and a clearing without an open is impossible. “The truth of being and so this itself holds sway only where and when Da-sein.”32 It is in this sense that Heidegger wrote in the 1940s that “Man is the shepherd of being.”33 Heidegger even believed, stronger, that the event claims humanity, that the happening of clearing self-concealment appropriates humans. “Who is man? The one who is used by being to withstand, stand out, the happening that belongs to the truth of being [Ausstehen der Wesung der Wahrheit des Seyns]” (B 318, C 223). The role of shepherd is one into which humans are appropriated. In short, although Heidegger accorded humans a unique role in the clearing, his anthropocentrism is a posthumanism. What I mean is that the uniqueness of humanity springs, not from the nature of humanity on its own, but instead from the event of the truth of being through its appropriation of humans. Indeed, because the clearing happens, or better, events, the clearing and humanity event as belonging to one another. To quote the protocol of a late seminar: “. . . what the event events, i.e., brings into its own and holds in the event: namely the belonging together of being and man.”34 Timespace links being and man in their belonging together. In sum, the happening of timespace is the happening of the open that is a basic feature of both human life and the clearing: the event is the happening of clearing self-concealment, in which a temporalspatial open is cleared and humanity stands into this opening because this temporalspatial open is its basic feature. In the Contributions, timespace is unified.35 Unlike the time-spaces conceptualized in social theory, timespace in the Contributions is not a conjunction of time and space conceived of as separate phenomena. In this book (and in subsequent work),36 Heidegger construed the unity of time and space as lying in the possession of a common origin. This common origin is the event, the happening of the clearing of being into which humans stand. Time and space are unified by virtue of each arising in the same happening of a clearing as an essential dimension of that clearing. “Time-space is the essential unfolding

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(Wesensentfaltung) of the happening that belongs to (Wesung) truth” (B 386, C 269).37 This account of timespace is of little help, I believe, in grasping human activity, social life, and history. This partly follows from its resolutely abstract character. The Contributions is a hyper-abstract text even in comparison to the formidably abstract Being and Time. Some sense of this can be garnered from quotes such as the following: Time-space is the capturing-moving toward [berückend-entrückende] gathering encircling essential happening [Wesung], the so joined and correspondingly attuning absent ground [Ab-grund], whose essential happening becomes historical in the grounding of the “there” through being-there (its essential paths of sheltering the truth).” (B 386, C 269–70)

The Contributions indicates almost nothing about what timespace concretely amounts to in human life. Heidegger did sometimes call on terms such as “remembering,” “awaiting,” and “entrance into abandonment”—which prima facie pertain more to humanity than to the clearing—to characterize the happening of timespace, or rather, the temporalizing and spatializing that together, as temporalizing-spatializing, are the happening of timespace. He did this because timespace (temporalizing-spatializing) is not just a feature of the clearing, but also a basic feature of humanity. (As a result, what the terms designate are indifferently basic operations of the clearing and fundamental features of human existence; see B 257, C 181 on remembering and preparation).38 Even when, however, the Contributions characterizes the temporalizing of past and future as remembering and awaiting, its use of these terms bears little resemblance to their common use in describing human beings. Indeed, Heidegger never focused on remembering and awaiting as normal features of human life and activity. Another reason why the account of timespace in the Contributions offers little for the topics of the present book is that it has no discernable implications for theorizing human activity, at least in any usefully general or systematic form. The Contributions approaches timespace both as a feature of the clearing and as that by virtue of which humans stand into the clearing, thus in relation to everything tied up with the clearing (event, being, truth, Da-sein). Even though the terms Heidegger used to characterize timespace (temporalizing-spatializing) equally apply to the clearing and to human life, his claims about timespace primarily concern it qua feature of the clearing. He wrote little about timespace qua feature of human life. The facts that Heidegger barely elaborated the terms “remembering” and “awaiting” and did not put them to extensive analytic use is symptomatic in this regard. The remoteness of Heidegger’s account from concrete human activity renders it useless for

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the purpose of theorizing this activity. This distance is also significant vis-àvis theorizing society and history because human activity is a key feature of social life and history. Indeed, many theorists argue or assume that activity is the central ontological category in social and historical thought. Any appropriation of Heidegger’s thought that aims to illuminate human activity, society, and history must abandon the ontological concerns that animate his philosophy. It must set aside Heidegger’s ruminations on being, the clearing, and truth, however illuminating these might (or might not) be in contexts of a more philosophical sort. But although the notion of timespace in the Contributions offers little for understanding human life and society/history, the book will not be completely put aside in the following. A key idea of Heidegger’s that guides my overall discussion, namely, the centrality of timespace to human life, is articulated only in the Contributions. In chapter 4, moreover, I appropriate Heidegger’s notion of the event to conceptualize human activity as a temporalspatial event as opposed to a flow or causal event. Temporality and Spatiality in Being and Time In the Contributions, Heidegger held that timespace is central to human life because it is that feature of human life by virtue of which humanity stands into the clearing. I concur that timespace is central to human life, society, and history. What is central to these, however, is activity timespace, not some timespace that is a crucial feature of both human life and the clearing. The concept of activity timespace is utterly alien to the Contributions. I derive it, instead, from Heidegger’s earlier magnum opus, Being and Time. The biggest difference between activity timespace and timespace as developed in the Contributions is that timespace in the Contributions is the open where the world exists, whereas the timespace of activity, like activity, is a phenomenon of the world. It thus lacks the metaphysical significance that timespace enjoys in the Contributions. Although I derive the concept of activity timespace from Being and Time, it should be noted that, in this book, the concept of activity timespace does not appear as such, and Heidegger followed traditional philosophical and intellectual practice in discussing time (i.e., temporality) and space (i.e., spatiality) separately. That is, he treated them as distinct phenomena that are not inherently connected, or at least not any more inherently connected than is any feature of human existence to temporality. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of activity timespace can be seen in, and a powerful account of it derived from, Heidegger’s analysis of temporality and spatiality in that book.39 Division One of Being and Time begins with the announcement that Dasein’s being is existence: what it is to be a functional human being is to exist.

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Existence, in turn, centrally consists in being-in-the-world. The idea that human life is being-in-the-world contrasts with so-called Cartesian conceptions of human being as something encapsulated in an inner sphere standing over against the world: these conceptions largely dominated Western philosophy and humanistic intellectual work more broadly until the work of Heidegger and his contemporaries Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Dewey. Over the course of Division One, Heidegger redefined being-in-the-world in two formulas: existence is (1) thrown, projecting-being-amid entities and (2) being-ahead-of-itself-already-in-the-world as having to do with entities encountered in the world (Sich-vorweg-schon-sein-in-[der-Welt] als Sein-bei [innerweltlich begegnendem Seienden]; SZ 193). Each of the three components of the second formula reinterprets one of the three components of the first. Heidegger also claimed that temporality is the meaning of Dasein’s being. Putting aside interpretive issues about the nature of meaning and intelligibility, it suffices for present purposes to interpret this claim as meaning that all the structures that make up existence are modes of the temporalizing of temporality (Zeitigung der Zeitlichkeit; see SZ 304). Consider the two above expanded formulations of existence. Heidegger analyzed the three dimensions of human temporality—past, present, and future—as been-ingness (Gewesenheit), making present (Gegenwärtigen), and coming towards (Zu-kunft). To interpret being-in-the-world as a mode of the temporalizing of temporality is to interpret each of the three components of being-inthe-world as one of these dimensions. Projecting, for instance, which is reinterpreted in the second formula as being-ahead-of-itself, is understood as a coming-towards (towards, namely, what it is projected). Similarly, thrownness, reinterpreted as already-in-the-world, is further understood as been-ingness (thus, as the past). And being-amid entities turns out to be a making present (the present). It should be obvious that by “temporality” Heidegger meant something other than objective time, that is, the before and after ordering of events or instants. When Heidegger wanted to refer to objective time, he used the word Zeit (time). He was quite careful to use a different term, Zeitlichkeit (temporality), to designate the phenomenon that is the meaning of human existence. In using a different term, he signaled that human temporality is not a substitute for or alternative to objective time, but instead a distinct and fundamental temporal phenomenon. Human life exhibits a kind of time—a beening-making present-coming toward—that differs from the time familiar in ordinary and scientific life. One key difference between objective time and human temporality concerns succession. Objective time is succession. The three dimensions of temporality, by contrast, are not successive (see SZ 327). Instead, the existential

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past, present, and future occur together at once, or in Bergson’s phrase, “at a single stroke” (d’un seul coup).40 “Temporality temporalizes itself as beening-making present future” (SZ 350). To avoid misunderstandings, note that events in objective time can also be assigned to the past, present, and future, where the objective past and future are defined as the events or moments that occur, respectively, before or after an event or moment arbitrarily chosen as the present (e.g., the moment this sentence is being read). Past, present, and future events and moments still form successions, however: the past precedes the present, which precedes the future. The past, present, and future of human existence, by contrast, occur all at once. To use Heidegger’s terminology, been-ing does not precede making present, and coming toward does not follow been-ing and making present. That is, the existential past does not precede the existential present, and the existential future does not follow the existential past and present. Rather, all three are so long as a person exists: so long as someone exists she beens (is as she has been), makes present, and comes toward herself. This simultaneity of the three dimensions of temporality will become clearer when I link temporality to teleology. In claiming that the meaning of Dasein’s being is temporality, Heidegger asserted that all structures of human existence are modes of a fundamental temporal phenomenon distinct from objective time. This claim points in two directions. It points, first, towards an account of the clearing and the thesis discussed above that human existence, or rather, its meaning—temporality—coincides with the there. What this thesis means, again, is that the open that constitutes the clearing is an open that is inherent in temporality. “Temporality is the originary ‘outside of itself’ in and for itself” (SZ 329). As itself, essentially, open, temporality “clears [lichtet] the there originarily” (SZ 351). The claim that the meaning of Dasein’s being is temporality points, second, toward an account of human activity as temporal phenomenon. The claim points toward such an account because human existence, being-in(the-world), is, centrally, acting. In contrast to his philosophical predecessors Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Henri Bergson (among others), who conceptualized life as a flow of experiences, Heidegger treated human existence as, above all, acting in worldly contexts. Other interpreters of Heidegger will insist, and I affirm, that being-in is more than just activity (see the discussion of emotions in chapter 3). I think, however, that Heidegger’s analyses of such phenomena as being-in and world can—and should—be taken as analyses principally of human activity.41 In any event, this is the use to which I put them in this book. It is important to add that Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world should be taken as an account, more specifically, of experiential acting. By “experiential acting” I mean two things: first, that people experience, or live through, how they proceed in the world and,

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second, that a person’s experience occurs within the ken of his or her activity. What I mean by experiences occurring within the ken of activity is also twofold: first, that experiences occur while people are performing actions and, second, that what people are up to in performing actions lays down lines of relevance that inform the general progression of experience as they act. These lines of relevance inform experience without dictating what is experienced: what a person experiences when repairing a car, for instance, depends partly, but only partly, on the actions and projects he carries out. These lines of relevance also sometimes inform experience without specifying much of what is experienced: what one experiences when watching a movie, for instance, is not specified much by what one is up to in watching it. In Being and Time, as in the Contributions subsequently, Heidegger was interested in ontological matters above all else. As a result, analyzing the clearing was ultimately more important to him than was analyzing human activity: his remarks about existence and human activity were simply a route to addressing questions of being. Consequently, in appropriating his ideas on temporality and spatiality for the purpose of theorizing human activity, society, and history, I diverge from his own concerns. Indeed, after the Being and Time era (roughly 1924–1929) Heidegger never wrote anything that is as detailed about human activity as are Division One and parts of Division Two of that book. Because, however, these sections of the book concern activity, it is legitimate to appropriate them as such. In claiming that the meaning of existence is temporality, Heidegger claimed, inter alia, that human activity is fundamentally temporal. An important feature of temporality as a feature of human activity is its relation to teleology. By “teleology” I mean the orientation toward ends. Consider the two above formulaic interpretations of existence. Existence is (1) thrown, projecting-being amid entities and (2) being-ahead-of-itself-already-in-the-world as having to do with entities encountered in the world. In the second formula, thrownness is interpreted as already being-in-a-world. Whenever a person acts, she is always already immersed in particular situations, in the context of which she acts. What she does is sensitive to, responsive to, and reflective of those situations, or rather, of particular aspects of them. These aspects are givens, from which she departs in acting. Projection, meanwhile, is being ahead of oneself. It is putting ways of being before oneself and acting for their sake. Whenever a person acts, she acts for the sake of some way of being (e.g., winning a competition, getting home on time, being a good sister)—toward which she comes. Being-amid, finally, is having to do with entities encountered in the world, that is, acting toward, with, and amid (bei) them. Heidegger sometimes described this as falling into the world. All told, a person, when acting, falls into the world stretching out between that toward which she is coming and

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that from which she is departing. This falling-stretching out is the opening up of the past, present, and future of activity. This structure can be described in more familiar terms. The future dimension of activity, coming toward something projected, is acting for an end. The past dimension of activity, departing from something given, is reacting to something or acting in its light, i.e., being motivated. The present of activity is acting-encountering entities. The temporality of activity is, thus, acting amid entities toward an end from what motivates. It is a phenomenon of teleology and motivation. Because, moreover, temporality is the meaning of Dasein’s being, it follows that human life, in particular, human activity is inherently teleological and motivated. The temporal cum teleological-motivated character of activity will occupy central stage in the remainder of this book. Spatiality Parallel to the distinction he made between temporality and time, Heidegger distinguished the space of human existence from objective space, using the terms Räumlichkeit, spatiality, and Raum, space, to mark the difference (though not as consistently as he employed Zeitlichkeit and Zeit to mark a fundamental temporal difference). To explain spatiality, we must consider Heidegger’s notion of world. The world, as that “wherein a factical Dasein as such lives” (SZ 65), is a nexus of meaningful entities involved in or connected to that person’s activities. When at work, for instance, the world of a horse trainer comprises the arrangements of entities that constitute stalls, barns, riding rings, and the like in their meaningfulness for the activities performed when training horses. The “worldhood” (Weltlichkeit) of that world, moreover, comprises the possible meanings of these entities together with the performable actions and tasks and pursuable ends relative to which entities have meaning. According to Heidegger, the world amid which a person proceeds forms a world-around (Umwelt, usually translated as “environment”). The world is the world around—amid, with, and toward whose entities the person proceeds. The around (Um) of the world-around makes up the world’s spatiality. “We designate the phenomenal structure of the worldliness of space as the aroundness [Umhafte] of the world as world-around.”42 Heidegger’s discussion of this aroundness centers on the spatiality of the equipment nexuses that compose a world. This spatiality is characterized by two pairs of phenomena: nearness and farness, and place and region. The nearness of a piece of equipment is that equipment’s being at hand, available for use or actually being used. A piece of equipment is far when it is not this. The nearness and farness of equipment are clearly not kinds of objective distance. A horse farm owner’s German saddle supplier is sometimes

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near in the sense of involvement but far away objectively, whereas the book of poems on his bookshelf is near objectively but possibly far from involvement. Heidegger indicated that for a piece of equipment to belong to a world is for it to fall somewhere in a near-far spatiality spectrum for each person in that world. Within a world, moreover, a piece of equipment has a place (Platz). This place, or where (Wo), is the there of its belonging-to (Hingehörens). What, generally speaking, any piece of equipment belongs to is human activities. The specific place of a piece of equipment is where it belongs in, where it fits into, these activities: the “to” of its belonging-to is the action it does or can subserve, the use to which it is or can be put. Heidegger wrote (SZ 102), accordingly, that the place of a piece of equipment is the place of this equipment to X, where X is the action it subserves. One place of a fence, for example, is a place to watch horses. Notice that, on the one hand, equipment are places— places where something can be done (e.g., a fence is a place to watch horses). On the other hand, equipment have places (e.g., the place of the fence is to be where people can watch horses). This duplexity indicates that the place that a piece of equipment is is the place that it has. A fence is a place to watch horses, which is at once the fence’s place in people’s activities. Equipment, Heidegger claimed, always come in nexuses. This means that the places of the equipment that belong to any such nexus are interrelated: these places form place-wholes (Platzganzheiten). Both wholes—that of equipment and that of their places—devolve from the wholes composed of the ends, tasks, actions, and uses that people can pursue and perform when carrying on in the world constituted by these placed equipment. Heidegger called such a place-whole a region (Gegend). A region is the “where [Wo] of the where-to [Wohin] of a belonging-to, going-to, bringing-to, seeing-to and the like.”43 It is where the activity that uses equipment, and by reference to which that equipment has places, is performed. This region, consequently, is composed of a totality of placed equipment, more accurately, by a totality of particular equipment in their possible places as defined by the possible actions that they can subserve for certain possible ends. Possible places, actions, and ends, incidentally, can be “assigned or discovered” (SZ 103). Heidegger observed that a person primarily proceeds, not through places that she herself assigns to the entities with which she deals, but through places that she discovers since they are already assigned to these entities (by social norms, see section 5). The region contributes to the aroundness of the world-around: “This regional orientation of the place-multiplicity of equipment constitutes the aroundness, the about-us-aroundhere [das Um-uns-herum] of proximally encountered, world-aroundish [umweltlich] entities” (SZ 103). These entities, as

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discussed, are also differentially near and far according to their involvement in and subservance of ongoing activity. In sum, the around of the world-around is a region of interrelatedly placed equipment differentially near and far visà-vis people’s activity. The around is the regional nexus of differentially near and far placed entities at, toward, and amid which people act. The spatiality of the world obviously differs from objective space. Objective space is space conceived of as a property of the world that endures independently of human apprehension, comprehension, and action. The spatiality of the world—both nearness/farness and places/regions—devolves from human activities and the ends these activities pursue. It is not, as a result, independent of human action and comprehension. Accordingly, it is not a form of objective space. One manifestation of this fact is that, unlike objective space, neither nearness/farness nor places/regions can be measured by reference to repeatable units. At best, one can distinguish nearer and farther places, more and fewer places, and fuller and thinner regions. These adjectives, however, cannot be translated into numbers associated with a metric or coordinate system. Heidegger’s discussion of the spatiality of equipment or world is complemented by a discussion of Dasein’s spatiality, the spatiality of being-in.44 Being-in, to begin with, is itself a spatial phenomenon. The sense in which people are-in(-the-world) must be distinguished from the sense in which objects are inside one another. One object is inside another (e.g., water is in a glass) when the second object entirely surrounds the first (as determined by their positions in objective space). A person is not in the world in this way. Being-in-the-world is not a matter of, say, a person’s body being entirely surrounded by the entities that make up a given world. The in concerned is, instead, the in of involvement.45 To be-in-the-world is to be involved in a world, to proceed within it with, toward, and amid the entities that compose it. It is to engage entities in pursuing tasks for the sake of certain ways of being because of such and such states of affairs. The spatiality of involvement has two chief aspects: orientation (Ausrichtung) and dis-tance (Ent-fernung). Orientation is the orientation of beingin-the-world. This orientation lies in the equipment-using actions people perform, that is, the uses people make of equipment. These uses are tied to the projects, ends, and motives that determine people’s activity. As the actions that equipment subserves, the uses that are made of equipment, orientation is at once the “to” of the belonging-to of the equipment utilized.46 Dis-tance, meanwhile, is the elimination or overcoming of distance, i.e., bringing near. (The hyphen that Heidegger inserted into Entfernung thus indicates that the literal reading he gave the term diverges from its common meaning as distance.) As noted, the entities that compose a world are differentially near and

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far in—more and less involved in—the activities people carry on there. Distance simply means that people’s activities so unfold that entities that were far are brought near. A horse that was far vis-à-vis the farm owner’s observation of ongoing fence repairs is suddenly brought near when it neighs and the owner turns to look at it. Heidegger distinguished three modes of dis-tance: now attending to something, now using something, and maintaining an “average field of reaching, grasping, and seeing” (SZ 106–7; entities in this field are at hand [zu Hand] in a way those outside the field are not). Notice that an entity that is near is an entity that has been brought near: dis-tance and the nearness of equipment are two sides of one phenomenon (e.g., SZ 107). Heidegger, it might be added, did not explicitly distinguish a fourth mode of bringing-close: relevance. Entities are brought near when activity so unfolds that previously irrelevant entities become relevant.47 Every entity within a world is far from or near to the activities carried on there. As activities proceed, moreover, the nearness and farness of given entities change. Because, therefore, “Dasein is essentially spatial in the way of dis-tance, dealings always proceed in a ‘world-around’ [Umwelt] that in each case is distant from it in a particular leeway [Spielraum]” (SZ 107). The distance of the world-around from a person consists of the nears and fars of equipment relative to his activity. There is leeway for changes in these nears and fars corresponding to changes in activity. The pattern of nears and fars also defines the person’s “here.” Where someone is is not defined by the location of his body, the point in objective space where his body is located. Rather, Heidegger wrote, “the ‘here’ is the where-amid [Wobei] of a dis-tancing being-amid, in one with this dis-tance” (ibid.). A person’s here is defined by the pattern of nears and fars (that help compose the aroundness) of the entities amid which he is carrying on as determined in the bringings-near effected in his or her activity. It is a here near these entities and far from those bringing these near and making those far in performing such and such actions. The there (Dort) coordinated with this here embraces the places of near and far equipment. The here of a person’s situation, meanwhile, embraces the leeway in nascent activity for the nears and fars of equipment: here with different possible circles of near and far tied to different possible patterns of bringings-nears in using equipment (SZ 369). The there [Dort] coordinated with the here of the situation embraces the possible places of near and far equipment: this there is the region. It is worthwhile at this juncture to point out two overall lacunas in Heidegger’s remarks on spatiality. The first, which will not occupy me subsequently, is a general lack of clarity about how the human body and the phenomenon of embodiment are tied up with questions of space. Heidegger acknowledged that the bodily character of human being raises issues that

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he declined to address (SZ 108) but gave few indications of how bodilyness should be approached or how it bears on the topic of spatiality. Malpas, for instance, argues that the spatiality of being-there should be understood, not through the combination of existential spatiality (i.e., the spatiality of beingin) and equipmental spatiality that he attributes to Being and Time, but instead through a conjoining of bodily space (the space of the acting body) and objective space.48 My own sense is that taking account of the body complements, and does not supplant, existential spatiality and thus multiplies the range of spatial phenomena to be considered while also making them more complex. In any event, Heidegger’s few remarks on the body are obscure. For instance, in contrast to the traditional practice of attributing the distinction between left and right to some aspect of the body, Heidegger attributed it to the orientation and dis-tance of being-in. Left and right, he remarked, are permanent possibilities of a person’s directness into the world. It is because left and right are this, he added, that bodyliness (Leiblichkeit), too, has a left and right (e.g., left and right arms). It is hard to know what to think about the body and spatiality in Heidegger.49 The second lacuna concerns the relation between existential spatiality and objective space. Heidegger claimed that people usually encounter entities as equipment in their regionalized places. People can also, however, encounter entities as occurrent things (Vorhandene) in objective space. This can occur, for example, when activity breaks down. For instance, when the tip of the pencil I am using breaks off, leaving me, say, looking at the pencil in my hand, the pencil is encountered as in my hand, useless. No longer involved in my activity, the regional place that the pencil formerly occupied in my ends, tasks, and actions has dropped away, and the pencil is now encountered simply as occurring at a spot (Stelle) in objective space: in my hand. (Of course, if I set right to sharpening the pencil, it quickly returns to being equipment.) The objective space accessed in this and other ways can be measured and become a topic for study in mathematics, architecture, and the physical sciences. Although Heidegger acknowledged that people encounter and deal with objective space, he nonetheless accorded priority to regionalized places over objective space. This priority consists in (1) regional placement being the spatiality that characterizes the entities that humans firstly and almost automatically encounter when existing and (2) a person being able to encounter things in objective space only if she is also able to encounter equipment in regionalized places. In addition, people almost always deal with regionalized placed equipment even when they stare at, observe, or think about occurrent things (e.g., the clothes they wear). But even though Heidegger acknowledged that people cope with things in objective space, he never conceded that objective space is something with which they omnipresently deal. A person, as she

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acts, must always negotiate an objective space that embraces the occurrent things that equipment are. It is not obvious that regionalized places should be accorded priority over objective space. This topic requires, of course, more careful discussion that can be given here. Still, it is fair to say that Heidegger did not sufficiently think through the relations between existential spatiality and objective space. Instead of prioritizing the former over the latter, human activity is better thought of as inherently and crucially related to both. Heidegger’s 1954 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” sketches an account of spatiality that strongly resembles the account of it in Being and Time. This essay contains points of interest for the present book. One of the most prominent concepts in Heidegger’s work of the 1950s is that of an Ort (place, locale). An Ort is where a clearing—the open realm in which what is shows up—opens. The concept thus captures the fundamental spatiality of the clearing: the clearing happens at a place, the happening of the clearing is a taking place. Of course, this place (like the event) is singular, whereas the places it embraces are plural. An Ort is the place of many places; it is where the multiple places opened in the event are. Notice that the notion of an Ort descends from that of a region in Being and Time. Expressed in the language of Being and Time: an Ort is the place that a world is—the place of many places. It is not a place within the world. In the formulation, “an Ort is where a clearing opens,” the “where” is formal. It denotes the where-ness of a clearing, the fact that there always is a where a clearing opens. In the 1950s, Heidegger analyzed the event and clearing in the language of mortals, gods, world, and earth (the fourfold), which he appropriated from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Formulated in this language, the happening of the clearing, the eventing of the event, is the mirror-play (Spiegel-Spiel) of the simple oneness (Einfalt) of the fourfold (Geviert). An Ort is the where of a mirror-play of the fourfold. In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger explained that what plays the role of Ort are things. A thing “allows [verstattet] the fourfold a site [Stätte],”50 where a site is a specific space where the mirror-play of the fourfold transpires. To allow the fourfold a site is to give the mirror-play of the fourfold a space. This is what it is to be an Ort, to be where a clearing opens. A thing, where a clearing opens, is also a here of human habitation. For the site that a thing allows the fourfold is a type of space into which mortals, gods, sky, and earth are admitted (eingelassen). And another description of the space into which mortals are admitted is the space in which they dwell. Indeed, Heidegger claimed that the ancient meaning of Raum (“space”), Rum, is freed place (Platz) for settlement and encampment (BWD 148; BDT 154). He further held that the dwelling of humans in this space is particularly critical to the fourfold being admitted into it because this admittance occurs by

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way of human dwelling taking the fourfold into its care (hüten) and preserving it in the happening that belongs to it (its Wesen). Dwelling accomplishes this by way of sojourning at (sich aufhalten bei) the things at which clearings open. Finally, the site into which the fourfold is admitted, as a space of human dwelling, is more concretely an array of places and paths—places and paths of human dwelling. The site of the mirror-play, the space of the happening of the event, are the places and paths of human life. Heidegger famously illustrated this account with an example of a bridge. Along the river, before the bridge was built, there were only many points (Stellen) in objective space where something could occur or stand. Once the bridge had been built, one of these points became a where, an Ort, by virtue of the bridge. Indeed, the bridge is this where. (Just as in Being and Time a piece of equipment both is and occupies a place, in this essay a thing both is and is at a where.) As an Ort, the bridge admits (zulassen) the fourfold into a site. It admits the fourfold into a site by setting it up (einrichten) there (BWD 153; BDT 158). And it sets up the fourfold there by organizing an array of places and paths for the human dwelling whose happening admits the fourfold into the site. These places and paths are places and paths in the sense Heidegger wrote of them in Being and Time, for example, a place to fish and a place to exchange goods, a path to the fields and a path across the river. These paths and places make room for—are the spaces of—human habitation, through which people go in their daily lives. They are also anchored in, i.e., objectively located at entities and differentially distributed near and far the bridge. In sum, an Ort is where a clearing opens, an event events. The spaces that compose the site that is associated with a thing qua Ort—its places and paths—are at once the space of the clearing’s happening and the spaces of human dwelling. These spaces are, at once, a basic feature of the clearing and fundamental to human life. A strong parallel exists between the account of space in Being and Time and the one in “Building Dwelling Thinking.” According to both texts, human life carries on in some open whole—a region or a space—that is filled with differentially near and far places and paths anchored in entities. According to both texts, moreover, humans proceed through regionalized places and paths in the sense of acting at and being attuned to them. The chief difference between the two accounts reflects the ontological shifts that Heidegger’s thought underwent between them, from thinking that human existence and the clearing coincide to thinking that humans stand in the clearing (in this case, by dwelling). This ontological difference funds different conceptions of the center around which the regions or spaces of human life open. Whereas in Being and Time the center is practical dealings, in “Building Dwelling Thinking” it is things: regions, the arounds of the world-around (Umwelt),

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center on things, not on practical activities. Of course, the places instituted around things, like regionalized equipment places in Being and Time, are not independent of human activity: it is by virtue of what people do (their practical dealings or dwelling) that such and such places and paths—and not others—are set out about things. But things are the poles around which they are instituted. There are two other important differences between the two accounts worth mentioning. The first is a difference in emphasis: whereas Being and Time emphasizes entities in conceptualizing space as a regionalized nexus of placed entities, “Building Dwelling Thinking” emphasizes places in conceptualizing space as regionalized nexuses of places opened at the thing and anchored in entities. The second difference is that, after Being and Time, Heidegger stopped writing in a way that suggests that places and paths can be solely of teleological or instrumental significance and no other sort, e.g., aesthetic or religious. With an eye to chapter 4, I should conclude this section by explaining that movement is crucial to the account of human existence in Being and Time. Heidegger wrote that “[w]e name the specific being-on-the-move [Bewegtheit] of the stretched-out self-stretching out the happening of Dasein” (SZ 375). The expression “stretched-out self-stretching out” refers to the opening up of the threefold structure of existence, which is ultimately the three-dimensional structure of temporality. In this quotation, movement takes the form of the being-on-the-move that belongs to the opening up of the three temporal dimensions: being-on-the-move is the pendent in Dasein’s way of being—existence—to the motion (Bewegung) of objects. Heidegger did not discuss the notion of movement much in Being and Time. Nonetheless, it is crucial. Heidegger wrote on the background of life-philosophy. According to life philosophers such as Bergson, Nietzsche, and Dilthey, human life (maybe life more broadly and even reality in toto) is in constant movement: life flows. As I will explain in chapter 4, Heidegger did not share this intuition. He thought of human life, instead, as happening.51 Yet, movement, in the guise of being on the move, is a crucial aspect of this happening: the happening of life is being on the move, i.e., being-on-the-move is life’s happening character.52 Movement is, if you will, the operation by which temporality temporalizes, human existence happens. The Unity of Temporality and Spatiality In Being and Time, Heidegger attempted to derive spatiality from temporality, or more precisely stated, to demonstrate that the meaning of spatiality is temporality, i.e., that spatiality is a mode of the temporalizing of temporality. This undertaking fell out of Heidegger’s broader thesis that the meaning

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of existence is temporality, which entails that all fundamental structures of existence are modes of temporalizing. In accordance with this thesis, Heidegger, in chapter 4 of Division Two, systematically took up the various structures of existence that he had pointed out in Division One and reinterpreted them as modes of temporality. The reinterpretation of spatiality in section 70 is rather mechanical and perfunctory. Heidegger justified (SZ 368) this treatment with the remark that the reinterpretation is only as detailed as is needed for “later” (never published) discussions of the “‘coupling’” of space and time. It is not necessary to affirm Heidegger’s contention that temporality has priority over spatiality. It is possible to conceptualize temporality and spatiality—as they are analyzed in Being and Time—as unified. In the Contributions, as discussed, time and space are unified by virtue of a common origin (the happening of the clearing). By contrast, the unity of the temporality and spatiality that Heidegger analyzed in Being and Time lies in their teleological nature. As discussed, the future dimension of activity, which Heidegger analyzed as coming toward something projected, is acting for an end. The past dimension of activity, departing from something given, is responding to something or acting in the light of it, i.e., being motivated. And the present of activity is activity itself. The temporality of activity is, thus, acting toward an end from what motivates. It is a teleological phenomenon. The spatiality composed of regionalized places and paths is also a teleological phenomenon. Places and paths are of and for—derivative from and sites of—human activity. Their distributed anchoring indicates how the material settings through which people live house their activities and subtend their ends: where it is sensible to perform this and that action that are components of projects carried out for particular ends. The anchoring, i.e., objective locations of places and paths thus derives from the teleological structure of human activity. The fact, for instance, that a particular fence anchors a place to watch horses indicates how it can be involved in activities such as supervision and enjoyment and serve the ends pursued therein. The derivation of spatiality from teleology is also reflected in two familiar facts. The first is that use objects are defined by their uses, thus by human projects. The rough definition of a fence as a continuous built structure that divides land, for instance, indicates how fences can be involved in such activities as riding, supervision, or landscaping and serve the ends pursued therein. The second fact is that people lay out settings—fields, homes, barns, roads—with an eye to the activities that are supposed to be performed in them, thus by reference to human projects and ends. Note that spaces of activity are teleologically underpinned even when places and paths are determined, not by a given person’s activities and ends, but by social norms that specify how “one”

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acts (see below). For instance, this here object called a fence affords places to watch horses, not because Winston, say, wants to watch horses, but because this is what people do. Places and paths that are normativized in this way are teleologically underpinned because social norms that govern the use of objects reflect prevalent activities, projects, and ends. I acknowledge that the significance of objects for human activity is not just teleological. Some objects, for instance, have ritual, ceremonial, or aesthetic significance. The layout of the tree-lined driveway between farm entrance and family mansion might reflect aesthetic matters as much as it does teleological ones. Similarly, horse farm horse cemeteries are places for such activities as remembrance, meditation, and connecting with the past. Because pursuing these activities need not be oriented toward ends, the places anchored at the cemetery need not be teleological in character. The concluding section of chapter 3 shows that the existence of noninstrumental significance does not undermine the integrity of the teleological timespace of activity. Both the temporality and spatiality of activity are teleological phenomena. In fact, they reflect one and the same teleological structure of human activity: this structure coincides with the future of activity temporality and underpins the spatiality of regionalized places and paths. Human activity thus institutes and bears a timespace whose temporal and spatial dimensions are inherently, not contingently, connected. Indeed, the two dimensions are coordinately instituted together. This co-institution contrasts with the conjoined nature of the space-times discussed in section 2. The timespace of human activity consists in acting toward ends departing from what motivates at arrays of places and paths anchored at entities. I should acknowledge that several features of this conception of timespace are likely to be contentious. In my opinion, Being and Time offers a propitious analysis the teleological-motivational structure of activity. The idea that human activity is teleological dates back at least to Plato and Aristotle. Being and Time can be viewed as perpetuating this idea, above all in its Aristotelian form.53 What Heidegger accomplished was to update the Aristotelian scheme of ends, means, and practical reason with concepts that capture the teleological-motivational structure of experiential acting. As mentioned, by “experiential acting” I mean, first, that people experience, or live through, their own activity and, second, that their experiences occur within the ken of their activity. The concepts that Heidegger used to articulate the teleological-motivational structure of experientially acting—concepts such as for the sake of (Worum-willen), in order to (Um-zu), involvement (Bewandtnis), and thrownness (Geworfenheit)—articulate the structure of the activity a person lives through within whose ken his or her experiences occur. Appropriating Heidegger’s analysis raises issues about the relation between the structure of

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experientially acting and the common practices of citing reasons or purposes or beliefs, desires, and other mental conditions to explain actions. I examine this relation in chapter 3. Appropriating Heidegger’s analysis also raises issues about the relation between experientially acting and both cognitive and neurological processes and structures. For the purposes of the current discussion, such issues can be bracketed.54 Some theorists, furthermore, are bound to challenge Heidegger’s interpretation of activity and its determination as a type of time. As explained, Heidegger interpreted projection as acting for the sake of something and acting for the sake of something as coming toward it. This is the future dimension of acting. It is also acting teleologically. Heidegger interpreted thrownness, meanwhile, as acting in a situation and acting in a situation as departing from it. This is the past dimension of acting. It is also acting motivatedly, in the light of or in response to something. Activity and its determination are, thus, acting coming toward an end departing from what motivates. This is temporality. Mainstream philosophers of mind and action are likely to reject calling acting coming toward-departing from a type of time. This rejection probably reflects the dominance of objective time in modern intellectual culture, that is, the pervasive belief that time simply is objective time. I will return to the cogency of this belief in the following section. This rejection might also reflect the widespread idea that the determination of action is a causal affair, for example, the orthodox conviction that beliefs and desires cause actions. I will challenge this conviction in chapters 3 and 4. Interpreting teleology and motivation as dimensions of temporality is an alternative to the dominant causal model of action, one rooted in an alternative tradition that promulgates the idea of a human time (see section 4). My view is that the nature of the determination of action is clarified by construing teleology and motivation as dimensions of a kind of time seated in human life. As I will explain in chapter 4, to construe them as dimensions of a kind of time is to understand them as facets of the event of human activity: teleology and motivation determine activity by being constitutive dimensions of activity as an event. They do not determine activity by being states of a causal apparatus. Elsewhere I have defended Heidegger’s description of acting coming toward-departing from as a type of time.55 I will not repeat those arguments here. One reason I do not do so is because arguments cannot convince an advocate of the causal theory of action to affirm the temporal character of teleology and motivation. Arguments in this context can always be met with counterarguments, and neither psychology nor social science can help resolve the disagreement (they largely ignore the issue or simply assume one or another causal theory). The best test of my conception of action determination

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as temporality is the value of the wider accounts of human activity and social life based on it. In this regard, the bearing on the present account of challenges to Heidegger’s description of acting coming toward-departing from as a kind of time can be neutralized by thinking of this description as a working hypothesis grounded in the intuition that a fruitful account of human and social life can be constructed on its basis. Otherwise stated: the concept of activity timespace that is discussed in the present chapter appropriates Heidegger’s idea of the teleological-motivational cum temporal structure of activity to fill out the relevant sense of time. Coordinately, the attempt in the following chapter to illuminate social life with this concept is an attempt to develop a Heideggerian account of basic features of society. Being and Time and “Building Dwelling Thinking” concur that the spatiality of human existence consists in arrays of differentially near and far places and paths anchored at objects. This is a propitious conception of a human spatiality that differs from—however connected it might be to—objective space. The value of this conception is suggested by the fact that philosophers and social thinkers still continue to appropriate it.56 As explained, moreover, Heidegger offered two versions of this conception: (1) an earlier one that centers arrays of places and paths in human activity, focuses exclusively on the teleological character of places and paths, and highlights the entities at which places and paths are anchored, and (2) a later one that centers such arrays on things, acknowledges that paths and places need not be teleological in character, and highlights the places and paths that are anchored at objects. The following account merges these two versions, combining the two conceptions of center and equally emphasizing place-path arrays and the objects at which they are anchored. The timespace of human activity consists in acting toward ends departing from what motivates at arrays of places and paths anchored at entities. This timespace is just as pervasive in human life as is proceeding in objective time and objective space. It also harbors the times and spaces that are, so to speak, closest or most intimate in human life. This is because, to begin with, human life is a temporalizing. Although human activities occupy positions in objective successions, and although people have long regulated their activities by reference to periodic processes such as lunar cycles, animal migrations, the seasons, the turning of clock hands, and the radioactive decay of cesium atoms, people inherently come toward and depart from in acting. Similarly, although human activity ineluctably negotiates the objective spatial features of things, it intrinsically institutes and is attuned to place-path regions. Temporalizing and spatializing are inherently of and in human activity and life. As I will discuss, moreover, the objective temporal and spatial properties of activity reflect its timespace.

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Heidegger de-emphasized the significance of objective time and space for human life. He consistently treated them as derivative phenomena that are somehow dependent on the temporality and spatiality (or time and space) of human existence or life. However, his attempt in Being and Time (SZ Division Two, chapter 6) to derive time from temporality fails.57 This failure, together with the palatable presence of objective time and space in human life, indicates that it is best to view space, spatiality, time, and temporality as distinct phenomena, each of which is of great significance for human existence. It follows that an important domain of investigation, about which Heidegger had nothing to say, comprises relations between time and temporality and between space and spatiality. Heidegger, I should also acknowledge, never stated that temporality and spatiality are teleologically unified, even when he discussed them as dimensions of human activity. Indeed, Being and Time, as well as other works that belong to its era, is bereft of any notion of timespace. Still, premonitions of a teleologically unified timespace are found in Being and Time. For instance, the idea in that book that the place of an entity is where it fits into human activities does not entail that places are teleological. Heidegger, however, glossed place as the there of the use to which entities can be put; more generally, he treated the actions that entities subserve as uses that can be made of them. He thus interpreted places teleologically. This interpretation is reinforced by his analysis in sections 15–18 of how the activities in which entities are encountered (including encountered as missing, deficient, and in the way) are governed by signifying and thereby structured teleologically. In addition, a region is delimited by a manifold of possible actions that entities can subserve for certain possible ends, and the worldhood of the world comprises possible meanings of entities together with the performable actions and pursuable ends relative to which entities have meaning. Region and world, consequently, are also teleological phenomena. Although, therefore, my conception of the teleological unity of timespace departs from Heidegger’s official position, it upholds his specific observations about temporality and spatiality.

4. On the Intellectual Contexts of Activity Timespace The timespace of human activity is acting toward an end from what motivates at place-path regions anchored at objects. The present section places this idea in wider contexts. It is illuminating to begin by relating it to a matrix of types of timespace due to the organization theorist Hans Rämö. In his essay, “An Aristotelian Human Time-Space Manifold,”58 Rämö crosses two ancient Greek conceptions of space with two ancient Greek conceptions of time to

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produce a fourfold typology of timespaces. The two types of space are chora and topos, which Rämö interprets, respectively, as abstract space and place. This interpretation is a little misleading because abstract space is likely to be understood as nonexperiential absolute space or some sort of mathematical manifold, and chora is neither of these; in fact, chora is much closer to topos than space is to place in contemporary parlance. The two types of time, meanwhile, are chronos and kairos, which Rämö straightforwardly interprets, respectively, as time, that is, quantified time (e.g., clock time) and right moment, as in the right moment to act. The four resulting categories of timespace are chronochora, chronotopos, kairochora, and kairotopos. Illustrating these categories are, respectively, four-dimensional mathematical manifolds interpreted as timespaces, the use of clocks to organize everyday life, timely communication in virtual space, and acting judiciously and wisely on a specific opportune occasion. This is a suggestive typology.59 Disconnecting it from the Greek meanings of its elements yields an even more useful classification. Follow Rämö’s intuition and associate chora and topos with space and place as these are understood today, i.e., as abstract homogeneous matrix and focus-site of human dwelling.60 Associate chronos and kairos, moreover, with objective time and human time (the time of the soul, lived time, experiential time etc.—see below). Chronochora is then the appropriate label for most conceptions of space-time. By contrast, the activity timespace discussed in the present chapter instantiates the kairotopos category and concerns human directedness in the world. Rämo’s examples of using clocks to organize everyday life and timely communication in virtual space remain examples of chronotopos and kairochora. As indicated, the time component of the timespace of activity is acting toward an end from what motivates. Acting for the sake of some state of being is the future dimension of activity, responding to something or acting in its light is the past dimension, and acting itself is the present. The time component of timespace is, thus, a version of past-present-future (dimensionality). Pastpresent-future contrasts with succession, the time of objective reality. This contrast was no more famously dealt with than in J.E. McTaggart’s celebrated 1908 article on the A and B time series. Although an immense literature exists about the differences between time as past, present, and future and time as succession, I will organize what I presently want to say about them around McTaggart’s discussion. In McTaggart’s hands, succession (B series) and past-present-future (A series) are alternative systems for ordering temporal positions or events. “Each position [or event-TRS] is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future.”61 McTaggert also associated succession with objec-

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tive reality and past-present-future with human experience. His account of the two series nonetheless reinforces the equation of time with objective time that has marked so much Western intellectual and practical life. For although he held that both series are essential to time, he also argued that the A series does not exist and that time, as a result, is unreal, i.e., is not true of reality. And assisting his argument to this conclusion were (1) his recognition that the A series concepts of past, present, and future arise from experience and (2) his conviction that the A series cannot be relative to individual stream of experiences because such a relativity would contradict the status of time as “belonging to reality.” In McTaggart’s eyes, in other words, time is either a feature of objective reality or nothing at all. McTaggart’s discussion points, however, toward a different possibility, namely, that there are two fundamental concepts of time, neither of which can be reduced to the other. McTaggart construed succession and past-present-future as alternative ordering systems for the events of objective reality. As some theorists have recognized, however, it is possible to affirm succession as such a system while treating dimensionality (past-present-future) as an essential feature of a different kind of time, one seated in human life.62 McTaggart dimly espied this in acknowledging that the concepts of past, present, and future arise from human experience. He persisted, however, in treating dimensionality as an ordering system for events that happens to arise from experience—instead of, in the first place, as an essential feature of a kind of time seated in human experience. Existential temporality is one example of the type of dimensional time of human life I have in mind (others are listed below). I write “in the first place” because events can, of course, be assigned to the past, present, and future once the distinctions between these are at hand. As mentioned in the previous section, however, there is a key difference between past, present, and future as an ordering system for events and past, present, and future as dimensions of a time seated in human life: whereas past, present, and future events form successions (past events precede present ones, which are followed by future ones), past, present, and future as dimensions of human time occur together “at one stroke.” The past and future of human time do not come before or after its present; they are, instead, simultaneous with it. In defense of this alternative interpretation of past-present-future, let me mention two facts. These are not the only considerations that can be advanced for it, but they are pertinent to the current discussion.63 The first fact is that, although the concepts of past, present, and future are not essential to how the natural sciences conceptualize their subject matters, they are intrinsic to how history does this and also central to many descriptions of human life in the other human sciences. Of all the entities that science in its entirety studies, the

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study of human life alone centrally rests on dimensionality. This fact suggests that past-present-future is somehow a feature of human life. The second fact is that dimensionality does not characterize objective reality. I just noted that past and future events occur before and after present ones. In fact, which events are past and which events are future are relative to which events are present. For either (1) the events that are past or future are defined as the events that occur before or after present ones or (2) past events are defined as events that are no more and future events are defined as events that are not yet, and what is no more and not yet are defined relative to what is, i.e., is at present. What, however, is the present (dimension) of objective reality, relative to which objective reality has a past and future? Nowhere in objective reality does the property or determination “present” exist; neither which moment or interval of time is the present one nor which events, situations, or periods are present ones are features of objective reality. A moment, interval, event, situation, or period is the or a present one only if it is designated as such. Any moment or interval, however, can be designated the present one; any moment or interval other than the one chosen could have just as justifiably been designated the present. The designation, consequently, is arbitrary. One might define as present all events that interact with a given object at a given instant or interval.64 This definition, however, simply reinforces the conclusion that the present is arbitrary for it treats all instants or intervals alike (and any ordering of events into past, present, and future is relative to the particular instant chosen). Alternatively, the present moment or interval might be thought to be the moment or interval when this here sentence is being written or read; that is, the moment or interval of the current experiential activity of the person or persons who are contemplating this issue. The currency, or presentness, of this experiential activity, however, is relative to people, thus to human life; or rather, its quality as current is a feature of us, that is, of our lives. Hence, although people are part of objective reality, any ordering of events as past, present, and future is relative to us, relative either to events we designate as present ones or to the present moments of our own lives. This relativity is illustrated by the fact that the “pasts” studied in historical fields such as evolutionary theory, geomorphology, natural history, and human history comprise, in each case, events preceding the investigator’s era. This relativity, together with the innumerable divisions of events into present, past, and future that follows from it, contrasts with the independence and unity—or with the inertial frame relativity—ascribed to objective succession. Because, therefore, succession is widely taken to be a feature of objective reality, past, present, and future can be sensibly treated as dimensions or features of human life. The failure of objective reality to divide events into past, pres-

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ent, and future dramatically contrasts with the sense that every functional human being has that some things are past, others are happening, and still others are to come. It is not necessary, therefore, to draw the conclusion that McTaggart drew from facts of the above sorts, namely, that past, present, and future, and thus time itself, do not exist. Incidentally, nothing I write denies that human life is part of objective reality and its successions. I simply claim that present, past, and future are features of human life. At the end of section 1, I mentioned a philosophical tradition that has promulgated the idea that there exists a kind of time (and/or kind of space) that is seated in human life. To forestall misunderstandings, note that the idea of a time that is seated in human life differs from the idea that humans possess an awareness, perception, or sense of time: such an awareness, perception, or sense can be of succession and its properties. The oldest moments of the aforementioned philosophical tradition concern time. The division between a time of succession marking objective reality and a time of dimensionality seated in human life emerged in early Christian philosophy. Objective passage is a Greek notion of time, the considerable variations among Greek thinkers notwithstanding.65 Aristotle, for instance, famously defined time as “number of motion in respect to before and after.”66 Deviating from the Greek notion, Plotinus suggested that time is “contained in the differentiation of life.”67 For Plotinus, time is the life of the soul as it moves from one act or experience to another. This idea makes time a feature of human existence, but retains succession as the essence of time. The succession that is time is simply an experiential succession, not one independent of experience in reality. Augustine appropriated Plotinus’s internalization of time, but conceived of the time involved as dimensionality. “It is now, however, perfectly clear, that neither the future nor the past are in existence . . . Though one might perhaps say: ‘There are three times—a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.’ For these three do exist in the mind.”68 For Augustine, the time of the soul is a nexus of past, present, and future, or more exactly, a nexus of present past, present present, and present future. Augustine thereby inaugurated a line of Western philosophy that has associated the dimensionality of time with something human—soul, life, experience, existence. In the twentieth century, this tradition was extensively developed in the form of lived time (Eugene Minkowski), nootemporality (J.T. Fraser), existential time (Heidegger), and the time of consciousness (Bergson and Husserl).69 My interpretation of existential time as a time of activity squarely falls in this tradition. Conceptions of a type of space seated in human life are of more recent vintage and largely based on Heidegger’s ideas. The notion of place as something different from space has a long tradition going back at least to Plato’s

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discussion of the place of an individual material object in the Timaeus and Aristotle’s discussion of physical place in the Physics. In these texts and those that follow them, however, place is construed objectively, as something like the location of a particular entity as opposed to the surrounding space in which it exists. As Casey relates, moreover, place so construed has largely been subordinated to space.70 The idea that there is a type of space that is based in, a feature of, and particularly pertinent to human life is a twentieth-century idea. Heidegger’s notion of a region, of a place-path array through which humans experientially act, apparently struck a chord: the idea of a space of human life seated in life has spread in the humanities and social sciences. Theorists who have followed his lead in conceiving of a lived, existential, or activity spatiality include Eugène Minkowski, Ludwig Binswanger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Otto Bollnow, Anne Buttimer, Yi-Fu Tuan, Anthony Giddens, Henri Lefebvre, Christian Norbert-Schulz, Edward Relph, Edward Casey, Tim Ingold, Jeff Malpas, and many others. My Heideggerian conception of the timespace of human activity thus falls at the confluence of two traditions, an older one pertaining to time and a more recent one pertaining to space. What differentiates my conception from earlier ones in these traditions is that it attributes, not just a time or a space, but a unified timespace to human life. The time and space components of activity timespace are teleologically unified.

5. The Social Character of Activity Timespace Since the inception of social thought in Plato, accounts of the basic nature, elements, or structures of social life (social ontologies) have endeavored to understand the relationship between key social phenomena and individual people. An important facet of this relationship is whether and, if so, in what ways individual people are social in character. The phenomenon of activity timespace has implications for this issue and for the broader relationship between individuals and social entities. Activity timespace is the dimensionality of activity. As a result, there are, strictly speaking, as many activity timespaces as there are human activities. Because activities are multiple, so, too, are timespaces. Activities of any given type can be individuated, moreover, by their position in objective time and space. What, for instance, distinguishes different instances of, say, saddling a horse is where in objective space and when in objective time they happen. This quick statement masks ample complexity. Analyzing how objective time and space individuate activities requires attention to human bodies since activity, as I will discuss in chapter 4, centrally consists in the performances

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of bodily actions. Further complicating matters is the fact that another individuating feature of activities, and thus of timespaces, is whose activities given activities are, that is, whose, i.e., which persons’ performances they are.71 Activity timespace is the property of a person, or of the existence or life of that person. The fact that the sort of timespace under discussion is the property of a person, or of that person’s existence or life, reflects the fact that, by design, Being and Time is the analysis of individual existence: ipso facto, activity is the activity of, existential temporality the temporality of, and existential spatiality the spatiality of an individual person. In the 1950s, Heidegger, following Hölderlin, conceptualized timespace as a property, not of individuals, but of mortals (Sterblichen). Because the term “mortals” always occurs in the plural, it does not refer to individuals as individuals. Nor does it refer to any particular familiar sort of group such as families, peoples, tribes, nations, and societies (let alone, say, classes or status groups). The expression instead picks out indefinite collections of people. In the 1950s, accordingly, Heidegger construed timespace as the property of such indefinite collections. At the same time, the fact that clearings open at things—as emphasized by the example of the bridge and by a second example Heidegger cited, a Black Forest farm house—implies (1) that clearings are often, to use contemporary parlance, “local” phenomena and (2) that they are always tied to particular historical constellations of entities and people. (This idea is also found in the Contributions.) In other words, the mortals involved in any clearing are particular, often local, groupings of people. I doubt that these groupings can be as extensive as the peoples (Völker) spoken of in the Contributions and the Ister lectures.72 But the clearing nonetheless happens to a social group, perhaps indefinite or open in its precise membership.73 Although activity timespace is a property of individual persons, I endorse Heidegger’s later idea that it is a property of mortals; or rather, I affirm this idea under a particular interpretation, namely, as pointing toward the common and shared dimensions of the timespaces that belong to the members of certain collections of people. Explaining this affirmation requires returning to the account of individual existence in Being and Time. The fact that Being and Time focuses on individual existence does not imply that Heidegger’s analysis is monadic in some further and problematic way, as various commentators have charged.74 For Heidegger held that being with others is just as constitutive of existence as is being-in-the-world; the two are “equiprimordial,” as he put it. Individual human existence, the subject matter of Being and Time, is not merely being-in-the-world, but being-in-the-world with others—it is essentially social.75 Another way of saying this is that existence is intrinsically coexistence.

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Coexistence embraces four basic aspects: (1) encountering others within the world, (2) acting toward others, (3) acting in the same world(s) in which others act, and (4) the sameness of the world’s worldhood for whomever is in it. The fourth aspect is the crucial one at present. The structure of a world is significance (Bedeutsamkeit), a nexus of possible ends, tasks, actions, and uses-meanings of entities. It is a single nexus, elements of which determine the activity of individuals who proceed in that world: these elements fill out these people’s orientations and the temporal organization of their activities and are something to which their dis-tances are beholden. This structure also underpins the spatiality of the world, both the nears and fars of entities and their regional places. Heidegger’s claim is that, in a given world, a single range of ends, tasks, actions, and meanings circumscribes different people’s activities and how people encounter equipment as near or far equipment in regionalized places. The tasks, ends, actions, and uses that make up this single range are those that people who proceed in the world concerned should or acceptably pursue or perform. Heidegger designated this phenomenon das Man. Das Man, familiarly characterized, is the social normativity that governs people’s lives. By “normativity” I mean both what should be (is enjoined or prescribed) and what is acceptable.76 Because Heidegger conceived of people as proceeding in worlds (being-in-the-world), das Man can be more specifically characterized as the normativity that governs proceeding (being-) in particular worlds. In any instance, moreover, the people subject to the normativity that delimits a world are whoever proceeds in that world. The worldhood of the world, the single range of ends, tasks, actions, and meanings that govern people’s activities in that world, is a das Man significance: it embraces all items of these sorts, and thus all nears, fars, bringings near, places, and regions, that are enjoined of or acceptable for whomever proceeds in that world. As a single set of such matters, this range is the same for—common to—everyone involved. Another way of putting this is that das Man is a clearing constituted by normativized items of the above sorts.77 Heidegger acknowledged that many such clearings have historically existed. He also, I believe, would have affirmed that multiple clearings characterize what are standardly called “societies” and “cultures.” An individual person relates to any clearing by way of being thrown into it and projecting it. Vis-à-vis any particular clearing, as a result, there is one clearing but multiple instances of proceeding in it: one clearing (substantive) but multiple clearings (gerund) of it. Each clearing, in other words, is common to the different people who are thrown into and project it. Here, “common” connotes the singleness of something to which multiple lives relate, as opposed to multiple lives contingently possessing the same properties (sharing;

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see below).78 In sum, although in Being and Time temporality and spatiality are, strictly, dimensions of individual life, human lives are governed by and proceed within common normative realms that found their temporalities and spatialities. Individual human life is inherently social. I claim that much the same holds of the timespace of activity.79 In Being and Time (and other works of its era), Heidegger wrote very little about the social character of human existence. He sought to skirt ontological individualism by supplementing being-in-the-world with being-with-others. His analysis of being-with, however, is thin, especially in comparison to his extensive discussion of being-in. This meagerness has generated significant criticism over the years, as well as the suspicion that, in Heidegger’s eyes, being-with is somehow secondary or supplementary to being-in. What Heidegger did write about being-with, furthermore, sheds scant light on the social character of existence and thus of temporality and spatiality. Only that aspect of being-with captured in the notion of das Man substantially illuminates the social nature of these phenomena. In effect, therefore, his notions of being-with and das Man acknowledge the sociality of human life and indicate the need for a more robust conception of it.80 As explained, Heidegger held that one nexus of possible ends, tasks, and actions governs the actions performed by anyone proceeding in a given world. The nexus concerned embraces ends, tasks, and actions that should be or are acceptably pursued and performed in that world. This, Heidegger’s notion of das Man, is his conception of the social normativity that governs acting in particular worlds. I affirm the idea of common social norms and the observation that activity and its timespace are subject to them. I also endorse the wider idea that human beings coexist by virtue of participating in, or relating to, common milieus of some sort(s). Heidegger erred, however, in tying common norms to worlds, in supposing that activity in a particular world is governed by a single set of norms that applies to anyone who acts in that world. Take as examples of worlds the realms that are colloquially captured in such terms as “the business world” or “the academic world.” Activities in such worlds are obviously subject to multiple, sometimes competing, at times incompatible sets of norms. Normative competition and conflict mark the business and academic worlds, and no single nexus of normatively enjoined or acceptable ends, tasks, and actions circumscribes what people do in them. The same remarks hold of the “‘public’ we-world” (whatever that is) and of the “immediate (domestic) environment” (nächste [häusliche] Umwelt), both of which Heidegger cited as examples of what he meant by “world” (SZ 65). Only rarely are the activities of everyone who proceeds in a shared public space or in a given setting subject to the same one range of normative possibilities. In short, das Man is too unifying a notion if the common normative

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pools it denotes are associated with worlds. Affirming the idea that common norms govern different people’s activities requires treating this normativity as the property of some other sort of common entity. How should this be understood? A clue is found in the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” This essay analyzes space as a property of human lives, though not as a property of either individual lives taken singly or the lives of people who form any particular kind of social group. The lives of which space in any instance is a property are indefinite in number, and their further characteristics are undefined. As discussed, this state of affairs is signaled in Heidegger’s use of Hölderlin’s term “mortals.” It is also reflected in the famous bridge example. Which places and paths are arrayed around the bridge depends on human activity, on what people do at the entities that are distributed around it. A path between village and fields, like a place to fish in the shadows, is found around the bridge both because of the bridge and because of how people act in its vicinity. In this example, the people—the mortals—who perform these activities and proceed through the spaces involved form an indefinite collection, namely, those living in the vicinity. This example thus intimates that the sizes and further characteristics of such collections can vary from case to case. Activity and activity timespace are, formally, features of individual people. They are subject, however, to common norms—they are also social phenomena (though, as implied, subjection to common norms is not the only form of socialness). The subjection of activity and its timespace to common norms does not arise from people’s membership in familiar types of social group. This subjection instead arises from their participating in, or relating to, some sort of common phenomenon: the people in the bridge example are part of some collective common phenomenon by virtue of which they stand in and go through the same “spaces.” “Building Dwelling Thinking” does not indicate what this common milieu is. The only commonalities in the bridge example are the common places and paths and the bridge, village, fields, riverbank, and so on. Heidegger’s texts thus do not provide adequate guidance as to the social character of activity timespace. I suggest that the collective common milieu involved be analyzed as social practices. It is by virtue of carrying on the same practices amid the same entities that people—such as those living in the vicinity of the bridge—are subject to common norms and possess common and shared timespaces. Carrying on the same practices amid the same entities also guarantees, by the way, that divergent elements of different people’s timespaces are often tied to one another. In fact, the timespaces of people who carry on the same practices amid the same interconnected arrangements of entities form an interwoven net. In the next chapter, I will show that nets of interwoven timespaces are a pervasive and crucial feature of social life.

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By a “social practice” I mean an open, organized array of doings and sayings.81 Examples include political practices, horse breeding practices, training practices, cooking practices, religious practices, trading practices, and teaching practices. Practices of any of these sorts can vary historically and geographically, the variation consisting in different practices of a given sort comprising different doings and sayings, organized differently, with a different history. The doings and sayings that compose a practice are organized by phenomena of four types: (1) action understandings, which combine knowing how to perform an action that helps compose the practice, knowing how to recognize this action, and knowing how to respond to it; (2) rules, by which I mean formulated directives, admonishments, orders, and instructions to perform or leave off certain actions; (3) a teleoaffective structure, which comprises acceptable or prescribed ends, acceptable or enjoined projects to carry out those ends, acceptable or prescribed actions to perform as part of those projects—thus acceptable or enjoined end-project-action combinations—as well as, possibly, accepted or prescribed emotions and even moods; and (4) general understandings about matters germane to the practice. The ends, projects, and actions that form a teleoaffective structure can be enjoined of and acceptable for either all participants in a practice or those participants enjoying certain statuses, for example, certain roles or identities. Consider horse farm tour practices. Organizing such practices are (1) understandings of how to walk around a horse barn unobtrusively, how to look out of car windows, how to ask questions, how to open closed gates, and how to lead people through barns (as well as knowing how to recognize and respond to these actions); (2) explicit rules about such matters as where to stand as a horse passes, when tours are and are not welcome at particular farms, and whether photography is admissible; (3) acceptable and enjoined combinations of such ends as enjoying an afternoon, learning about horse farms, impressing out-of-town visitors, earning money, making horse farm affairs seem dramatic and important, such projects as seeing as many horses as possible, asking as many questions as possible, taking an extended tour, telling stories about horse farm owners, and such actions as turning and looking out the back window, taking photographs, asking for a clarification, calling people’s attention to a particular barn; and (4) general understandings of such matters as courtesy, the treatment of minorities (many grooms and barn hands are Latinos or African Americans), and tact in asking questions. Notice that many of these items help organize practices other than those of horse farm tours. Practices so conceived are social phenomena. Not only do multiple people participate and thereby coexist in a given practice, but its organization is a property of the practice, of the manifold of doings and sayings that composes it, and not a property of the individuals participating in it.

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The social character of activity timespaces arises from people’s participation in social practices. To begin with, the timespaces of individuals are circumscribed by the teleoaffective structures of practices. A teleoaffective structure encompasses ends, projects, actions, and combinations thereof that participants should or acceptably pursue. It thereby encompasses existential futures that are enjoined of or acceptable for participants in the practice involved, as well as prescribed and acceptable places, paths, and regions. Participants in the practice tend to actuate subsets of the futures involved and to treat entities as anchoring subsets of the places, paths, and regions concerned. This is what it is for the organization of the practice to circumscribe their timespaces (see chapter 4). The activity pasts of these people will overlap, moreover, since people who carry on the same practice typically act in response to or in the light of many of the same states of affairs. This is the case partly because pertinent states of affairs are encountered or learned about when carrying on the practice and partly because participants in a given practice typically share prior experiences and participate in other practices in common. As a person carries on her day, she participates in different practices. The teleological structures of these practices circumscribe the temporal and spatial components of her life. Other components of practice organizations also help circumscribe timespace. Rules, for instance, can specify elements of timespace. The activity future of the person who observes the rule to stand to the left of horses being walked is partly specified by that rule, just as part of the spatiality of the lives of those taking horse farm tours is spelled out by the rule that vans can let them out to look at the scenery only at pull offs along the roads (this rule treats these pull offs as places to get a view). The rule regarding position vis-à-vis horses also specifies common pasts since it leads people to respond to the same state of affairs, namely, the approach of a horse. Similarly, a general understanding of tact in asking questions can affect what a tourer does and why, just as an understanding of courtesy might determine where someone stands to look at a horse farm landscape so as not to block others’ views. Practices vary in how much rules and general understandings help circumscribe the timespaces of participants’ lives. The activity timespaces of participants in a given practice are partly common, partly shared, and partly personal. Explaining why this is so will elucidate the social character of timespace and the dependence of this character on practices. The common dimension of activity timespaces arises from several factors. As noted, certain ends, projects, actions, and combinations thereof are enjoined in a practice, i.e., should be pursued or performed there. Reacting to certain states of affairs or acting in their light might also be prescribed. The futures, presents, and pasts thereby picked out are common to all subject to the enjoinment. People who take or lead a horse farm tour, for example,

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have a common present and past in observing the injunction to stand to the left of horses being walked. Common futures and pasts underlie common spatialities, moreover, as when the common future of taking in a landscape makes a particular roadside pull off a place to do this in common. In addition, the use of certain objects, and thus the anchoring of places and paths in those objects, is sometimes “standardized.” Beds as places to sleep, roads as places to drive, roadside pull offs as places to get out and look—such matters are standardized in the sense that, in certain practices, this is what one does at/with them. Most standardizations of this sort are weak enjoinments. The prescriptive quality of a standardization such as a roadside pull off is a place to get out and look comes out in such matters as people telling others to pull over at pull offs and warning them not to do so elsewhere. Many regularities of practice are not enjoined. The facts, for instance, that people regularly take photographs when on a horse farm tour and that a group at a pull off turns in unison to look at a galloping horse, are not prescribed. Nonnormative practice regularities are a second factor that engenders common timespaces. The relevant regularities include those of pursuing particular ends, reacting to particular circumstances, performing particular actions, and performing particular actions in particular places. Such regularities beget common futures, pasts, presents, places, and paths for participants because the regularities are public phenomena that people can come across, and people often fall in line with encountered regularities. A third factor that engenders common timespaces is people acting amid the same or similar arrangements of objects. The sameness or similarity of the material arrangements amid which people act contributes to their proceeding through common places, paths, and regions.82 That a particular roadside pull off is a common place for horse farm tourers to gaze at the landscape depends partly on the fact that the pull off is a particular strip of asphalt at the side of the road that each can encounter. The timespaces of participants in a given practice are also shared. They are shared whenever participants pursue the same end, carry out the same project, react to the same state of affairs, or proceed through the same places, paths, and regions but not because they are enjoined to do so. People who take the horse farm tour for the sake of seeing horses share this future even though pursuing this end is not prescribed in the practices involved, and others take the tour for different reasons. Similarly, those for whom a trackside fence is a place to watch horses train proceed through spatialities that share at least this much. Practice organizations circumscribe the shared dimension of their participants’ timespaces because teleoaffective structures comprise acceptable futures in addition to enjoined ones. Practices also shape their participants’ activity pasts since talk and experience in a practice strongly contribute to

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participants reacting to the same states of affairs when they are not enjoined to do so. Hence, the shared elements of the timespaces of participants in a given practice are at least partly determined within the practice. Timespaces are personal, finally, when participants in a practice pursue ends different from those other participants pursue, perform actions different from those others perform, react to states of affairs different from those to which others react, or proceed through places, paths, and regions that differ from those through which others proceed. Personal timespaces are only weakly delimited by practice organizations since people, when carrying on a practice, can pursue ends, perform actions, and proceed through spatialities that are not acceptable in that practice. A person might take a horse farm tour, for instance, to scout out a murder. Sometimes, of course, divergent timespaces hang together. That, for instance, one spouse takes the tour to see horses and the other does so to please him are not independent facts. Nor are the facts that one person steps back from an approaching horse and a second person complains about being jostled by the first. I call the nonindependence of divergent features of different people’s timespaces “orchestration.” Timespaces are orchestrated when elements of different people’s timespaces that are neither common nor shared are not independent of one another. The activity timespaces of participants in a given practice are partly common, partly shared, and partly orchestrated. Commonality, sharing, and orchestration are circumscribed (1) by the organization of the practice, (2) by the often regular doings and sayings that compose the practice, and (3) by the same and similar settings in which the practice is carried out. This holds of orchestration because even when people, say, nonindependently act for different ends or nonindependently perform different actions, their ends and actions are circumscribed by whatever practices they carry on. The tour company owner’s pursuit of profit is not independent of his tour guides’ pursuit of earned income, and the pursuit of either end devolves from the organization and regularities of economic practices. Of course, myriad contingencies also help establish commonalities, shared elements, and orchestrations. The people taking the horse farm tour, whose lives temporarily exhibit common, shared, and orchestrated timespaces, might have planned for months to take the excursion or instead spontaneously decided to do so after seeing a sign advertising it at the entrance to the Kentucky Horse Park. The flow of events decisively contributes to the interwovenness of timespaces. This analysis explicates the social character of activity timespace, a feature of individual lives: not just the timespaces of an individual person, but also common, shared, and many orchestrated features of different people’s timespaces devolve from and reflect the practices they carry on. Summarily

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stated: practices are arenas in which participants’ timespaces interweave and form nets of jointly instituted, interwoven futures-presents-pasts-placespaths. The interwoven character of timespaces lies in commonalities, shared elements, and orchestrations. As indicated, I claim that nets of interwoven timespaces are central to the constitution of the social. This centrality is the new key, having nothing to do with Heidegger’s claim that temporality or timespace is a basic feature of the clearing, in which I will now recast his contention that temporality or timespace is crucial to human life.83

Notes 1. A good example of the latter is found in J.T. Fraser, Time: The Familiar Stranger (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). 2. Two prominent examples of social constructionist conceptions are Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) and Helga Nowotny, Time. The Modern and Postmodern Experience, trans. Neville Plaice (Oxford: Polity, 1994 [1989]). 3. For example, in Justice, Nature, & the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), David Harvey argues that social space-time—a form of objective spacetime—must be understood relationally and not absolutely (see chapter 2). He draws on the philosophies of Leibniz and Whitehead to formulate his position. In the context of the wider analysis in his book, however, it does not matter whether the objective time and space out of which social space-times (in particular, the space-times of economic systems) are composed are relational or absolute. 4. Nowotny, Time. The Modern and Postmodern Experience, 8. 5. Ibid., 57, 54. 6. Harvey, Justice, Nature, & the Geography of Difference, 207. 7. Henri Lefebvre, rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Athlone, 2004 [1992]), 89. 8. E.g., Torsten Hägerstrand, “Space, Time, and Human Conditions,” in Dynamic Allocation of Urban Space, edited by A. Karlqvist, L. Lundqvist, and F. Snickars (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975), 3–14. 9. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002 [1961]), 47. 10. Lefebvre, rhythmanalysis, p. 44. Further references in the current section to this book are placed in the text. 11. This claim also holds of individual people: “It is in the psychological, social, organic unity of the ‘perceiver’ who is oriented towards the perceived, which is to say, towards objects, toward surroundings and towards other people, that the rhythms that compose this unity are given” (77). 12. Compare Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [1974]), 118: “Time and space are not separable within a texture so conceived: space implies time, and vice versa.”

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13. On page 78 of rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre denies that mechanical repetition is a rhythm, two pages earlier having written that a rhythm is “any series of identical facts separated by long or short periods of time: . . . the blows of a hammer, the noise of an engine.” It is not important for present purposes to resolve this prima facie contradiction. 14. See also Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II, chapter 1. 15. Ibid., p. 348. On moments, see also Henri Lefebvre, “The Inventory,” in Henri Lefebvre: Selected Writings, edited by Stuart Elden (London: Continuum, 2003), 166–76. 16. Ibid., 345, 346. 17. Stuart Elden suggests that the notion of moments can be understood only by reference to lived time. I do not, however, see evidence for this in either Lefebvre’s texts or Elden’s short discussion. See Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum, 2004), 173. 18. Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), 115–6. 19. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 13 and 22 for the attribution of this triad to physical and human reality alike. 20. In chapter 4 I will analyze two further conceptions of space-time, those of Tim Ingold and Doreen Massey, both of which build on Bergson’s notion of duration. 21. Don Parkes and Nigel Thrift, Times, Spaces, and Places: A Chronogeographic Perspective (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1980). 22. See Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977) and Anne Buttimer, “Grasping the Dynamism of the Lifeworld,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66, no. 2 (1976): 277–92. 23. I add that a number of Parkes and Thrift’s examples of timing space (and spacing time) suggest, contrary to their intentions, that time and space are, not separate, but inextricably intertwined. For instance, the authors offer (114) a planned freeway as an example of a temporal manipulation even though it is no less, and just as inherently, a spatial one. The construction of the freeway is best conceptualized as an alteration of material arrangements—not of space or of time—that changes (and implicates further possible changes in) the spatial and temporal features of activities, practices, and other arrangements. 24. Parkes and Thrift, Times, Spaces and Places, 34. 25. Ibid., 4 and 279. 26. Christopher Gosden, Social Being and Time (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994), 78. Further references in the current section to this book are placed in the text. 27. See also Gosden’s distinction between harmonious, disjoint, and concatenating times, three general types of “harmonic form” that result from joining activities and practices that belong to different time-scales and periodicities (126, 190). 28. This is not the only text in which Heidegger discusses timespace. The notion is briefly examined, for instance, in What Is a Thing? (1935–36) and “Time and Being” (1962). It is also prominent in the lectures, Hölderlin’s Hymn, “The Ister”(1942) I focus on the Contributions because this text makes extensive use of the concept. In

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this context, I should add that, because my interest in this section is to develop the concept of activity timespace, I only minimally engage the voluminous secondary literature on Heidegger. 29. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, fifteenth edition (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979 [1927]), 133. Ensuing references to this book are marked in the text by “SZ.” Translations are freely based on the Macquarrie and Robinson translation (John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time [Oxford: Blackwell, 1978]). I reference the German text and not this translation because a second quality translation (that of Stambaugh) exists. 30. Although my aim in the present chapter precludes engaging the secondary literature on the Contributions, I should acknowledge a key point of contention in this literature, stances on which shape overall interpretations of the Contributions. Some interpreters read the Contributions as describing universal structures of human life and its situatedness vis-à-vis truth, being, and the event. Others read it as describing a state of things to come for which the book is somehow to serve as transition or preparation. (For a superb reading of the Contributions as doing the latter, see Richard Polt, The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006].) I believe that the Contributions does both: describes universal structures and articulates a state of things to come that could characterize future humanity. The book does this because the future state of things involved is, formally, humanity coming fully and properly to be what it has always been, namely, the entity whose timespace structure is at once the open of the clearing. To put matters in the terms of Greek philosophy (which Heidegger would not have liked): the state of affairs to come is humanity realizing its essence. Or, as Heidegger did put it, that future state of affairs is humanity coming to itself, coming to its own. 31. I cannot presently engage ongoing debates about the proper translation of this term. 32. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie. (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfort am Main: Klostermann, 1989), 261; cf. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 184. Subsequent references to this book and to its published English translation are marked in the text by “B” and “C” respectively. Translations, however, are my own. I provide translations of this and other Heidegger texts, instead of using the published English translations, in order to impose uniformity. 33. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 189–242, here 221. 34. “Protokoll zu einem Seminar über den Vortrag ‘Zeit und Sein,’” in Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1969), 27–60, here 45. 35. Heidegger tended to write Zeit-Raum (“time-space”) instead of Zeitraum (“timespace”), in part because the common German word Zeitraum means length of time. I will continue to write “timespace” to emphasize the unity of its components. 36. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 54.

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37. In the Contributions, Heidegger frequently described timespace as the moment-site (Augenblicks-Stätte). This expression is extremely suggestive, both philosophically and social theoretically. Augenblick is the term Heidegger used in Being and Time to designate the authentic present, and authenticity in that book clearly parallels the state of affairs to come, prominent in the Contributions, in which humanity comes to itself. Stätte (site), moreover, is a term Heidegger pervasively used in his later works to designate the configuration of spaces and entities into which a clearing happens. “Authenticity” and “site” have also become prominent concepts in social thought. Ultimately, however, “moment-site” is simply an alternative name for the timespace of a particular historical humanity. The moment is the present in which the Entrückungen (see footnote 52 below) of time are gathered (B 384, C 268). The site is the encircling hold, the space of the event, which holds the moment (ibid.). Calling the timespace of a particular people “moment-site” adds little to what Heidegger otherwise wrote about timespace, except that the present is a kind of nonobjective now: his extensive use of this intriguing sounding term does not deepen his account of timespace. 38. For a meritorious interpretation of the Contributions that denies that the various features of and operations associated with timespace characterize humanity (even features such as attunement [159] and remembrance and awaiting [160]), see Miguel De Beistegui, Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), e.g., 131–33. De Beistegui argues that these features and operations at best characterize humanity at that moment to come when humanity comes to itself. 39. I believe, moreover, that a notion of timespace that is highly parallel to the one developed in the Contributions is inchoately present in Being and Time. Although the latter book conceptualizes the clearing as a temporal affair alone, it contains both direct and indirect signs of the idea that the clearing is as spatial as it is temporal: Being and Time is unable to repress the temporalspatial character of the clearing, even as its official position contravenes it. I cannot develop, let alone defend, this claim presently. 40. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911 [1907]), 309. 41. For two very different affirmations of this claim, see Hubert Dreyfus, Beingin-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992) and William MacNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 42. Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, second edition (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988 [1979]), 308; cf. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 224. Translations from this book are my own. 43. Ibid., 314; English, 228. 44. Heidegger’s discussions of the spatiality of equipment/world and the spatiality of being-in strongly overlap in content. This is because the overall spatiality under discussion is the spatiality of existence, the spatiality of being-in-the-world, and being-in-the-world is a unified phenomenon that cannot be decisively sundered into

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components, say, being-in and world (which could then be viewed as descendents of subject and object). Discussions of either the spatiality of equipment or the spatiality of being-in are really discussions of being-in-the-world that emphasize particular aspects of the spatiality of this unified phenomenon. I mention this because Jeff Malpas—in the most comprehensive and insightful book available about space and place in Heidegger (the book also extensively discusses the relation of temporality in Being and Time to place and topology)—distinguishes equipmental spatiality from the spatiality of being-in (which he calls “existential spatiality”) as distinct, though not unconnected types of spatiality. Although he believes that these types of spatiality form a unified structure, he does not treat them as overlapping combinations of different aspects of the one spatiality of being-in-the-world (Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World [Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2006], chapter 3, sections 3 and 6). He thus veers too closely for my comfort to separating world and being-in. He also claims that Heidegger gave priority to the spatiality of being-in over equipmental spatiality. This separation is particularly palpable in Malpas’s thesis that being-there, as spatial phenomenon, arises from the differential insertion of people into the public regionalized place spatiality of equipment by the particular orientations and dis-tances that constitute their individual “existential spatialities.” The differences between Malpas’s interpretation and my own are too vast to discuss here. 45. See Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, chapter 3, section 1. 46. Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, 316; English, 230. 47. For a discussion of relevance that dovetails with Heidegger’s discussion of orientation and dis-tance, see Alfred Schütz, Das Problem der Relevanz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971). 48. Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, pp. 132–4 and chapter 3, section 6 more generally. 49. For informative discussions of bodyliness in Heidegger, see David Cerbone, “Heidegger and Dasein’s ‘Bodily Nature.’ What is the Hidden Problematic? International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8, no. 2 (2000): 209–30 and Frank Schalow, The Incarnality of Being: The Earth, Animals, and the Body in Heidegger’s Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). For a Heideggarian account of bodyliness, see Medard Boss, Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, trans. Stephen Conway and Anne Cleaves (New York: Jason Aronson, 1979 [1971]). 50. Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” in Aufsätze und Vorträge (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 139–156, here 148; cf. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 143–62, here 154. Subsequent references to this essay and its published English translation are marked in the text by “BWD” and “BDT” respectively. All translations are my own. 51. According to Kisiel, Heidegger’s constant concern from the end of World War One to Being and Time was the happening character of facticity, of human life. See Theodore Kisiel, “Das Entstehen des Begriffsfeldes ‘Faktizität’ im Frühwerk Heideggers,” Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 4 (1986–87): 91–120. See also B 472, C 332. 52. This being-on-the-move ultimately consists in three abstract movements, three movings-toward (Entrückungen), by virtue of each of which one of the opennesses, or

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kinds of open, that the temporal dimensions are is opened. More or less the same idea reappears in the Contributions. In that book, the happening of timespace, temporalizing-spatializing, consists in four abstract movements: two Entrückungen—movements, or removals, toward—that are the movements that open up the past and future, an Einrückung—movement, or removal, into—that is the movement that opens up the present, and a Berückung—a capture (charming)—that is spatializing. This capture is an encircling hold (Umhalt): spatializing concerns the fixation of humanity (in place) by the entities with which it is concerned (see B 385, C 269). The idea that the opening up of temporality, time, or timespace is a kind of abstract movement, is a red thread that runs through all of Heidegger’s thoughts about them. For a particularly taut presentation of the idea, see Martin Heidegger, “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 1–24. 53. This observation is commonplace. See, for example, Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). 54. In the introduction to Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory after Cognitive Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 1), Stephen Turner writes that “a central challenge to social theory today [is] a revised understanding of a great many of our core concepts in light of the lessons and implications of cognitive science, especially connectionism.” I affirm that social theory must be compatible with true theories in cognitive science. One problem with Turner’s declaration, however, is that cognitive science, as he himself acknowledges, is a fast evolving area of investigation: connectionism might one day be replaced by a different research program that does not exclude the sorts of shared causally-efficacious cognitive contents that Turner claims connectionism precludes. It is almost assured, furthermore, that a range of social theories are compatible with the truth about how our brains work. For example, the social ontology I have developed in previous books is fully compatible with connectionism even though it does not share Turner’s emphasis on habits in explaining much of social life. I am unaware of any research in cognitive science that challenges the ideas presented in the current text. As a result, for the purposes of this book, I will bracket cognitive science. 55. Theodore R. Schatzki, “Where Times Meet,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 1, no. 2 (2005): 191–212, section 4. 56. For discussion of this legacy, see my Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2007), chapter 5. 57. See the comprehensive analysis in William Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Heidegger argued, more precisely, that existential time has priority over time conceived of as a series of instants, instant time being the ordinary interpretation of what he called “world-time.” Worldtime is the before-now-after structure bound up in people’s concernful engagement with the world; it is itself an interpretation of existential temporality. 58. Hans Rämö, “An Aristotelian Human Time-Space Manifold: From Chronochora to Kairotopos,” Time and Society 8, no. 2 (1999): 309–28.

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59. Mike Crang, for example, uses Rämö’s four cell matrix to collect together combinations of different sorts of time and space pertinent to analyzing social life (Mike Crang, “Time:Space,” in Spaces of Geographical Thought: Deconstructing Human Geography’s Binaries, edited by Paul Cloke and Ron Johnston [London: Sage, 2005], 199–220). In this context, I should also acknowledge an alternative timespace typology that Immanuel Wallerstein formulates in his essay, “The Invention of TimeSpace Realities: Towards an Understanding of Our Historical System,” Geography 73 (October 1988): 289–97. I will not examine Wallerstein’s schema because it is a typology of objective timespaces alone. 60. For a comprehensive and lucid discussion of this distinction and its history, see Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 61. J.E. McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind, New Series, no. 68 (October 1908): 457–74, here 458. 62. Barbara Adam, for instance, divides her discussion of theories of time that are pertinent to social thought into (1) those concerned with objective time, for which succession is essential (an example is the Aristotelian and clock-time idea of time as the measure of motion) and (2) those concerned with a time of past, present, and future that is either the essence of or closely tied to human mind, consciousness, or life. Adams labels the second family of theories theories of “relative time.” Barbara Adams, Time (Key Concepts) (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). 63. For historical and scientific considerations in favor of this alternative interpretation, or rather, for the thesis that past, present, and future arise from biological processes and receive their greatest clarity in the human mind, see Fraser, Time. The Familiar Stranger, chapter 3. 64. See, for example, G.J. Whitrow, What Is Time? The Classic Account of the Nature of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 133. 65. For elaboration of the historical material presented in this paragraph, see Charles M. Sherover, “The Concept of Time in Western Thought,” in Are We in Time? And Other Essays on Time and Temporality, edited by Gregory R. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 3–21. 66. Aristotle, The Physics, in Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 219b1. 67. Plotinus, “Time and Eternity,” Enneads 3.7, trans. Stephen McKenna, 4th and revised edition (New York: Pantheon, 1969). 68. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), §§ 11, 20. 69. For a recent discussion of this tradition that draws its borders somewhat differently, see David Hoy, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). 70. Casey, The Fate of Place, part three. 71. My analysis of a person hues closely to that of Peter Strawson, according to which a person is a type of entity to which both physical properties and mental properties of a certain sort can be attributed. See Peter Strawson, Individuals (London:

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Methuen, 1959). This analysis is not entirely foreign to Heidegger, as is suggested by his oft-cited thesis that existence is in each case mine (SZ 42). 72. In the Contributions, Heidegger held that activity and timespace are the properties of peoples. Timespace is at once the open of a clearing in which entities can be and that feature of a historical people by which it stands into that clearing. This position is particularly overt and well-developed in a text written not long after the Contributions, Heidegger’s lecture course on Hölderlins Hymne, “Der Ister” (1942). In these lectures, timespace is conceptualized as the basic structure of a historical people (Menschentum), whose history is one of passing through the foreign on route to coming home. The only individuals these lectures discuss are poets. A poet, however, is treated as the poet of a people: that member of the people who enables the people’s homecoming by opening the timespaces in which it comes home. A similar picture is presented in the Contributions (see the curious passage at B 96–7, C 66–7 on the three components of the people), even though in that book Heidegger more often wrote of humans (Menschen) than of people (Volk). On the topic of the people [das Volk] in Heidegger, see James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). For a discussion of the people in the Contributions that focuses on Heidegger’s idea that a people becomes a people when it comes to itself in homecoming, see John Sallis, “Grounders of the Abyss,” in Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, edited by Charles Scott, Susan M. Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Vallega (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 181–97. 73. Conceptualizing humanity as social groups of any sort carries a notable implication, namely, that the multiplicity of groups entails a multiplicity of timespaces, clearings, and events. The same result follows from the plurality of das Man normativities discussed in Being and Time (see below). I don’t see that Heidegger ever shirked from this implication, though he restricted his attention almost entirely to either the West and Western history or Germans and Germany history. 74. See, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1956 [1943]), Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987 [1985]), and John McGuire and Barbara Tuchanska, Science Unfettered: A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorical Ontology (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000). 75. A particularly forceful discussion of this thesis is found in Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982 [1975]), section 21e. 76. The term “normativity” has become immensely significant in contemporary philosophy. Although the meaning I give the term diverges from those that other philosophers give it, my definition should be readily intelligible. To forestall possible misunderstandings, I should state that I do not believe that normativity is always or only based in systems of rules. It is, instead, a product of judgment, dialogue, and existing rules. In particular, enjoinment (prescription) is not something that follows from rules alone. 77. This is not the place to spell out how the account of activity and world that I derive from Heidegger construes the relationship between teleology and normativ-

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ity. My basic view is that normativity delimits common worlds while teleology takes individual cuts out of such worlds along lines of relevance. 78. Hubert Dreyfus (Being-in-the-World, p. 129ff) argues that, in Being and Time, Heidegger never clearly distinguished the public “space” in which things show up from the centered spatiality of each human being. My view is that Heidegger’s thesis that das Man is a there (a disclosure space, in Dreyfus’s terms) marks this distinction. The das Man there is a public space in which entities show up to different people as the same entities with the same normative possibilities. Proceeding in this public space, each person has specific orientations and dis-tances that are tied to the specific actions she performs. 79. It is important to stress that, in the present book, the claim that timespace is a feature of individual existence is an interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy: activity timespace is a feature of individual existence as the notion is interpretively developed from his texts. As explained, the further claim that individual life, including its timespace, are inherently social in character is also found in Heidegger, though the way I develop the claim diverges from his texts. I am well aware that some theorists claim that time and space are features of social formations greater than individuals and that other theorists challenge the distinction between the individual and the social. Many issues attending the individual-social distinction are addressed in my book, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Exploration of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 80. For an attempt to fill out sociality in the spirit of Being and Time, see Frederick Olafson, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a sociological appreciation of Mitsein, see Johannes Weiss ed., Die Jemeinigkeit des Mitseins: Die Daseinsanalytik Martin Heideggers und die Kritik der soziologischen Vernunft (Konstanz: Uvk, 2001). 81. For extensive discussions of social practices, see Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and Social Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 4 and Schatzki, The Site of the Social, chapter 2. 82. Similarly, Hannah Arendt claimed that worlds of things in common are essential to the public spheres that she conceptualized as spaces of visibility in which people appear to one another. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). For discussion of the role of common objects in establishing sociality, see Karin Knorr Cetina, “Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies,” Theory, Culture, and Society 14 (1997): 1–30 and Alex Preda, “The Turn to Things: Arguments for a Sociological Theory of Things,” The Sociological Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1999): 347–66. 83. In Being Singular Plural (trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000 (1996)]), Jean-Luc Nancy writes (1) that the with of being-with is the sharing of timespace (35) and (2) that being-with involves a sharing of timespace between people (61). Resemblances notwithstanding, these claims diverge from my thesis that interwoven timespaces are central to social existence. Nancy writes that the timespace that people share is “same time/same space,” that is, a single timespace that is common to them all (ibid.). He seems, more-

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over, to follow the Heidegger of the Contributions to Philosophy in holding that what it is for people to share this single timespace is—expressed in Heidegger’s language—for each person to stand into it; the single timespace that people share is a clearing. This interpretation of timespace is suggested, for example, when Nancy states that “spacetime itself is . . . the possibility of the with” (ibid.) and when he writes of “the opening of a space-time for the distribution of singularities” (66; people are singularities). My account forsakes the notion of a clearing and argues that being-with is centrally a matter, not of participation in a single common timespace, but of interwoven activity timespaces.

2 Activity Timespace and Social Life

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1 EXAMINED THE TIMESPACE OF HUMAN ACTIVITY. Activity timespace is a unified nonobjective phenomenon: acting toward an end from what motivates at places and paths anchored in objects. It is also, strictly, a feature of activities and of the lives these activities help make up. As discussed, however, timespaces interweave partly due to people carrying on the same social practices. The present chapter examines the broader relationship between timespace and social life and argues that interwoven timespaces form an infrastructure that runs through and is essential to social affairs. Previous accounts of society have overlooked this essential infrastructure. The bulk of my discussion examines the contribution interwoven timespaces make to the constitution of social phenomena, including such phenomena of perennial interest as coordinated actions, social organizations, social systems, the interrelated spatial and temporal features of societies, and power. The concluding section explores the temporalspatial character of a type of social entity often thought to be a spatial affair alone: landscape. HAPTER

1. Human Coexistence I begin my discussion with the centrality of interwoven timespaces to a phenomenon that is fundamental to society: human coexistence.1 By “human coexistence” I mean the belonging-together and with-one-another of human beings. This togetherness-withness is a fundamental ingredient in all social affairs. Regardless of what else theorists have believed makes up society, all — 65 —

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theorists agree that social affairs embrace interrelated people: in the absence of humans living together with one another, society does not exist. This togetherness-withness, furthermore, can be succinctly captured with the expression “hanging together” (Zusammenhang): human coexistence is the hanging together (Zusammenhang) of human lives. It should be emphasized that the idea of human coexistence and its further specification as the hanging together of lives do not presume that human lives are integral entities independent of their connections. I mention this because this presumption is often, though usually erroneously, attributed to social ontologies that highlight individuals. Because the hanging together of human lives is basic to society, social affairs exist, at least in part, through the ways lives hang together. There are four principal ways human lives hang together:2 through the interpersonal structuring of what determines action, through chains of action, through intentional directedness toward others, and through the medium of settings. Focused on human coexistence, the claim that interwoven timespaces are central to social affairs is the claim that many such sinews are forms of interwoven timespaces. Detailing this will make patent that timespace lies at the core of social life. The interpersonal structuring of what determines action is the interpersonal structuring of such matters as the ends people pursue, the projects they carry out, the states of affairs to which they respond, the actions they perform, the rules they observe, and the emotions out of which they proceed (how these phenomena determine activity will be explored in chapters 3 and 4). This interpersonal structuring comes in two flavors: sameness and orchestration. Sameness exists when the same factors determine the actions of different people. Orchestration exists when different factors nonindependently determine different people’s actions. It should be obvious that sinews of this first sort are mostly instances of interwoven timespace. Same or orchestrated ends, projects, and reacted-to states of affairs are same (common or shared) or orchestrated temporalities. As will be discussed in chapter 3, moreover, same or orchestrated rules and emotions can lead to same or orchestrated temporalities; an example is acting for the same way of being—running away to be safe—out of the same emotion—fear of a bear. The second type of sinew embraces chains of action. Lives hang together when chains of action pass through and thereby link them. A chain of action is a series of performances, each member of which responds either to the preceding activity in the series, to what the previous activity said, or to a change in the world that the preceding activity brought about. For example, when a person taking a horse farm tour drops a map on the ground, and the tour leader picks it up and puts it in a trash receptacle, their lives are linked

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by a chain of action (which also connects them to the people who installed the receptacle). Conversations, to take another example, are chains of action in which people respond to what others say or to the saying of it. Chains of action are configurations of interwoven temporality. For responding to an action, to something said, or to a change in the world is the past dimension of activity. Each link in a chain of action thus involves some person’s past, and a chain comprising multiple links strings together the pasts and presents of different people. The third type of sinew through which lives hang together is intentional directedness. One life hangs together with another when one person is directed toward another (his actions, mental conditions, situations), as when she acts toward him, pursues some goal in regard to him, believes something about him, or acts out of an emotion directed toward him. This type of sinew is not automatically an interweaving of timespaces, though the conditions through which a person is directed toward someone else typically help fill out her past, present, or future. The fourth type of sinew is a grab-bag, embracing links that work via settings. Lives are linked, for example, when people, in the same or different settings, respond to the same events, for example, an explosion, the galloping of a horse, or an announcement of war.3 Lives are also linked when they proceed amid the same arrangement of material entities, regardless of whether the arrangement composes a single setting (e.g., an individual horse stall) or crosses multiple settings (e.g., the horse barn). Another sort of link between lives in the dimension of settings is via physical connections between settings: continuous physical structures such as roads and pathways, avenues of access such as barn doors and tunnels, and technological communications connections such as phone lines and wireless satellite systems. Finally, lives link through the same place-paths arrays being anchored at particular material arrangements (e.g., tourists understanding pull offs as places to look at landscapes), as well as through people nonindependently understanding different places and paths to be anchored at particular material arrangements (e.g., tourists understanding pull offs as places to look at landscapes and their children understanding them as places to run around and ignore their parents’ admonishments to behave and pay attention). Some of the sinews of these sorts that work through settings are patterns of interwoven timespace. Events that multiple people respond to are common or shared pasts, and the anchoring of the same place-path arrays in particular settings, like the orchestrated anchoring of different arrays there, are common, shared, or orchestrated spatialities. In sum, the hanging together of lives that is fundamental to human sociality centrally and pervasively consists in interwoven timespaces. Of course,

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lives do not hang together solely through timespaces. Intentional relatedness and physical connections among settings are not as such forms of interwoven timespace. Still, physical connections often underlie the interweaving of timespaces, and the mental conditions through which one person is intentionally directed toward others can be elements of the past or future dimensions of her activity. Beyond this, interwoven timespaces, in addition to filling out the hanging together of lives, also determine this: interwoven timespaces are often responsible for the sinews through which people coexist. This holds, for instance, of many chains of action since people often respond to other people’s actions due to the interweaving of their ends and projects. For example, one farm employee might set out the gear that horses wear when breeding and other employees later pick them up and fit them to the horses, because of common or orchestrated futures and common spatialities. Similarly, one person might be directed toward another because they pursue common ends and projects. All in all, sociality as people know and experience it is not possible, realistically, in the absence of interwoven timespaces.

2. The Coordination of Actions The current section further concretizes this claim—that interwoven timespaces are essential to social life—by describing the contribution such timespaces make to a key social phenomenon: coordinated action. Although society, as the preceding discussion of coexistence indicates, is not co-extensive with coordinated action, this type of action has received considerable attention throughout the history of social thought. In fact, many theorists have treated it as the fundamental building block of a prominent type of social phenomena: social organizations and associations. Detailing the temporalspatial dimension of coordinated actions will help make evident that interwoven timespaces are essential to social life. It will be helpful to begin with several examples of coordinated actions. All cases of coordinated actions are like those below or built out of states of affairs like them. (1) Two horse farm tourers deciding to hang back from the group so that they can observe horses breeding. (2) Two friends taking turns clicking photographs while the other takes notes about the countryside. (3) The tour guide who leads one party checking in by cell phone with the tour guide leading another party to make sure that the two groups don’t tour a particular farm at the same time.

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(4) The actions of the grooms, barn hands, riders, tour guide, and tourers in a barn. (5) Tour guides going out and purchasing uniforms after being informed by management of a change in company policy regarding appearance. (6) The guides striking on a picket line, as suggested by their elected leader in response to a new company policy regarding wages and tips. I should make explicit that by “coordinated actions” I mean actions that combine to achieve a result that someone intends be achieved, though the people performing the coordinated actions need not have agreed on the intended result or even be conscious that their actions are coordinated. As I use the word “coordination,” and contrary to some uses of it, linked, synchronized, or interdependent actions are not ipso facto coordinated. Three properties of coordinated actions are particularly germane to the present discussion. The first is the objective spatial-temporal form of the actions. There are four obvious forms: same place same time, different place same time, same place different time, and different place different time. The second property is the medium of coordination, among whose prominent types are faceto-face dialogue, technology-mediated dialogue, money, identical or linked situational events, and continual behavioral adjustment (as in crowd movement or traffic flow). The third property is that coordinated actions achieve results: breedings are observed, photographs and notes accumulate, tours do not overlap, people stay out of each other’s way, policies are implemented, and picket lines are formed. Indeed, the mark of whether actions are successfully coordinated is whether the designed or intended result(s) comes off. Note that failure to achieve this result is not a mark of failed coordination because the failure might result from something other than relations among the actions involved—the camera, for instance, might be missing a memory card, just like the strike leader might suffer a heart attack. Interwoven timespaces are central features of these coordinated actions. Example (1) exhibits shared futures and presents (the project of watching breeding and the action of ducking around a corner) linked to shared or common spaces (places to hang back from the group and to watch breeding). Example (3) exhibits common futures (avoiding being at a specific horse farm at the same time), orchestrated presents (waiting and hurrying up), and most likely orchestrated pasts (the first guide reacting to the presence of the second tour at the farm and the second tour guide reacting to the approach of the first tour)—not to speak of common, shared, and orchestrated spatialities such as designated places to turn off the road and wait, known places to get a good view, and a farm gate being a place to offer background remarks not independently of an obscure farm road being a path to make a quick exit. Example (5), mean-

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while, embraces shared and orchestrated futures (the ends for which the guides go out and purchase uniforms), common presents (purchasing the uniforms), and common pasts (reacting to the letter about changed company policy). And example (6) embraces common, shared, and orchestrated futures (the ends that the leader enjoins, the strikers’ shared hopes, their different but linked reasons for joining the strike), common, shared, and orchestrated presents (performing the actions that add up to forming and standing on the picket line), a common past (the new company policy), and whatever common, shared, and orchestrated spatialities are involved in establishing and maintaining the picket line. Example (4), finally, exhibits considerable orchestrated futures and presents. In addition to being a key feature of these examples, interwoven timespaces also help determine (and explain) them. In example (1), for instance, shared futures (the project of watching breeding) and a shared place (the far side of a building as a place to hang back) determine the coordinated actions of ducking around the corner. In example (3), the coordinated actions that the tour guides perform so that their tours do not overlap are determined by their common futures, orchestrated pasts, and common, shared, and orchestrated spatialities. Generally speaking, it is because the spatiality and future and past dimensions of activity determine it (see chapters 3 and 4) that interwoven timespaces help determine coordinated activities. Of course, other factors can also be involved. In example (1), for instance, the one friend might duck around the corner with the other in order to please her. Social theorists sometimes differentiate individualized forms of coordination from collective ones. Examples of individualized forms of coordination are phone calls, agreements to meet at a given hour, and the use of date books, BlackBerries, and calendars to keep track of events. Examples of collective forms of coordination are the use of clocks and calendars to regulate economic production, the official scheduling of events, and the organizational ordering—via regulations, laws, instructions, policies, commands etc.—of such matters as commodity production, economic trading, government policy-making, religious services, and sporting events.4 All of the above examples but (2) involve collective coordination. Examples (1), (3), and (4), for example, involve the organizational ordering of horse breeding, horse farm tours, horse training, or barn operations. In many of these examples, moreover, organizational ordering can contribute to the timespaces of individuals who are not members of the organization concerned, as when a tour guide times the arrival of the group at a barn to coincide with the training of horses (in which case the organizational ordering of training contributes to the tourers’ timespaces). I claim that the collective coordination of action takes the form of common (enjoined) timespaces. In example (6), for example, the collective coordination of the strike might consist of the elected leader (a) is-

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suing instructions for guides to show up at a particular time and location and (b) promulgating reasons to join the action. These instructions and reasons fill out the common dimension of the futures and pasts by virtue of which the guides show up and join the picket line. Because collective coordination lies in common timespaces, the often noted tendency in contemporary life toward increasingly individualized modes of coordination5 can be described as an attenuation of common timespaces. This tendency should not be described as a dilution of shared timespaces. Since orchestration, by itself, is unable to ensure coordination, little or no coordination would exist in social life in the absence of shared timespaces. Social theorists have also often distinguished kinds of coordination that work through actors’ orientations from kinds of coordination that work behind their backs, for instance, through unintentional consequences of action.6 What these theorists call “actors’ orientations” are closely related to what I am calling “timespace.” Interwoven timespaces are crucial to the kinds of action coordination that work through such orientations. Interwoven timespaces are also crucial, however, to the kinds of coordination that work behind people’s backs. As I discuss below, for example, the coordination that holds together an economic system significantly rests on common, shared, and orchestrated timespaces. As indicated, one property of coordinated actions is their objective spacetime forms. Whereas the coordinated actions in example (1) are simultaneously performed in the same locations, and the coordinated actions in example (3) are simultaneously performed in different locations, the coordinated actions in example (5) are performed at different times in the same or different locations. Other objective temporal or spatial features of coordinated actions, as of any set of connected actions, are the durations of their performances, their rhythms, sequences, and periodicities, and the distribution in three dimensional space of the locations where they are performed. I contend that the objective space-time properties of coordinated actions—or of any set of connected actions—centrally derive from the interwoven timespaces of those performing them. In example (3), for instance, the tour guides simultaneously perform coordinated actions in different locations because of their common futures, orchestrated pasts, and whatever shared and orchestrated spatialities already existed or resulted from their phone conversation. In example (5), both the different times when employees purchase uniforms and the same or different locations where they do so follow partly from their activities’ common pasts (receipt and contents of the letter), same or orchestrated futures (the ends they pursue in purchasing the uniforms), and same or orchestrated spatialities (the same or different stores as places to purchase uniforms). Of course, this example also shows that interwoven timespaces are not the sole determinant of the objective space-time forms of coordinated

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actions: the times and locations of purchases also depend on family affairs, the scheduling of competing activities, the timing of the availability of funds, procrastination, and so on. The objective space-time form of coordinated actions further depends on physical connections between settings. Still, the different times and same/different spaces in example (5) would not exist in the absence of the indicated interwoven timespaces. And many of the above additional factors that help determine these objective times and spaces help compose the futures and pasts of tour guides’ activities. So the objective times and spaces of coordinated actions strongly depend on people’s individual and interwoven timespaces. At the same time, and conversely, interwoven timespaces occur under the constraints of objective time and space. Nothing known can overcome or contradict the march of objective time. Like other events, human activities, and therewith timespaces and their interwoven components, occupy positions in the successions of objective reality. A person’s future, for instance, is his future for a particular moment or length of time, just as an orchestrated spatiality exists so long as different arrays are nonindependently anchored at arrangements. Human activities, furthermore, must accommodate—and interwoven timespaces reflect—the fact of change. They are also regulated by reference to repetitive processes that conventionally function as markers of time such as periodic environmental events (sunrises, animal migrations, seasons), the turning of clock hands, and the radioactive decay of cesium atoms. The interwovenness of timespaces is further constrained by the materiality of things and their geometric distribution. This distribution determines where places and paths can be in principle anchored. The materiality and geometric distribution of things also constrains which places can be anchored at specific objects; a place to gaze at a landscape, for example, cannot be anchored in the windowless storeroom of a horse barn. Of course, within these constraints, the use of objective time and space for the purpose of coordination presupposes, and is often mediated by, interwoven timespaces. The use of clocks, for instance, presupposes the existence of temporalspatially interwoven lives whose further coordination it facilitates. Similarly, the construction of lanes between field paddocks that enable grooms to lead horses to and from barns without coming across other horses, presupposes common as well as shared futures, pasts, and spatialities.

3. Social Organizations, Events, and Systems To illustrate further the essentiality of interwoven timespaces to social life, I want now to discuss the timespace structure of more complex social phe-

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nomena. To do this, I must first explain—and ask that the reader accept ex hypothesis—the analysis of social phenomena that I have defended in several publications. According to this analysis, social phenomena are either bundles of practices and material arrangements or aspects of such bundles.7 Practices and material arrangements “bundle” in the sense that practices transpire amid particular arrangements and are molded by them in various ways, while arrangements anchor the spatialities of practices and are set up and altered to varying degrees by the actions that compose practices. A tour company, for instance, is a bundle of practices such as those of scheduling, accounting, publicity, conducting tours, and making arrangements with horse farms that are carried on amid the layouts of and connections between such material arrangements as offices, van interiors, horse barns, country and horse farm roads, Horse Park kiosks, and country eateries. Similarly, an academic department is a bundle of such practices as grading, advising, research, collective decision-making, and afternoon picnicking carried on amid layouts of and connections between offices, classrooms, backyards, meeting rooms, courtyard lawns, and the like. Notice (1) that the practices that help compose a social phenomenon can be versions of those that help compose other social phenomena—the tour firm’s accounting practices can be a version of corporate accounting practices—and (2) that the material arrangements that help compose a social phenomenon can be contiguous or discontinuous and also connected to further arrangements that are not part of the phenomenon concerned (e.g., the filling station adjoining the firm’s offices, the interiors of horse farm mansions, other departments’ offices, and the university’s physical plant).8 Consider the following examples of a social organization, a social event, and a social system. Social organization: The horse farm tour company. Organizational theorists are less than unanimous about what a social organization is. The tour company, however, qualifies whether organizations are construed as (1) ensembles of interrelated actions, (2) pools of conscious, deliberate, and purposeful cooperation, (3) goal-oriented, formally and informally structured collectivities, or (4) metamorphosing functionally-integrated, rule-governed collectivities. According to my analysis, the horse farm tour company is the bundle described above: organized practices of scheduling, accounting, publicity, touring, and making arrangements with horse farms etc. carried on amid the layouts of and connections between offices, van interiors, horse barns, country and horse farm roads, Horse Park kiosks, and country eateries. Because practices are organized by rules and teleoaffective structures, among other things, elements of all four mentioned conceptions of organizations appear in my analysis: the practice-arrangement bundle embraces interrelated

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actions, conscious, deliberate, and purposeful cooperation, the pursuit of common goals, common rules, and enjoined teleologies. Social event: Race day at Keeneland Race Track (see book cover and figures 3 and 4 in the preface). Race day at Keeneland embraces a complicated nexus of human actions, equine doings, and nonaction events that befall the people or horses involved and/or the settings in which they act. The human actions involved are performed as part of such diverse practices as riding horses, walking horses, stabling and caring for horses, betting, drive-through betting, people-watching, making business deals, watching races, flirtation, entertainment, track supervision, track clubhouse management, food preparation, tickets sales, parking, and cleaning up. These actions are performed amid the layouts of and connections between the grandstands, interior saddling paddock, clubhouse, track offices, race track, starting gate, parking lots, stables, drive-through kiosk, walkways, grandstand stairs and exits, betting and concession areas, ornate entrances, and trackside spaces. Besides what the horses do, other events that help compose the race day include computer malfunctionings, television broadcasts (of races at other tracks), tote board video and information presentations, pigeon nuisances, and track surface deterioration.9 The race day thus embraces a complicated set of (1) practice-composing actions that are performed amid particular material arrangements and (2) other events that befall the people, horses, and arrangements involved. Social system: Fur trading in colonial New England.10 Fur trading in New England began with the first encounters in the sixteenth century between Europeans and Native Americans. It gained prominence after the severe erosion of traditional Indian forms of life in the 1610–1630s that followed the drastic reduction in Indian numbers caused by microbial diseases that accompanied European settlers across the Atlantic. The erosion of traditional Indian ways included the interruption or cessation of annual subsistence cycles, the disintegration of kinship networks and authority relations, the undercutting of the legitimacy of traditional healing practices, newfound machinations of individual survivors who sought power for themselves (often by allying themselves with the colonists), and wholesale fleeings away from former lands along the coasts. Many surviving Indians responded to the collapse of their traditional ways of life by taking up fur trading with the colonists, in the knowledge that there was demand among colonists, but especially among Europeans across the ocean, for animal furs, skins, and meat. Taking up this practice was feasible because Native Americans had long hunted beavers, bear, moose, and other furbearers. In exchange for these animals, Europeans offered Natives such items as metal pots, woven fabrics, hatchets, and firearms (also alcohol). Indians did not put these objects to the uses that Europeans made of them. They, instead, converted them into ornaments, treated their possession as a

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mark of status, and gave them away as part of the gift-giving practices through which kin relations and political alliances had long been maintained within and between Indian villages. At first, fur trading between the Europeans and Native Americans did not transform the other practices that were filling the void caused by the erosion of traditional native ways. New England fur trading quickly exploded, however, because of wampum. Wampum is strings of white and purple beads fashioned from shells. It was produced along the southern New England shore where the appropriate shells were found, and before the colonists arrived Indians along that coast used it as status symbols and gifts. In the 1620s, Europeans discovered that Native Americans elsewhere in New England would eagerly trade furbearing animals for wampum, in part because of the status its possession conferred in the struggle for power and authority—and in the face of weakened sanctions against individual gain—that broke out in Indian communities following the demise of their traditional forms of life. In fact, Indians would preferentially trade with those Europeans who could offer wampum in exchange. In response to increased colonial demand, and with the help of European tools such as drills, the Indians along Long Island Sound began increasing their production of the beads. Wampum quickly became a highly desired commodity, more and more of it came into circulation, and the hunting of furbearers (and/or the production of corn) accelerated to secure greater amounts of it. Wampum, in fact, became a kind of currency: the value of goods could be measured in quantities of wampum, and both Indians and colonists accepted wampum in exchange for other items in part because they knew that it could be traded for something else. The results of this accelerating nexus of production, exchange, and consumption included the increasing dependence of Indians on European traders, the accumulation by Indians of furbearing animals (before, Indians had mostly killed these animals only when they needed them), and the attempt by Europeans to control the production and availability of wampum (through trade, treaties, and the force of arms). Since furbearers had traditionally been the source of Native American clothing, the turn to hunting these animals for the purpose of exchange also caused increased Native demand for European fabrics. Wider results of the expanded fur trade included a reorganized nexus of Native American economic practices and, most importantly, the development of a regional New England trading economy that integrated Native American economic practices with European mercantile practices and European commodity and currency markets. As Cronon emphasizes, animal furs, wampum, corn, and European fabrics became commodities for the Indians; before these items had been use objects (clothing and food), status symbols, and ornamentation. The fur trade collapsed in the 1660s when European demand

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for beaver declined and silver coins were imported from the Caribbean and replaced wampum as currency. The colonial New England fur trade was a confederation of practice-arrangement bundles. Among these bundles were the ones that composed hunting, exchange, wampum production, gift-giving, the pursuit of power, distribution to European markets, and the European markets themselves. These particular bundles comprised, respectively, Native American tracking, trapping, shooting, and ceremonial (etc.) practices plied in the interconnected contiguous settings of the New England woods; the valuation, deception, deal-making, accounting, and ceremonial (etc.) practices of Indians and settlers that were carried out at Indian villages scattered throughout New England; the gathering, sorting, drilling, stringing, and storage practices of the Indians along Long Island Sound who produced wampum; the valuation, alliance-building, kinship-reinforcing, and again ceremonial practices carried on by Native Americans amid the material arrangements of their villages; the deception, alliance-building, plotting, and accumulation practices pursued by Indians in the competition for power and authority; the transportation, storage, accounting, loading, sailing, defense, and other practices that Europeans carried out in the material settings of roads, towns, ports, warehouses, ships, and seas; and the valuation, accounting, selling, trading, transportation, adjudication, monetary and other practices that people in Europe carried out at offices, marketplaces, warehouses, roads, estates, and the like. These bundles were connected to one another; indeed, it is by virtue of their connections that they formed the colonial New England fur trade. Among other things, bundles overlapped, as when actions were part of the practices of different bundles (e.g., the bundles of exchange and of the pursuit of power) or when practices of different bundles (e.g., wampum production and the pursuit of power) were carried out in the same village settings. Bundles were also linked by chains of action (such as those connecting the production of wampum to European markets), by physical connections among the settings in which their practices were carried out (e.g., such connections as roads, gangways, smoke signals, oceans, and continuous features of the landscape such as mountain ridges and ocean inlets), and when they were objects of intentional relatedness (as when the Europeans who exchanged wampum for furs thought about Indian hunting or wampum production practices in order better to exploit them). By virtue of links such as these, the New England fur trade was an interwoven confederation of practice-arrangement bundles. Interwoven timespaces are central to the horse farm tour company, the Keeneland race day, and the fur trade in colonial New England. Elucidating this fact should go some way toward making plausible that interwoven timespaces are crucial to social phenomena generally. Keep in mind that

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practices consist of organized doings and sayings. A practice-arrangement bundle is linked sets of organized doings and sayings that are performed amid interconnected, continuous, or discontinuous material arrangements. The horse farm tour company, the Keeneland race day, and the fur trade are all sufficiently complex as to exclude the sort of overview of their interwoven timespaces that I provided of the interwoven timespaces of coordinated actions. To make good my thesis about the essentiality of timespace to these phenomena, consequently, I will focus on one facet of them, namely, the ways that practices are bundled in them. One way practices bundle is by overlapping. Practices overlap when actions are part of more than one practice. When, for instance, a tour guide loudly waxes on about the landscape at a pull off where other tourists are milling about, he might be carrying on tour practices and publicity practices simultaneously. Practices overlap also when the same items organize them. If the people, for instance, who do the tour company’s scheduling or publicity are supposed to minimize expenses, they enjoy common futures. Similarly, visitors to Keeneland who carry on people-watching and betting practices at the track might share the future of acting for the sake of being entertained. Temporality can also be orchestrated across practices, as when the scheduler reacts to the upcoming three-day Rolex equestrian event by scheduling extra tours, and her doing so is not independent of the publicist seeking to inform people attending the event of the tours; or when a groom reacts to a horse’s sluggishness by taking him for a walk and this reaction leads later to a rider acting for the sake of calming the horse down. In ways such as this, practices bundle via common, shared, and orchestrated timespaces. Another important way practices bundle is through chains of action. As explained, the activity pasts of the people who perform actions in a chain are tied together. Because of this, practices bundle through linked pasts whenever action chains pass through them. Futures, moreover, can attach to these linked pasts; that is, the past of one activity in a chain can be tied to the future of another activity in it. Suppose that the tour scheduler, reacting to a truculent horse farm owner who is upset by an unruly tour the previous day, instructs tour guides to avoid that person’s farm, and later that day the company owner, after learning about the instructions, calls the owner in order to patch things up. In this case, reacting to the complaint is not independent of the project of fixing things up. Another example is a woman frantically calling her husband one minute before the betting windows close to get him down to place their bets, whereupon her husband hurries down for the sake of not being late (or avoiding discord). In this case, her past and his future are connected. These examples reveal that chains of action can exhibit elaborate interwoven temporalities. The extensive links that exist among bundled practices via chains of action thus ensure that bundled practices encompass

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labyrinthine interwoven temporalities. No further illustrations are needed of the fact, moreover, that in the above examples people proceed through common, shared, and orchestrated place-path arrays—at the roadside pull off, at the office, at the track stables, and under the grandstands. The bundling of practices in a social phenomenon is an elaborate configuration of interwoven timespaces. This result suffices at present to make plausible that interwoven timespaces form an essential infrastructure of social phenomena. I explained above that the objective spatial and temporal properties of coordinated activities reflect the interwoven timespaces of these activities. The objective spatial and temporal properties of social phenomena are likewise tied to the temporalspatial infrastructure of these phenomena. Consider, for instance, Native American hunting, which was part of the colonial fur trade in New England. Hunting embraced a large number of objective locations and trajectories, for example, locations behind logs and in clearings, trajectories from village to woods and in woods. These locations, where Native hunters were found when hunting, reflected their common, shared, and orchestrated understandings of places and paths—places to spot animals, places to hide, places to set up traps, paths into the woods, paths to avoid swamps, and so on. The objective trajectories that hunters took likewise depended on the common, shared, or orchestrated temporalities and spatialities of their activities, for example, different hunters reacting to the same animal movements, hunters interdependently pursuing the different ends of killing and of capturing, common paths home, and the different paths different hunters simultaneously took in order to encircle animals. The activities of hunters also occupied positions in objective successions and exhibited rhythms and periodicities. These objective temporal properties reflected the hunters’ common, shared, and orchestrated futures, pasts, and spatialities—for example, acting in common for the sake of killing, different hunters nonindependently pursing the different ends of killing or capturing; reacting to the same animal movements, acting alike in light of past animal behaviors, and some people doing this while others react to the previous successes of other hunters; and same or conflicting understandings of certain areas of the woods as good places to find certain animals. This example also nicely illustrates how the objective spatial and temporal properties of social phenomena depend on the objective spatial and temporal properties of entities and processes other than human activity, in this case, the locations, trajectories, times, and rhythms of animal movements as well as the locations of biological, ecological, and physical features of the landscape. More generally, the physical properties of anything bound up with hunting, including weapons and the human body (whose physical properties shape temporality in determining and constraining human movement and ability),

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shape the objective space-time of hunting. In fact, the objective spatial and temporal properties, not just of material production and subsistence, but of all human activities depend on the physical properties of, as well as the physical processes undergone by, bodies, artifacts, and materials. As noted regarding coordinated actions, finally, the objective spatial and temporal properties of social phenomena often result from happenstance. Usually, however, interwoven timespaces mediate the difference that happenstance events make to these properties. When the Keeneland tote board breaks down and causes the race day to exhibit objective space-times different from those it would have otherwise possessed, the difference is mediated through the interwoven timespaces that inform the betting, race-watching, track maintenance, and other practices carried on there. What held of Native American hunting also held of exchange between Indians and colonists, Native American wampum production, Native gift-giving, their pursuit of power, the transportation of furs to European markets, and the operations of those markets themselves. Each of these phenomena possessed complicated objective spatial-temporal properties that depended on the interwoven timespaces at work in them. Exchange between Natives and colonialists somewhat differed from the other phenomena because the two groups lacked common timespaces. They also enjoyed limited shared ones: the two groups shared few ends and projects, though they obviously reacted to many of the same states of affairs and had to share enough spatiality as to make exchange possible (persisting misunderstandings between the two groups makes it questionable, however, just how quickly their at first quite divergent understandings of spatiality converged). Indeed, exchange between Indians and colonists evinced two largely divergent interwoven timespaces, a situation that harbored considerable potential for conflict.

4. Harvey on Space-Time and Space-Time Compression In Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference, David Harvey argues that a complete account of social space-time must treat of two sorts of space-time: those of economic systems and those of experience. He develops his account of the space-times of economic systems by distinguishing three conceptions of plural space-times: (1) multiple perspectives on reality (e.g., frames of reference that assign different space and time coordinates to the same events—my example), (2) multiple possible worlds à la Leibniz, each with its own space-time, and (3) a plurality of space-time manifolds within actual reality. Social reality, he argues, exemplifies the third conception. In particular, societies, or modes of production, harbor multiple space-times. To fill out

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this claim, Harvey draws, somewhat gratuitously, on the philosophers Leibniz and Whitehead. From Leibniz he appropriates the relational theory of space and time. From Whitehead he appropriates the idea that the entities, relations among which constitute or undergird space and time, are processes. The real inspiration for Harvey’s account,11 however, is Nancy Munn’s study of the space-times created by the practices of a group of people called the Gawan, who live on an atoll off the northeast coast of New Guinea. Examples of the practices involved are those of domestic activity, marriage, and exchange between groups.12 Munn claims that these “socio-cultural practices ‘constitute (create) the space-time . . . in which they go on’” (215). More precisely, the space-times in which socio-cultural practices go on are constituted by the transactions (e.g., gift exchanges) and relations (e.g., relations of indebtedness) that transpire in them. These space-times are configurations of objective space-time defined by the locations of the people involved in the transactions and relations concerned and by the lengths of time encompassed in the transactions and relations. Hospitality practices “constitute” a space-time, for instance, whose spatial component is tied to the locations of people who provide or receive hospitality and whose temporal component reflects the lengths of times that those enjoying hospitality are indebted to those providing it. Harvey holds that societies—or modes of production—are composed of processes and that their spaces and times are relationally defined by these processes. Capitalism, for example, embraces processes of production, communication, finance, investment, transportation, migration, colonization, resource extraction, and technological development. When Harvey writes, however, that economic processes such as these define capitalist space and time relationally, he does not mean that relations among these processes do so. He means, instead, that relations within processes do so. Any economic process institutes a space-time that embraces the spatial and temporal relations that obtain among the activities, events (including biological and physical events), and material set-ups that compose it. The space-time of capitalist production, for instance, is constituted by the spatial and temporal relations that obtain among the acts, events, and set-ups that compose production. Of course, production processes vary across the globe and are inflected by social relations of class, gender, and race. Capitalism, as a result, contains numerous production space-times; it contains an even larger variety of space-times instituted in instances of the other mentioned capitalist processes, each subject to possible conflict and reflective of class, race, and gender differences. Harvey holds, further, that these multitudinous space-times are “closely mirrored through” different types and uses of money. Whenever, for instance, “money is earmarked within a household unit for burials, weddings, vacations, remittances, old age, college education, or whatever, it is set aside for a certain

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purpose each of which has a certain spatio-temporality attached to it” (236). Finally, the spatio-temporality built into financial networks and international currency coordination is very different from the spatio-temporalities of fixed capital investment in plant and equipment and is radically different from those long-term and massive projects of environmental transformation that have constituted, for example, the settlement of the US west. (286)

In short, there are as many space-times in capitalism as there are capitalist economic processes that harbor relational networks. The relational space-times that Harvey attributes to economic processes resemble those Munn attributes to the Gawan: they are relationally defined configurations of objective space and objective time.13 In Harvey’s case, the relations involved obtain among the activities, events, and material set-ups that make up particular economic processes. Commodity production, for instance, like the use of money as exchange medium, embodies myriad temporal and spatial relations among people and between people and objects. These relations describe an objective configuration of space-time. Harvey also claims that the different space-times that inhabit social reality are glued together by flows of such items as money, commodities, information, cultural artifacts, and symbolic systems (286). In capitalist societies, processes of “monetization, commodification, and the exchange relations embedded in the circulation of capital” (ibid.) form the common frame that mediates different space-times. This is the space-time of economic systems. Experiential space-time, meanwhile, is “[t]he spatio-temporality of my experience when I go to work, stop off at the bank, shop in the supermarket, cook, eat, and sleep at home . . .” (232). Such spatio-temporalities are usually associated, theoretically, with so-called life-worlds (233; life world is a phenomenological concept dating back to Husserl and Heidegger that can presently be taken to denote the worldly context through which people live). Harvey avers that life-world spatio-temporalities are place-based. By “places” he means “relatively permanent physical and social structures on the land” (295) that are erected in the flow of capital circulation, that are defined by the collective activities of the people who live and work there, and that form a locus of identity, value, community, and common memory for those people. To say that the space-times of experience are place-based is to say that these space-times occur in places shaped by the physical and social structures, the rhythms, distribution, and organization of activities, and the memories and values that constitute these places. Harvey, incidentally, associates the concept of place-based experiential space-times with Heidegger. He also criticizes Heidegger for supposedly

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esteeming face-to-face relations in place and for counting as authentic only those human lives and communities that are rooted in places, paradigmatically, Harvey alleges, rural places. He thereby accuses Heidegger of belittling, as inauthentic, all human relations and communities that are mediated over objective space and time.14 My present concern is not Heidegger interpretation. I am interested, instead, in Harvey’s claim that a complete account of social space-time combines the space-times of experience and the space-times of economic systems. Harvey does not clearly explain what the space-time of experience is. The “spatio-temporality of my experience” could be the objective durations and locations of my continuous lived-through performances of action, together with the durations and locations of the performances of the people whom I encounter. It could also be the objective spaces and times that I experience as my life unfolds. These two sets of objective times and spaces overlap but are distinct. The strong contrast that Harvey draws between what people experience and what lies beyond their experience (303–4, 313) suggests that he construes the space-time of experience as the objective space-times people experience. If this is right, then his contrast between the space-time of experience and the space-time of economic system is a contrast between the objective spaces and times that people experience and the objective spaces and times of economic processes, which extend beyond people’s experience. Incidentally, I assume that Harvey would agree that human experiences occur as people act and that people, as a result, take in the space-times of experience as they act. Economic processes—for example, the transportation of furs from New England to England—comprise actions, events, and material structures. The people who performed the actions that help composed this transportation of furs experienced objective space and times as they performed them. The space-times that they took in included objective temporal and spatial relations that obtained among the actions, events, and set-ups composing this process. Indeed, most of the objective spaces and times that they experienced when performing these actions were elements of the overall space-time of the process (people might have experienced these and other elements as they performed other actions, too). It seems, moreover, that each of a preponderance of the elements of the overall space-time of the process, in particular, each spatial and temporal relation that involved actions, was experienced by some combination or other of the people who performed or observed these actions.15 To be sure, no person or group experienced the entire objective space-time of the transportation of furs from New England to England—neither all the elements of this space-time nor the space-time as such. But any element of that space-time was experienced by some persons or other involved in the transport. The distinction between the space-time of experience and

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the space-time of economic processes is one, not of kind, but of quantity: it amounts to a distinction between limited and comprehensive. Harvey writes that “what goes on in place cannot be understood outside of the space relations which support that place any more than the space relations can be understood independently of what goes on in particular places” (316). The space relations he has in mind are those of economic processes. Since Harvey holds that the space-times of experience are place-based, it follows that experiential space-times cannot be understood outside of the economic space relations that support the places that underlie them, just as these economic space relations cannot be understood independently of these experiential space-times. I affirm the spirit of this declaration. As formulated, however, the declaration presumes that the distinction between the space-times of experience and those of economic processes form an ontological duality, a difference in kind. The declaration thus perpetuates the venerable social theoretical practice of theorizing social reality as multi-leveled. According to this pervasive practice, society contains distinct layers of phenomena, for instance, interpersonal interactions—individual social formations—social systems. These layers often form a hierarchy running from underlying to superstructural, and systematic constitutive, causal, and dependency relations always exist between adjacent layers. The levels, however, that Harvey identifies are related part to whole; the space-times of experience are elements of the space-times of economic processes. Even though some of the elements of the space-time of an economic process may not be experienced as such, the space-times of experience and of economic processes do not constitute distinct levels. Social reality, more generally, does not—I hold—embrace multiple levels. It is better thought of as a single plane, the constituents of which provide the material for conceptualizing all manner of social phenomena (in the above example: interactions, individual social formations, and social systems). Conceptions of social reality of this sort can be called “flat ontologies.”16 An example of such an ontology, expressed with concepts Harvey uses, is construing social reality as experienced social life and more experienced social life, all complexly connected, large economic processes and systems being larger agglomerations of experienced social life and not something categorically different from it. Another example of such an ontology is conceptualizing social reality as bundles and more bundles of practices and arrangements, all complexly connected, larger economic processes and systems simply being larger confederations of such bundles. Reformulated in an ontologically flat manner, Harvey’s declaration could read: “what goes on in place cannot be understood independently of the spatial features of the ensembles of interconnected places of which it is part any more than these spatial features can be understood independently of what goes on in particular places.”

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Harvey errs, however, in claiming that the space-times of experience are place-based. This is only sometimes true. Places as Harvey (and many other spatial investigators) conceives of them—built-lived sites of identity, value, memory, and community—certainly have been, and remain, a prominent feature of social life. Not all social life transpires, however, in places so conceived; an example is a visual exchange between motorists on a busy road. Like the spatiality of activity, therefore, the space-time of experience must not be inherently associated with places of this sort. More generally, any temptation to construe the fundamental—or inherent—space or spatiality of (the plane of) social reality as places must be resisted. The base-line space or spatiality of social life cannot be intrinsically connected to such complex phenomena as collective identity, collective memory, and community. Indeed, places as Harvey and others think of them are partly built out of this more basic space or spatiality. The present book contends that this more basic phenomenon is an amalgam of activity spatiality and objective space: place-path arrays anchored in geometrically arranged material entities. I wrote that I am not presently concerned with Heidegger interpretation. I might indicate, nonetheless, that Harvey’s attention to place is partly motivated by (1) the often affirmative reception that Heidegger’s conception of dwelling in place has received in contemporary spatial social theory and (2) Harvey’s desire to combine Heidegger and Marx, that is, dwelling and economy, in a comprehensive spatial theory (see 313ff). I should point out, therefore, that the current book in effect advises spatial theorists interested in Heidegger to turn away from places as Harvey conceives of them towards Heidegger’s life-long intuition that the spaces through which people live are centered arrays of places and paths. In any event, the basic temporalspatial distinction in understanding social life cannot be Harvey’s contrast between the space-time of experience and the space-time of economic processes; nor can the basic spatial distinction be that between place and space. Rather, the central temporalspatial distinction is that between activity timespace and objective space-time. Contrasts between what is local or close-to-home—experience or place—and that which lies beyond it encompassing more—economic process or space—are secondary in this regard (they might be primary in others). For both the local and what encompassingly transcends it exhibit timespaces and space-times. For example, individual lives and social phenomena alike possess properties of both timespace and space-time. The same holds of places and economic systems.17 A more ambitious rewriting of the above quotation from Harvey thus reads “what goes on in a practice-arrangement bundle and in the lives that proceed in it—including the temporalspatial and spatial-temporal features of this bundle and these lives—cannot be understood independently

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of the temporalspatial and spatial-temporal features of the confederations of bundles of which it is part, any more than the temporalspatial and spatialtemporal features of such confederations can be understood independently of what goes in particular bundles and lives.” Places of the sort Harvey and others discuss do, of course, exist. Their constitution can be conceptualized in line with the analyses sketched here. A place is a nexus of practice-arrangement bundles, whose arrangements (among other things) are both relatively well circumscribed geographically and constructed in the practices involved, and whose informing interwoven timespaces (inter alia) are filled in or determined by collective memories and senses of identity associated with this place. A contemporary phenomenon bearing an intriguing space-time structure is global professional services. Global professional services are legal, management, banking, certification, and IT consultancy services that are contracted around the globe, performed in multiple locations, and delivered to clients wherever they reside. Services of this sort are provided by international firms. An example is Nemko Corporation, which provides testing, inspecting, and certification services for electronic devices, machines, and installations worldwide.18 In 2006, Nemko had approximately five hundred employees located at seventeen offices in eleven countries. A typical provision of service by this firm proceeds as follows. A manufacturer, say, of cell phones wants to sell its products worldwide. To do so, it must meet the different certification standards in force in different areas of the globe. The manufacturer contacts the Nemko office in its home country (or geographical region). Once a contract is signed, the Nemko computer system, called NEX, divides the certification process into as many jobs as there are different standards to be met in the geographical regions in which the manufacturer wants to sell cell phones and sends each job to the Nemko office holding expertise in the specific standards. Prototypes of the new phones are distributed to all offices involved. Results of tests conducted on the phones by experts in any one office are then sent through NEX to a verifier in a different office in the same geographical region, who verifies the testing results. His or her verifications (assuming they are issued) are entered into NEX. Once the requested tests and verifications for each region of the world have been completed, certifiers, located in Nemko’s home office in Oslo, Norway, certify the overall results. Certification papers are completed and subsequently uploaded to the on-line customer site set up for the manufacturer. Once the manufacturer downloads these papers, the phones can be shipped. Three factors are key to Nemko’s success. The first is its division of activity, the division of the overall certification process into jobs. One motivation for this division is the variation of standards across geographical regions. Another motivation is how it makes the certification process more efficient

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and enables the manufacturer to get its product more quickly to market. A second crucial factor is NEX, Nemko’s information-communications system. This system receives client information, divides the work to be done, forwards tasks and data to the pertinent offices, relays test results and verifications to the offices where the next stages of the process are performed, and produces certification papers that are made available at on-line sites. Hydle observes that a third key ingredient in the success of global professional service firms is something she calls “global service practices.” These are “common ways of working across different locales.” Elements of such practices include (1) the use of common information-communications technology (e.g., NEX), (2) predefined procedures and roles (e.g., regarding testing, verification, and certification), (3) common specialized vocabularies, (4) common practices of cooperation (such as forwarding problems to norm and standard experts and teaming up with colleagues at a given office), and (5) a common incentive system (e.g., tying promotions to testing experience and internal examinations). In addition, employees involved in the certification process know about Nemko’s division of activity and the operations of NEX. Global professional services are a fine example of what Harvey calls “spacetime compression,” that is, the annihilation of time by space and of space by time (241). An example of the annihilation of time by space is achieving faster turnover times through a reorganization of a factory floor. An example of the annihilation of space by time is overcoming spatial barriers by sending information by e-mail instead of by letter. Nemko provides services efficiently regardless of the location of clients and experts. Its operations are a miniature space-time compression. Among other things, its objective spatial organization quickens turnover time, and its technical infrastructure overcomes spatial barriers. Harvey claims that the processes of annihilating space and time by time and space are central to the dynamics of capitalism, indeed, are “implicit in the very laws of motion of capitalist development” (241).19 The space and time he has in mind are, of course, objective space and time: a space-time compression is a compression of objective space and time. Harvey does not mention the temporalspatial infrastructure of the processes involved, without which none of them would exist. Nemko compresses objective space and time by virtue of the particular bundles of practices and arrangements that compose it. Crucial to this achievement is, of course, NEX, which links the different arrangements that make up the offices and testing rooms of the firm (materially, Nemko is not much more than eleven IT-linked clusters of offices and testing rooms). NEX annihilates space because the firm’s division of activity includes (1) a distribution of contracting, testing, verification, certification, and reporting practices among these IT-linked arrangement clusters (contracting and reporting can

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also be effected electronically) and (2) the concentration of design, IT support, management, and accounting practices at its home office. This spatial division of activity is crucial to the firm’s ability to provide services efficiently, i.e., to decrease turnover time. Particular provisions of service, moreover, comprise series of action chains that encompass experts at the same and different offices. By virtue of these series, the different steps in the overall certification process, the enactment of the practices that are spatially distributed in the firm’s division of activity, are effected. Crucial to these chains are the common, shared, and orchestrated timespaces of the people who perform the actions composing them, both at the same and at different offices. Indeed, it is the occurrence of these IT-mediated, timespace-interwoven chains of action that makes up the firm’s compression of objective space-time: without this net of interwoven timespaces, no such compression would exist. What holds of this miniature compression holds of space-time compressions generally. Insofar, therefore, as space-time compressions are central to the development of capitalism, the transformation and redesign of interwoven timespaces is key to its history. This conclusion, moreover, generalizes: changes in social life require changes in temporalspatiality.20 This conclusion was already presaged in the above discussion of the colonial New England fur trade. The fur trade, recall, embraced such phenomena as hunting, wampum production, exchange, gift-giving, the pursuit of power, distribution to markets, and the markets themselves, each a bundle of practices and arrangements. The fur trade was a confederation of practice-arrangement bundles. As discussed, moreover, interwoven timespaces were central to these bundles and to how they connected. An important effect-feature of this confederation of bundles was the linking of Native American economic practices to European markets, that is, the emergence and consolidation of an economic system that joined activities in New England and Europe. This economic development was another timespace compression, one more extensive than the one embodied in Nemko. Like the latter, though, it was mediated by interwoven timespaces. The interweaving of the timespaces of Native Americans, colonists, sailors, and people in Europe in particular practices, in particular practice-arrangement bundles, and in the confederation of bundles that was the fur trade, was essential to the occurrence of this objective space-time compression. In short, social change, as Max Weber among many others averred, has a mental infrastructure.

5. Conflict and Power The following discussion does not aim at a theory, account, or conception of social conflict and power. My goal is far more modest, namely, to show that

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conflict and power are temporalspatial phenomena. More specifically, I claim, conflict always evinces or is rooted in, and power always shapes or consists in, interwoven timespaces. It is too strong, moreover, to aver that my discussion “shows” these things. The kinds, forms, and sources of conflict are so varied, and the conceptions and types of power so multifarious, that I can only hope to make my claims plausible. Conflict can be classified into endless sorts, for example, economic, political, social, racial, class, ethnic, religious, domestic, institutional, educational, and athletic, or conflicts over money, wealth, prestige, appearance, jobs, immigration, living space, land boundaries, scientific research, church versus state, TV watching time, choice of restaurant, choice of clothes, distribution of work, proper textual interpretation, rewards for and acknowledgments of contributions to joint accomplishments, and so on. Indeed, it is safe to say that conflict can characterize just about any social phenomenon and just about any matter that is addressed or dealt with in social life. All it takes is for individuals or members of such groups and formations as classes, parties, races, ethnicities, religious groups, professions, and athletic teams either to perform activities that are perceived as injurious or disadvantageous to others or to possess incompatible or disharmonious goals, projects, experiences, emotions, or desires. What I suggest is that conflicts of any of the above and further sorts are temporalspatial phenomena, more specifically, that they evince or are rooted in features of either the interwoven timespaces of individuals or the interwoven timespaces of members of social groups, organizations, or formations. This proposition should come as no surprise: because interwoven timespaces—as I have been explaining—are central to the constitution of social phenomena, social conflicts, a type of social phenomenon, are bound to exhibit interwoven timespaces or to rest on features thereof. Instead of demonstrating this idea systematically, I will make it plausible by examining several cases. I begin with conflicts that arise from the breakdown of harmonization. By “harmonization” I mean the seamless interlocking of different people’s activities in the same or connected settings that arises from continual adjustments of their activities to what the others do. Examples include crowd and traffic flow, people exiting a horse tour van to take a look at the landscape, tourers nosing about in a barn while grooms and riders carry out their business (example [4] in section 2), people streaming from the grandstands through the grandstand causeway exits toward the concession stands and betting windows, and people milling about the interior paddock talking, looking at horses, and checking one another out. As these examples suggest, harmonization is a pervasive social phenomenon that makes a significant contribution to the maintenance of social order. What distinguishes it from

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other cases of coordination is that harmonized actions yield no result, that is, no overall result that someone intends (each person at best intends her actions to mesh with those of the people with whom she interacts). Or better, the result of harmonization is the absence of conflict, that is, harmony. Like other social phenomena, however, harmonization evinces and rests on interwoven timespaces. Harmonization almost always, for example, rests on common and shared spatialities—roads as paths to destinations, a van door as a place to exit, and the gravel causeway encircling the interior paddock as a place to hang out between races. Harmonization also evinces common and shared temporalities such as the common or shared futures of reaching destinations safely, of gazing at the landscape, of betting or purchasing food, and of seeing and being seen. To the extent that harmonization rests on common and shared timespaces, the latter secure it by aligning people with, and sensitizing them to, one another: knowing that others have some of the same ends as herself and that they are prepared to react to others’ actions, each person involved makes continual adjustments pursuant to these ends. When common and shared timespaces exist due to people carrying on the same practices, the harmonization that arises from these timespaces ultimately rests on the enactment of those practices. Objective space also contributes to the existence of harmonization: the packing constraints of physical space (as Hägerstrand called them)21 require that people who act in the same settings adjust their behavior lest they collide or run into things. The contribution to harmonization made by the concern with collisions that objective space imposes on people is purer in cases where people who act in the same setting carry on different practices and are less rather than more temporalspatially interwoven. Examples are tourers nosing around in a barn while grooms and barn hands go about their business and crowd behavior in public spaces such as city plazas. Harmonization, however, is also always secured by common and shared temporalities, if only by the common or shared end of avoiding collisions. Conflicts often arise when harmonization breaks down. When harmonization fails to occur, people or things collide, veer out of control, or come to a halt. This state of affairs often leads to such incidents as motorists fighting, pedestrians hurling insults or worse at each other, and horse farms tourers or visitors at the race track jostling or cursing. Conflicts of this sort are not trivial. Although they rarely put life, livelihood, or identity at risk, they pollute and intensify the build-up and metastasis of tension and unease in social life. Of present significance is the fact that conflicts of this sort require interwoven timespaces. For they arise from breakdowns of smooth mutual adjustment on the background of people pursuing the same ends, reacting to the same events or states of affairs, and acting in the same place-path arrays.

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Many conflicts other than those that ensue from the breakdown of harmonization arise from or evince divergent or incompatible timespaces. Lefebvre wrote that “conflict supposes arhythmeia; a divergence in time, in space, in the use of energies.”22 I do not agree that conflict requires arhythmeia, but Lefebvre is right that many conflicts rest on divergent timespaces.23 A pervasive type of conflict that obviously does so is conflict over land. Such conflicts always reflect divergent and possibly incompatible spatial understandings (incompatible in the sense that the physical arrangements involved cannot simultaneously bear the divergent spatialities). Conflicts between developers and preservationists furnish familiar examples: such conflicts revolve around incompatible visions of which place-path arrays should be anchored at particular pieces of land. Incompatible understandings of which arrays are or should be anchored at particular pieces of land, or at particular material arrangements, also underlie other disputes such as those over the placement of possessions in a newly occupied house or apartment, the erection of buildings and monuments, and the political-legal status of locales such as Jerusalem, Garvaghey Road in Portadown, Northern Ireland, and white-owned farms in Zimbabwe. These examples also show that conflicts do not arise from incompatible spatialities alone. In each case, divergent and possibly incompatible futures and pasts are also responsible (incompatible in the sense that the divergent futures cannot be simultaneously actuated and the divergent pasts cannot all be true). The conflict between Jews and Moslems over Jerusalem partly rests on their pursuit of incompatible futures fueled by divergent pasts. The same holds of conflicts over Garvaghey Road or the Zimbabwean farms, over the location of monuments on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and over the layout of furniture and other artifacts in a house or apartment. Cronon’s book offers a wealth of further examples. Deforestation was one of the weighty achievements of the New England colonies. It came about partly because farming required cleared land. Lumbering, however, also contributed to this accomplishment. Several factors contributed to lumbering becoming a major industry, including the huge European demand for timber (resulting from the dearth of trees in Europe), the virtually free access colonists enjoyed to the forests of New England (it was easy to come by the land ownership supposedly required to fell trees and clear brush), and the perceived immensity of the New England forests, which led colonists to rely on wood as a building material and to waste large amounts of it. By the 1630s, the massive demand for lumber began to force colonists to travel long distances from their villages to fell trees. Illicit lumbering on common lands close to the villages resulted and became a constant source of conflict between individuals and communities. Fueling such conflicts were (1) the incompatibility of certain individuals’ personal understandings of

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common lands as places to steal timber with pervasive common understandings of these lands as places for the community to obtain wood and (2) the divergence between these individuals’ personal futures of making money and others’ common and shared futures of erecting buildings and fences. Divergences in pasts also almost certainly had a hand in these conflicts. A particularly interesting sort of conflict arose from divergences between Indian and colonist ideas on the rights that attach to land. Cronon cautions that the colonists differed among themselves about property. Their ideas and systems of property nevertheless shared the conviction that land can be owned. To own land is to have the right to do with it as the owner (individual or group) wills. This includes the right to sell it; the idea that land can be owned makes it possible for land to be a commodity. The Indians, by contrast, did not believe that land could be owned. Although they widely accepted both that the land around a village was the territory of that village (more exactly, was held by the sachem [chief] of the village as the symbolic possession of the village) and that this land was the village’s to use, and although the territories of different villages were carefully demarcated and did not overlap, the Indians did not think that a village owned its territory. They thought, instead, that villages had usufruct rights, that is, rights of use: the inhabitants of a village had the right to use the land around their village (kin networks, incidentally, could have usufruct rights that cut across those of villages). Indians often abandoned villages and moved to new locations. When this occurred, they forsook their rights to use the lands around their former homes and acquired rights to use the lands surrounding their new ones. They would not, moreover, move to a location where their usufruct rights would conflict with those of an extant village. A usufruct right is a particular understanding of place. The right of a village to use the land surrounding it consisted in Indians believing, and when carrying on hunting, gathering, agriculture, and other practices acting on the belief, that this land holds places where the village’s inhabitants may carry on certain practices, for example, crop planting. The European idea that land can be owned also embraces an understanding of place: it construes land as harboring places where its owner can carry on almost any practice he wants. The difference between these elements of the spatiality of Indian and European practices was made greater by the fact that the Indians understood usufruct rights to be rights to specific uses of the land. Different villages could have different usufruct rights to the same piece of land: the right of a village to plant crops on the land surrounding it did not exclude the right of another village to gather berries there. Similarly, the right of one village to gather berries on land that was not in the immediate vicinity of any village did not exclude the right of a different village to hunt animals there. The same piece of land, consequently, could contain places for one village to carry on one practice and

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places for another village to carry on a different one. This state of affairs is difficult to realize on the European understanding of land ownership. This difference in spatialities fed innumerable conflicts between Indians and colonists. Colonists took exchanges of goods for land to be acquisitions of ownership in the land, meaning that the land and everything on it was theirs. Indians, by contrast, understood such exchanges as exchanges of goods for usufruct rights—in their eyes, the colonists acquired the right to make certain uses of the land (e.g., to build on it, to farm it, to trade upon it) while they, the Indians, retained rights to make other uses of it (e.g., to hunt or to gather berries).24 The resulting collisions arose from divergent spatial understandings. These conflicts also reflected interwoven futures and pasts: when (1) the Indians hunted on “colonists’ land,” (2) the colonists confronted and accused the Indians of trespassing, and (3) a series of reactions to one another’s actions ensued, the two groups interrelatedly pursued different ends and projects and interrelatedly reacted to different states of affairs (including each other’s actions and the same past events—for instance, the original exchange—interpreted differently). Of course, many conflicts do not center on land or rest on divergent or incompatible spatial understandings. All conflicts, however, are characterized by divergent temporalities. When one Indian village went to war against another because the first village’s sachem thought he was cheated in a exchange of gifts, divergent pasts (the perceived injury versus earlier aggressions) and divergent futures (gaining revenge versus defending justice) fueled the conflict. At the same time, these divergent pasts and futures were related. Similarly, conflicts consequent on the tour guide picket line blocking the tour company offices reflect the orchestrated futures and pasts of the guides, office employees, manager, and owner. Orchestrated timespace is more or less a universal feature of social conflict. Common and shared timespaces are present to different degrees in different cases.25 Interwoven timespace is just as essential to power as it is to conflict. Instead of marshaling examples to make this claim plausible, I will take up three conceptions of power and show how each construes power as a temporalspatial phenomenon. One of these conceptions is intuitive; the others are those of two leading contemporary theorists, Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault. I proceed by examining conceptions of power because power is much more conceptually unstable and theoretically controversial than is conflict.26 Indeed, it has been a leading focus of recent controversy in the humanisticsocial scientific domain of thought called “social theory.” Social theorists are that much more likely to acknowledge the temporalspatial character of power if power as conceptualized by these leading theorists is temporalspatial.

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The sort of power of greatest interest to social theory might be described in a Weberian manner as power over people (other categories of power are relevant, too, for instance, power as ability and the power of mechanical or electronic devices). This sort of power is often called domination. Intuitively speaking, to have power over people is to be able (1) to do things to them that they do not want done to them and (2) to compel them to do things they may not want to do. Consider (2). Compelling others to perform specific actions is specifying their presents. Usually, moreover, the means by which people are compelled to act—the threat of force, the threat of termination, charisma, the possession of special knowledge, emotional bonds, or the occupancy of a particular role, identity, or status such as king or priest—either fills out or is responsible for their pasts. When a parent, for instance, compels a teenager to complete her homework by threatening to ground her, the teenager reacts to this threat, which thereby constitutes her past. When an employee, moreover, stays late to finish a report because his boss asks him to and he is afraid of being fired, the employee’s reaction to the boss’s request reflects the threat of termination—the boss’s request constitutes her past due to this threat. Compelling a person to act consists in specifying her future, moreover, whenever a person is compelled to pursue a particular end or, more usually, to carry out a particular project. Compelling others to act is, thus, either a configuration of temporality or an effectuation of the timespaces of those upon whom it is exercised. This also holds of (1) above. Actions done to people that they do not want done to them often constitute the pasts of their own subsequent activities. Actions done to people might also lead them to perform particular actions, to pursue particular ends, and to take particular arrangements as places to do certain things. Government oppression, for example, often forms the pasts of the activities of those suffering it. If the oppression is severe or persistent, it will also likely shape these people’s futures (e.g., acting in order to topple the government), presents (e.g., strikes and demonstrations), and spatialities (e.g., city plazas as places to demonstrate and set fires). Finally, when power is exercised over people, the timespaces of those who suffer it—for instance, the timespaces of the reactions of government opponents—typically interweave with the timespaces of those who exercise it—for instance, those of the activities of government ministers and police leaders. In this way, too, most exercises of power over people embrace interwoven timespaces. These matters, I assume, are obvious. The exercise of power, intuitively understood, both consists in and effects configurations of timespace. What holds of power intuitively understood also holds of power as theoretically conceptualized by Giddens and Foucault.

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Power, Giddens writes, is transformative power, the ability to bring about changes in the world. The type of transformative power that is most pertinent to understanding social life is the ability to secure outcomes that rest on the actions of others.27 This ability rests on the possession of resources, through the use of or reliance on which others are brought to perform the actions needed to secure the desired outcomes. To possess something as a resource is to enjoy a command over people or things, and to draw on a resource is to exercise this command. Now, there are two types of resource. The first comprises authoritative resources. Examples of authoritative resources are specialized knowledge, the organization of activities, and the coordination of action.28 Authoritative resources are called “authoritative” because to possess one is to enjoy commands over people. To possess, say, the organization of activity as a resource is to enjoy commands over people by virtue of one’s position in that organization; drawing on this authoritative resource (in order to secure a desired outcome) is then exercising these commands (in order to get people to perform the needed actions). Drawing on an authoritative resource is, in short, coercing people. The second type of resource comprises allocative resources. Examples of allocative resources are wealth, technologies, raw material, and land.29 To possess an allocative resource is to enjoy a command over things, namely, the money, technology, materials, or land (etc.) involved. Suppose that the owner of the horse farm tour company wants to advertise tours in the local newspaper and to this end tells his secretary to place an ad in it. The result he seeks depends on the secretary’s actions, and he coerces her to perform the required actions by exercising the command over her that falls to him by virtue of his status as owner. He thereby draws on the organization of the firm as an authoritative resource. The owner could also induce the actions he needs by giving her a $100 bill. If he does this, he exercises his command over this monetary note, which command falls to him because the bill is his. He thereby draws on the allocative resource of money. A command is funny sort of entity. I will return to this in chapter 4. For now, think of the commands involved in authoritative resources as claims on the timespaces of other people’s activities. To possess a command over someone is to have a claim on the actions he performs, the states of affairs to which he reacts, the projects he carries out, the ends he pursues, or what places and paths he treats as anchored where. Usually, moreover, claims on timespace amount to claims on interwoven timespaces. For a claim on timespace often (1) is a claim on the timespaces of multiple people or (2) causes the claimed timespaces to interweave with one another and with those of additional people. If the tour company owner decides, for instance, that the annual switch from the winter tour schedule to the summer one will take place earlier than

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normal, he lays claim to an interwoven timespace that encompasses all the firm’s employees. (Of course, to stake this claim is no guarantee that it will be honored.) Drawing on an authoritative resource usually causes a particular configuration of interwoven timespaces. Although, meanwhile, an allocative resource is, formally, a command over an object—money, technology, raw material, land—its possession implies a negative claim on the timespaces of people’s actions. To own, say, a plot of land is not just to possess the claim to be able to do with that plot what one wills; it is also to possess the claim that people refrain from performing certain actions or pursuing particular projects on this plot, for example, cutting across, loitering, digging for minerals, planting crops, and so on. Of course, allocative resources are often bound up with authoritative ones. The tour company has money deposited in a bank and owns the building and land where its offices are located. In order, however, for it, i.e., the owner or an employee, to draw on these resources, various authoritative resources must be called upon. In sum, power, as Giddens conceives of it—the ability to achieve outcomes that depend on the actions of others—works via claims that those who have power possess on the timespaces of other’s activities. It usually works, therefore, via claims to interwoven timespaces. Power à la Giddens is inherently a temporalspatial phenomenon. A similar conclusion holds of power as Foucault conceived of it. “The exercise of power,” Foucault wrote, “is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective . . . It is . . . always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.”30 Government, he continued, is the relationship inherent in power, where “[t]o govern . . . is to structure the possible field of action of others.”31 Power, accordingly, consists in actions structuring other people’s possible fields of action. This structuring can be understood to consist in the constraining and enabling of others’ actions. Power, accordingly, as Foucault memorably asserted, can be negative or positive: it consists, not just in constraining what people can do, but in enabling this as well.32 The tour company owner maintains a power relation with his secretary by setting a rule that limits her behavior—for instance, that she cannot leave work until all tour arrangements with horse farms have been finalized. He also maintains such a relation, however, by expanding her possible field of actions. An example would be bringing someone in to teach her how to maintain the firm’s website, thereby giving her new skills and in this way enabling her behavior. To structure other people’s possible fields of action is ipso facto to structure their possible presents. More expansively, it is to structure their possible timespaces. For an action is performed somewhere for the sake of some way of

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being because of certain states of affairs. A person’s possible field of action can be structured by shaping any of these items, thus, by shaping her possible futures, pasts, presents, or spatialities. If, for example, the company owner gives his employees a new task or forbids the guides from taking certain county roads, their possible actions are either augmented to include a new project (and maybe new actions) or altered to include different options. Similarly, making an organization’s operations more transparent or secretive structures its employees’ fields of action by enlarging or contracting their possible pasts, the range of items to which they can react or in whose light they can proceed. And forbidding smoking in public spaces, like requiring motorists and bicyclists to stop at red lights, shapes people’s spatialities and restructures their possible actions. In ways such as these, power consists in ordering possible timespaces. More expansively, power in Foucault’s sense almost always consists in ordering possible interwoven timespaces. For, a given action often structures the possible actions of more than one person, and the occurrence of a power relation almost always yields an interweaving of the timespaces of the persons involved. City ordinances that ban smoking from public places illustrate both types of case since they prescribe and otherwise cause interwoven timespaces that link activities of the officials who issue the ordinance. In short, power à la Foucault is not just a configuring of possible timespaces; it is inevitably a matter of possible interwoven timespaces. Both the ability to achieve outcomes that depend on the actions of others and the enabling/constraining of actions by other actions are inherently temporalspatial phenomena. This conclusion should make plausible that power consists in or effects configurations of interwoven timespaces. Resistance to power also always has a temporalspatial character. According to Giddens’s conception of power, for instance, resistance involves evading or refusing to acknowledge a claim that someone places on one’s own timespace. The secretary of the tour firm, for instance, can refuse to place the ad or challenge the owner’s right to tell her to place it, just as the firm’s employees can band together and either refuse to observe the summer schedule or tell the owner that he should not move up the date when it comes into effect. It should be pretty obvious at this point that these refusals and challenges, fully considered, are configurations of interwoven timespaces. Similar comments apply to resistance to power on Foucault’s conception of the latter: refusing to entertain new possible actions (e.g., maintaining the website), insisting on pursuing risky possibilities (e.g., smoking in public), and taking actions to reverse or counteract how others have structured one’s own possible actions (e.g., talking to the owner’s wife in the hope of getting her to convince him to rescind a decision).33

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6. Landscapes Landscapes are usually treated as spatial entities. Regardless of what sort of thing a scholar, tourist, city planner, or painter thinks landscapes are, he or she likely takes for granted that they are essentially spatial things. This presumption reflects the fact that by “landscape” most people mean an expanse of terrain that is visually apprehensible. For a visually apprehensible expanse is primarily encountered as a spatial phenomenon, notwithstanding whatever temporal phenomena or temporal features are associated with it: activities performed on it, changes occurring to it, events befalling it, observers’ senses of time when gazing at it, and so on. Of course, no one denies that landscapes are temporal phenomena. Everyone knows, for instance, that contemporary landscapes differ from earlier ones. Such admissions, however, treat landscapes as spatial entities, visually accessible expanses, that also occur in time. The temporal character of landscapes is, so to speak, an added feature, one secondary to what is essential to a landscape—its spatial nature. The current section explores the temporalspatial character of landscapes. It concludes my substantiation of the thesis that timespace is central to social life. I set aside the issue of whether landscapes are better thought of, objectively, as spatial entities in time or as spatial-temporal entities. My interest lies, instead, in their temporalspatial character. Nonetheless, the objective spatial and temporal properties of landscapes will be pertinent to my discussion. Not only are these properties often crucial to the temporalspatial character of landscapes. Landscapes also—perhaps because they are often taken to be spatial phenomena—especially well reveal the entwinement of timespace and space-time. I take for granted, furthermore, that at least most landscapes are social in the sense of phenomena of human existence. This is obviously true of the built aspects of landscapes. It is also true of those many “natural” landscapes whose present form significantly reflects past human activity (e.g., New England forests). I will not inquire whether all landscapes commonly designated “natural” are actually social.34 “Natural” landscapes, regardless of their status as social, natural, or hybrid, are bound up with the timespaces of human activity. Just about any landscape, furthermore, is social in the sense of being encountered in, or constituting a setting for, social activity. I have nothing new or noteworthy to convey about the term “landscapes.” I should, nevertheless, make clear what I mean by it. The common use of the term is diffuse. The word, for instance, forms a set with others that resemble it: “seascape,” “townscape,” and “cityscape.” This juxtaposition suggests that landscapes are segments of land, that is, countryside, just as seascapes, townscapes, and cityscapes are segments or portions of seas, towns, and cities.

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The emergence in recent decades of expressions such as “urban landscapes,” “suburban landscapes,” “rural landscapes,” and “natural landscapes” defeats this suggestion. These expressions do not directly contest the idea that their root term, “landscape,” denotes countryside. The pluralization of types of landscape indicates, however, that what the word “landscape” intends is not confined to the countryside variety. Theorists, meanwhile, strongly disagree about the sort of entity a landscape is. Some, for instance, maintain that a landscape is something seen, a visual scene, while others treat it as a morphological phenomenon, the place of human dwelling, a vast mnemonic, or a cognitive or symbolic construction.35 I preserve the intuition that landscapes are visually encounterable spectacles. Abandoning the link to visibility, it seems to me, grants too much leeway to definitions of the phenomenon. As indicated, moreover, this intuition underlies the widespread presumption that landscapes are spatial entities—the spatial character of landscapes is most palpable when they are encountered visually. Of course, a landscape is not merely a visual object. It can also be, for example, something heard or listened to. More important for the present discussion, a landscape is also a place of human habitation. The expanses of terrain that people label “landscapes” either form sites of human activity or are phenomena towards which people act. I will define a landscape, consequently, as a portion of the wider world around that can be taken in visually where human activity takes place. Four notes are in order. To begin with, a landscape is a portion of the world, not a view of it.36 To say that it is a visual spectacle is to say both that it can be taken in visually and that this visibility is essential to its being a landscape. The landscape, however, is the thing seen, not the visual experience of it. Moreover, even though a landscape is a visual spectacle, being a landscape is not the same as being seen as a landscape. What a landscape is experientially encountered as can vary. Someone standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building, for instance, might encounter the cityscape below as the epicenter of modern culture, as a heartless tangle of steel, concrete, and stone, or as home. He or she might also encounter it as a landscape, that is, as an expansive portion of the world that can be visually apprehended. In this example, the same urban landscape is encountered as different things. Its status as landscape, therefore, does not require its being encountered as such. A landscape, whatever else it is, is an objective spatial-temporal phenomenon that people can encounter differently. Second, as the Paris-New York example shows, my use of the word “landscape” encompasses what is denoted, not just by such expressions as “urban landscape,” “rural landscape,” and “suburban landscape,” but also by such words as “cityscape” and “seascape.” At least, it encompasses the assemblages

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of land, water, built environment, activities, and events that any of these terms denote (when they are used as denoting terms). The third comment is that, in speaking of the world “around,” I indicate that the person who takes in a landscape is usually in it, even if off to one side. This person is not in the landscape, however, in the way that a physical object occurs at a point in a physical milieu. Rather, she is in it as acting attuned to it, amid (bei) the entities that compose it. Her activities, accordingly, are among those that make the landscape a site of human activity. Taking in the landscape visually is just one of the possible sorts of activity involved. Indeed, someone who is in a landscape is not likely to be involved with it as spectator alone. Finally, I speak of the “wider” world around to distinguish landscapes from more constricted settings such as rooms, subway cars, and Manhattan street corners. “Setting” is the generic term I use for the portion of the overall world where a person acts. It is also an elastic term, stretching from close-in surroundings to expanses that extend over the horizon. Landscapes are a type of setting, namely, those that visually fall away expansively from people. “Falls away expansively” is relative to possible lines of sight, and these in turn are partly determined by the physical properties and geometrical arrangement of the entities that compose the setting. A subway car, for instance, travels through a tunnel that is surrounded by rock. Due to the physical properties of walls and rock (and light), a person riding in the car can see the interior of the car but cannot see any landscapes. The geometrical arrangement of the physical world is a key determinant of possible landscapes. I begin consideration of the temporalspatial character of landscapes by examining their status as visual objects. Landscapes are visual objects in such activities as looking, gazing, observing, scrutinizing, staring, scanning, sizing up, checking out, and casting an eye over. The wider world around has the status of landscape only if it is possible for people to carry out one or more of these activities with regard to it. When, moreover, a person performs one of these actions toward a portion of the world around her, she carries out some practice or other, of which the action concerned is a moment. The practices in which the world is taken up as a visual spectacle thus bear on its status as landscape. Of course, in almost any activity and practice a person is directed toward the world and cognizant of it in some way or other. This is even true of mathematical practices. In many activities and practices, moreover, people look at, scrutinize, and size up entities and settings about them. The fact that people are generally oriented toward entities and settings about them does not imply that they are encountering landscapes. The child who watches a DVD player while his parents wind their way through the Bluegrass horse farm countryside does not encounter a landscape, nor do his parents when they admire a rock fence, check the odometer, anxiously search for indications of

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the next roadside eatery, or look around the homespun interior of the eatery. A landscape is a portion of the world around receding from the immediate setting of action that can be taken in—scrutinized, gazed at, examined etc.—as an expanse. The world around figures as a landscape only in certain practices. Horse farm countryside figures as landscape, for example, only in such practices as those of guided tors, city-county planning, historical preservation, fox hunting, and tourism. Horse farm landscapes do not figure as such in other practices that are carried out on them, for instance, horse training, barn maintenance, building construction, sports, veterinary medicine, and children’s play. Encountering a horse farm landscape is hardly a specialized experience. Nonetheless, it is an occasional one. Its frequency, moreover, probably correlates with social marks such as occupation, education, class, and the like. The wealthy horse farm owner and the poor hired hand who trudges daily between the farm and one of the small Hispanic settlements that have replaced the “Negro” hamlets that used to dot the horse farm landscape out of sight of main roads and hill-top mansions (see the diagram of a horse farm in the preface), encounter the world about them differently. The owner is more likely than the farmhand regularly to encounter the surrounding farm as landscape. In addition, the people who take horse farm tours or drive along the scenic routes taking in the sights are predominantly whites and/or well-todo tourists from other countries. In different practices, the places from which the wider world around is encountered as such are anchored in different subsets of the material entities that make up that world. Whereas the owner encounters the wider world as a landscape at a second floor window, from a private road, on a hill on his property, and from on horseback, the tourist and historical preservationist encounter this along the main roads that pass through the countryside or from the private roads visited on a farm tour, while the fox hunter encounters them on horseback in the countryside and from under trees. One way landscapes are ensnared in action is by being objects of visual activities (looking, gazing, scrutinizing, etc.). As such objects, landscapes contribute to interwoven timespaces, in particular, to common and shared presents (e.g., tourers looking at a landscape) and to common and shared places (e.g., places to look at it). Like other entities, landscapes can also be incorporated into action by helping to fill out activity futures and pasts. As a result, landscapes also contribute to interwoven timespaces by filling out common, shared, and orchestrated pasts and futures. When a landscape fills out the past or future of activity, a portion of the world around that can be taken in visually is—as such—what someone reacts to, acts in the light of, or comes toward in acting. For example, for the sake

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of seeing the landscape might be the future of an horse farm owner who ascends a hill to overlook her property, of tourists who have finished lunch and are resuming their journey, or of fox hunters who are finished with a kill (mostly coyotes, not foxes). Examples of landscapes helping to compose the past of activity are an owner proposing to her family that some feature of the landscape be changed so as to enhance its appearance, a tourist taking a side road in search of a better scene (the landscape from the main road is unsatisfactory), a fox hunter proposing that the ride stop for lunch in a particularly scenic spot (i.e., because it is scenic), or a city planner advocating a particular positioning of a new road so as not to spoil the beauty of existing arrangements. It is not necessary that a landscape be encountered visually in order for it to fill out the past or future of activity. The horse farm owner, for example, might never have seen her property from this hilltop or personally noticed the aspect of the landscape that she proposes to alter. Obviously, though, it is through being seen that landscapes often come to fill out the past and future of activity, especially the past. It is apropos to recall that landscapes also occur in objective time. Not only do their features persist and change over time, but landscapes are encountered as landscapes, and fill out the futures and pasts of activities, for only as long as the activities involved are performed. Both actual and imagined past or future landscapes can also fill out activity futures or pasts. A landscape is encountered as such only as long as the activities in which it is so encountered are performed. As intimated, however, landscapes are not landscapes for only as long as they are encountered as such. Regardless of whether a landscape is or is not visually apprehended as such during a given stretch of objective time, it can form a site of activity during that time. Portions of the world that recede from people can harbor arrays of places and paths for activities whether or not these people visually apprehend these expanses as such. Again, this phenomenon must be distinguished from that of immediate surroundings anchoring places and paths through which activity proceeds. The van in which the tourers sit, like the hilltop copse under which the owner reclines and the roadside pull off where the city planner takes a rest, form the immediate locale, the array of places and paths closest to hand, through which these people’s current and nascent activity proceeds. By contrast, a landscape qualifies as the site of activity when an array of places and paths that is distributed across a visually apprehensible portion of the wider world around is relevant to what people do. Such is the case in horse farm supervision practices when the owner and his principal manager trundle around the farm inspecting structures and watching the training of horses in different paddocks. It is also the case in city-county planning practices when a planner traverses the landscape noting as many features as possible

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that are pertinent to impending rezoning petitions. Similar remarks apply to veterinary practices, fox hunting practices, horse farm tour practices, and maintenance practices, indeed, to all practices that involve linked activities at, and movement between, different points in an expansive portion of the world that can be taken in visually: an array of places and paths distributed through this expanse—though obviously not all places and paths located there—are relevant to carrying on the practices concerned. This is even true of tourist practices, since the roads tourists take are part of the landscape, and where tourists stop, the directions they look in, and what they talk about are keyed to the distribution of places and paths in the landscapes they encounter. Incidentally, since places and paths can be common, shared, and orchestrated, landscapes contribute to the interwoven timespaces of social life, not just as discussed by filling out the futures and pasts of activities, but also by housing interwoven spatialities. Landscapes can fill out the futures and past of activities in practices other than those in which landscapes are encountered as visual spectacles, for example, the practices of training, barn maintenance, building construction, religion, sports, veterinary medicine, and community organization. In building construction practices, for example, desired aesthetic effect or considerations of efficiency and organization vis-à-vis other buildings can teleologically order the construction of a building at a particular spot, just as consistency of appearance with neighboring farms can motivate the construction of a barn with certain ornamental features. In religious practices, moreover, the beauty of the landscape can occasion thanks for God’s generosity, just as in community organization practices efforts to embarrass the owner of some kitschy neon signs might be pursued for the sake of maintaining the traditional look of the landscape. The possibilities are endless. Indeed, the horse farm landscape enjoys such significance for life in the Kentucky Bluegrass that aspects of it fill out futures and pasts in remarkably many practices there. It is worth adding that, insofar as the landscape is built, and thus built in particular practices, it is tied to particular activity pasts and futures. In sum, landscapes are temporalspatial phenomena. They help constitute activity timespaces—and thereby help fill out interwoven timespaces—as visual spectacles, as the contents of the pasts and futures of activity, and as far-flung arrays of paths and places for human activities. In all these modes, moreover, the temporalspatial features of landscapes are tied to the practices of which the activities concerned are part. I explained in the previous chapter that human activity at once occurs in objective time, copes with objective space, and opens timespace. Acting is an event that occurs before and after other events, negotiates the distribution of things in three dimensional space, and stretches out from states of affairs

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toward a way of being in dealing with regionally placed entities. Inevitably, therefore, human existence amalgamates timespace and space-time. The above discussion, for example, points toward myriad connections between the spatial-temporal and temporalspatial features of landscapes. Prominent types of such connection include the anchoring of place-path arrays at entities arranged in three dimensional space, changes in place-path arrays over time, changes in how landscape features fill out the pasts and futures of activities, and objective spatial or temporal properties of landscapes forming the pasts or futures of activities. Many connections between space-time and timespace work through landscapes. For example, the objective space-time paths of tourists link with the timespaces of horse trainers via the paddocks and pathways that compose a particular landscape when these paths converge on a spot in objective space in visual range of the paddocks and pathways at a period in objective time when the trainers act for the sake of moving horses among paddocks efficiently and without incident. I want now to explore one nexus of landscape-mediated connections between timespace and space-time. Doing this will introduce a phenomenon, memory, that will again be taken up in chapter 4. Landscapes are not just present phenomena. Some current landscapes also existed in the past, while many other current landscapes descended from past ones. By “past” I mean, in the present context, before the present: to exist, or have existed, in the past is to exist (or have existed) before the present. It follows that something that is past once existed. A present landscape that existed in the past or descended from past landscapes is a historical entity that has persisted relatively unchanged or arisen through a series of transformations that occurred before the present. Relevant changes can concern the entities that compose landscapes, the practices that are carried out in them, and how landscapes are encountered. As historical entities, both past landscapes and the pasts of present landscapes are possible objects of memory. Two categories of memory are pertinent. The first category, to paraphrase Patrick Baert’s interpretation of the philosopher-sociologist G.H. Mead,37 is memory as the past for the present, that is, past states of affairs being objects of knowledge and recollection in practices. Recall that Gosden highlighted memory of this sort in his account of the temporal nature of human activities. Knowledge and recollection of past states of affairs are crucial to the enactment of most practices, including those of tourism, horse farm touring, farm maintenance, historical preservation, training, and city-county planning. Their importance lies in serving up possible activity pasts (and futures): many, though not all, of the states of affairs that motivate action are past states of affairs, and a past state of affairs often can fill out the past (or future) of activity only because it is remembered.

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For example, past reactions to changes in land-use rules, like a tour guide’s promise to have the group at the country eatery at 1 pm, can motivate present activity only if they are remembered. Conversely, the fact that something fills out the past of activity—especially repeatedly does so—can have repercussions for memory qua knowledge and recollection of the past. For instance, idle talk about a grand mansion on the Greene farm that burned down two generations ago can lead to the past mansion becoming an object of recollection and even being recorded for posterity—even though it never existed or existed, say, on a different farm in a different county. Mention of recording introduces an important subtype of this first sort of memory—recording the past. By “recording the past” I mean the use of writing, art, film, and digital pictures etc. to note, record, keep track of, and commemorate past events. I do not mean the activity of professional historians (many historians contrast their activity to memory). Years ago, for example, a newspaper reporter might have written a story about how people back then reacted to changes in land-use regulations. If, today, the reporter shows the story to a current member of the planning commission, it could transpire that the reported past reactions fill out the past of a comment that the commissioner makes at a subsequent commission meeting about a proposed change in regulations. In this case, a form of social memory, as opposed to personal memory (see chapter 4), enables a past state of affairs to fill out the past of current activity. The role of recording as social memory varies among practices; it is crucial in some, for example, training and city-county planning, and mostly absent in others, for example, daily transportation between home and workplace. The second form of memory is, again to paraphrase Baert’s interpretation of Mead, the past in the present. Many types of common memory claim imply the existence in the present of something acquired in the past. An example is the claim to remember how to shoe a horse, which implies the current possession of an ability acquired in the past. The presence of the past in the present can be construed as a type of memory. Of course, not just any such presence qualifies as memory. Many features of a landscape persist over time, and it would be odd to call, say, the presence of an ancient rock cropping or the presence of a barn built sixty years ago “memory.” Only when what is present can guide action, is the presence of the past memory. What can guide action, however, is relative to practices. A sixty year old barn, for example, counts as memory in design and construction practices if designers and builders use it as an exemplar in trying to preserve traditional themes in new structures. Even a rock outcrop might qualify as memory, for example, in pagan religious practices. Any practice, moreover, bears a memory of this second sort, namely, the persistence of particular rules, ends, and projects as organizing features. The

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present circumscription of activity by such items can be called “practice memory” since the rules, ends, and projects involved bear on activity (see chapter 4). Landscapes are bound up with practice memories insofar as landscapes are incorporated into the organization of practices—as objects or referents of rules, as the contents of ends, and as objects of projects or understandings. Landscapes are held in the memory of fox hunting practices, for instance, in the persistence of rules that govern permitted entrance to, egress from, and paths across farms, in the perpetuation of landscape preservation as longstanding end, in the repeated deployment of well-known pursuit stratagems, and in handed-down understandings of likely coyote hiding places. Whereas landscapes that appear in memories qua knowledge and recollection are by definition in the past (though they might be past stages of present landscapes instead of landscapes that no longer exist), landscapes that are contained in practice memories can be objectively past, present, or future: past, present, and future landscapes alike can be incorporated into the organization of practices. What’s more, landscapes that are incorporated into memories of either sort can fill out activity pasts or futures. Through memory, therefore, landscapes are ensnared in complex intercalations of objective space-times and activity timespaces. Perceptions of current landscapes enriches their entanglement in these intercalations. In sum, landscapes are not just denizens of objective space (and time). They are also temporalspatial phenomena bound to the teleological structure of activities carried out on or in relation to them. Indeed, their temporalspatial and spatial-temporal features are interwoven in complex ways gestured at in the above discussion. Landscapes are amalgamated temporalspatial, spatial-temporal entities. In the previous chapter I noted three key features of contemporary conceptions of social space-time. The third is the proposition that social space-times are plural. Contemporary conceptions of social space-time promulgate this idea because (1) they treat particular space-times as the collections of spatial and temporal properties that attach to or arise from specific nexuses of social processes or phenomena and (2) these collections are as numerous as are the nexuses involved. My account affirms, similarly, that timespaces are plural. As the dimensionality of activities, in fact, timespaces, strictly speaking, are as multiple as are activities. This is a misleading assertion, however, because the timespaces of activities exhibit considerable commonality and sharing. A given person’s timespaces, for instance, often have the same futures and pasts. Different people’s timespaces, moreover, exhibit commonalities and sharing that largely derive from people carrying on social practices. The claim that timespaces are as numerous as are human lives must be complemented—tempered—by the understanding that most timespaces are variations of one another.

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Landscapes, too, are plural. I do not just mean that different landscapes are found in different geographical locations. I do not mean, moreover, that landscapes are relative to individual lives, such that a given expansive portion of the world is a different landscape to anyone who encounters or lives through it. I mean, instead, that a visually encounterable expanse of terrain harbors multiple landscapes (with variations) insofar as multiple practices are carried out on or in relation to it. Any portion of the Bluegrass horse farm countryside can, in principle, be taken in visually. Any such portion (as defined by physical features that delimit objects and lines of sight) encompasses as many landscapes as there are practices propagating through or toward it in which it is taken in as such, for example, tourist practices, horse farm tour practices, city-county planning practices, historical preservation practices, and fox hunting practices. In each of these, a visually accessed portion of the world around is encountered and acted amid as a different array of places, paths, and regions. This pluralization implies that, as they carry on the practices in which they bear the following identities, farm owners, managers, trainers, grooms, tourists, farm tour guides, planners, preservationists, and hunters (as well as Hispanics and poor whites) often act in different landscapes. Although these different groups traverse, and enact practices on or in relation to, the same objective spatial expanse of the world, the landscapes they occupy and encounter often vary. An individual person, moreover, lives through and encounters different landscapes anchored in the same portion of the world as he carries on different practices in relation to it. Landscapes are relative, not to individuals or groups, but to practices and their temporalspatial regimes.

Notes 1. I concentrate on human sociality and put aside those of other creatures. This decision does not reflect the conviction that the socialities of other creatures diverge from human sociality. It follows, instead, from a desire to concentrate on the human case. I happen to think both that the socialities of some nonhuman species share much with the human variety and that conceptualizing the sociality of animals requires a healthy understanding of human sociality. These beliefs are irrelevant, however, to the following. 2. For detailed discussion, see my book, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 6. 3. Common focuses on the same events, namely, events befalling foreign currency markets, are a key element of Knorr Cetina and Bruegger’s analysis of such markets as global fields of intersubjectivity; see Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger, “Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets,” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 4 (2002): 905–50.

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4. For discussion of the two types of coordination vis-à-vis time, see Dale Southerland, “Re-ordering Temporal Rhythms: Coordinating Daily Practices in the UK in 1937 and 2000,” in Time, Consumption and Everyday Life, ed. Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilkes (London: Berg, 2009), 49–64. 5. See Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness + Convenience: The Social Organization of Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 180–2. 6. E.g., Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987 [1981]), chapter 6. 7. This claim follows from the thesis that nexuses of practices and arrangements form the site of human coexistence, where “site” means context of which some of what occurs or exists in it is inherently part. What it means for nexuses of practices and material arrangements to be the site of human coexistence is that sinews of the four types described above—through which humans coexist—exist or transpire as part of particular social practice(s) carried on amid particular material arrangements: all human coexistence inherently transpires as part of nexuses of practices and arrangements. It follows that any social phenomenon, as a phenomenon of human coexistence, is a feature or slice of the overall web formed by nexuses of practices and arrangements. For elaboration, see Theodore R. Schatzki, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Exploration of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), chapter 3, and Theodore R. Schatzki, “A New Societist Social Ontology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 33, no. 2 (2003): 174–202. 8. Elsewhere I have argued that this account of social phenomena opens new perspectives on the presence of materiality in social life. See “Materiality and Social Life,” Nature + Culture, forthcoming. What I presently want to note is that, in construing social phenomena as partly consisting in material arrangements, I treat materiality—including biophysicality and nature—as part of society and not as something separate or opposed to it. 9. There is no definite, clear demarcation between the actions and events that do and those that do not help compose this social event. The concept of a race day is not that precise. Notice, however, that the nonaction events that those who understand the concept of a race day will agree are part of the race day all bear on the actions that compose this event. Termites eating away at the grandstand foundations are not part of the race day unless the grandstands buckle or exterminators arrive. 10. My description of this economic system is taken from William Cronon’s superb book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). 11. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, & the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 233. Further references to this book in this section are included in the text. 12. Nancy Munn, The Fame of Gawa (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). 13. This characterization also holds of the timespace distantiation of a social system in Giddens’s sense: the relationally defined spread, reach, or stretching of a social system over objective space and objective time. See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Similarly, when Giddens

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writes (ibid., p. 17) that structures in his sense—sets of rules and resources—function to “bind space and time” or to enable the same practice to exist over time and space, what he means is that actions separated in objective time and space can be linked by way of drawing on the same structures. 14. Harvey even claims that places, for Heidegger, are “sites of incommunicable otherness” (315). The reader might recall from chapter 1 that in the 1950s Heidegger characterized those to whom the clearing happens, not as a people or a community as is appropriate for a conception of place such as Harvey’s, but as mortals. A YMCA building, for instance, can be a thing in the sense Heidegger gave this term. The collection of people, relative to whose activities places and paths are arrayed at and around the Y, embraces members of the Y. This collection is not a community or a people. For criticism of Heidegger’s alleged romantic focus on rural places, see David Kolb, Postmodern Sophistications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Nigel Thrift, “Steps Towards an Ecology of Place,” in Human Geography Today, ed. Doris Massey, J. Allen, and P. Sarre (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 295–322, and Barbara Bender, Stonehenge: Making Space (Warwick: Berg, 1988). For defenses of Heidegger that disengage his account of dwelling and place from neoromanticism and a valoration of the rural, see Robert Mugerauer, Interpretations on Behalf of Place (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 15. This claim is not affected by the fact that the economic process is “disembedded,” to use Giddens’s term, from local settings. (Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], 21ff). What Giddens means by “disembedded” is twofold: that the relations that constitute the process stretch over objective space-time and that the spatial and temporal properties of the process cannot be explained by features of immediate settings but only by “disembedding mechanisms” such as money and knowledge-technology systems. 16. On flat ontology, see Sallie A. Marston, John Paul Jones III, and Keith Woodward, “Human Geography without Scale,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 30 (2005): 416–32. 17. This claim also holds of Giddens’s contrast between social and system integration: between the interdependence among actions that is effected via interactions in contexts of co-presence and the interdependence among them that is rooted in the relatedness inherent in (social) systems of interaction. Both types of integration evince configurations of interwoven timespaces as well as properties of objective space-time (respectively, same time-same space, and different or same time-different space). Giddens appears to acknowledge something like this when he writes that the distinction between center and periphery can apply “across the whole range of the settings of locales” (Giddens, The Constitution of Society, p. 130). He does not, however, develop the point. For the distinction between social and system integration, see Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 76–81. 18. My description of Nemko is taken from Katja Maria Hydle, “Practices for Relay Races in Global Professional Service Performance” (paper presented at the Second

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Organization Studies Summer Workshop on “Re-turn to Practice: Understanding Organization As It Happens,” Mykonos, Greece, June 2006). 19. For a superb discussion of timespace compressions and their role in the development of capitalism, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 20. See Harvey, Justice, Nature, & the Geography of Difference, p. 230; cf. Lefebvre’s claim in rhythmanalysis that social changes require “imprinting” new rhythms on social life (14) 21. E.g., Torsten Hägerstrand, “What about People in Regional Science?” Papers of the Regional Science Association 24 (1970): 7–21. 22. Lefebvre, rhythmanalysis, p. 68. 23. John Allen identifies contradiction in spatiality (in my sense) as an origin of political tensions over the use of public space. He does not, however, claim that spatial contradictions, divergences, or tensions underlie conflicts more broadly. See John Allen, Lost Geographies of Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 166. 24. See the very instructive case of the purchase of land by one William Pynchon from the Agawam tribe in central Massachusetts in 1636; Cronon, Changes in the Land, pp. 66–8. 25. For an analysis of the temporal and spatial dimensions of social standoffs, see Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). By “social standoff” Wagner-Pacifici means such episodes as Wounded Knee (1973), the conflict between MOVE and the Philadelphia police in 1983, and the standoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidians in 1993. Although Wagner-Pacifici neither conceptualizes timespace as such nor uses the term, her analysis clearly reveals the temporalspatial features of these episodes. 26. Steven Lukes holds that power is an essentially contested concept. See Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974), 26. Incidentally, I could have used Lukes’s conception of power just as well as those of Giddens and Foucault to illustrate the temporalspatial nature of power. 27. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, 93. 28. See Giddens, The Constitution of Society, 258, 260–1. 29. Ibid., 258; Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, 104. 30. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Afterword to Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208–28, here 219, 220. 31. Ibid., p. 221. 32. This formulation of the positive character of power presupposes the description of power found in “The Subject and Power.” Earlier descriptions of this positive character spoke, not of enablement, but of production, effectuation, and inducement. See, for example, Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, trans. and ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 78–108 and the parallel account in Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975– 1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003 [1997]), chapter 2. 33. Many other issues affix power and timespace. An example is people’s control over their timespaces and whether degree of such control tracks socioeconomic

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class. See Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness + Convenience, p. 181 for this issue as regards space-time. 34. I have taken up this issue in The Site of the Social, chapter 3, section 4. 35. See, respectively, Richard H. Schein, “The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, no. 4 (1997): 660–80, Carl O. Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape,” in Land and Life: Selections from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, ed. John Leighly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963 [1925]), 315–50, Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), and Denis E. Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 36. Cf. Cosgrove’s notion of a way of seeing; Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 37. Patrick Baert, Time, Self, and Social Being (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), 86–7.

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in the previous two chapters presumes that human activity is teleological—directed toward ways of being for the sake of which people act. I argued, for instance, that the temporal structure of activity lies in the self-stretching out of a person between that for the sake of which she acts and that in the face or light of which she does so. The unity of timespace presupposes, moreover, that teleology underlies the place-path layouts of the worlds in which people proceed. If it turned out that human activity is significantly or extensively nonteleological, temporality would not be a pervasive feature of activity. Spatiality and temporality would fall apart. My claims about the role of interwoven timespaces in social life would also enjoy limited scope: interwoven timespaces could no longer be essential to sociality. The overall issue of the present chapter, consequently, is whether or not human activity is fundamentally teleological. Is the activity of a cognitively functional human being teleological (I thus exclude infants and those with significant mental disease, but not those with physical disabilities) unless something overrides or counteracts this? Are there nonteleological forms or aspects of action and practice? If so, are these forms or aspects sufficiently numerous or common to negate the proposition that activity is basically teleological? Some theorists have replied Yes to the final question. The present chapter replies No. Although human activity intermittently assumes nonteleological forms and more often, even omnipresently, possesses nonteleological aspects, it remains centrally and pervasively teleological. HE ACCOUNT OF ACTIVITY TIMESPACE DEVELOPED

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The present chapter examines the bearing of emotions on human activity, the character of ceremony and ritual, and the “primitive” religious understanding of the world as sacred. These are phenomena that diverse thinkers have believed undercut the thesis that human activity is fundamentally teleological. These topics are also vast. The below discussion, as a result, does not aim at complete treatments of them. My objective is much more limited, namely, to show that emotions, ceremony and ritual, and sacred worlds are compatible with the teleological nature of human activity. My discussion of emotions will attempt to delineate this compatibility systematically. My discussion of ceremony, ritual, and sacred worlds will examine particular aspects or analyses of them and seek only to make the congruity between them and teleology plausible. Together, the two discussions should disabuse anyone who has it of the assumption that these phenomena significantly limit or overthrow the dominion of teleology. Before beginning, I should explain that, on my understanding, teleology is not equivalent to rationality. An action is teleological if and only if it is performed for the sake of a way of being or state of affairs (for an end). Although the doings of such entities as organizations, systems, and nonhuman organisms are teleological if they are directed toward an end, my concern in the following is with human activity alone. An activity is rational, by contrast, just in case it is a sensible way of proceeding for the way of being in the pursuit of which it is performed. Not all teleological activities—activities directed at an end—are rational—sensible ways of proceeding for that end; the existence of irrational teleological actions is all too familiar from history, fiction, and personal experience. The converse, however, holds: all rational activities are teleological. If an activity is not directed toward something, there is nothing by reference to which its rationality or irrationality can be determined.1 Of course, items other than activities can be rational or irrational, for instance, beliefs, ideas, practices, and institutions. Like the doings of nonhumans, these items are not of present interest. I focus on activity, though some of these other items, most obviously beliefs, bear on the rationality of activity. A key difference between teleology and rationality as I understand them is that rationality is normative whereas teleology is not. Whether someone acts for the sake of something is a factual issue to be settled by consulting or scrutinizing her. The status of an activity as rational or irrational similarly rests on facts, for instance, the person’s end, what she does, the results of the activity, and what she believes prior to and while acting. But the epithet “rational” implies that what a person does is a sensible, intelligent, and appropriate thing for anyone in her shoes who pursues the same end, to do. To label an activity “rational” is to endorse it as a means of achieving a given end and to recommend it to others should they pursue the same end in the same

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situation. Nothing like this follows from identifying an activity as teleological. The status of an activity as teleological implies simply that it was directed at an end. Of course, an observer might pass normative judgment on the actor’s end or on the course of action by which she pursues it and thereby endorse or condemn them. This judgment, however, is based on normative considerations that the observer brings to bear in the judgment. By itself, identifying an action as teleological implies neither endorsement, condemnation, recommendation, or dissuasion.

1. Outline of a Theory of Human Activity Discussing the extra-teleological dimensions of human activity and their relations to teleology requires recourse to an account of activity that is richer than the one utilized in previous chapters. Elsewhere I have developed the following account at length and will only outline it here.2 In addition to facilitating my analysis of the extrateleological aspects of activity, this outline will also help prepare the analyses, in chapter 4, of indeterminacy and of activity as event. I stress that the point of presenting this outline is to facilitate discussion of teleology, emotion, ceremony/ritual, indeterminacy, and events. The goal is not to offer a novel account of activity. The account I outline does diverge from existing accounts on the determination of activity, the flow character of activity, indeterminacy, emotional sense, and the nature of beliefs and desires. But I will highlight these differences only when doing so serves the purpose of the discussion. This purpose will also sometimes be served by emphasizing parallels or convergences between my account and standard alternatives. I should also point out that the first two sections of the present chapter primarily engage work in philosophy. This is because, of all the disciplines that contribute to humanistic social theory, philosophy has probed human activity in greatest detail. The second half of the chapter primarily draws on work in anthropology and sociology. Human life is a flow (see next chapter). In the course of daily life, people do one thing after another. Consider what I was just doing. I first composed a paragraph on the computer, listened to music on the radio, and pondered what to write next, before replying “Come in” to a knock on the door, saying “Hello” to the colleague who entered my office, and celebrating with her an increase in the department’s operating budget. These actions can overlap. I continued pondering what to write next while saying “Come in” and “Hello,” though I could have left off doing this while speaking and resumed it later. While all this was going on, moreover, I awaited the noon ringing of the courtyard bells and tapped my foot on the ground to the rhythm of the music.

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Any segment of objective time can encompass a diversity of doings and sayings, intentional, unintentional, voluntary, and involuntary. In the flow of activity, what a person does next is usually the action that makes sense to him to do given that such and such is the case. After typing, for example, I listened to music on the radio because doing this is what made sense to me given that the paragraph I was working on was complete. Similarly, while pondering what to write next, I said “Come in” because saying this is what made sense to me to do given that a knock came at the door. I call the phenomenon of its making sense to someone to perform an action “practical intelligibility.” The notion of practical intelligibility captures the sense that animates or informs the frequent redirections and restarts that mark the flow of conduct, including those redirections and restarts that are not consciously thought about or explicitly grasped. To claim that practical intelligibility governs what people do is to claim that what people do next in the flow of ongoing conduct is whatever it is that makes sense to them to do. For philosophers I note that practical intelligibility does not govern what people do in the manner of efficient causality (one thing bringing about another). It does so, instead, in the manner of formal causality (cf. Aristotle’s notion of formal cause). Practical intelligibility determines what it is that a person does next in the flow of conduct. Historically, many philosophers have construed actions as interventions in the world. Like other contemporary thinkers, by contrast, I countenance as actions such so-called mental actions as listening, thinking, imagining, and remembering. The flow of activity is broken into a series of overlapping actions that contains interventions in the world as well as mental proceedings. It might help clarify my account (for the philosophical reader) if I mention two reasons for gathering “worldly” and mental actions into one class.3 One reason is that actions of both types can be voluntarily performed. As Wittgenstein put it, it makes sense to order someone to do them. A person can also cease doing them when ordered or she desires this, though the existence of urges and neurotic compulsion shows that the line between voluntary and involuntary can be indistinct. A second reason to treat worldly and mental actions on a par is that an action of either type can be in principle what makes sense to someone to do at a given moment; that is, it can make sense just as much to perform a mental action such as working out a sum in one’s head or imagining a landscape as to perform a worldly one such as working out the sum on paper or running through the landscape. Regardless, furthermore, of which sort of action is signified, the determination of practical intelligibility bears the same basic form: given such and such states of affairs, it makes sense to perform this action for the sake of such and such way of being (or state of affairs). In more familiar words (see below): which action is signified as the

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one to perform—regardless of whether it is worldly or mental—depends on believed, perceived, imagined, expected, presumed etc. states of affairs and desired, wanted, sought after etc. ways of being. For example, pondering further what to write made sense for the sake of finishing an essay given an impending deadline and the fruitlessness of my ideas earlier in the day, just as saying “Hi” made sense for the sake of friendship given my colleague’s appearance. Finally, a person need not be explicitly aware of practical intelligibility or its determination (that is, of a particular action making sense to her to perform or its doing so given such and such or for the sake of so and so). Not entertaining these matters does not preclude being aware of them in some other sense.4 As discussed in chapter 1, the teleological and temporal characters of activity lie in its determination. As I am now describing matters, the determination of activity is its making sense to a person, given this and that state of affairs, to perform a particular action for the sake of this or that way of being. As I am now describing matters, accordingly, action is teleological because what makes sense to people to do rests on ends. Action is temporal, meanwhile, because what determines practical intelligibility (what makes sense to someone to do) fills out the temporal future and past. (Chapter 4 will explain that the coincidence of temporality and the determination of practical intelligibility arise from the character of activity as event.) In addition, the present—current activity—falls out of the past and future by way of its making sense to perform an action given particular states of affairs and for the sake of particular ways of being. This conception of the temporal determination of human activity resembles Alfred Schutz’s idea that action is determined by what he called “in-order-to” and “because” motives.5 In-order-to motives are the ends (or purposes) an actor pursues, whereas because motives are states of affairs that so causally formed the actor in the past that he presently pursues one end (purpose) rather than another. Because motives are not, as on my account, states of affairs given which it makes sense to perform a particular action (the states of affairs to which the person reacts or in the light of which he proceeds). Schutz gave a temporal gloss to his two types of motive: the states of affairs that are the contents of in-order-to and because motives lie in the objective future or past, respectively. Because of this, action and its motivation—as on my account—span the three dimensions of time. Of course, Schutz construed the three dimensions involved as modes of objective time, whereas the three dimensions of the temporality of activity are features of a time centered in human life. Incidentally, I affirm something like the causality that Schutz attributes to because motives, namely, past states of affairs picking out the ends that a person presently pursues. This sort of determination must be supplemented by the parallel phenomenon of past states of affairs picking

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out which state of affairs in response to or in the light of which a person presently acts. This sort of determination will become prominent in section 2. Whenever a person does what makes sense to him to do, what he does is intentional. The above actions that I performed in my office are examples. I mention this because the concepts of intentional action and voluntary action are of great significance in contemporary accounts of action (not just in philosophy), the concern with voluntary action dating back at least to Aristotle. As I understand it, an action is intentional just in case the person performing it meant to do it. Intentional actions are also ones that people will tell you that they are doing if you stop and ask them.6 An action is “voluntary,” meanwhile, just in case the actor bodily controls its performance and can desist if he or she so desires. The above actions that I performed in my office are, not just intentional, but also voluntary. Notice that a necessary condition of something a person does qualifying as a voluntary (or intentional) action is that she is aware of it. There is much more to say on the topic of intentional and voluntary actions, but this will suffice for present purposes. An important feature of human activity is that some actions are performed by way of the performance of other actions. In particular, a person carries out at least most of the actions that make sense to him to do by performing bodily actions. A bodily action is a bodily doing or saying that a person can directly perform, that is, can perform without having to do something else.7 For instance, a person with the physical ability can directly wave his hand back and forth, but he cannot get someone’s attention except by way of doing something else, either a bodily doing such as waving or a bodily saying such as calling out. In the example with which I began, moreover, I composed the paragraph by way of performing various bodily actions: typing words, hitting the delete button, navigating back and forth in the paragraph, and looking at my outline. I might have also performed mental actions such as trying to keep in mind what I wanted to write. The bodily actions involved are part of what can be called my “bodily repertoire.” Generally speaking, the nonmental actions that make sense to someone to perform are either actions that she can carry out without further ado by performing actions in her bodily repertoire or bodily actions that are themselves contained in that repertoire. (The performance of many mental actions likewise involves the performance of bodily actions.) A familiar type of situation in which a bodily action is signified is when a person is unable directly to do something that is normally part of her bodily repertoire and must work out alternatives; my hand might be in a cast, for instance, requiring me painstakingly to type out individual letters with my finger tips. When intentional actions are carried out by bodily actions, the latter are not intentional actions. (This does not mean that they are unintentional, simply that they are not intentional.) They are actions, nonetheless, because they are voluntary.

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As noted, the actions that make sense to people to perform are often carried out through the performance of bodily actions. I use the term “practical understanding” to denote a type of know how that is crucial to these performances, namely, knowing how, through the performance of bodily actions, to carry out actions that make sense to perform. Practical understanding must be distinguished from abilities to carry out bodily actions, which are not practical understandings but—like abilities to perform mental actions—motorperceptual-cognitive skills.8 Notice that practical understanding does not help determine what makes sense to someone to do. Practical understanding is, instead, knowing how, through the performance of bodily actions, to carry out actions that are signified as the ones to perform. This notion of practical understanding greatly differs from the sort of omnibus practical understanding that, famously according to theorists such as Bourdieu and Giddens (in the form of habitus and of practical consciousness, respectively), lies behind all or most human action in its finely tuned sensitivity to immediate settings and wider contexts and histories.9 Another important feature of human activity is that, as a person acts intentionally, she typically performs actions beyond those that make sense to her to do and those by which she carries these out. Among the further sorts of action she might perform, two are germane at present. The first type comprises actions whose performance consists in the performance of the intentional action plus consequences of that action. In Donald Davidson’s memorable prowler example, for example, a person turns on the lights in his house and thereby unwittingly notifies a prowler that he is at home.10 Notifying the prowler of this is something the person does in addition to turning on the lights. It is not, however, an intentional action: the person does it unwittingly and is unaware of what he is doing. Whether the action is voluntary is less clear, since the person controls it and could in principle desist, but is unaware that he is doing it. The second sort of further action comprises more encompassing actions that are made up of, or subserved by, the intentional action in question. For instance, turning on the lights—along with making tea and fetching a book—might be part of preparing to read. Alternatively, turning on the lights might be what chasing away the gloom in the living room consists in in this situation. An action that encompasses or subsumes intentional actions in this way can be called a “project.” In carrying out intentional actions that subserve or are parts of a project, a person ipso facto carries out that project. He or she also does so intentionally: carrying out the project is a further intentional action. A project, moreover, might itself subserve or help make up a wider project; preparing to read might be part of the project of getting ready for tomorrow’s seminar, just as chasing away the gloom might be part of taking positive steps to shake off a temporary depression. If so, then the person is

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not just turning on the lights and either preparing to read or chasing away the gloom, but also getting ready for tomorrow’s seminar or shaking off a temporary depression (or at least trying to—the possibility of failure complicates matters in ways that need not concern the present discussion). In short, in doing what makes sense to him to do, a person performs a variety of actions, in particular, he performs a series of intentional actions, with actions on a given level subserving or being part of actions the next level up. At the zenith of such a series is the pursuit of something, for the sake of which it makes sense to perform the action that makes sense to the actor to perform.11 The series tops off at whatever project it is that neither subserves nor is part of yet a further project. This project—being some way or achieving some state of affairs—is the person’s end. In performing the action that makes sense to him to perform, a person pursues an end (assuming he is acting for one) and carries out whatever projects form the series of actions that stretches from seeking his end to doing what makes sense. In turning on the lights, for example, the person in Davidson’s example might also be chasing away the gloom, trying to shake off a temporary depression, and seeking to lead a healthy life, or getting ready to read, preparing his seminar, and doing his job as professor. Whenever a person does what makes sense to him to do, he typically also pursues an end, carries out projects, and performs bodily actions by which he carries out the signified action. Practical significance can be described in the other direction: given (e.g.) that I have been working in the garden, pursuing my job as professor signifies preparing tomorrow’s seminar; given that I have not yet done the reading, preparing tomorrow’s seminar signifies getting ready to read; given that the room in which I read is dark, getting ready to read signifies turning on the lights—so I reach for the switch and push it upward. Such a series of significations, which can be called a “chain of significance,” articulates the hierarchical determination of practical intelligibility. Chains of significance bear a strong surface resemblance to practical reasoning understood as the thought process or inferential structure of propositions through which a person settles on what to do in pursuit of given ends.12 Many contemporary philosophers hold that practical reasoning is responsible for which intentional actions people perform. The convergence of these accounts with my own can also be brought out by redescribing the hierarchy of actions that a person performs when acting intentionally in language familiar both to Heidegger and to contemporary philosophers of action. To revert to Davidson’s example, the person turns on the light in order to (um zu) get ready to read, which he does in order to prepare his seminar, which he does for the sake of pursuing his job as professor. “In order to” is a common way of formulating the concept of purpose: the person’s purpose in turning on the light is to get ready to read, his purpose in

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getting ready to read is to prepare his seminar, and his end in preparing his seminar is doing his job as professor. What makes sense to someone to do is determined by ends and purposes. The word “purpose” is widely used both in common life and in academic theory to explain human action. The reader might have also noticed that, in previous chapters, in order to capture the past and future dimensions of activity, I often employed further words that, like “purpose,” are used commonly and in theories to explain action. Examples are “desire” and “belief.” I want now to account for both my use of these words and their common and theoretical explanatory employment, by relating them to the hierarchical structure of the determination of practical intelligibility. Doing this will further position my account of action relative to alternatives and also ready the discussion of emotions in the following section. It will be useful first to characterize more precisely what sort of account of action my Heideggarian analysis is. This account uses concepts such as practical intelligibility, signifying, and for the sake of (Worum-willen) to analyze the structure of what in chapter 1 I called human “experiential acting.” As I explained, the expression “experiential acting” indicates two things: that people experience (live through) how they proceed in the world and that a person’s experiences occur within the ken of his or her activity. To say that practical intelligibility etc. structure experiential acting is to say that they structure human proceeding (i.e., being-) in the world, which people experience as they act. My account, however, neither presents activity as its performers experience it nor articulates the experience of that activity. Rather, it describes the structure of activity itself, which is accessible through the experience that is a feature of that activity.13 Incidentally, experiential acting is not separable from the objects and events—the world—with which a person deals in acting: what practical intelligibility and its ilk structure is acting with, at, and amid (bei) entities and events within the world. The structure of experiential acting is not the business or concern of people other than scholars in their professional lives. In fact, an account of it is likely to interest only those scholars who are attuned to phenomenological research. Outside philosophy and psychology, terms different from those with which any such account works are used to deal with human activity, terms such as “want,” “desire,” “believe,” “expect,” “hope,” “fear,” “joy,” and “disgust,” not to mention the immense stock of words for actions. For convenience, I will call the first set of words “terms for mental conditions.” The use of such terms is complex, and speakers can do a large variety of things in employing them.14 One thing that people do with them is of particular relevance to the present discussion, namely, to explain human action. I claim that terms such as “desire” and “belief” are used to explain action because through their use the determination of

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practical intelligibility is put into words. In saying that people believe or desire such and such, English speakers (1) formulate ways of being and states of affairs (the such and suchs) that are responsible for actions making sense to people to perform and (2) indicate the bearing of these ways and states on the determination of practical intelligibility. On many occasions, for example, a first person ascription of belief puts into words the bearing of a state of affairs on what made sense to the speaker to do. In my opening example, for instance, I might have answered a query about why I said “Come in” after hearing a knock at the door by saying that I believed someone was at the door (or that I heard a knock). In response to a question about why he turned on the lights, moreover, the person in Davidson’s example might have replied that he believed it would help chase away the sense of gloom in his living room.15 As these examples suggest, one prominent use of the word “believe” and its cognates is to articulate the past dimension of action temporality. Similarly, one prominent use of “desire” and “want” is to put into words the future dimension of action temporality, that is, the pursuit of projects and ends. I might, for instance, have replied to the question, “Why did you say ‘Come in’?” by explaining that I wanted to let the person who knocked know that he or she could enter; after further Why?-questions, I might end up claiming that I wanted to uphold a long-standing custom of decorous social interaction. Similarly, Davidson’s person could have explained that he wanted to chase away the gloom, that he wanted to brighten his spirits, and even that he wants to lead a healthy life. (As these examples suggest, exactly what a person says is subject to myriad contingent contextual factors.) Some philosophers argue that a person’s reason for an action is a combination of desire and belief (or a combination of items closely related to these). I believe it is more accurate to say that a person’s reason for an action are the ways of being and states of affairs that determine that this action made sense to him to perform.16 Regarding desires and beliefs, what is true is that people sometimes use the words “desire” and “belief” (among others) to answer questions about, to specify the reasons, why they (or others) performed a particular action—for with these terms they put into words the bearing of particular states of affairs and ways of being on its making sense to perform that action. I should clarify that when I write of the “determination” of practical intelligibility I do not mean causally determine in the sense of efficient causality (X makes Y happen). I mean states of affairs and ways of being combining to specify what makes sense to someone to do: it makes sense to do something given certain states of affairs and for the sake of some way of being. (Reason explanations are thus not causal explanations, though this is a further story.)17 The use of other mental condition terms to explain actions works similarly. For example, the states of affairs given which it makes sense to perform an ac-

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tion can be picked out, not just with the word “believe,” but also with the words “think,” “see,” “hear,” “learn,” “expect,” “hope” etc. The use of multiple words for the same purpose at once reflects and articulates, among other things, (1) different ways that a state of affairs comes to be that given which it makes sense to X, (2) different ways that states of affairs contribute to the determination of what makes sense, and (3) different past and future actions of the actor. Which word is appropriate depends on what happened in the flow of activity and also on the contexts in which it occurred. When, for instance, I said “Come in” to the colleague at my office door, it is probably more accurate to say that I heard a knock than that I believed a knock occurred. Similarly, Davidson’s person might have more accurately explained that he had hoped—not that he had believed—that turning on the lights would chase away the gloom. The differences captured by the uses of these different terms publicly come out in various ways, including in the actor’s ensuing course of activity, in how she explains herself, in how she acts in parallel situations, in the different contexts in which these behaviors occur, and in how others respond to her.

2. Emotional Activity By an “emotional activity” I mean an activity among whose determinants is one or more emotions. Many thinkers have averred that the existence of emotional activity undermines the alleged teleological nature of human activity. Underlying this asseveration are, among other things, the wrought character of some emotional actions, their occasional seeming pointlessness or irrationality, the fact that they typically do not fit into wider plans and action sequences, and their often apparent impulsiveness. It is a good question whether all human actions are determined by emotions, or more plausibly, by emotions or moods (where moods differ from emotions, prominently, in lacking a distinct target).18 I will ignore this question because the answer to it is irrelevant to the present investigation: actions that emotions determine are usually done for an end, or so I will argue. I will also say nothing about what an emotion is, why people have them, or their neurophysiological character or basis. My aim in the present section is to explicate the complementarity between emotions and teleology. I will accomplish this goal by explaining how emotions determine activity according to the account of activity sketched in the previous section. It will be useful to have examples of emotional activity before us. Some of these are standard in the literature (1) Athletes pumping the air with joy after a spectacular play, or running towards one another and jumping into the air to bump chests.

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(2) Participants in a Shaker Sunday service whirling and crying out while doing so19 (3) A parent crying inconsolably out of grief over the death of a child (4) A cell phone user angrily throwing down and breaking a malfunctioning cell phone (5) A child angrily reaching out and slugging a sibling who won’t hand over her piece of pie (6) Filing a complaint against someone because of an off-hand comment (7) With relish, destroying letters from an ex-beau (8) Planning a rival’s demise (9) Kissing the picture of one’s beloved, or reaching out and stroking the hair of someone one loves (10) Figuring out a really good gift for one’s spouse (11) Proudly cutting a pose and strutting before a mirror after being complimented for one’s good looks (12) Bringing one’s recent accomplishments to the attention of all one’s colleagues (13) Bowing and cocking one’s head, or quickly leaving the room, in shame (14) Taking elaborate precautions to avoid shameful situations (15) Screaming in terror at a horror film (16) Jane gouging out the eyes of a photograph of Joan, her rival.20 Some of these actions are patently emotional given my descriptions of them (e.g., the use of adverbs of emotion). Activities that wear their emotional character on their sleeves are usually impulsive or spontaneous in character. The list also includes deliberate and thought out activities that are not clearly emotional (6, 8, 10, 14). They are not patently emotional because cases exist where the activities as specified are not emotionally determined. There are three general ways that emotions can determine activity, three general types of emotional activity. These three, note, are not mutually exclusive; a given action can be emotionally determined in more than one way. The first way emotions determine activity is by picking out which ways of being and states of affairs determine practical intelligibility. A shameful experience can, for example, lead a person to do things that make sense for the sake of avoiding shameful situations (e.g., speaking up at meetings only when addressed or playing games of basketball only against older opponents). Similarly, pride can lead a scholar to pursue the end of informing all his colleagues of his latest accomplishments, the specific actions carried out in pursuit of this end varying with opportunity and context. Alternatively, to vary this

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example, the scholar’s pride might cause a colleague’s mention of an accomplishment to be that given which it makes sense to him to boast in reply. In this alternative scenario, pride determines that the action that makes sense to the prideful person to perform is an action that makes sense to him given the colleague’s comment (i.e., it makes the comment salient to the prideful person). A final example is its being due to long-standing anger toward someone that an off-hand remark by that person becomes that given which it makes sense to file a complaint against him. It is worth adding that a way of being or state of affairs picked out by emotion can ceaselessly determine what makes sense to someone to do. Staggered by anger, for instance, gaining revenge can become an idée fixe that shapes and distorts a person’s life. This phenomenon explains some cases of neurotic or compulsive behavior. Emotions can either be occurrent or standing. An emotion is occurrent when it is expressed in current actions and states of consciousness. When these expressions cease, the emotion either no longer is occurrent or has dissipated (and thus was temporary). Occurrent anger, for instance, is expressed in bodily sensations, feelings of tension and gnawing, and involuntary bodily movements, as well as in a range of actions including some mentioned in the above list, for instance, a child slugging her sibling because of withheld pie. An emotion is standing, by contrast, when its manifestations in action and consciousness are intermittent and concentrated in episodes. Anger, for instance, can lay in wait before suddenly bursting forth in response to an offhand comment of the person at whom it is directed. Not all emotions can be standing. Grief and love, for instance, can, whereas joy cannot. The observation that emotions can determine activity by picking out which ways of being and states of affairs determine practical intelligibility parallels the thesis advanced by the still prevalent belief and desire causal account of action—whose principal thesis is that beliefs and desires cause actions—that the bearing of emotions on action is always mediated through beliefs and desires. Donald Davidson inaugurated and was a prominent defender of this account (the “standard account”). He claimed (1) that the reason for an intentional action causes the action21 and (2) that the reason for an intentional action consists of a desire together with the belief that the action performed is a means of attaining what is desired (more precisely: a pro attitude—desire, want, urge, fancy etc.—toward actions of a certain sort plus the belief that the action performed is of that sort).22 A further feature of the belief plus desire causal account of action (or at least almost all versions of it) is the idea that desires alone motivate action. Although Davidson, for example, analyzed the cause of an action as a desire conjoined with a belief, he really treated desire as the only mental condition capable of motivating action. For desires provide the descriptions that actions must satisfy in order to be performed, whereas

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beliefs simply certify that actions are of the desired types. As a result, the only way that an emotion can determine actions is by “fixing” which desires cause them. As I will explain shortly, this is one point at which my account of action diverges from the standard account. The “fixing” of desires consists in emotions either causing desires or themselves partly consisting of desires. It is important to acknowledge both possibilities. In the course of an important article, “Arational Actions,” Rosalind Hursthouse examines how the standard account would treat the case of Jane, who “in a wave of hatred for Joan, tears at Joan’s photo with her nails, and gouges holes in the eyes.” Hursthouse indicates that she agrees with the standard account that Jane’s action is motivated by a desire; in particular, “Jane does this because, hating Joan, she wants to scratch her face and gouge out her eyes.”23 It turns out that what Hursthouse means is that the desire that causes Jane’s action—her desire to scratch Joan’s face and gauge out her eyes—is part of her hatred for Joan: part of what it is for Jane to possess this emotion is for her to have this desire. Hursthouse also implicitly attributes this idea to the standard account. She continues by pointing out that, given Jane’s just mentioned desire, the standard conception applies to Jane’s action only if an absurd belief is attributed to Jane, for instance, that the photo of Joan is Joan herself: Jane’s desire to assault Joan together with her belief that this photo is Joan causes her to assault the photo. Hursthouse concludes that the standard conception cannot handle this case. David Charles points out that Hursthouse overlooks the first possibility mentioned above, namely, that emotions can lead people to pursue particular desires.24 When this occurs, emotions exert an efficient causality that resembles the efficient causality that Schutz attributed to past experiences that lead people presently to pursue particular purposes and ends. Charles claims that because the standard account can countenance this possibility, it can handle the example of Jane: Jane’s hatred causes her desire to attack the photo. Peter Goldie has more recently defended a propitious version of the standard view that desires alone motivate emotional actions, at least emotional actions of a certain type.25 The type concerned comprises “reasoned actions” performed “out of emotions.” Goldie contends that such actions, like all intentional actions, are caused by combinations of desire and belief. They are performed “out of emotions” in the sense that emotions give rise to the desires that motivate them. He claims, for example, that if a person jumps over a gate out of fear of a bull, the action is caused by a desire to escape the bull that arises from the person’s fear of it. Such cases clearly exist. Contra Goldie, however, it must be kept in mind that emotions can pick out, not just which ways of being, but also which states of affairs determine practical intelligibility. Emotions, that is, can also shape actions through beliefs, expectations,

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hopes, and the like. More importantly, it is even possible for emotions together with beliefs (perceptions, expectations etc.) alone, that is, sans desires, to be responsible for actions. It might be the case, for instance, that on coming across Joan’s photograph it made sense to Jane to attack it simply because she hates Joan so. Or it might be the case that coming across a photo of Jeanette, whom Jane holds up as a paragon of virtue, it makes sense to Jane to bite her lips and nod her head just because she esteems Jeanette so.26 Although desire, as a matter of fact, is involved on most occasions when emotions determine action, I see no convincing reason to insist—as the standard account typically does—that desire must always be complicit.27 Desire, cognition, and emotion can join in varied combinations to determine human behavior; emotions, too, can move activity. The second way emotions determine activity is by helping to determine, given certain states of affairs and for the sake of a particular way of being, which actions make sense to someone to perform. Until now, I have been presuming sotto voce that its “making sense” to perform an action means, to use Martin Hollis’s expression,28 that it makes rational sense to do so. What makes sense is what is rational—sensible, intelligent, and appropriate—given an end and a particular situation. Conceptions of practical reason assume that practical reasoning is rational in this sense. In this context, moreover, “rational” means rational from the perspective of the actor. The action that makes sense to perform is not one that is sensible, intelligent, and appropriate tout court, but one that is these according to the actor’s lights. What makes sense to someone to do can diverge from what is rational to that person to do. In particular, rational sense needs to be supplemented by what I call “emotional sense.” An action makes emotional sense to a person when it makes sense to her because of an end, circumstances, and an emotion, but it is not rational (from her perspective) given the end and circumstances. Such an action has a rationale and seems, to the actor, to be the thing to do. She thinks this, however, only because she is gripped by the emotion. Once free of the emotion, she would deem the action not rational. Suppose, for example, that a bus driver, near the end of her shift, sits second in line at a red light.29 The light turns green, but the driver of the car in front of her is talking on his cell phone and doesn’t notice. Suddenly, the bus driver, at great peril, swerves to the other side of the road in front of oncoming traffic, zooms around the stationary car, and speeds off, all the while muttering under her breath about damn cell phones. Imagine that it is due to her fear of the repercussions of arriving home late that this dangerous maneuver is what made sense to her to do given the inattentive driver and for the sake of getting home on time. This fear inflected how the end and the circumstances combined to pick out a particular action to perform. Her action was not rational. Things

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could have turned out disastrously, and alternative courses of action existed, for example, leaning on her horn. Only an irrational piece of practical reasoning could have picked out this action. Yet, driven by fear, the driver veered into traffic. It is due to this fear that it made sense to her to do this for the sake of getting home on time. As suggested, the end and the circumstances provide a reason for the action. “Why did you do that?”—“To get home on time; the jerk wasn’t paying attention.” This answer shows “the favorable light in which the agent saw what [s]he did.”30 The bus driver might also respond to this question by mentioning her fear: that if she did not get home on time her husband might start drinking again. The fact that the driver had reasons, that something, from her perspective, spoke for the action, is part of the point of speaking in this case of emotional “sense.” The reasons, however, are not good ones: clear thinking would have counseled against this action. Had the driver not been so fearful, she would have judged this action crazy and not performed it; in fact, it probably would not have occurred to her at all. Gripped by fear, however, an action which needlessly flirted with mayhem and death—hers and the passengers’—made sense to her to perform. The literature on emotions and action has ignored that emotions can shape activity by inflecting the determination of practical intelligibility—more conventionally formulated, by inflecting practical reasoning, e.g., desires and beliefs (etc.) combining to select or cause particular actions. Most writers highlight a contrast between actions that are caused primarily by desires that arise from emotions and actions that emotions directly cause (see below). Contemporary discussions also presume that desires and beliefs, in addition to causing actions, rationalize actions in the sense of constituting people’s reasons for acting, the favorable lights in which they view what they do. For most writers, accordingly, actions are either rationally caused, the product of reason, or emotionally caused. And emotions either feed input into practical reasoning or bypass practical reasoning altogether. I claim, by contrast, that emotions can also shape practical reasoning (or, rather, practical intelligibility)—either its progression, if it is treated as a process, or inferential relations among its propositions, if it is viewed as a structure. Lying behind the just mentioned contrast between rational causation and emotional causation is the peculiar modern opposition between reason (i.e., rationality) and emotion. This opposition has played a key role in many philosophical analyses of human life since Descartes and Hobbes, including those of Spinoza, Hume, and Kant. An important principle upheld by those promulgating the opposition between reason and emotion is that reasonableness requires the oppression of emotions. This principle is contravened by Aristotle’s observation that reason and emotion are potentially compatible.

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Emotion can bolster and be reason’s ally, fostering actions to which reason would also lead (virtue requires “truth in agreement with right desire”).31 The reverse, however, is also possible, though Aristotle did not note this. Reason can bolster and be emotion’s ally in cases where emotion leads people into action: under the spell of emotion, reason can provide rationales for actions that it might otherwise condemn. What is crucial is that reason and emotion are not opposed in principle and need not be opposed in fact. Philosophical analyses of human life based on the opposition between reason and emotion were contested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger among others. These philosophers centered human life in teleology and treated reason and emotion as facets of teleological life. I agree with these thinkers. Practical intelligibility is (largely) a teleological phenomenon. It is determined by desire, emotion, and cognition (belief, perception). Reason is a secondary notion. People’s reasons for actions are simply the determinants of practical intelligibility, whatever these are. What the tradition called “reason,” moreover, consists simply in actions that make sense to people to perform being intelligent, sensible, and appropriate from their perspectives. As explained, however, emotions can inflect the determination of practical intelligibility. Not everything that makes sense to people to do is sensible, intelligent, or appropriate from their own perspectives. The third way that emotions can determine activities is by directly causing them. Many of the examples listed at the beginning of this section illustrate this type of emotional activity, including pumping the air with joy after a spectacular play, crying out in a Shaker service while whirling about, crying inconsolably in grief, angrily throwing down a cell phone, screaming in terror at a horror film, proudly cutting a pose and strutting before a mirror after being complimented for one’s good looks, and Jane’s assault of Joan’s photograph. Of course, some of these activities as specified can also be emotional activities of the first two types. A person might cut a pose and strut before the mirror for the sake of improving his appearance, the pride he experienced after being complimented for his looks having picked out improving his looks as the project, component actions of which are what makes sense to him to perform. As for Jane, her hatred for Joan might have directly caused her attack on Joan’s photo. Alternatively, her hatred might have determined the attack by (1) being responsible for a desire to assault Joan’s photo or (2) making it the case that, for the sake of getting back at Joan for yesterday’s slight, it made sense to her to attack the photo. Knowing what actually happened requires ascertaining—in real life—or specifying—in imagined examples—further facts of the case. By “directly causing activity,” I mean that emotions determine activity in ways that bypass practical intelligibility and its determination. The actor does

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not do something that makes sense to him to do. Rather, the emotion—as the visceral experience of compulsion and impulse suggests—produces the activity bodily. The bodily feelings and sensations and agitated and frantic movements that often accompany or constitute these actions likewise point toward bodily causality. These facts indicate that further explication of this causation requires attention to neurophysiology.32 At the same time, bypassing practical intelligibility does not entail that the determination of these actions is a matter of neurophysiology alone. Various phenomena such as identity, commitments and values, and personal history can contribute to the occurrence of these actions, for instance, as standing causal conditions. The key point at present is that practical intelligibility is not involved. Emotional activity of this third type is often intentional activity in Austin’s sense: the actor means to do it and, when asked, reports that she does it. Not always, of course: a person, for instance, can slug a sibling despite herself. Slugging a sibling, throwing down a phone, or whirling and crying out in a Shaker dance can also straddle the line between intentional and not intentional. Parallel remarks hold regarding voluntary and involuntary. Emotional activity of the third sort can be voluntary or involuntary. Crying inconsolably out of grief is involuntary. This is also probably true of much of the whirling and singing out that took place in Shaker Sunday services. Throwing down a cell phone, by contrast, is usually voluntary: the actor could have stopped herself. Many instances, however, are ambiguous. Partly responsible for this ambiguity is the fact that people can struggle or learn not to perform these actions—not to cry, not to throw things down, not to scream at the screening of a horror film. People can likewise struggle against the emotional selection of which ends they pursue and which beliefs, perceptions, expectations, and hopes they act on. Their abilities to control any of these matters also vary. This third type of emotional action has been increasingly recognized in the literature despite its incompatibility with the standard desire plus belief causal conception of action. Sabine Döring, for example, explains them as follows. Emotions have representational content. An emotion’s representational content captures the import that a state of affairs holds for the person in its grip. The representational content of a person’s fear of a bear sitting before her on a trail, for instance, is the bear’s dangerousness. Part of what it is to be gripped by an emotion, moreover, is that the person who is under its spell feels its representational content, feels the import that some state of affairs holds for her, in this case, the dangerousness of the bear before her. This feeling translates directly into action.33 The hiker, for instance, who suddenly comes upon this bear feels the dangerousness of it before her, and this felt dangerousness directly causes fleeing. Note that although—as in this example—many emo-

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tional actions of the third type are triggered by something perceived, this need not be so; an example is the crying that gushes out of a grieving person. Hursthouse, to take another example, calls such actions “arational.” An arational action is an intentional action that is explained by current emotions but not performed for a reason. Hursthouse argues that arational actions are prompted by occurrent wants of a special sort that arise in a person who is the grip of an emotion: the person performs these actions “just because she wants to,” “for the sake of themselves.”34 According to Hursthouse, however, the desire to perform an action just because one wants to—the desire to perform an action for its own sake—does not amount to a reason. On my typology, an emotional action that is performed just because the actor wants to do it is an emotional action of the first sort: the emotion either is responsible for or partly consists in performing this action making sense for the sake of performing it. With relish destroying letters from an ex-beau is an example: confronted with his letters, a person’s hatred for him is responsible for it making sense to her to tear them up for the sake of destroying them. The case of Jane can be analyzed similarly.35 Some, however, of the actions that Hursthouse labels “arational,” in particular many “impulsive” or “spontaneous” emotional actions, cannot be analyzed thus. When, for example, someone inconsolably cries out of grief, the griever does not “just want to do this”; he does not cry “for the sake of crying itself.” Döring’s and Hursthouse’s accounts join mine in positing a direct causal connection between emotions and activity.36 All we really know, however, is that people in the grip of certain emotions do certain things. It is the felt experience of impulse, compulsion, and being caught up in action, both in one’s own case and those of others, that motivates the imputation of a causal connection between them. As more is learned about the neurophysiology of emotions, this experiential conviction will likely be replaced by confirmed knowledge. How emotions determine activity is socially circumscribed. In particular, it is circumscribed by social practices and their organizations. It is on the basis of practices and their organizations, for example, that such actions as berating, gauging out eyes, burning in effigy, and casting a spell might make sense to a hateful person to perform (Döring rightly points out that expressing hatred through the gauging out of eyes is reserved for women). Even how emotions cause activity independently of practical intelligibility often presupposes practices and people’s familiarity with them—think of pumping the air in joy, whirling and crying out out of devotion, kissing the picture of one’s beloved, and destroying the letters of an ex-beau. Of course, not all emotional activity of the third sort is socially underpinned; examples might include crying in grief and throwing down a broken cell phone in anger. What’s more, the fact

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that the emotional determination of activity is socially circumscribed does not preclude people changing—through action, media, and literature—which actions emotions cause or what can make sense to people to do in the grip of an emotion. The above discussion makes clear that the existence of emotional actions does not contradict the thesis that action is fundamentally teleological. Emotions determine action either by shaping practical intelligibility or by causing action independently of practical intelligibility. They shape intelligibility, moreover, by (1) picking out that for the sake of or given which people act or (2) inflecting what makes sense to people to do, given particular states of affairs and for the sake of certain ways of being. Usually emotions determine action by picking out ends or inflecting what makes sense. Apart from unusual cases such as neuroses, they only occasionally cause actions independently of practical intelligibility. Even less frequently, emotions, independently of ends (desires), combine with particular states of affairs (particular beliefs, perceptions, expectations etc.) to determine action. When emotions determine action, they generally do so by molding teleology. Emotions can abrogate temporality. They do so, however, only when people perform emotional actions of the third sort. When people perform such actions, the future and past fall away and abandon the present (current activity). What could have constituted the past of action, motivating what the actor does—that the cell phone is broken, that we made a spectacular play, that my son died—instead triggers an emotional reaction. Bereft of past and future, such activity is cut loose, without orientation, and, as a result, agitated and typically brief. Notwithstanding whatever evolutionary advantage such actions as impulsively fleeing in the face of fearful things might have secured for our ancestors, social life cannot tolerate too many emotional actions of this third sort: an emotionally atemporal life can survive—for instance, in asylums—only with assistance from those whose lives are temporal.37

3. Ceremony and Ritual Various scholars have presumed that ceremony and ritual are not teleological phenomena. Many reasons lie behind this presumption, including the traditional cast of most ceremonies and rituals, their repetitious quality, the symbolic character of many, the seeming pointlessness of some, and the existence of structural homologies among the rituals of far-flung peoples. In the eyes of these scholars, tradition, repetition, symbolism, seeming pointlessness, and structural homology suggest the absence, or dearth, of teleology, the fact that

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ceremony and ritual constitute “teleology-free zones of sociality” (apologies to Jürgen Habermas). Is this true? If so, just how pervasive are ceremony and ritual in human life? Some thinkers have argued that they pervade human existence and are found in all domains of action, even characterize all actions and practices. If these theorists are right, the reach of teleology might have to be reconsidered. Many analyses of ceremony and ritual exist. It would explode the current chapter systematically to consider them. The current section will, instead, proceed in two steps. I will first briefly discuss the starting point of, as well as a lesson to be drawn from, a prominent multidisciplinary debate that flared up in the 1960s and 70s about the character of so-called primitive magical and religious practices. Working with a recent theoretical conception of ceremony and ritual that distributes these phenomena throughout social life, I will, second, show how my account of activity and practice analyzes them. This analysis reveals how ceremony and ritual can be teleological phenomena despite their nonteleological aspects. Section 4 will then explain how the historian-anthropologist Mircea Eliade’s account of sacred space reveals a further facet of the complementarity between teleology and ceremony/ritual. The second step in the current section will focus largely on contemporary ceremonies and rituals. I do this because my interest in discussing ceremony and ritual lies in the challenge they seemingly pose to the pervasiveness of teleology, and they can pose such a challenge only if they are widespread in the contemporary world and not just at earlier stages of western history or in the lives of “primitive” peoples. Residents of contemporary North Atlantic countries sometimes believe that they perform many fewer ceremonies and rituals than do either their ancestors or traditional peoples generally. Social observers have added that contemporary life is steadily losing the rituals it does retain. These convictions reflect the fact that anthropologists and sociologists have long associated the expression “ritual” with magic, religion, and myth.38 For, according to a familiar story, science, technology, and rationality have supplanted magic, religion, and myth in modern North Atlantic life. It follows that ceremony and ritual can truly challenge the pervasiveness of teleology only if they are not straight off restricted to magic, religion, and myth. They must be so delimited as to encompass nonmagical, nonreligious, and nonmythical phenomena, too. Of course, an alternative reaction to the just cited familiar story is to claim that ceremony and ritual challenge the pervasiveness of teleology only in “premodern” worlds. I will not address this reaction head on. I will, however, indirectly consider it by recalling the starting point and one lesson of the aforementioned debate on primitive religion and magic and, in section 4, taking up Eliade’s stark dichotomy between profane and sacred worlds.

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Instrumental Versus Expressive Religious and Magical Activities One now classical way of analyzing ritual, construed as magical, religious, and mythical activity, is to characterize it as expressive practice and to distinguish between, even oppose, expressive and instrumental practice. An impressive line of social investigators applied this distinction to the study of social life in the middle stretches of the twentieth century, including Bronislav Malinowski, Ernst Cassirer, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, R. G. Collingwood, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Talcott Parsons, Edmund Leach, Leslie White, and John Beattie. Lying behind this dichotomy is Emile Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and the profane. Instrumental practice, what I label “teleological” practice, is activity carried out for particular ends. The ends can be of any sort, from “practical”—building a boat, reaping a good harvest, getting revenge—to “spiritual”—appeasing the gods, inducing higher powers to do one’s bidding, or resecuring the group’s place in the cosmos. There is no generally agreed definition of expressive practice. It is analyzed as activity that expresses feelings, emotions, or attitudes, that says or communicates something, or that is symbolic, the variety of concepts and accounts of expression, saying, communication, and symbolism expanding the spectrum of preferred analyses.39 In the 60s and 70s, the distinction between the instrumental and the expressive helped shape a lively debate among philosophers, anthropologists, and sociologists about the character of religious and magical practices. The anthropologists and sociologists party to this debate took “instrumental” to mean directed to an end. By contrast, many of the philosophers involved interpreted “instrumental” as rational. These philosophers were as interested in situating ritual relative to the distinction between rationality and expression as positioning it relative to the distinction between teleology and expression.40 Their attention to rationality reflected their professional preoccupation with it as well as their conviction that rationality is central to how an anthropologist copes in and with another culture.41 In their hands, the issue of the relation of rituals to ends was doubled by the question of whether rituals are sensible, intelligent, and appropriate ways of achieving certain ends. The discussion thereby moved onto terrain plowed by anthropologists such as Sir Edmund Frazer, Jack Goody, and Robin Horton, who interpreted rituals as practices that, although carried out for practical ends, are far less successful than are those based on modern science. This debate was partly triggered by the work of Peter Winch. In turn, Winch’s views on ritual and religion were based on Wittgenstein’s comments about James Frazer and about religious belief. Squarely opposing Frazer’s attempt to portray magic and religion as inferior or faulty science, Wittgenstein appeared to draw a sharp contrast between expressive and teleological

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activities. In his so-called Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, he wrote, inter alia, (1) that activities such as burning in effigy or kissing the picture of one’s beloved do not aim at anything else (instead, “we just act so and then feel satisfied”), (2) that magic expresses a wish instead of aiming to bring about some result, and (3) that rituals are spontaneous, instinctual reactions of a ceremonial animal to impressive worldly phenomena—lightning, the sun, majestic oak trees etc.—that express shared wishes, feelings, values, and understandings of these phenomena.42 Regarding religion, Wittgenstein claimed, among other things, that to profess a religious belief is not to propound a thesis or view about reality, but instead to affirm the centrality of an idea in one’s life, that it is something one will stand by come what may.43 Winch, building on Wittgenstein, embraced a strong dichotomy between practices that sensibly pursue material ends, for example, the control of nature, and practices that symbolically express attitudes and emotions.44 Focusing his discussion on the Azande witchcraft practices that Evans-Pritchard had made famous,45 Winch declared that, whereas modern science consequentially seeks to control nature, Azande witchcraft practices express an attitude toward contingencies that enables the Zande to go on living in the face of adversity. This opposition ignited a still continuing discussion about the proper analysis of magic and religion. Looking back, I believe it is fair to say that one important lesson to be gleaned from this debate is that teleology and expression coexist. Instead of trying comprehensively to show that the debate suggests this, I will cite three witnesses for this conclusion. The first witness is interpretive. Many commentators have claimed that Wittgenstein viewed ritual and religion as expressive phenomena as opposed to teleological ones.46 Wittgenstein’s texts, as indicated, abet such an interpretation. Other commentators, however, have argued, persuasively in my opinion, that in criticizing Frazer Wittgenstein did not deny the teleological dimension of ritual. This second group of commentators holds that a principal aim of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of Frazer was to suggest that rituals are spontaneous, unratiocinated reactions (“instinct-actions”), as opposed to thought-out ways of acting based on reasoned beliefs about the world.47 The aim of his criticisms, in other words, was to suggest that it is wrong to construe rituals as intellectual phenomena (Frazer had treated them as inferior science), not to suggest that rituals lack ends; the principal target of these critical remarks was the intellectualist Frazer, not the instrumental one. Another way of putting this thesis is that Wittgenstein did not dispute the teleological dimension of rituals, but questioned the probity of judging rituals to be rational or irrational. A lecture remark of Wittgenstein’s reported by Alice Ambrose is telling here: “People at one time thought it useful to kill

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a man, sacrifice him to the God of fertility, in order to produce good crops. But it is not true that something is always done because it is useful. At least this is not the sole reason.”48 In this remark, Wittgenstein acknowledged the existence of instrumental ritual actions, the existence of noninstrumental actions, and maybe also the existence of actions that are multiply instrumental, that is, performed for multiple reasons. It is also worth pointing out—for those familiar with Wittgenstein’s remarks—that when Wittgenstein wrote in the “Remarks on Frazer” that burning in effigy does not aim at anything, he was talking about effigy burnings that take place in modern western life, in practices that are better characterized as festival than as magic or religion. The remark, in other words, is a comment about a modern version of a longstanding practice that might have lost the teleological significance of its religious and magical predecessors. The second witness is one of the most insightful approaches to primitive religion and magic to emerge from this debate. In his essay “Rationality,” Charles Taylor notes that two cognitive achievements often opposed to one another—the explanatory understanding of a meaningless reality and the wise attunement with a meaningful cosmos—separated during a particular period of western history, namely, during the emergence of modern science.49 Ever since that period, concerns with explanation and concerns with wisdom have been assigned to different individuals and practices, for instance, the scientist and the sage (if wisdom is assigned to anyone). Prior to the rise of modern science, by contrast, philosophers and theologians were concerned with explanation and wisdom alike. Any attempt to grasp their theoretical practices by classifying these practices on one side or the other of this dichotomy is anachronistic. According to Taylor, the strong separation between instrumental and expressive practices that marks the debate about the character of primitive religion and magic likewise arose during a particular period of western history, one in which religion and art differentiated out as distinct realms of practice. Today, now that this differentiation has occurred, science, engineering, planning, economy, and politics are generally treated instrumentally as practical arenas, while religion and art are seen as expressive realms.50 A strong separation between instrumental and expressive has also taken root in those parts of the world that the west has transformed. Any attempt to understand past or pre-westernized practices through this strong separation is doomed to ethnocentrism. Modern westerners must recognize that the types of practice domain that characterize past or pre-westernized peoples differ from their own. Correlatively, they must cease carving these other peoples’ worlds along the types of domain that exist in the west, for instance, instrumental versus expressive, or science, religion, economy etc. It follows that it is also mislead-

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ing to label the practices of past or pre-westernized peoples “magic,” “ritual,” or “science.” These are our terms and retain something of the opposition found in recent western history between magic and religion, on the one hand, and science and technology on the other.51 Nevertheless, Taylor implies, teleology and expression characterize premodern and prewesternized societies as much as they do modern western ones. The fact that different types of practice are open to different peoples does not imply that either teleology or expression can be absent from any social world. What varies from time and place to time and place, and across practices at a particular time and place, is the mix of teleology and expression; whereas we in the modern west have created practices that specialize in one or the other, the two strongly intermingle in the practices of others. Expression, in short, is not opposed to teleology; it can join with teleology in varied combinations. The third witness is the growing recognition that the ethnographic record leaves little doubt that people pursue ends in carrying out primitive magic and religion. Practitioners of traditional religion and magic typically report, for example, that they pursue particular ends when practicing them.52 One can argue, as did Marx and Winch, among others, that people can be mistaken about themselves, just as one can argue, as did Freud and Davidson, that what people say about themselves is simply part of the total evidence on the basis of which an interpreter does or does not attribute particular ends to them. The magnitude of the evidence has made plain, however, that in this context these gambits are merely theoretical. Traditional peoples carry out their rituals for diverse purposes.53 Of course, most observers agree that there is more, indeed, much more to rituals than simply this. Prominent anthropologists and sociologists have long argued that the instrumental and the expressive combine in much human practice, including magic. Consider, for example, this quotation from Edmund Leach: Almost every human action that takes place in culturally defined surroundings is divisible in this way; it has a technical aspect which does something and an aesthetic, communicative aspect which says something. In those types of behavior that are (typically) labeled ritual . . . the aesthetic, communicative aspect is particularly prominent . . . But it is equally a matter of “ritual” that whereas an Englishman would ordinarily eat with a knife and fork, a Chinese would use chopsticks . . . the term ritual is best used to denote this communicative aspect.54

Indeed, John Beattie forcefully claimed that no “present-day” anthropologist denies that primitive magic and ritual combine the instrumental and the expressive.55 Of course. what is equally true is that the penchant of (some)

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anthropologists such as Leach to cite expression or something similar as what distinguishes magic and ritual from science and practical activity obscured the fact that ritual and magic are also instrumental. Beattie offered an instructive analysis of ritual as both expressive/symbolic and instrumental. By “expressive” and “symbolic,” Beattie meant that a ritual says something, respectively, represents abstract notions that those performing it greatly value. A ritual is also carried out in pursuit of something, i.e., for a purpose. Beattie had an insightful idea about the connection between the expressive/symbolic and instrumental dimensions of ritual: the instrumental character of ritual, the fact that practitioners carry it out for particular purposes, rests on their belief in the instrumental efficacy of the fact that the ritual says or stands for something, i.e., it rests on their belief that the expressive or symbolic qualities of the ritual are what bring about the desired effect.56 Suppose, for instance, that a rain dance symbolizes rain and that its practitioners perform it with the idea that will bring about rain. They do so in the belief that it is because the dance symbolizes rain that performing it will, say, induce the powers and spirits that watch over the world to bestow rain. Incidentally, Beattie contrasted the magico-religious, which mixes the expressive and instrumental, with art, which he treated as purely expressive.57 An analysis that parallels his account of the magico-religious can, however, be given of art. Art, to be sure, is symbolic or expressive. Artists, however, produce art for this or that purpose, including for the sake of making a living, in order to communicate something, and for its own sake. Just like ritual practices, therefore, practices of art are both expressive and instrumental. It is the product of these practices, art qua entity, that is more plausibly characterized as purely symbolic. Beattie also characterized rituals as ends in themselves.58 This characterization parallels Hursthouse’s claim that arational actions are performed for their own sake. The characterization also implies that the performance of ritual serves two ends, namely, the performance itself and what its practitioners seek to achieve in performing it: ritual is both an end in itself and a means toward a further end. Like Leach, among others, Beattie averred that expression and symbolism distinguish ritual from practical activity: ritual is symbolic-expressive, and practical activity is not. It turns out, however, that Beattie thought that rituals differ from practical activities also in that people perform rituals both for their own sake and for the results they promise, whereas they carry out practical activities only as means. Although Beattie did not point this out, this difference provides a teleological ground for contrasting ritual and practical activity.59 Anthropological research teaches that ritual does not preclude teleology. Even those anthropologists who emphasized that the distinguishing mark or

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center of gravity of rituals is expression and symbolism conceded that people have purposes, and take themselves to have purposes, in carrying rituals out. What’s more, the main opponents of expressivist and symbolist analyses of ritual treated rituals as instrumental phenomena, comparable, albeit unfavorably, to instrumental practices based on modern western science. All thinkers, finally, acknowledged that, whatever the nature of ritual, much of the lives of premodern peoples is spent in practical end-oriented activity. In short, the debate on the character of primitive magic and religion strongly points toward the conclusion that these phenomena do not challenge the near ubiquity of teleology. Teleological Ceremony I will now defend the same conclusion regarding the ceremonies and rituals of modern life. I will first appropriate a conception of ceremony and ritual according to which these phenomena are prevalent in the contemporary world and not just in traditional ones. I will then spell out how ceremony and rituals so conceived are analyzed on my account of activity and practice. This analysis will show that teleology inhabits all ceremony and ritual. I begin, once again, with a list of recent or contemporary ceremonies and rituals. (1) Singing “My Ol’ Kentucky Home,” alternatively, “The Star Spangled Banner,” at the beginning of a University of Kentucky basketball game (2) A Sunday Shaker worship service (3) Shaking hands with other people (4) The Blessing of the Hounds performed at the start of the fox hunt season at the Iroquois Hunt Club in Lexington, Kentucky60 (5) A wedding ceremony (6) A funeral (7) Burning someone in effigy at a political rally (8) Lighting the menorah at Hanukkah (9) A Native American rain dance (10) Burning sins at New Year61 The sociologist Steven Lukes defines ritual as “rule-governed activity of a symbolic character that draws the attention of its participants to objects of thought and feeling which they hold to be of special significance.”62 This definition resembles Beattie’s definition of symbolic activity. Two significant differences are that the activities concerned are conceived of as rule-governed

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and that they draw attention to objects of thought and feeling instead of standing for them. Lukes’s definition of ritual as a kind of rule-governed activity is important: ceremonies and rituals do seem to be more “rule-governed” than are other social activities. Focusing on rule-governedness nevertheless obscures other dimensions of ceremony and ritual. A wedding ceremony, to be sure, is governed by rules. Equally if not more essential to the ceremony, however, is the fact that some of those involved carry it out for the sake of getting married. Gilbert Lewis has suggested, moreover, that because those who carry out a ritual know that it is supposed to follow precedent in order to be effective or proper, they expect rules to exist and ask for them whenever they are not sure how to proceed.63 As a result, those in authority or with special knowledge are sometimes called on to make rulings about what is supposed to occur (or about what this or that action, event, or entity means). This dynamic implies both that the purpose of rules is often to eliminate circumstantial uncertainty regarding ongoing performance and that rules are not necessary to the extent that performance is sure-footed. Lewis’s observations thus suggest that rituals are less rule-governed than it might seem. A theory of ceremony and ritual must clearly highlight factors other than the rules that determine and circumscribe action. Expanding Lukes’s analysis, Paul Connerton suggests that rituals, presumably because of their rule-governedness, evince repetition, if not also stylization and stereotypification.64 Rituals, for sure, are repetitious; they are also sometimes stylized and stereotypical. Above all contemporary rites, however, can leave open considerable latitude for how people perform what is repeated. Burning in effigy is an example, as is shaking hands. Connerton also claims that calling people’s attention to objects of thought and feeling articulates meanings and values that color activities beyond the ritual itself. This holds of the sorts of monumental public ceremonies (e.g., massive Nazi commemorations) that Connerton has in mind, but it is not obviously a feature of many contemporary rituals. I am not sure that whatever thoughts and feelings shaking hands calls attention to—and it is not clear how often shaking hands calls attention to these—are significant for other activities. Burning sins at New Years is an interesting example in this regard, since it is supposed to have this effect but probably rarely does. Something similar can be said about the ceremonious singing of songs before sporting events. Lukes’s definition attributes considerably more ritual to contemporary western life than is recognized by the equation of ritual with magic and religion. It is insufficiently capacious, however, to support the contention that contemporary life contains considerable ceremony and ritual, let alone the thesis that all practices are partly ceremonial in nature. Let me turn, then, to a recent analysis by the anthropologist Wendy James. James argues that the

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consignment of ritual to religion and magic, buoyed by the modern western separation of the instrumental from the expressive that underlies this consignment, has hobbled the study of primitive ritual. For it associates primitive ritual with western religion understood as a domain of activity and belief separate from science and the practical sphere. This consignment has also blinded theorists to the prevalence of ceremony and ritual in all domains of contemporary life. According to James, another baleful idea that arises from the separation of religion and science is that ceremony and ritual are distinct practices, as opposed to qualities of all practices. In her eyes, “Ritual, symbol, and ceremony are not simply present or absent in the things we do; they are built in to human action.”65 James develops this thesis without defining ceremony straight out. Invoking a Wittgensteinian notion of grammar as forms of agreement in practice, she instead introduces the idea of ceremonial grammar, of “forms of agreement in the way we ‘dance’ with one another.”66 Pursuing the analogy with dance, she construes this ceremonial grammar as a “layered choreography” that pervades social life. This grammar, or choreography, comprises “rules about space, time, a sense of sequenced action within an anticipated or designed event, and of formal relations between participants.”67 I think, although James does not state this, that space should be understood as including the place-path layout of the world. As David Parkin has emphasized, “directionality, movement, and spatial orientation” are essential to ritual; every ritual embraces a place-path layout.68 (Similarly, time should include the temporality of activity, though averring this begs the basic issue in this chapter.) Other features of dance that pervade social life include the “counterpoint of style and rhythm,”69 the “vital etiquette of personal encounters,”70 and the production of meanings open to contestation and interpretation.71 I believe that it is fair to say that ceremonial grammar specifies an amalgam of interwoven timespaces and objective times and spaces for ceremonial activities. According to James, finally, ritual—as opposed to ceremony—is deliberate ceremonial performance.72 All in all, in focusing on ceremony instead of on ritual, and thereby sidestepping the association of ritual with religion, magic, and premodern or precolonial ways of acting, James brilliantly makes plausible to modern ears the claim that something associated with dance is ubiquitous in social life.73 The examples of ceremony and ritual listed at the beginning of this subsection all evince ceremonial grammars, layered choreographies embracing rules or senses of space, time, the sequencing of action within greater wholes, and relations and interactions among participants. Even something as potentially perfunctory as hand-shaking exhibits a grammar since timing, an etiquette of grasping and shaking, an understanding of one’s own actions as part of an interaction, and the institution of relations among participants are features of

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this dispersed practice. Singing anthems before sporting events likewise fits this specification, as evidenced by the actions of standing at one’s seat, facing the flag, and putting a hand over one’s heart (or not doing these things), as well as by the pace of the singing, the connectedness of the audience in the activity, and the shared anticipation of both the end of the song and the commencement of the competition. More complex rituals such as wedding ceremonies and funerals embrace more elaborate choreographies of such matters. So, too, does the Native American rain dance. Any such dance makes a specified use of space, involves movement and directionality at an elaborate place-path array anchored in a setting, occurs at certain moments in the year, requires that individuals have a sense of timing, and comprises actions that must be performed in the correct sequence and at the proper places in order for the dance to count as proper and to be potentially successful in influencing higher powers. How does my account of activity and practice analyze ceremony and ritual? Recall the conception of practice drawn on in previous chapters. A practice is an organized, open-ended array of doings and sayings. This array is organized by a set of (1) action understandings, which combine abilities to perform actions, to recognize others’ actions, and to respond to those actions, (2) rules, which are formulated directives, instructions, admonishments, and the like, (3) a teleological-affective structure, which embraces a range of ends, projects, actions, combinations thereof, and emotions that participants should or acceptably pursue or exhibit, and (4) general understandings of matters germane to the practice involved, including the abstract notions that Beattie and Lukes claim rituals, respectively, stand for or call attention to. Organizing Shaker worship practices, for example, is an understanding that dancing is a form of selfpurgative, ecstatic activity in which war can be prosecuted against sin and evil. The organizations of practices contain and lay down the ceremonial grammar that James attributes to social life. Consider a wedding ceremony. Regardless of what specific practices a particular wedding enacts (multiple such practices might be available at a given time and place), the ceremony, as Lukes observes, is rule-governed. Rules that are either articulated by parents and officials or written in manuals and guides are bound to specify some of the following features of the ceremony: (1) spatialities and spaces (e.g., principals before the audience at a designated place; processionals through the audience along aisles as paths toward that place), (2) objective times (e.g., the length of the ceremony, vows, and musical interludes), (3) action sequences, and (4) formal relations and interactions (e.g., between the person officiating and the persons marrying, between parents and future sons- and daughters-in-law, between the principals and the best men and ladies in waiting). Rules, however, are only one component of practice organization; ceremonial

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grammar is not laid down by rules alone.74 Some of the above matters might be delineated by general understandings—such as those of matrimony and union—that inform the wedding (and possibly other) practices. The teleoaffective structure of the wedding practices, moreover, delimits acceptable or enjoined ends, acceptable or prescribed projects to execute for these ends, and acceptable or enjoined activities to perform for these projects. The teleoaffective structure thus embodies, prescribes, and circumscribes spaces, times, sequences, and formal relations that characterize the ceremony. Even people’s common and shared understandings of how to carry out particular actions, for instance, walking down the aisle, giving speeches, and exchanging gifts, underlie ceremonial grammar. All of this organization conspires to guarantee, finally, that the timespaces of those carrying on or attending a wedding ceremony are common, shared, and orchestrated. A practice and an activity are ceremonial (or ritualistic) in different senses. A practice is ceremonial to the extent that its organization specifies spaces, times, action sequences, action rhythms, and both formal relationships and nuanced interactions among participants. All practices are ceremonial in this sense. Indeed, much of what practice organization imposes on human activity amounts to ceremony. What varies among practices is the extent of their ceremonialness and the relative contributions of the different components of practice organization to it. The ceremonial quality of the dispersed practice of shaking hands lies in proper spatial uses and directionalities of the hands and body, a sense of the proper time to act, a sensitivity to the specific movements of the other person, and the establishment of new relationships. The first three features are carried in handshakers’ common or shared action understandings, whereas the fourth feature is carried in their common or shared general understanding of acquaintanceship. The ceremonial character of the practice of singing anthems before sporting events, meanwhile, reflects understandings of these sorts and also rules as well as a simple teleoaffective structure. The strongly ceremonial character of Shaker Sunday worship, the Blessing of the Hounds, lighting the menorah, burning sins at New Year, funerals, and the Native American rain dance likewise result from all dimensions of practice organization. Whether an activity, by contrast, is ceremonial or not depends on the organization of the practice of which it is a part: an activity is ceremonial just in case it is governed by a component of practice organization that specifies ceremony. An activity that is governed by a rule about either the spatial arrangement of people or the place-path layout at a wedding ceremony is a ceremonial activity. So, too, for example, is any activity whose position in an activity sequence reflects a prescribed or acceptable end-project-action combination (e.g., the sequence of actions that the principals perform or the order

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in which toasts and speeches are made), as well as any activity that reflects a general understanding of relations between participants (for example, hugging a new in-law). This delimitation of ceremony leaves considerable room for nonceremonial activities: much of what people specifically do and say at a wedding is not governed by those components of practice organization that specify space, time, sequence, relations, and interactions. The ceremonial character of an activity does not exhaust the nature of that activity. In particular, a person can, and usually does, act ceremonially for a purpose. At a wedding, for instance, the principals carry out the complex sequence of ceremonial actions for the sake of getting married (or of marrying them). At a Sunday Shaker worship service, Shakers stood and began to dance for the sake of initiating more ecstatic and frenzied activity; they carried out the ceremony, moreover, for the sake of shaking off the flesh. A person, meanwhile, shakes another person’s hands for the sake of friendliness, for the sake of instituting a relationship, or for the sake of upholding acquaintance practices. And people burn others in effigy for the sake of demonstrating hatred or loathing, burn sins at New Year’s for the sake of publicly affirming their resolve to act differently in the new year, and perform their part in the Blessing of the Hounds for the sake of bringing good fortune to the hunt, getting the first hunt going, or upholding tradition.75 Circumscribing the teleological character of ceremonial activities is the organization of the practices of which they are part, in particular, the teleoaffective structures of these practices. Any practice prescribes and/or deems acceptable a variety of ends. The range of acceptable ends extends well beyond those prescribed. The practice of singing anthems before sporting events, for instance, admits various acceptable ends for the sake of which people might stand up and sing, including expressing allegiance to country, expressing one’s identity as member of a group, doing what others do, and not standing out in a crowd. Wedding practices similarly delineate acceptable ends for participants to pursue. For the wedded, these include joining in indefinite union, getting rich, combating loneliness, and keeping on good terms with one’s parents, while for the official presiding these include doing one’s job, fulfilling a contract, doing someone a favor, substituting for the minister, and so on. A participant in a ceremony usually acts for one of the acceptable ends delimited in the organization of the relevant practice. Because ceremonial activities can be, and usually are, carried out for a purpose, they can be strategic. A strategic action is an action performed pursuant to a scarce item in knowledge of other people’s actions and plans. The scarce item can be money, property, goods, consumables, power, prestige, a desired sexual object, the favor of authority, and so on. It was once thought that the symbolic and expressive qualities of ritual precluded its strategic per-

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formance. Over time, however, myriad anthropologists have described how people manipulate, deceive, and control through ritual conduct. Indeed, rituals can be a medium of power and domination as well as a site of contestation and competition, say, for scarce resources or for legitimating leadership roles. Ceremony and strategy are not mutually exclusive. The ends for which people perform ceremonial actions can, though need not, be group-oriented. A Shaker might get up and commence dancing for the sake of our—not his or her own—shaking off the flesh (which we can only do together). Similarly, someone might help burn an enemy in effigy for the sake of demonstrating our hatred of that person, or perform his part in the Blessing of the Hounds for the sake of bringing good fortune to our hunt. When an end is we-regarding as opposed to self-regarding and can be attained only by coordinated actions from those forming the we involved, I call the end a “collective” end. A common end, by contrast, is an end that is prescribed either of anyone participating in or of some specified set of participants in the practice(s) concerned. Attaining a common end might or might not require coordinated actions, and the end itself can be either self- or we-regarding. An important subtype of collective and common ends alike comprises ends that are ascribed to ceremonial practices either in the sayings that help compose those practices, in texts that are believed to guide them, or by authorities who watch or preside over them. It might, for instance, be part of the Native American Rain Dance to chant, or for the priest to intone, that the proceedings will induce higher powers to bestow rain. (Whether those carrying on the ritual do so for the purpose of influencing higher powers is a further question.) Of course, social investigators have long attributed purposes to practices and institutions that diverge from those formulated by native or member sayings, texts, and authorities. They have also sometimes affirmed a tight connection between such purposes and those pursued by participants in the practices or members of the institutions. Regardless of what one thinks about such ends and purposes, it is important to keep them separate from the ends and purposes (1) for which people perform the actions that compose practices and institutions or (2) which people formulate and attribute to their practices and institutions. My present concerns are with the latter two sorts alone. So-called functionalist anthropologists and sociologists have also long sought to identify the functions of ritual and ceremony. They have argued that ritual and ceremony, among other things, strengthen social solidarity, foster group identity, resolve personal and social problems, reaffirm a group’s moral principles, or symbolize or present the central concepts, motivations, and anxieties that organize and give meaning to people’s lives. Functions such as these can be theoretically analyzed as either feedback-secured causal effects

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of the performances of ceremonies and rituals, achievements ipso facto realized in these performances, or the point of carrying out ceremony and ritual. Functions so analyzed might in fact characterize many overtly ceremonial practices and institutions. Functions, however, must be distinguished both from the ends people pursue in carrying out ceremonial and ritual actions and from the ends and purposes they attribute to their ceremonies and rituals. How is the practical intelligibility that governs ceremonial and ritual activities determined? Consider the shaking of hands. The intelligibility at work in such an activity might take the following form: given that Jones has just introduced us and that the person introduced is initiating the act of shaking hand, it makes sense, for the sake of being friendly—or for the sake of initiating a relationship or for the sake of upholding decorum—to shake hands. Similarly, the practical intelligibility that governs a priest calling his tribe together to begin a rain dance might take the following teleological form: given that the sun rose today at the midpoint between the two sacred mountains (as seen from a certain spot outside the village), it makes sense, for the sake of appeasing the gods—or for the sake of doing what is incumbent on priests—to call the tribe to gather. In these two examples, practical intelligibility is teleological in nature. The practical intelligibility that governs ceremonial or ritualistic actions, however, need not be teleological. Vis-à-vis hand shaking, for instance, it might be that it makes sense to shake hands simply because Jones has introduced us and doing so is customary. Similarly, it might make sense to the priest to call out the tribe because the sun rose today at the midpoint between the two mountains and when this occurs priests are supposed to do this. In cases such as these, it makes sense to people to act ceremoniously or ritually because the ceremony or ritual is enjoined or customary, and not for the sake of anything (“customary” = what is done, what we do, what one does). It is even possible for activities and practices to be so taken-for-granted, or better, “lived into” (eingelebt) as Max Weber put it,76 that in certain circumstances its making sense to people to perform them does not even rest on the shouldness or customariness of the performance. It might make sense to shake hands, for instance, simply because Jones has introduced us—tout court. Likewise, it might make sense to the priest to call out the tribe simply because the sun rose at the midpoint between the mountains. These possibilities bear some resemblance to those cases of emotional action in which emotions pick out which states of affairs determine practical intelligibility. Practices, too, can do this. Some theorists have argued that ceremonial and ritual activities generally are ateleological in these ways (or that this is the character of traditional activities generally).77 What is true is that people can ateleologically perform the actions that compose simple ceremonies such as handshaking. They can

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also ateleologically perform some of the actions that make up more elaborate ceremonies such as rain dances, the Blessing of the Hounds, lighting the menorah, funerals, and even weddings. In the midst of carrying on a ceremony or ritual such as these, a person can purposelessly observe a rule or purposelessly perform an enjoined activity: now, for instance, that my compatriots have begun carrying out one part of the ceremony, it can make sense to me to commence the next part simply because this is the prescribed sequence and my role is to perform the next part. Ceremonies, finally, can be initiated simply because they are enjoined or customary. As suggested, it might make sense to the priest to call out the tribe simply because this is what priests should do when the sun rises at the midpoint between the two mountains. In these sorts of case, a person, without pursuing an end, does something simply because it is enjoined or customary. Norms and customs can, therefore, neutralize teleology, the future dimension of action temporality. I described above how emotions can extinguish the future and past dimensions of temporality and reduce action to a bodily reaction into the world. Norms and customs do not extinguish the future. They, instead, pre-empt it: they short circuit the teleological determination of practical intelligibility by themselves specifying what makes sense to people to do. Usually, furthermore, norms and customs leave the past dimension of activity intact: what makes sense to someone to do is what makes sense given such and such states of affairs and such and such norms and customs. I do not believe, incidentally, that practices (norms, customs, traditions) can determine activity in the third way emotions can do this—by causing it independently of practical intelligibility. Ceremonial actions are never wrought causal reactions. What is true is that the prescription or customariness of activities such as shaking the hand of someone to whom you are introduced and calling out the tribe when the sun rises at a certain place, need not help motivate ceremonial performance; the motivation for such performances can be exhausted by the states of affairs that occasion them (e.g., the approaching hand, the sunrise between the mountains). Usually, however, what norms and customs prescribe contributes to the motivation of the performance: the enjoinment or customariness of the action is part of the reason it is performed. Even when this is not the case, the actor, if queried, is typically able to summon up the prescriptive status of the action as a further reason for the activity. I have been describing ways that ceremonial activities can ateleologically conform to norm and custom. Many such actions, however, are performed for the sake of something. For example, what norms and customs prescribe often fills out, not the motivations that lie behind ceremonial actions, but the purposes or ends for which they are carried out. A person, for instance, might

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shake the other’s hand in order to do what is customary and not because doing so is customary. A person can also perform ceremonial actions, not only in order to do what is prescribed, but also in order to do what others are doing: even though he hates the ceremony, the person might shake the other’s hand so as to do what others do. In addition, the flip side of a possibility mentioned above—the ateleological performance of some of the actions that compose complex ceremonies—is that other such actions can be performed for a purpose. For instance, after an Iroquois club member, per custom, bows his head and listens to the minister’s blessing of the hounds, he might hurriedly line up to receive an individual blessing for the sake of getting the hunt going. This commingling of actions done for a purpose with actions performed simply out of adherence to a custom or norm can mask the presence of teleology. Most importantly, most people who perform a ceremony or ritual report that they do so for a purpose or end.78 When a ceremony or ritual is carried out for a purpose or end, the actions that compose it are also performed for a purpose or end, namely, the purpose(s) or end(s) for which people carry out the ceremony or ritual concerned. This is true whether or not these actions are performed according to standing rule or custom (and whether or not the actors have additional purposes or ends in performing individual actions). People might, for example, participate in a rain dance for the sake of bringing about rain, for the sake of doing what is customary, for the sake of doing what others are doing, or so on. The actions and sequences thereof that compose the dance might be enacted, moreover, according to custom.79 The ends for which the people individually participate in the dance—regardless of what they are—anchor the intelligibilities that govern their performances of the customarily sequenced actions: the dancers enact the ritual according to custom and for the sake of this or that end. Similarly, a person might attend a funeral for the sake of supporting a grieving family but then carry out the ceremonial actions disinterestedly, inattentively, and mechanically. He performs these actions for the sake of standing by the family, even though this end makes no contribution to what he specifically does, and he might even appear not to be acting purposively at all. As indicated, one way of teleologically carrying out a ceremony or ritual is to perform it for the sake of doing either what others do or what one is supposed to do. One can shake hands for the sake of decorum, attend a funeral to do what one is supposed to do, stand and sing “My Ol’ Kentucky Home” to join in with others, and participate in the Blessing of the Hounds for the sake of acting like other Iroquois Club members, just as one can light the menorah at Hanukkah, help burn someone in effigy, and even, as a Shaker, stand and begin to dance in order to do what one is supposed to or to act like others. Conformity, in other words, need not be purposeless adherence

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to custom or norm; it can also be powerful teleological impetus. It is worth adding that the above possibilities were all open to “premodern” and “traditional” peoples. In carrying out ceremonies and rites, they could pursue personal, common, or collective ends, seek to act like others or to do what they were supposed to do, and/or simply conform to norms and customs. Some glimpse into the complex nexus among teleology, normativity, and custom in premodern (and some contemporary) practices is provided by Rodney Needham’s observations about the variety of answers ritual actors proffer to the question of why they perform a given ritual: (1) sometimes people say the ritual is their custom or that their ancestors require it of them, (2) sometimes people defer to a local authority who gives a traditional reason that is really just a feature of the ritual, (3) on other occasions different people give conflicting reasons, and (4) in some cases the reasons they give are contradicted by their actions. Needham concludes, quoting Arthur Waley on Confucian practices, that “The truth . . . is that there is no ‘real reason’ for ritual acts.”80 This truth leaves people free to perform these acts for diverse ends. The upshot of this discussion of ceremony and ritual is that the pervasiveness of these phenomena in both modern and nonmodern worlds does not imply that human action is fundamentally ateleological. Actions can be simultaneously ceremonial-ritual and teleological. Indeed, ceremony and teleology are complementary dimensions of human activity. Occasionally people simply conform to custom and norms, and teleology is neutralized. Sometimes, conversely, people flexibly and even inventively pursue their ends, and ceremony is set aside. Most activities, however, mix teleology and ceremony. This holds just as much in the “practical,” “prosaic,” “technological,” “instrumental,” or “reasoned” arenas of social life as it does in the “religious,” “artistic,” “expressive,” or “spontaneous” domains. Not just teleology and expression, as Taylor observed, but ceremony, too, is differentially distributed throughout social life. The familiar description of the transition from premodernity to modernity as a development embracing increasing teleology and less and increasingly restricted expression and ceremony is untenable.

4. Sacred Worlds Animating the idea of a unified activity timespace is the thesis that teleology underpins the spatiality—the place-path layouts—through which people live. A place is a place to perform some action, whereas a path is a way between places. Place-path arrays are a type of space fundamentally tied to—following from and determining—human activity.

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The objects amid, at, and in relation to which people act can have noninstrumental significance, i.e., significances other than their places in human activities, for instance, aesthetic significance, religious significance, and symbolic significance. The layout of the tree-lined driveway connecting a horse farm entrance to the family mansion can be aesthetically pleasing, a horse farm cemetery can hold sentimental or historical significance, a field can be where a religious event of great importance took place, and an object such as a crystal chalice can symbolize an abstract idea of great value to some group of people. These aesthetic, sentimental, historical, religious, and symbolic significances have implications for action: the driveway might be something to erect or to admire, the cemetery might be a place to reminisce, meditate, or connect with the past, the religious site might be the destination of a pilgrimage or a place to defend at all costs, and the chalice might be something to handle with great care or to produce imitations of profusely. The fact that significances of these sorts implicate actions, and thus places and paths, raises the question of whether place-path arrays must be underpinned by teleology. If they do not, the unity of timespace as portrayed in previous chapters is merely a contingent, occasional matter, and I cannot claim that it pervades human life. Can aesthetic, religious, symbolic etc. significance underlie placepath layouts independently, and even in the absence, of teleology? I will not confront this issue systematically. I will, instead, focus on one particularly rich and consequential account of religious significance, Eliade’s account of sacred worlds. I hope that my comments about this one example will make plausible the general thesis formulated at the end of this section about the contribution that noninstrumental significance makes to spatiality (place-path arrays). Eliade’s views commend themselves, above all, for their grandeur. They raise profound questions, for instance, about how to distinguish traditional worlds from modern ones. More germane to the present context, Eliade claims that the significance of the world for the category of human he calls “religious man” diverges profoundly from the significance of the world for the category he counterposes to religious man, “profane man”: the world of religious man is through and through a cosmogony-based sacred world. It does not seem, at first glance, that the place-path layouts of sacred worlds depend on teleology. As a result, Eliade’s account of the world of religious man appears to endanger the scope of my account of unified timespace. Another reason Eliade’s views recommend themselves in the present context is their Heideggarian character. Eliade conceived of the sacred and the profane as two modes of being-in-theworld. His descriptions of sacred worlds are descriptions of the worlds in which certain people experientially act. His account of sacred space is, accordingly, an account of the spatiality—the aroundness—of sacred worlds.

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Religious man lives in a sacred space, a sacred cosmos, in whose sacredness everything—humans, artifacts, other living creatures, and inanimate objects—participates. A sacred space is centered around a hierophany, which is a manifestation of the sacred. This hierophany is an absolutely fixed point that provides orientation for human activities. Because religious man cannot live without orientation, the occurrence of an hierophany, the existence of a fixed point, is tantamount to the creation of a world in which he can live. The sacred space, or cosmos, instituted about an hierophany is at once a centered space of inhabitation. The opposite of sacred space, profane space, is a formless expanse, homogeneous and neutral. Such an expanse lacks absolute fixed points; the closest thing it possesses are privileged places which change in accordance with the needs of the day. Profane space thus provides no orientation. It is uninhabitable and terrifying: chaos. The absolute fixed point of an hierophany can be “discovered or projected.”81 It can also take the form of a “sacred precinct, a ceremonial house, a city, a world,”82 a rock, or a mountain. This entity is the center of the world. It is also a break in homogenous space: an opening through which passage from one cosmic region to another occurs. This communication with heaven is expressed in images of an axis mundi: a pillar, ladder, mountain, tree, or vine. Around this axis mundi lies the world, i.e., the world of the people whose sacred space it is. The center of the cosmos is consecrated, usually through ritual. This is the reason for the elaboration of techniques of orientation which, properly speaking, are techniques for the [ritual] construction of sacred space. But we must not suppose that human work is in question here, that it is through his own efforts that man can consecrate a space. In reality the ritual by which he constructs a sacred space is efficacious in the measure in which it reproduces the work of the gods.83

Religious man seeks to live near the center of the cosmos. As a result, whenever he intends to settle a territory or to inhabit a structure, he performs a ritual of consecration that creates a centered, inhabitable world. This consecration ritual is effective because it repeats “the pre-eminent cosmogonic act, the Creation of the world.”84 To ensure the endurance of the created world, a sacrificial ritual that repeats the divine sacrifice at the Creation is also performed.85 Transformed into the center of a cosmos, the territory or structure is then occupied. These rituals are performed multiply, at the founding of dwellings, cities, and lands. As a result, a people’s world always contains multiple centers; an example is Palestine, Jerusalem, and the Temple, each the site of an hierophany. In a sacred world, the center is the preeminent place, the place of the hierophany, in relation to which the world is ordered and delimited. In this regard,

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the center—be it a house, a temple, or a city—is no mere instrument for living, something more or less exchangeable for other such instruments. As the center of the world, it orders life and is not easily abandoned. Other objects in this cosmos such as artifacts, cities, cultivated fields, and things of nature have significance by virtue of participating “in a reality that transcends them,”86 more specifically—like the consecration of the cosmic center—by virtue of repeating an extraterrestrial archetype. Only those objects that repeat such archetypes are meaningful; everything else is only of fleeting and fluctuating import. The same hold of human acts. Actions are significant only insofar as they repeat a primordial act or mythic example. The life of religious man, as a result, is “the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by others”87 who were not men. All human activity is encompassed in this system: the archaic world knows nothing of “profane” activities: every act which has a definite meaning—hunting, fishing, agriculture; games, conflicts, sexuality,—in some way participates in the sacred . . . every responsible activity in pursuit of a definite end is, for the archaic world, a ritual.88

In sum, for Eliade the sacred space of religious man is an inhabitable world that revolves about and is ordered by reference to a sacralized center, and in which anything that is real is either an instantiation of an extraterrestrial archetype or a repetition of an archetypical act.89 Everything outside this space is disordered and meaningless, chaotic and terrifying. A sacred space, or cosmos, is populated, consequently, by objects and events whose meaningfulness is tied to another reality. The most general claim I make about spatiality, the place-path layout of the world, is that it is relative to practices: which place-path arrays are anchored at a particular arrangement of objects depends on the practices carried on at or in relation to it, on the organized doings and sayings that compose these practices. In previous chapters I argued, more specifically, that these arrays are underpinned by the teleology of activity: (1) by the ends and purposes people pursue when carrying on practices amid or in relation to particular arrangements of objects and, behind this, (2) by the teleoaffective structures of the practices involved—the ends, tasks, actions and combinations thereof that are acceptable or enjoined in these practices. What Eliade’s analysis illuminates is that general understandings also underlie place-path arrays. In sacred space, something’s meaning derives from its relation to an extraterrestrial reality; formulated in my language, its meaning reflects a general understanding that something is real only if it instantiates or repeats an extraterrestrial archetype. Everything that exists, consequently, is such an instantiation or repetition. Similarly, something’s status as center of the cosmos reflects general understandings of hierophany and cosmology that are

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articulated in the consecration and sacrificial rites through which a center is established. These general understandings establish basic features of religious man’s being-in-the-world: they inform how religious man experientially acts in and encounters the world around. On their basis, everything in the world possesses sacred meaning. According to Eliade, moreover, these understandings diffuse throughout the practices of religious man. Recent anthropology (among other disciplines) has challenged the supposition that everyone who carries on a particular practice shares specific general understandings. Practitioners in a given practice interpret what they are doing differently, and their interpretations can also diverge from the official ones enunciated by authorities. In response to this challenge, one might wonder whether generally shared understandings of the sorts Eliade invoked were more common in the past. A more decisive response, however, is to point out that the general understandings involved are common, not shared. Indeed, almost all general understandings that organize practices, including contemporary practices, are common. Contemporary scholars are right that participants in the practices of religious man do not share understandings of reality, hierophany, and cosmology. What is true, however, is that some participants in these practices sport these understandings and that the latter are available to and encountered by all participants. For they are articulated and prescribed in these practices. General understandings of cosmos, life, hierophany, and sacred meaningfulness as repetition may not be universally shared by religious man, but they are afoot in his practices. The important point presently is that this complex of general understandings informs the teleological organization of religious man’s life, his pursuit of particular combinations of ends, projects, and actions. Sacralization and sacrificial rites are carried out, for instance, for the sake of sanctifying territory or structures and insuring that the sanctification holds. Cosmogonic understandings, moreover, inform myriad projects and actions by setting standards for people to meet and patterns for them to emulate, regardless of the ends for which they act. Once a centered space for inhabitation is established, religious man always seeks to ensure that important activities are properly carried out, i.e., that these activities adhere to their archetypes. In this regard, consider Eliade’s comments on dance: All dances were originally sacred; in other words, they had an extrahuman model. The model may in some cases have been a totemic or emblematic animal, whose motions were reproduced to conjure up its concrete presence through magic, to increase its numbers, to obtain incorporation into the animal on the part of man. In other cases the model may have been revealed by a divinity . . . or by a hero. The dance may be executed to acquire food, to honor the dead, or to assure good order in the cosmos. . . . What is of interest to us is . . . [that]

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[c]horeographic rhythms have their model outside of the profane life of man; whether they reproduce the movements of the totemic or emblematic animal, or the motions of the stars; whether they themselves constitute rituals (labyrinthine steps, leaps, gestures performed with ceremonial instruments)—a dance always imitates an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment. In a word, it is a repetition . . . 90

Cosmogonic understandings establish patterns of action and movement that dance is supposed to instantiate. The instrumental significance of magico-religious entities likewise reflects general understandings. Something’s instrumental significance is its place in human activity. Instrumental significances, accordingly, are tied to people’s purposes and ends. Something’s instrumental value as a cloak, for instance, reflects the fact that people act for the sake of protection from cold and for modesty. Eliade repeatedly documents that the instrumental values of magico-religious entities are informed by general understandings of magical and religious matters.91 Consider, for example, this passage: Just as the infant is placed on the ground immediately after birth so that its true Mother shall legitimize it and confer her divine protection on it, so, too, infants, children, and grown men are placed on the ground—or sometimes buried in it—in case of sickness. Symbolic burial, partial or complete, has the same magico-religious value as immersion in water, baptism. The sick person is regenerate; he is born anew. The operation has the same efficacy in wiping out a sin or in curing a mental malady . . . The sinner is placed in a cask or in a trench dug in the ground, and when he emerges he is said to “be born a second time, from his mother’s womb” . . . Initiation includes a ritual death and resurrection. This is why, among numerous primitive peoples, the novice is symbolically “killed,” laid in a trench, and covered with leaves. When he rises from the grave he is looked upon as a new man, for he has been brought to birth once more, this time directly by the cosmic Mother.92

A hole or trench in the ground is regarded as a place at which to cure a sickness or to become a new person. This understanding presupposes the ends of curing sickness or becoming a new person. It also reflects general cosmogonic understandings. General understandings combine with teleology in the determination of human activity. They specify ends and purposes, stipulate forms of activity, and inform how objects and events can be used in the pursuit of particular ends and purposes. By virtue of these effects, general understandings also underpin spatiality.93 Interestingly enough, Eliade hypothesized that religious

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man seeks to live in a sacred world in order to ensure his participation in being, for the sake of avoiding the chaos that is tantamount to nothingness. He thereby suggested that the sacralized life and world of religious man subserves a primordial teleology, even, possibly, that teleology is rock bottom in human life. However that may be, teleology and general understandings deeply entwine in the life of religious man: both the ends religious man pursues and how he pursues them reflect his general understandings, his general understandings sometimes respond to his deepest ends and needs, and the spatiality of sacred worlds is shaped by this complex of teleology and general understanding. It is a fair bet that this entwinement characterizes human life in general.94 General understandings shape spatialities, i.e., place-path arrays only in conjunction with teleology. Even such all-encompassing general understandings as those cosmogonic ones that underlie the sacred worlds of religious man establish at best minimal place-path arrays. The more elaborate arrays through which religious man proceeds reflect his ends and purposes (some of which might rest on these general understandings). Similarly, noninstrumental significances such as aesthetic, religious, and symbolic significance do not, by themselves, set up place-path arrays. Only in conjunction with teleology do they do so. A religious site, for instance, is a place to mount a defense only for people who act for the sake of protecting the centers of their worlds, just as a crystal chalice anchors places to move about and handle things gingerly only for those who act in order to safeguard it. Similarly, the prospect of a pleasing tree-lined driveway makes a strip of land a place to build the driveway only in conjunction with the desire to live amid beauty, just like the driveway’s pleasing quality institutes a place to admire it only for those who want to look at beautiful things. Noninstrumental significances, like sacred worlds, determine spatiality only in conjunction with teleology. They do not, consequently, challenge the basic unity of timespace. Teleology is indispensible to the spatiality of the world. In this chapter, I have tried to show that neither the emotional side of human life, the widespread existence of ceremony and ritual, nor the sacredness of the world of religious man à la Eliade undermines the teleological character of activity. These phenomena reveal, instead, that infrequent actions, particular aspects of action, and particular features of the world around are rooted in something other than teleology. These nonteleological actions, aspects, and features, however, either are relatively rare or peacefully coexist and even join with teleology in shaping human activity. I conclude that human activity is fundamentally teleological. I also reaffirm that activity evinces a unified timespace and that interwoven timespaces are pervasive in social life.

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Notes 1. This claim must be tempered. In highly traditional contexts, for instance, the rational thing to do might be whatever tradition counsels, and any departure from tradition might be irrational. To label an action “rational” is to imply that it is intelligent, sensible, and appropriate; see below. 2. An earlier version is found in Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 2. 3. For an argument that they should not, see Brian O’Shaunnessy, Consciousness and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. A third reason for treating worldly and mental actions as a class is that actions of either type consist in bodily actions that are performed, and states of consciousness (e.g., sensations, images) that occur, in particular contexts. A particular occurrence of, say, removing a diseased gall bladder consists in a series of bodily actions performed by a surgeon at and around the operation table (in conjunction with the bodily actions of residents and nurses), as well as in many (though probably not all the) thoughts, feelings, and images the surgeon had while performing these actions. Similarly, working out a math problem in one’s head on a particular occasion consists not just in a series of images and thoughts (or simply the onslaught of the answer), but also in whatever facial or hand gestures and absent-minded actions such as doodling the cognizer makes. Of course, interventions in the world primarily consist in bodily actions in particular circumstances, whereas mental actions primarily consist in the occurrence of images and words in particular circumstances (consider what happens when you obey an injunction to imagine looking over a landscape from the top of a mountain). Fully considered, however, actions of both sorts consist in contextualized bodily actions and states of consciousness. For further discussion, see Schatzki, Social Practices, chapter 2. 5. See, for example, Alfred Schutz, “Choosing Among Projects of Action,” in Alfred Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality. Collected Papers I, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 67–96, here 70. 6. I here side with Austin and oppose the widespread conception of intentional actions as actions done for a reason. (See J.L. Austin, “Three Ways of Spilling Ink,” in Philosophical Papers, second edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970 [1961]), 272–88.) In its contemporary form, the latter conception dates at least to G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957). Austin’s essay offers an insightful and, as far as I can tell, accurate account of the common concept of intentional action. I have no present interest, moreover, in using a regimented or theoretical version of this concept. It would take the present discussion too far afield to address the significant methodological issues that attend this decision. 7. See Arthur Danto’s notion of basic actions; Arthur Danto, “Basic Actions,” American Philosophical Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1965): 141–8. 8. For an account of action different from mine that acknowledges abilities to carry out bodily actions, as well as what I am calling “practical understanding,” see Jennifer

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Hornsby, “Agency and Actions,” in Agency and Action, ed. John Hyman and Helen Steward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–23. For an account of the role of bodily capacities in activity that parallels the role that I attribute to bodily repertoires, see Vincent Descombes, The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism, trans. Stephen Adam Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001 [1995]). For the initiate I might add that Descombes, drawing an analogy between bodily capacities and what Marcel Mauss called “techniques of the body,” ties the bodily capacities involved to the practical syllogism, not to practical intelligibility. 9. For further discussion, see Theodore R. Schatzki, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Exploration of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 77–9. 10. Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, Causes,” in Donald Davidson Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3–20. 11. Some readers will recognize this and the previous paragraph as an explication and expansion of Heidegger’s notion of signifying (Bedeuten). On my interpretation, Heidegger’s description of signifying is an account of the determination of activity. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), section 18. 12. Signifying bears an especially strong surface resemblance to a family of accounts that distinguish between prior intentions and intentions-in-action, prospective and immediate intentions, or intentions and executive representations. See, respectively John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Myles Brand, Intending and Acting (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), and Kent Bach, “A Representational Theory of Action,” Philosophical Studies 34 (1978): 361–79. One major difference between my account of action and these is that its making sense to someone to perform an action does not causally govern what the actor does. It instead picks out something that the actor, because of his practical understanding, therewith executes (“therewith” because signification is signification to an embodied agent: the person to whom it now makes sense to X is a person who has the bodily ability to X). Like most accounts of practical reason, moreover, the three aforementioned accounts of intention are not interested in phenomenological saliency. They provide rational reconstructions that use partially regimented mental condition terms familiar from and still tied to their common use. This ad hominum characterization raises far too many substantive and methodological issues to address here. For a taste of these issues, see John Searle, “The Limits of Phenomenology,” in Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 71–92 and Dreyfus’s response in ibid., 323–37. 13. The idea of accessing the structure of human activity through an experience that is a feature of that activity goes back to Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of Innewerden. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Grundlegung der Wissenschaft vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Ausarbeitungen und Entwürfe zum Zweiten Band der Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (ca. 1870–1895), Gesammelte Schriften 19, 2nd, revised edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 62–63, 203–4, 207–8. With an eye to my discussion of Bergson in chapter 4, I might add that this idea should be

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contrasted with Bergson’s claim that a recollection of perception/action is produced simultaneously with every perception/action. Such recollections, Bergson claimed, can become conscious, thereby providing ex post access to the contents of perception/action. They do not, however, provide access to the structure of consciousness or experience. See Henri Bergson, “Memory of the Present and Future Recognition,” in Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920 [1908]), 134–85, here 157–8. 14. For discussions of the best available philosophical account of this complexity, that of Wittgenstein, see Malcolm Budd, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (New York: Routledge, 1989) and Paul Johnston, Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner (London: Routledge, 1993); see also my book, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social, chapter 2. A recent account in psychology that largely supports Wittgenstein’s observations is Bertram F. Malle, How the Mind Explains Behavior: Folk Explanations, Meaning, and Social Interaction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). 15. He might also have declined to use some version of “believe” and simply replied that it would chase away the gloom. This points to the idea mentioned below (in the text) that reasons for actions are, not mental conditions such as beliefs and desires, but believed states of affairs and desired ways of being, i.e., the contents of beliefs and desires. For versions of the idea that what motivates actions are not mental conditions, see Rudiger Bitner, Doing Things for Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Jonathan Dancy, Practical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Frederick Stoutland, “The Real Reasons,” in Human Action, Deliberation and Causation, ed. J. Bransen and S.E. Cuypers (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 43–66. 16. This claim implies that explanations of actions by reasons articulate the teleologies as well as the motivations that govern behavior. It implies, in other words, that such explanations are teleological-motivational in character. Depending on context, actual reason explanations can cite ways of being, states of affairs, or both (and maybe also emotions—see section 2). In analyzing reason explanations as encompassing both teleology and motivation, I avoid the either-or of forward-looking teleological explanations versus backward-looking normative explanations that is posed by a recent analyst of teleological explanations. See Scott Sehon, Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 176–7. 17. For additional discussion of the issues touched on in this and the previous paragraph, see Theodore R. Schatzki, “Coping with Others with Folk Psychology,” in Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2, ed. Wrathall and Malpas, 29–52. 18. Heidegger, by the way, believed that all actions are determined by emotions or moods, if only by a “pallid, evenly balanced lack of mood, which . . . is far from nothing at all” (SZ 134). 19. Shaker Sunday services were locally famous events which interested outsiders could witness. After initial words and a sermon from a village elder, Shakers rose and carried out set dances. After a while these dances broke down and individual Shakers began whirling about and crying out on their own. The ensuing pandemonium could continue for hours and be heard miles away. The Shakers understood all this whirling

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about, writhing on the floor, and crying out as a form of worship to which supernatural powers had led them. The ability so to dance was understood as a gift from God, a sign of divine anointment. 20. This last example, repeatedly analyzed in the literature, was introduced by Rosalind Hursthouse in “Arational Actions,” The Journal of Philosophy 88, no. 2 (1991): 57–68. 21. As I will explain in chapter 4, this formulation is misleading. For the sake of clarity, however, I will suppress the accurate, but more complicated formulation until then. 22. See Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” and Donald Davidson, “Hume’s Cognitive Theory of Pride,” in Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 277–90. 23. Hursthouse, “Arational Actions,” 59. 24. David Charles, “Emotion, Cognition, Action,” in Agency and Action, ed. John Hyman and Helen Steward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 105–36, here footnote 34, 132–3. 25. Peter Goldie, “Explaining Expressions of Emotion,” Mind 109, no. 433 (2000): 25–38 and, more expansively, his The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 5. 26. Desireless cases such as these are emphasized in Monika Betzler, “Expressive Actions,” Inquiry 52, no. 3 (2009): 272–92. According to Betzler, emotions rationalize actions in the absence of desire by reference both to engagements with people and things to which actors are committed and to the sense of identity that these committed engagements provide. She believes that emotions rationalize a large portion of emotional actions in this way. I will not pursue the point further, but each of the cases she describes fall into one or another of the three ways mentioned in this section in which emotions determine actions. The idea that emotions relate to actions through values and valuation is also found in Elisa A. Hurley, “Working Passions: Emotions and Creative Engagement with Value,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 (2007): 79–104. 27. On this point I agree with Sabine A. Döring, “Explaining Action by Emotion,” The Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 214–30. One must also distinguish cases sans desire where perception and emotion determine what makes sense to someone to do from cases sans desire where perception and emotion jointly cause an emotional reaction (see below). 28. See Martin Hollis, “Reason and Ritual,” in Rationality, ed. Bryan Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 221–39. 29. The following example is inspired by a real incident I witnessed and by a poem by Charles Bukowski titled “hot,” in Burning in Water Drowning in Flames. Selected Poems 1955–1973 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 161–2. 30. John McDowell, “Reason and Action,” Philosophical Investigations V, no. 4 (1982): 301–5. 31. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. W.D. Ross (New York: Random House, 1941), 1139 a31. 32. Kovach and de Lancey argue that, for a large central class of emotions, the emotional determination of action works via “affect programs” that are evolutionarily

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wired into the brain and operate largely independently of cognitive capabilities. Adam Kovach and Craig de Lancey, “On Emotions and the Explanation of Behavior,” Nous 39, no. 1 (2005): 106–22. 33. Döring, “Explaining Action by Emotion,” 223–5. 34. Hursthouse, “Arational Actions,” 58, 62. 35. I might mention that Goldie defends his version of the standard account by radically restricting what I label the third category of emotional performance. All emotional actions, he claims, are explained by desires and beliefs; involuntary doings alone can be caused by emotions. The third category of emotional performance thus comprises only such involuntary bodily doings as Duchenne smiles when happy, facial contortions when fearful, and cascades of tears when grieving. (These involuntary doings are to be distinguished from “bodily changes that are part of the emotion” such as responses of the autonomic nervous system, hormonal changes, and muscular reactions such as trembling and flinching.) Goldie thus defends the standard account by reclassifying most emotional actions of the third type as cases of the first. This is not the place to consider Goldie’s creative interpretation of the beliefs and desires needed to explain the reclassified actions. 36. Another example is Élisabeth Pacherie’s description of emotional actions of the third sort as “impulsive”: spontaneous, unratiocinated. Pacherie explains their impulsive character as follows. Emotions are defined by action tendencies; fleeing, for instance, defines fear. The action-tendency essence of emotion implies that an (emotional) perception of an object or event as, say, dangerous is equivalent to encountering this object or event as something from which to flee. Because of this, an emotional perception immediately gives rise to a motor representation that causes action; perceiving the bear as dangerous, thus as something to flee, immediately leads to fleeing. See Élisabeth Pacherie, “The Role of Emotions in the Explanation of Action,” in European Review of Philosophy, 5: Emotion and Action (Stanford: CSLA Publications, 2002), 53–91, here section 4.2. On attributing action tendencies to emotions, also see also Craig DeLancey, “Real Emotions,” Philosophical Psychology 11, no. 4 (1998): 467–87. 37. Could emotional actions of the third type have been more prevalent in earlier historical eras? Readers of, for example, Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (revised edition, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 (1939)]) might think that direct emotional expression was more prevalent in the uncivilized body. I do not know the answer to this question. Even if it is Yes, limits exist as to how much atemporal activity of this sort social life can tolerate. 38. On the history of the expression “ritual,” see Talal Asad “Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 55–79. 39. These analyses employ notions of expression that are related to but to different degrees narrower than prominent philosophical notions of expression. Examples of the latter are Wilhelm Dilthey’s idea that acts, texts, and built structures (objective spirit) express purposes, values, and ideas, Wittgenstein’s idea that doings and sayings express states of consciousness, emotions, and cognitive conditions, and Taylor’s

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broad conception of the expressive nature of language and meaning. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, Gesammelte Schriften VII (Tübingen: B.G. Teubner, 1927), Joachim Schulte, Experience and Expression: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Charles Taylor, “Language and Human Nature,” in his Mind and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 215–47. 40. Further complicating the situation was the fact that some philosophers equated teleology with rationality. See, for example, I.C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi, “The Problem with the Rationality of Magic,” in Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson, 172–93, here 173. 41. See, for example, Donald Davidson, “Radical Interpretation,” in Donald Davidson, Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 125–39 and the collection Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982). 42. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 118–55. Clause (3) combines several of Wittgenstein’s remarks. 43. See, for instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology & Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 44. See, above all, Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 307–24. 45. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937). 46. See, for example, John Cook, “Magic, Witchcraft and Science,” Philosophical Investigations 6, no. 1 (1983): 2–36, H. Mounce, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” Philosophy 48, no. 186 (1983): 347–62, Alfred Ayer, Wittgenstein (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), and Berel Dov Lerner, Rules, Magic, and Instrumental Reason (London: Routledge, 2002). 47. Brian R. Clack, Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion (New York: Palgrave, 1999) and Frank Cioffi, “Wittgenstein on Making Homeopathic Magic Clear,” in his Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 155–82. 48. Alice Ambrose, Wittgenstein’s Lectures 1932–5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 33. 49. Charles Taylor, “Rationality,” in Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, 87–105. 50. For a useful compact summary of this development, see Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974 [1947]). 51. On this, see also David Hoy, “Ethnocentrism and Objectivity,” in Objectivity and Its Other, ed. Wolfgang Natter, Theodore R. Schatzki, and John Paul Jones III (New York: Guilford, 1995), 113–36. 52. On this, see Lerner, Rules, Magic, and Instrumental Reason, chapter 10. 53. Pascal Boyer maintains, for instance, that people insist on the exact repetition of rituals because they seek certain results and fear that even slight deviations will cause rituals not to achieve these results. See Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and

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Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17. 54. Edmund Leach, “Ritual,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 523–4. 55. John Beattie, “Understanding Ritual,” in Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson, 240–68, here 246. Compare Beattie’s assertion to Malinowski’s characterization of religion, magic, and practical behavior as, respectively, purely expressive, a mix of expression and teleology, and purely teleological; Bronislav Malinowski, “Magic, Science, and Religion,” in Science, Religion, and Reality, ed. Rodney Needham (London: Sheldon Press, 1926), 19–84. 56. See John Beattie, “Ritual and Social Change,” Man (N.S.) 1 (1966): 60–74; also Beattie, “Understanding Ritual.” 57. Beattie, “Ritual and Social Change,” 72. 58. Ibid., 78. 59. In this context, it is worth mentioning Rom Harré’s idea that social formations are jointly constituted by “practical” and “expressive” orders. The practical order is made up of those aspects of social activity that are oriented toward the fulfillment of biological and material ends, whereas the expressive order is made up of those aspects that are oriented toward “such ends as the presentation of the self as valuable and worth of respect” (25; cf. Erving Goffman’s notion of the presentation of self). The distinction between the two orders is thus rooted in a distinction between types of ends people pursue. See Rom Harré, Social Being, second edition, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993 [1979]), chapters 1 and 7. 60. The Blessing of the Hounds is a traditional blessing spoken by a priest or minister at the beginning of the hunting season. Its practice follows the tradition of honoring Saint Hubert, the patron saint of hunters. This blessing typically occurs in front of a hunting lodge before the assembled and festively clad members of the lodge together with their horses and dogs. At the Iroquois Hunt Club in Lexington, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Lexington stands on a circular stone tablet before old Grimes Mill (the lodge), semi-circularly surrounded by approximately one hundred officers and members of the lodge who are dressed, respectively, in red or black formal hunting attire. The hounds are brought into the circle, and the Bishop gives the fifteen minute Blessing. After a short prayer and sermon, the horses and hounds are blessed. The riders then come forward individually, kneel on a cushion in front of the Bishop, and receive their blessings, along with a St. Hubert medal that the Bishop places around their neck. The first hunt then commences. The event is accompanied by music provided by local musicians. 61. This is an increasingly popular ritual today that dates back centuries. People commit their fears, hopes, regrets, and the like to pieces of paper that are burned to symbolize spiritual cleansing. The ritual is not restricted to New Year’s Eve, but can also accompany life-passage ceremonies such as weddings. It can also be carried out in more or less complicated forms, from individuals doing it alone to church ceremonies where people take turns going to the altar to light their papers with the support of all in attendance. These activities can be supplemented by related activities such as committing goals to, and discussing personal flaws on, additional pieces of paper.

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62. Steven Lukes, “Political Ritual and Social Integration,” Sociology 9 (1975): 289–308, here 291. 63. Gilbert Lewis, Day of Shining Red: An Essay in Understanding Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), chapter 1. 64. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 44–5. 65. Wendy James, The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7. If this is true, why did I begin the current subsection with a list of ceremonies? The plausibility of any definition of ceremony rests partly on its fitting paradigmatic examples—hence the list. Nothing, however, precludes a plausible definition from attributing ceremony broadly to social life. 66. Ibid., 92. 67. Ibid., 243. 68. David Parkin, “Ritual as Spatial Direction and Bodily Division,” in Understanding Rituals, ed. Daniel de Coppet (London: Routledge, 1992), 11–25. Arguing that the spatial and directional qualities of movement are the basis of proper and effective ritual, Parkin defines ritual as “formulaic spatiality carried out by groups conscious of its imperative or compulsory nature” (18). 69. James, The Ceremonial Animal, 78. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 243. 72. Ibid., 107. 73. Marc Augé has attributed to social life generally a concept of ritual that parallels James’s. (Marc Augé, An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds, trans. Amy Jacobs [Stanford: Stanford Press, 1999 (1994)].) Claiming that ritual is essentially concerned with the constitution of relative identities and othernesses, Augé writes that rituals comprise material spaces, measurable durations, symbolic and specific ends, varied effects (intended and unintended), formal constraints, and temporal phases. He also holds that the ritual relation to the world is “consubstantial with the social” (84). What he means is that the social is the realm of the demarcation and recognition of otherness and identity. This definition of the social is too narrow for the purposes of this book. I agree with Augé, however, that the construction of identity and otherness is pervasive in social life. Indeed, all practices and practice-arrangement bundles institute identities and othernesses, for instance, participant/member and nonparticipant/nonmember, not to speak of the roles that practices and bundles encompass. (I disagree with Augé, however, that the symbolic end of all practices and bundles is this construction.) It is useful to add the construction of identity and otherness to James’s list of the features of ritual. 74. James does not say what rules are. It might be that, like Humphrey and Laidlaw, she conceptualizes them à la Parsons, Giddens, and Searle as implicit constitutive directives and formulae and not à la Wittgenstein as formulated regulative prescriptions and instructions as in my text. This is not the place to contest the former notion of rules. See, however, Barry Barnes, The Elements of Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), chapter 3 and the brief remarks in Schatzki, Social Practices, 50–1.

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75. For a detailed and insightful discussion of the teleological dimension of ritual, see Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual. A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 7. Humphrey and Laidlaw claim that people almost always carry out ritual actions for the sake of something. The purposes involved can be personal or those that are formulated in texts or by authority figures (as the purposes of the ritual). Humphrey and Laidlaw also intriguingly argue (in chapter 4) that rituals comprise actions whose identities derive, not from the intentions of participants, but from constitutive rules that determine what actions it is that people perform when they carry out rituals. Rules accomplish this, moreover, independently of the intentions and purposes of the participants. Humphrey and Laidlaw hold that it is this “objective” quality of ritual actions, the fact that rules and not people’s purposes and intentions define what people do, that enables practitioners to adopt varied purposes in performing, and to entertain varying interpretations of the meaning of, these actions. 76. Max Weber, Soziologische Grundbegriffe (Tübingen: J.C. B. Mohr, 1960), 44. 77. See Weber’s characterization of a traditional action as “very often simply a dull [dumpfe] reacting to familiar stimuli that proceeds according to an already lived-into disposition [Einstellung].” Ibid. 78. At least in contemporary societies, in fact, the more complex a ceremony or ritual is the less possible it is that a person can participate in it a-purposefully. An inverse relationship exists between, on the one hand, how much knowledge people possess of their practices, how much they think about which practices to carry on, and the range of alternatives available to them and, on the other, how likely they carry out ceremonies or rituals purposelessly. 79. James suggests that one feature of ceremony and ritual is that they are patterned activities into which people try to fit themselves, as opposed to organized activities that arise from people’s purposive attempt to bring them about (James, The Ceremonial Animal, p. 258). This is an important contrast famously dating back at least to Ferdinand Tonnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Community and Association, trans. Charles P. Loomis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955 [1887]). Humphrey and Laidlaw also base their account of ritual on it. This feature of ceremonies and rituals is preserved in my account of how the organizations of ceremonial and ritual practices shape activity. 80. Rodney Needham, “Wittgenstein and Ritual,” in Exemplars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 149–87, here 160. The quote is from Arthur Waley, Analects of Confucius (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 57. 81. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, 1987 [1957]), 22. 82. Ibid., 37. 83. Ibid., 29. 84. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971 [1949]), 18. 85. For detailed discussion of these sacrificial rites, see Mircea Eliade, Commentaires sur la Légende de maître Manole, trans. Alain Paruit (Paris: L’Herne, 1994). 86. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 4.

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87. Ibid., 5. 88. Ibid., 21–2. 89. For a discussion of exemplary ritual repetition, see Connerton, How Societies Remember, chapter 2, section 5. 90. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 28–9. 91. In this regard, consider the chapter Eliade devotes to sacred stones in Patterns of Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), chapter 6. 92. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 143–4. Italics in original. 93. The category of general understanding includes symbolic understandings. Symbolic understandings specify what is a symbol of what, for instance, the moon as a symbol of becoming, vegetation as a symbol of renewal, and openings at the tops of house as symbols of a communicative opening to a different reality. An account such as Eliade’s that claims that “theories,” i.e., general understandings underlie the significance of the world must be distinguished from an account such as one of Lefebvre’s that treats the social world as a text composed of signals, signs, and symbols that actors must read: “In the village everything is symbolic, and reveals the truth of symbolism: ancient and powerful, strongly attached to things, and also to rhythms. Houses, fields, trees, sky, mountains or the sea are not simply or solely themselves. Cosmic and vital rhythms surround them; they contain subtle resonances; every ‘thing’ is part of a chorus. Space and soil symbolize the community; the church sets the time and symbolizes, in the cemetery, the world, life and death. In this poignantly archaic world, daily life presents itself in all simplicity, both utterly quotidian and inseparable from its resonances.” (Henri Lefebvre, “The Social Text,” in Henri Lefebvre: Selected Writings, ed. Stuart Elden [London: Continuum, 2003], 88–92, here 89.) 94. If so, then it follows, stated grossly and in terms parallel to the above discussion of teleology and expression, that the transition from premodernity to modernity—in Eliade’s terms, from religious man to profane man—is not an ascension of the priority of teleology over general understandings but a switch in dominant general understandings.

4 Activity and History as Indeterminate Temporalspatial Events

I

1 I DESCRIBED THE CENTRALITY TO Heidegger’s post–Being and Time philosophy of the idea that a clearing of being happens. The happening of a clearing is the event. It is the happening of a timespace in which events take place. The timespace involved, moreover, is the open that belongs to a clearing. Timespace is also that feature of human life by which humanity stands into the clearing. The singularity of a clearing—the singularity of there being places and times—contrasts with the plurality of events that take place in it. Although the further thesis that a clearing cannot happen without humanity standing into it accords people great significance, human activities number among the multitudinous events that take place in a clearing. In chapter 1 I quickly abandoned Heidegger’s ontological concerns (his concerns with the clearing, being, and truth) after discussing them. Focusing on human activity, I derived a concept of activity timespace from Being and Time and, in chapter 2, argued that interwoven activity timespaces are essential to social phenomena. The current chapter returns to Heidegger to appropriate his notion of the event for the purpose of analyzing human activities—and therewith social phenomena and their interwoven timespaces—as indeterminate temporalspatial events. The chapter’s analysis of activity develops through contrasts with and criticisms of (1) the still standard belief plus desire causal account of action determination and (2) the idea—chiefly as presented in the work of Henri Bergson—that human activity is a kind of temporal flow. My discussion also explains why the indeterminacy of activity contravenes many accounts of how social phenomena determine action. The final section of the chapter elucidates what a basic feature of history—the existence of the past in N CHAPTER

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the present—amounts to when history is understood as a realm encompassing indeterminate activity events. A raft of Bergson-inspired accounts serves as contrast. The book concludes with the suggestion that the persistence of practice organizations over time is a type of memory—practice memory. In chapter 1, I developed my notion of activity timespace from the analyses of temporality and spatiality found in Being and Time. It might seem incongruous—to someone who knows Heidegger’s work—that I now appropriate a concept prominent in Heidegger’s post–Being and Time work to analyze further the activity of which timespace is the dimensionality. I should emphasize, therefore, that Heidegger’s notion of the event is foreshadowed in Being and Time. Dasein, Heidegger wrote there, happens (geschehen; Dasein is functional human life). Heidegger conveyed little about what this signifies or implies—only, for example, that Dasein happens out of its future (SZ 19) and that in happening Dasein reckons with time (SZ 371). Heidegger also claimed, however, that Geschichtlichkeit, usually translated as “historicity” or “historicality,” means the being-constitution (Seinsverfassung) of the happening (Geschehen) of Dasein (SZ 20). As a result, considerably more is indirectly revealed about the happening of Dasein in the chapter on historicity (Division Two, chapter 5), inter alia, that this happening is tied to tradition, that it has past, present, and future dimensions that occur all at once, and that, in happening, Dasein is its past and future. Clearly, the constitution of Dasein’s happening is closely connected to temporality. Indeed, Heidegger wrote that “the interpretation of the historicality of Dasein proves itself to be just a more concrete working out of temporality” (SZ 382). In the chapter on historicality, Heidegger raised the question of the connectedness of Dasein from birth to death. Rejecting the Diltheyan-Husserlian thesis that this connectedness consists in a string of experiences reaching from one temporal end point of life to the other, Heidegger claimed that the two end points, birth and death, are ipso facto connected whenever Dasein exists. This is the case because existence is a self-stretching out that encompasses beginning and end, thrownness and projection; in other words, whenever Dasein exists, it exists as a temporal field that embraces past and future. This idea then leads to the most consequential sentence about Dasein’s happening. I quoted it in chapter 1: “We name the specific being-on-the-move [Bewegtheit] of the stretched-out self-stretching out the happening of Dasein” (SZ 375). The happening of Dasein is its being-on-the-move, its movement. The stretched-out self-stretching out of which this happening, or being-on-themove, is a quality, is the opening of Dasein’s temporal field. The happening of Dasein, consequently, is at once the opening of the clearing. Although, therefore, Being and Time did not explicitly conceptualize the happening of the clearing (what Heidegger later dubbed the “event”), the idea of happening

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that informs the notion of the event is present in Being and Time. Indeed, in that book it characterizes human existence, that is, human activity. It is no confusion, consequently, to draw on this idea of happening to conceptualize human activity further.

1. Human Activity as Event As stated, one of the two chief contrasts for my conception of activity as temporalspatial event is the belief plus desire causal account of action determination. Although this account has many detractors, in different versions it has dominated mainstream philosophical analysis since Donald Davidson’s famous 1963 essay, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes.”1 Something roughly like it is also common in social and historical thought broadly, though it is often appropriated unnamed and unacknowledged, and specific conceptions vary. I mentioned in the previous chapter that, according to Davidson, a reason for an action consists in a desire to perform actions of a certain sort (more generally, a “pro attitude”—desire, wish, want, urge, fancy—towards actions of that sort) together with a belief that the action performed is of that sort. Since the desire to perform an action of particular sort usually derives from a desire for something else, which actions of the sort in question (help) satisfy, a more perspicuous formulation of Davidson’s position is that a reason for an action consists of a desire for something together with a belief that the action performed is a means of satisfying that desire. Davidson argued that a reason for an action should be construed as its cause because this construal is the only way to distinguish the actual reason for an action from other reasons the actor might have had for performing it: the actual reason is distinguished from alternatives in virtue of the fact that it, and not the others, caused the action. Some versions of the belief plus desire causal account interpose intentions between beliefs and desires, on the one hand, and actions on the other. The desire for something, together with the belief that a particular action is a means of satisfying that desire, cause an intention to perform that action, which in turn causes the action.2 Regarding Davidson, I should explain that, although he sometimes wrote that reasons cause actions, he did not mean that reasons as such do so. Davidson treated causality as a relation between events and denied that reasons, that is, beliefs and desires, are events; rather, they are states. When Davidson stated or indicated that reasons cause actions, what he meant is that reasons causally explain actions.3 According to his account of causal explanation, however, the fact that a reason causally explains an action entails that an event associated with the reason caused the event that is the action. In “Actions, Reasons,

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and Causes,” the examples he gave of associated events are the onset of the pertinent desire and belief, and noticing or observing changes in the ambient environment. Thus, even though Davidson denied that reasons as such cause actions, his account retains (indeed, inaugurated) a key motif of the belief plus desire causal account of action, namely, that something that precedes action—a desire and belief or an event associated with them—causes action. Not all philosophers agree that causality is a relation among events, though this is a pervasive idea. Nor do philosophers concur that the causality pertinent to activity works only through events linked in causal chains, though this view, too, is widespread.4 What is unanimous, however, is that causality has a patent objective temporal structure: causes precede (and maybe persist concurrently with) effects. According to Davidson’s account of action, for example, action has the following temporal form: the cause of an action, an event associated with the desire and belief that explain it, precedes action, which itself precedes whatever it effects. Action is thus a component of the following succession: (event associated with) desire plus belief ¨ action ¨ further events. In Davidson’s prowler example, for instance (an event associated with) the home owner’s desire to read precedes the action of turning on the light, which itself precedes the prowler learning that the home owner is at home. All causal accounts of action treat actions as components of causal sequences. Of course, advocates of such accounts defend divergent conceptions of (1) which mental entities (including agents) cause action, (2) the nature of mental conditions such as desire, belief, and intention, (3) the nature of the causal relation, and, as indicated, (4) whether causal sequences exhaust the causality at work in activity. These theorists concur, however, that action is caught up in temporally extended causal sequences. This concord strengthens the dominant causal account against minority views that argue that actions do not have causes (coordinately, that explanations of actions by reasons or by mental conditions are not a species of causal explanation). These minority accounts do not entail any single conception of the temporal structure of action, and particular such accounts often do not entail any such conception at all. Recall, furthermore, the role that the standard causal account accords emotions in the etiology of action. Emotions determine actions by “fixing” which desires cause action: emotions either constitute an earlier stage in the causal chain, causing desires that cause actions that cause effects, or consist in the possession of certain desires that cause actions. (On Davidson’s account, an event associated with an emotion causes an event associated with the desire that the emotion explains, this or another event associated with this desire then causing action.) The causal account of action should in principle be able to acknowledge the third type of emotional activity identified in the previous

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chapter: emotions directly causing actions. After all, emotional activities of this type are caused by emotions and either follow or occur concurrently with these emotions. The orthodox causal account privileges desires and beliefs, however, and requires that the causality that gives rise to actions funnels through these conditions. Otherwise, this account claims, the caused behaviors do not qualify as actions—to be an action, a behavior must be caused by beliefs and desires. Any causal account of action that, like Davidson’s, construes causality as a relation among events, treats action as an event. Indeed, most accounts of action treat it as an event, as something that happens. Philosophers sometimes distinguish actions from events. Their concern is to differentiate actions from other sorts of event, what one might call “mere occurrences.” The difference they have in mind is that actions are doings, things that people5 do, whereas mere occurrences simply happen. Another way of stating this contrast is that actions are performed whereas occurrences just happen. So construed, however, doings, or performances, are still events: that is, they happen. They simply form a particular type of event. One mark that actions are events is that doings occupy places in objective time, in successions of events. Taking a horse farm tour, eating lunch, devastating the forests of New England, and daydreaming about yesterday’s drive down Old Frankfort Pike all occur or occurred before and after other events. This holds true despite the indefiniteness of the duration of certain doings. Taking a tour, for example, has clear-cut boundaries in time, namely, the beginning and end of the tour. Devastating the forests, by contrast, had no such boundaries. The devastation was, nonetheless, an event: it occurred before and after various other events, for instance, the “discovery” of the New World by Europeans and the invention of plastics. Of course, taking a tour is indefinite, too, just within narrower limits. It is not set out in reality whether the tour begins when the tour guide picks up his charges at the Horse Park Tour Kiosk or when he starts the van and drives off. Although imprecision of this sort infects many, if not most, performances, doings still take up positions in successions. It does not harm their status as events. In distinguishing actions from mere occurrences, philosophers also seek to differentiate things that people do from things that happen to them—moving one’s arm, say, from someone else moving it. This contrast is one between activity and passivity. Now, an important characteristic of Heidegger’s event, that is, of the happening of a clearing, is that a clearing just happens; it is not a doing, or performance. Because, moreover, humanity must stand into a clearing for the clearing to happen, clearings befall humans: standing into a clearing happens to people as a feature of the happening of that clearing. Standing into a clearing is not something that people do.

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Activity is the performance of an action. Such performances, I believe, possess a feature that Heidegger accorded clearings in their relation to humanity, namely, that of befalling entities. In the case of clearings, these entities are historical peoples or mortals. In the case of actions, these entities are the people performing them. Performances, as events, befall people, that is, they happen to people. A person, to be sure, performs, or carries out, an action. She does not, however, perform, or carry out, the performance: the performance befalls her. Its befalling her is, at once, her carrying out the action. The claim that performances befall people is not self-contradictory. It might seem that the claim entails that something people do, namely, perform actions, is something that happens to them, thus is something that they do not do. Performance, or doing, seems to exclude happening to, or suffering. Doing and suffering, however, designate different aspects of the event of activity. A person performs an action. The action is what is done, whereas the performance is the doing of it. As noted, moreover, the performance itself is not performed. The performance, instead, happens; it befalls the person who performs the action. Yet, even though the performance happens (to her), it is still a performance; what happens is her performance. Because, consequently, what happens is her performance of an action, she is responsible for it—it is her performance. She is also, of course, responsible for the action performed. So responsibility befalls the actor.6 In short, human activity combines something done and something that just happens. Lingering behind the intuition that a performance cannot befall a person is, I think, the idea that a performance is chosen or the result of free will.7 Choosing or freely willing something seems radically opposed to its befalling one. This opposition is an illusion. Choice and free will are implied in the character of the performance event as performance. What I mean is that, if an event is a performance, it follows, from the nature of performance, (1) that the person performing the action has chosen it and (2) that she has exerted free will. Choice and free will, in other words, are facets of performance. They need not be conceptualized—as some philosophers do—as additional machinery or events (e.g., triggers) responsible for this event. This topic deserves further discussion, which I cannot provide here. The event of activity has a structure quite unlike that of other events. It is a temporal event in the sense of the temporality of activity. More specifically, it has three temporal dimensions, namely, coming toward that for the sake of which one acts (the future), coming or departing from that to or in the light of which one reacts (the past), and acting itself (the present). I summarily abridged this structure as teleologically acting motivatedly. Activity is a teleological event. It is also a spatial event in the sense of the spatiality of activity. People always perform actions in regions of places and paths anchored at material

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entities. Any performance, for instance, happens near some entities and far from others, where near and far describe degree of involvement and relevance to activity (see chapter 1). This even holds of “mental” activities, for instance, figuring out a problem in one’s head, which happens in a region of places and paths to sit, write, stroll etc. which are anchored at chairs, desks, blackboards, podiums, country lanes, and so on. As described in chapters 1 and 2, moreover, which arrays of places and paths activities happen within depends on (1) the ends, purposes, and motivations that determine performances and (2) the prescriptions, acceptabilities, and regularities that characterize the practices people carry on in acting. Note that spatiality reflects temporality. Spatiality also, conversely, determines temporality. People often, for example, perform a particular action at a particular object (e.g., sit on a park bench) because a particular place or path (e.g., a place to sit) is anchored there. The anchoring of places at particular objects is grounded both in the prescriptions, acceptabilities, and regularities of practices and in the motivations, projects, and ends that determine people’s actions—in this case, in the acceptability and regularity of people sitting on benches and the motivations, projects, and ends on the basis of which they do so. Activity is a temporalspatial event. The timespace of activity, accordingly, is a feature of certain events, namely, performances. Timespace, as such a feature, likewise happens. It, too, is event-like. I might point out for philosophers that a key implication of conceiving activity as a temporalspatial performance event that befalls people is that the determination (and explanation) of action can be theorized without hypostasizing teleology and motivation. In particular, this conception implies, as Scott Sehon has recently argued, that “it is a mistake to look for a thing that is the agent’s reason for ⌽ing, whether the thing be a state of affairs, fact, or psychological state. There is a perfectly good answer to the question ‘What was her reason for doing that?’ However, the answer is not some reified state, psychological or otherwise.”8 For the sake of present discussion, assume that actions are determined by reasons and that an explanation of an action cites the actor’s reasons for performing it (both these suppositions are widespread among contemporary philosophers). Philosophers have debated whether reasons for action are mental states, psychological states, or aspects of reality such as facts or states of affairs. These alternatives—from Davidson’s widely shared thesis that reasons are mental states to Jonathan Dancy’s and Frederick Schueler’s alternative that reasons are worldly states of affairs—reify reasons. As explained in the previous chapter, by contrast, the account I advocate holds that a person’s reason for an action consists in the bearings that particular ways of being and states of affairs have on the practical intelligibility that governs its performance, namely, that for the sake of such and such and

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given this and that it made sense to perform it. Acting for the sake of such and such and acting given this and that are the future and past, respectively, of performance events. According to my account, consequently, the reason for an action is contained in the future and past dimensions of the event of performing it; it is not “some reified state, psychological or otherwise.” Suppose that it makes sense to someone to take his daughter on a horse farm tour given that they have an afternoon to kill and in order to please her, which he does for the sake of being a good dad. In this example, neither (1) given an afternoon to kill, i.e., because of this, (2) in order to please his daughter, i.e., for this purpose, nor (3) for the sake of being a good dad, i.e., for this end, are things. Having a free afternoon, pleasing his daughter, and being a good dad are, of course, states of affairs or ways of being. These states and ways also figure in his reasons (and in an explanation of his action by reasons). But his reasons—to please his daughter and because we have a free afternoon—are not states of affairs, ways of being, facts, or mental conditions. They are the bearings of states of affairs and ways of being on what makes sense to him to do: the contents of the future and past dimensions of a performance event.9 A complementary philosophical implication of this conception of activity is that ends are not future states of affairs.10 Ends are aspects of events, not future things of any sort. Many philosophers have treated ends as not yet obtaining states of affairs at which people aim. Many such philosophers have also construed practical reasoning as working backwards from the supposed obtaining of this state of affairs (in the future) to the specification of what action to perform here and now.11 As discussed in chapter 1, however, the future dimension of activity is simultaneous with the present: the past, present, and future of activity occur “at a single stroke.” Acting for the sake of something, thus its status as something sought after, are aspects of current activity. An actor’s end, consequently, cannot lie in the objective future—it is not a future way of being or state of affairs. Rather, it is a feature of the present:12 it is a pursued, or sought after (desired), way of being or state of affairs, whose status as sought after or desired consists in the actor coming towards it in acting. Of course, a desired state of affairs can also be entertained or thought about—for example, in practical deliberation—as a future state of affairs, that is, as one that has not yet obtained. A state of affairs fills out a person’s reason for acting, however, only as something sought after (desired), never as something outstanding. Davidson famously wrote that “. . . a person can have a reason for an action, and perform the action, and yet this reason not be the reason why he did it. Central to the relation between a reason and an action it explains is the idea that the agent performed the action because he had the reason.”13 I just explained that reasons consist in the bearings of ways of being and states of affairs on the practical intelligibility that governs action. This thesis implies

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that any reason that a person has for an action cannot but be the reason why she performed it. Any “reason” that fails to be the reason why she performed it is not a reason, but instead a possible or imaginable reason. A person can have many possible or imaginable reasons for performing an action. As possible or imaginable, however, they are automatically not the reason she did it. Accordingly, Davidson’s apparently sensible supposition, which has provided powerful support for the causal account, is false: a person cannot have a reason for an action and perform the action and yet the reason not be the reason she did it. Although, moreover, a person can have possible or imaginable reasons for the action that are not the reason she did it, this truth lends no support to the thesis that the reason she did it caused the action. This observation about reasons also underwrites a noncausal explanation of the “because” in the above quotation. “The agent performed the action because he had the reason” says the same as “the agent performed the action for the sake of such and such given this and that.” Of course, this argument leaves untouched the epistemological problem of ascertaining the reason for, i.e., the temporal structure of, any particular performance event. Timespace, as noted, is a feature of performance events. Because of this, interwoven—common, shared, and orchestrated—timespaces are also event-like. When two horse farm tourers hang back from the group to observe horses breeding, shared futures and presents (the project of watching breeding and the activity of ducking around a corner) are linked to shared or common spatialities (places to hang back and to watch breeding). This interwovenness happens at once with, as a feature-effect of, the two tourers’ performances of particular actions (conversing, pulling away, following the other’s lead, quickly moving around a corner etc.). Similarly, when two tour guides check in with one another by cell phone to make sure they don’t tour a particular farm at the same time, an interwoven timespace consisting in common futures, orchestrated presents and pasts, and common, shared, and orchestrated spatialities happens as a feature-effect of their activities. Like activities and interwoven timespaces, practices and practice-arrangement bundles are events, too. Practices such as those of horse farm touring are composed of doings and sayings. Because doings and sayings are events, so, too, are these practices; the organization of a practice is the organization of an open set of performance events. For the same reason, a practice-arrangement bundle is likewise an event, composed of a more complex and diverse set of activity events. It follows that social phenomena—which consist in or are aspects of practice-arrangement bundles—are also events. The horse farm tour company, for example, embraces practices such as those of public relations, accounting, touring, and making arrangements with horse farm owners. These practices are carried on amid the arrangements that compose the

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central office, the horse farms, and the vans. The company is thus a constellation of open sets of organized temporalspatial activity events that occur amid interconnected material arrangements. As discussed, the event of activity has a three dimensional temporal structure. This event is also part of objective time successions. Human activity, consequently, has two times: it is an event in objective time with a three dimensional temporal structure of a different sort. (Human activity also has two spaces: it takes place at places and paths that are anchored at geometrically arranged material objects). As mentioned in chapter 1, in Being and Time Heidegger argued that existential temporality has priority over objective time. I do not want to examine this claim here. It is important, however, to explain how activity temporality has priority over the objective time of activity. Consider, again, Davidson’s version of the desire plus belief causal account of action determination. I noted above that, according to his account, an action is a component of a sequence of events, each of which precedes or occurs concurrently with the next event in the sequence: event associated with desire and belief ¨ action ¨ effects. The priority of activity temporality over the objective time of activity lies in the fact that which desire/belief event ¨ action succession helps compose this sequence depends on activity temporality, i.e., on the determination of practical intelligibility. An action makes sense to someone to perform for the sake of such and such given this and that. In an early example in the previous chapter, for instance, it made sense to me to say “Come in” given a knock on my office door. To put this in the language of belief (as explained in that chapter, the word “belief” can be used to put into words that a specific state of affairs is something given which it makes sense to perform a particular action): I said “Come in” because I believed someone knocked at the door. Davidson, as indicated, would have said that an event associated with this belief caused my action, and that this event preceded or was concurrent with the activity. The fact that I said “Come in” because I believed someone knocked on the door, thus, in Davidson’s view, the fact that an event associated with my belief caused my action, follows from the determination of what made sense to me to do, i.e., from activity temporality. For the claim that I said this because I believed someone knocked articulates its having made sense to me, given the knock, to say “Come in.” If, then, as Davidson would have it, this because is explicated causally, it follows that what caused my action is picked out by the determination of practical intelligibility, i.e., by activity temporality. Activity temporality also thereby picks out the causal succession of which the action is a component.14 (The same result ensues if the determinant of my action is construed, not as the belief that someone knocked, but as the state of affairs that someone knocked.) If, instead, given my promise to a colleague to finish a letter, it had made sense to me to ig-

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nore the knock, then the promise, or the belief that I had made a promise (or an event associated with this), would have qualified as the determinant, or “cause,” of what I did (ignore the knock), and what I did would have been part of a different succession. This priority of activity temporality over objective time can be formulated in terms of the latter: with the performance of an action (and by virtue of its activity past), particular states of affairs, occurring at particular points or stretches of time—or beliefs in these states of affairs, occurring or associated with particular points in time—are settled as the determinants (“causes”) of that action. Of course, objective time conditions activity temporality, too. For instance, a state of affairs can fill out the activity past—be that given which it makes sense to perform some action—only if the actor confronts it prior to or concurrently with the commencement of the action. This fact does not entail that the state of affairs obtained before the performance. Anticipated events, including ones that never occur, can help determine what makes sense to someone to do. What is required is only that they were anticipated prior to or concurrently with the performance.

2. The Indeterminacy of Activity The foregoing discussion introduced an important consequence of the idea that activity is a performance event: the indeterminacy of activity. Activity is indeterminate in the sense that it is not fixed or laid down in reality prior to acting either what a person does or what teleological or motivational factors determine this. Nothing about a person or the world at tn secures, requires, or necessitates either that she perform a particular action at tn⫹1 or that any particular factor determines what makes sense to her to do then. Whatever she does is, nevertheless, determined. To speak the language of reasons: she has reasons for whatever she does. It is important to stress that indeterminate does not imply undetermined. It is natural to interpret the thesis, that nothing fixes or lays down ante eventum what someone does, as implying that activity is random. Activity, however, is not random. A person has reasons for what she does. These reasons, however, are not fixed, settled, or determinate until she acts. The indeterminacy of action follows from the thesis that activity is a performance event. As discussed, the determination of action is contained in the temporal structure of activity. People act for the sake of such and such given this and that, i.e., what they do is what makes sense to them to do for the sake of such and such given this and that. Acting for the sake of such and such and acting given this and that are the future and past dimensions of activity,

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respectively. Since the past, present, and future dimensions of activity are simultaneous, the determination of activity occurs at a single stroke with activity: that given which, as well as that for the sake of which, a person performs an action, are settled with the (commencement of the) performance. Prior to the performance, that which determines what a person does is open: which ways of being and states of affairs will be those for the sake of which and given which she acts is not settled. What she does similarly lacks determinacy. Even when, as we say, everything speaks for an action, nothing guarantees that a person performs it—for prior to acting nothing settles what a person does and what determines this. Human activity is constitutionally vulnerable to what philosophers call “weakness of will.” Because activity is indeterminate, so, too, are timespace and interwoven timespaces. An important implication of the indeterminacy of interwoven timespaces is that nothing ensures the perpetuation of the temporalspatial constitution of social phenomena through time. Because interwoven timespaces determine coordinated actions (see chapter 2), nothing ensures the perpetuation of coordinated actions through time either. Practices are likewise indeterminate: which practices a person carries on, and thus which practices people carry on, is not definite until they act. So, the persistence of practices, too, over time is not settled before people act. The same holds of social phenomena generally. In chapter 3, I described how practical intelligibility governs emotional activities of the first two sorts. Emotions either pick out that given or for the sake of which someone acts or inflect the determination of practical intelligibility. Emotional activities of these types are indeterminate; which emotions shape or inflect the determination of practical intelligibility is not settled until people act. Practical intelligibility does not, however, inform emotional activities of the third type. Activities of this type are brought about via causal processes that bypass practical intelligibility. Such activities, as a result, are not indeterminate in the sense just specified (they might be open in some other sense). In the case of these actions, emotions are settled as the causes of activity prior to their performances, which therewith follow (whether or not what the emotional person more precisely does is fully determined). When someone throws down a deficient cell phone out of anger, the anger precedes the throwing down and becomes, through existing bodily causal networks, that which brings it about. Of course, causal determination is not invincible. A person’s ability to check emotional reactions is the learnable capacity for practical intelligibility to pre-empt emotional bodily networks. Most accounts of action that treat reasons or mental states as causes of action contravene the indeterminacy of action. For most such accounts, even if they deny that causes are governed by laws or that causality is a relationship of

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necessity, hold that causes in some sense foreshadow their effects. For example, when one thing causing another is understood as the first thing bringing the other one about, the first thing is understood to reach out from the past to make the other one happen. If, moreover, causality is viewed as embodying necessity, then in Kant’s exemplary words, “. . . to the synthesis of cause and effect there attaches a dignity that can never be expressed empirically, namely, that the effect does not merely come along with the cause, but is posited through it and follows from it.”15 When causality embodies necessity, in other words, the future has to take a certain form because of the past. On a weaker, Humean view of causality, finally, causes foreshadow their effects in the sense that events of one sort repeatedly follow events of another sort: extant regularities implicate future events (even when they are qualified by all things being equal clauses). In short, a causal world is one in which states of the world prior to t1 determine prior to t1 that particular states (or types of states) exist at t1. Indeterminacy upsets this arrangement vis-à-vis human activity. Nothing pertaining to teleology or motivation prior to t1 settles what a person does at t1. Stronger: nothing of these sorts prior to t1 settles which ways of being and state of affairs determine activity at t1. Yet, what is done at t1 is not undetermined. It is often even determined by states of affairs that existed prior to t1. It is only with the performance at t1, however, that what determines this activity—in particular, which previous states of affairs do this—is settled. Traditional conceptions of causality cannot accommodate this situation. The sociologist Hans Joas has criticized what he calls the “teleological interpretation” of intentionality and action on the grounds that it depicts action as following preconceived ends.16 According to the teleological model, he claims, people first set goals and then settle on appropriate means for realizing them, before carrying out actions that implement these means. At times Joas’s criticism of teleology reads like its real target is, not the idea that ends determine actions, but the idea that action is determined by something that proceeds it in time. Among the examples of the teleological model he cites are the ideas that action is determined by “unambiguously defined, preconceived intentions,” by “clearly identifiable motives,” and by “internalized values that are unambiguously applicable to specific situations as the stimulus for action.” As replacement for the teleological interpretation of activity, moreover, Joas describes (most) actions as unreflective reactions to situations in which the people performing them are already involved. Situations, he claims, “constitute” actions: what a person unreflectively does is what his perception of his current situation specifies he should do. Because a person is always already in this or that situation, he is always already reacting to them. Goal-setting, on Joas’s view, is just a momentary phase of an actor’s reactive relationship to a

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situation, a moment in which an actor, perhaps because of a breakdown in smooth performance, deliberates, reflects, and chooses a goal to realize. A goal thus arises in the midst of both a situation and a course of activity that is already reacting to that situation. What’s more, regardless of what goals, plans, or intentions a person might intermittingly choose, and irrespective of what values she might observe in choosing them, her ensuing courses of activity are never fully traceable to them and, instead, also depend on evolving situations. Indeed, what, specifically, goals, plans, intentions, and values imply for action fully depends on the situations in which people act. There is much to agree with in this picture. For instance, I concur that actions are not, so to speak, controlled at a distance by preconceived goals. People, moreover, often do spontaneously react to situational events. Joas, however, has an overly narrow conception of teleological accounts of activity. In particular, he errs if he thinks that a teleological account must hold that activity is the product of preset ends. On the neoHeideggerian account that I have been developing, for example, activity is teleological just in case a person performs an action for the sake of some way of being. Acting for the sake of some way of being, however, is a feature of the activity itself; it does not entail that the end, or even that a person acts for an end, is settled prior to the activity. A teleological interpretation of action can also affirm the observation that people sometimes set goals, or discover what their goals “really” are, in the middle of a situation. For this observation says nothing about the scope of teleology vis-à-vis activity. For example, it does not preclude people unreflectively performing actions for the sake of particular ways of being, that is, pursuing ends without thinking about this and without being explicitly aware that they are doing this or of the ends they are pursuing. To put this in Joas’s terms: a person’s perception of the situation in which he currently finds himself, and thus the action this perception specifies, can be shaped by ends even if the actor is unaware of this. In short, neither unreflective actions nor spontaneous situational reactions refuse teleology.17 Indeed, on my account, unreflective actions and spontaneous reactions are usually performed for the sake of ways of being or states of affairs. This also holds of most instances of two categories of action that Joas describes as not rational in character: acting on inclination or whim and habitual action. As noted, Joas wavers as to whether the target of his criticisms is the thesis that human action is teleological or the idea that action is determined by factors that precede it in time. He seems to reject both propositions. However, Joas’s alternative to tracing situational reactions to ends, plans, intentions, motives, and values is to trace them to such factors as unreflective “aspirations and tendencies that are prereflective and have already always been operative.”18 He also writes of “vague dispositions towards goals, which are

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constantly at work even when we have not set ourselves any immediate goals . . .”19 Joas thus attributes situational reactions to factors that precede them, factors that he locates in the human body. I am not sure in what sense aspirations, tendencies, and dispositions toward goals are “bodily” phenomena. Their bodily character does not change the fact, however, that Joas substitutes one sort of control at a distance for another. Instead of goals reaching out of the past to direct the present, he imagines aspirations, tendencies, and dispositions causally doing so. Supporting Considerations I have presented the indeterminacy of action as a consequence of the neoHeideggerian conception of human activity as a performance event that takes place in objective time. Resistance to this conception of activity might fuel skepticism about indeterminacy. I should point out, therefore, that other theorists have attributed indeterminacy to human activity. As I will discuss in the next section, for example, Henri Bergson articulated an idea that at least closely resembles it.20 Something resembling this idea also gained prominence—without being named—through the movement of thought called “life-philosophy” (Dilthey, Simmel, Spengler), in particular, through their idea that life precedes the forms and structures it assumes. This latter idea infused continental philosophy in the postWorld War Two period, most importantly, in the intuition that the phenomena and structures that allegedly determine human activity are in fact effects of that activity. This intuition animated, among other things, Wittgenstein’s account of rule following and his conviction that action underlies language, thought, and reason; Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of freedom; H.-G. Gadamer’ idea of continuous concept formation; and Jacques Derrida’s and Judith Butler’s notions of the performative citation of norms.21 I now discuss three considerations that support the idea that human activity is indeterminate. These considerations do not confirm or demonstrate this idea, only make it more plausible. Consider the following issue, formulated in terms of the orthodox account of action. A person always has a variety of desires and beliefs. By virtue of what are some—and not others—causes of action? That is, given the multitude of possible reasons a person can have for acting, why do some desires and beliefs—in my language, some ways of being and states of affairs—and not others cause actions, i.e., fill out reasons why the person acts? The issue is not the illusory one Davidson imagined, namely, why a given action is caused by one reason rather than another. Rather, the issue is why some possible reasons and not others, why some desires and beliefs and not others, cause any action

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at all. I want to mention problems for two historically prominent answers to this question. The first claims that mental conditions possess relative strengths, or intensities, and that the strongest extant desire motivates action. The long recognized problem with this answer is that no sense can be given to a desire being more or less strong independently of it, as opposed to other desires, leading to actions. The problem is not simply the epistemological impossibility of reliably ascertaining the strength of desire independently of action (e.g., asking people is notoriously unreliable). Rather, the problem lies in the idea that a desire possesses a relative strength independently of action—what could it be for a desire to be strong in the absence of any connection to actual action? Desires as a class have no obvious feature unconnected with action that permits them to be ordered as stronger or weaker. People do, of course, label as “strong” those uncomfortable, immoral, embarrassing, or nagging desires that well up and are suppressed only through struggle. The criterion of strength that this consideration suggests, however, does not apply to all desires. Regarding the desires it does cover, moreover, relative strength is no longer responsible for one such desire rather than another causing action. A second answer claims that a person has a set of final ends or values by reference to which her desires are ranked and that relative ranking explains why some desires and not others cause actions (constitute reasons for actions). This venerable proposal raises several issues. One is whether there can be values and ends relative to which all, even radically different types of desire, are comparable. Another is the stability of final ends and values and, thus, the decisiveness of higher ranking relative to particular ends and values. A third issue is whether everything a person does is rooted in his or her final ends and values. People perform a variety of offhand or, as Joas emphasizes, highly situation dependent actions that do not obviously rest on final ends. They also sometimes act contrary to the counsels of final ends. It is not clear, consequently, how final ends and values can provide a general explanation of why certain desires, and not others, cause actions. Finally, invoking final ends and values simply postpones the original question, which now becomes: By virtue of what do people have particular final values and ends and not others? One historically prevalent approach to this issue is to make final values and ends formal, thus the same for all humans, and to lodge them in human nature (e.g., eudaimonia, atarxia, utility maximization, or satisfication). It is then no longer obvious, however, that final ends and values are what is responsible for particular desires, and not others, causing action. Common to these and further proposals is the attempt to specify factors—strength of desire, binding values, and ends—that secure what is done before action occurs. These proposals essay to identify factors that make it

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inevitable, unavoidable, predetermined, or even necessary that actions of certain types are performed. The failure of such attempts suggests that there is something wrong with trying to nail down action ante eventum. Their failure thus supports the idea that activity is indeterminate, that it is not fixed or laid down in reality prior to acting either what a person will do or what factors will determine what she does. Indeed, indeterminacy provides a simple explanation for the failure of these traditional—and still often affirmed22—ideas about action. The second consideration to be considered here is Wittgenstein’s observations on rule-following. Wittgenstein famously demonstrated that a rule—by which he meant an explicit formulation—cannot, by itself, determine what it is correctly to observe it. Previous conceptions of rule-following had held that a rule, by virtue of its (formulated) content, settled, prior to conduct, which actions do and which actions do not conform to it (thus the famous image of train rails proceeding to infinity).23 Wittgenstein showed, by contrast, that what does and does not conform to a rule cannot be determined prior to activity: only with ensuing activity does what a rule implies for action become a little more determinate. Whether an action conforms or not to a given rule (the rule that it supposedly observes or that the actor tries to observe) instead depends on the context in which it is performed.24 Considerable controversy has reigned over the character of the relevant contexts and the role they play in establishing conformity to and divergence from rules. Some commentators have maintained that the relevant context is ongoing practice (cf. Wittgenstein’s reference to customs and institutions),25 and considerable controversy has focused on the role of community judgment and agreement in this regard. The relevant point at present, however, is that rules do not determine what people do; rather, what people do determines what following rules amounts to. Another aspect of Wittgenstein’s argument directly relates to the indeterminacy of action. Rules pre-exist the actions that follow them. What Wittgenstein showed, in other words, is that certain items that pre-exist the actions that observe them cannot by themselves determine what observing them consists in. (Nor, of course, do they predetermine that people will follow them in the first place.) This thesis has narrower scope than does the idea that nothing settles what a person does before he acts. But it does illustrate the general idea: the pre-existent rule that someone is to follow does not settle what he does ante eventum. The other dimension of indeterminacy—according to which, prior to acting, which items determine activity is not settled—can then be formulated as follows: not only does a rule, prior to following it, not determine what following it amounts to, but nothing, prior to acting, settles which rule a person follows or that he follows any rule at all. Wittgenstein did

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not note this. It is eminently plausible, however, especially given the myriad rules, i.e., formulated directives, admonishments, and directions that pepper social life and the diverse actions that are not obviously governed by them. Even in a case Wittgenstein pondered—a pupil learning to “Add two”—the learner might at any moment act on some other rule, for instance, “Clean up your room before you go to bed.” The third consideration I will mention is the compatibility of the indeterminacy of activity with recent psychological research on voluntary action that has generated considerable interest among philosophers. This research has discovered that the brain processes that lead to voluntary movement (say, the voluntary movement of a finger) precede conscious awareness of wanting to perform such movement. The details of the research are not presently relevant. This research has been used to deny the anyways dubious idea that conscious will plays a role in the etiology of voluntary movement: “It seems that conscious wanting is not the beginning of the process of making voluntary movement but rather is one of the events in a cascade that eventually yields such movement.”26 It has also been used to challenge the belief that people are the authors of their actions and therefore responsible for them. These experimental results are to be expected given the indeterminacy of action. Only with activity does what determines it become determinate. Reformulated so as to make patent the relevance of indeterminacy to the psychological research at issue: only with acting, i.e., with the commencement of the brain processes that lead to voluntary movement,27 does intention become determinate. Awareness of intention is presumably the product of brain processes. If so, then the indeterminacy of action implies that these brain processes can commence only once the brain processes that lead to voluntary movement have begun. Assuming further, then, that the brain processes that lead to awareness of intention take time, it follows that conscious awareness of wanting to move should follow the beginning of the movement-generating brain processes. This situation leaves open the possibility that nonconscious mental “processes” relevant to the movement coincide with these movement-generating brain processes. The only point I want to make at present is that the experimental results are to be expected given the indeterminacy of activity. Indeterminate Activity and Social Phenomena Nothing settles before a person acts what that person does or which factors determine this. This claim holds of social phenomena: they, too, cannot settle, before a person acts, what she does or which factors determine this. This is an important claim about social life. Generations of scholars have maintained that such entities as rules, traditions, hierarchies, roles, cultures, and social

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structures accomplish what the indeterminacy of action precludes. An examination of the sociologist Edward Shils’s forthright account of how tradition (and memory) shapes activity will illustrate where these scholars have erred. The indeterminacy of action entails that tradition does not predetermine activity but, instead, forms part of the context in which people act. A tradition, according to Shils, is anything passed or handed down from past to present.28 Tradition shapes action by (1) supplying the beliefs, ends, means, and standards that cause it and (2) shaping the situations in which people act. What this means is that among the entities handed down from past to present are such action-causing items as beliefs, ideals, ends, rules, principles, and patterns of evaluation or judgment (e.g., valuing economically oriented action, appreciating the economic rational mode of choice; 33), as well as such features of a person’s situation as tasks posed to and opportunities afforded her (48). These elements of tradition cause people’s actions. Of course, tradition is often not the only element responsible for actions. Rational judgment and current perception can also play a role (though engaging in rational judgment is itself a tradition). Emotional actions, moreover, partly escape the imprint of tradition, though what someone does in the grip of an emotion can reflect traditional ideas and norms (e.g., gauging out someone’s eyes in a photograph). Traditions, in addition, can be plural, and which elements of which traditions a person adopts depends on inclinations and dispositions “set by experience and sentiment” (41) and possibly also on genetic endowment (48). Still, what a person does is centrally and pervasively determined by elements of tradition. The presence of the past in the present is so great that the vast bulk of the factors that cause action do so because they have been handed down as tradition: All the features of an individual exist, of course, in the here and now; but most of these features are the latest states of a tradition which has moved through various distances down from the past with varying degrees of modification . . . Every human action and belief has a career behind it, it is the momentary end-state of a sequence of transmissions and modifications and their adaption to current circumstances. (43)

The reason that ideals, ends, beliefs, tasks, judgment patterns, and the like are handed down and come to determine action is that the “presentation” of such items to upcoming generations is normative: they are presented as matters that should be upheld, believed, or achieved. “Tradition is thus far more than . . . statistically frequent recurrence over a succession of generations . . . The recurrence is a consequence of the normative consequences—sometimes the normative intention—of presentation and of the acceptance of the tradition as normative” (24). Finally, Shils likens memory to a storehouse in which

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elements of tradition (and personal experiences) are deposited (166–7). Tradition determines current activity largely by depositing in people’s memories the normatively qualified ideals, ends, beliefs etc. that cause their actions. Shils’s vision is that beliefs, ends etc. propagate through generations because of their normative character and that they cause actions because they are deposited in memory thus qualified. According to Shils, therefore, the normative character of beliefs, ideals, ends, and the like settles, prior to acting, that people act on them. People are predetermined to act on the beliefs, ideals etc. handed down to them because these items have been presented, and taken on, as normatively binding. Shils’s emphasis on normativity converges with the above discussed traditional idea that it is settled, prior to acting, that a person’s final ends or values determine what she does—for it is the normative bindingness of these ends and values that supposedly effects this. I noted that the traditional idea is undercut by the instability of allegedly final ends/values and by the fact that people sometimes ignore or contravene them. This instability and fact are undergirded by the indeterminacy of activity. Similar observations hold of tradition normatively construed. It is always possible—and frequently happens—that people ignore, contravene, or negate what was presented to and taken on by them as normatively binding. Beliefs, ends, and ideals can be handed down between, and presented to successive, generations as normative, but their normative character cannot compel people to act on them. Indeed, nothing can guarantee, before the fact, that people will do what is enjoined of them. The normative quality of beliefs, ends etc. is effective, that is, makes a difference to what people do, only if it makes sense to people to perform actions given, i.e., because of this quality. Beliefs, ends, and ideals may be presented as normatively binding, but the effectiveness of their normative character is an effect of what people do. In short, tradition as Shils conceives of it determines activity only insofar as activity affirms it, only insofar as activity affirms the normative character of tradition by acting on traditional beliefs, ends, and ideals because they are normative. These comments apply to normativity in general, thus also to the normativity of practice organization. Nothing guarantees or presettles that participants in a practice will, for example, carry out the ends, projects, and actions that are prescribed or deemed acceptable in the practice’s teleoaffective structure; in particular, the enjoinment and acceptability of these items cannot do this. This is why I wrote in chapters 1 and 3 that practice organization “circumscribes” what participants do and not that it “determines” this. Of course, it is a fact about human life that people tend to uphold normativity (and to fall in with action regularities): tradition à la Shils or practice organization in my scheme. By itself, however, normative form cannot explain this

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fact; the normative character of practice organization does not command its observance. What explains why participants in a practice tend to pursue the ends, projects, and actions contained in its teleoaffective structure are two facts: first, that people are shaped to uphold normativity (this includes being convinced that particular normative items should be upheld) and, second, that practice organization is normative.29 People, moreover, only tend to uphold practice organization. The normative character of the organization serves only to identify ends, projects, and actions among which participants, shaped so as generally to uphold normativity, tend to find ones they pursue. It follows that the perpetuation of practice organization through time is a product of participants’ activities (see section 4). This conclusion parallels the sociologist Barry Barnes’s claim that “. . . all the order observable in [a] situation [is] a product of interaction . . . cultural and institutional order are not given patterns that enforce themselves upon people but are forms of order that emerge as people interact—forms that people themselves create and recreate.”30 Barnes’s argument takes wing from Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule following. He draws from Wittgenstein the lesson that following a rule does not consist in carrying out implications that are inherently contained in it. Following a rule is, instead, successfully carrying on in analogy to actions already recognized as conforming to it, as certified by collective agreement (whether automatic or the result of negotiation). Whenever a situation calls for following rules, people (attempt to) proceed in analogy with precedent and custom, relying on “skilled improvisation” (65) to do so. The actions they perform in following rules are thus spontaneous, on the spot interactional improvisations. The actions that people perform in interactional settings also perpetuate cultural and institutional orders such as hierarchies, authority, routines, and regularities. As a result, Barnes claims, social orders, too, are perpetuated and extended through spontaneous improvisation, creation “ab initio” (67). In short, Barnes holds that what people do in given interactional situations is not predetermined or dictated by pre-existing rules or cultural and institutional orders. Rather, as quoted before, “all the order observable in the situation [is] the product of interaction.” Barnes attributes the spontaneous creation of social order to human interaction. A social event, “in both its routine and its improvisatory aspects, [is] the outcome of and nothing but participants’ goal-oriented use of cultural and institutional resources in ordered interaction with one another” (ibid.). Interaction, moreover, “can never be understood simply as a combination of pre-existing elements that individuals bring into it, whatever these elements might be” (71). Interaction, in short, is an order sui generis. Nothing that preexists it—neither social or cultural orders nor cognitive elements such as rules qua internalized instructions—can predetermine its forms or results. Social

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orders do not determine human interactions; rather, interactions determine social orders. I affirm these insights. I believe, however, that indeterminacy is lodged deeper than human interactions—it is an inherent feature of human activity generally. Human activity, to use Barnes’s Durkheimian language, is sui generis vis-à-vis the past. It is only with acting that extant features of social life (rules, hierarchies, routines) help determine what people do—if they do at all. For it is only with activity that the teleology and motivation that are responsible for activity exist. And it is only over time that what is commonly dubbed “personality” or “character”—the pendent in an individual of the cultural and institutional order of social life—accrues. In short, the indeterminacy of interaction is grounded in the indeterminacy of activity. It is ultimately because activity is indeterminate that cultural and institutional orders, like knowledge, competence, preference, desire, commitment, and conviction, cannot predetermine the forms, or “orderly features,” of interaction. When discussing Giddens’s conception of power in chapter 2, I wrote that commands are funny entities. It is now apparent why. I described a command over people as a claim on the timespaces of their lives. A claim is a normative entity: when I, the person holding the claim, tell you, a person on whose timespace I have a claim, to pursue an end or to carry out a task, you are supposed to do it. Implications such as this are what a claim amounts to. On their own, however, claims are ineffectual: only if you respond to my claim by doing what you should is the claim effective interactionally. Commands are in the same boat. Recall, furthermore, that Giddens both defines power as the ability to achieve outcomes that depend on others’ actions and argues that power works via claims over people. Claims, as just stated, are effective or ineffective depending on what the people upon whom they are placed do. There is no parallel issue of whether power is effective or ineffective: a person either possesses the pertinent ability or not. Because claims are effective, however, only if people do what they should, the ability that Giddens defines as power exists only if people as a factual matter do what they should; a person is powerful just in case others uphold the claims she places on them. Hence, as Hegel famously observed, the powerful have power only if those over whom they possess it cooperate.31 Human activity is indeterminate. So, too, as noted, are interwoven timespaces. Like rules and cultural as well as institutional orders, interwoven timespaces cannot predetermine activity. They explain coordinated actions because they happen along with, as the effects of, the performances of actions. Because, moreover, social phenomena consist in practices, and practices are composed of actions, social phenomena, too, are indeterminate. Which social phenomena persist through objective time is fundamentally unsettled until

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people have acted. This fact does not preclude people from making accurate predictions about social affairs. It implies only that it is impossible to know which reasonable predictions will turn out to be wrong.32

3. Human Activity as Flowing In this section I consider an account of human action due to Henri Bergson. A prime reason for taking up Bergson in the present context is that he attributed to human life something extremely close to the indeterminacy of action. There are three further reasons for examining his views. The first is that flowing is a palpable, omnipresent fact of ongoing activity, life, and consciousness, and Bergson is the preeminent theorist of this phenomenon. Any account of human activity is incomplete if it fails to analyze or recognize it. A second reason is that Bergson is a key “contemporary” figure in that tradition dating to Saint Augustine that has conceptualized a time of human life different from objective time. Because time is a central topic in this book, his ideas should not be overlooked. The final reason to examine Bergson’s views is that Bergson has recently regained some of the attention he widely enjoyed during his lifetime, becoming a noted reference point in certain philosophical and social theoretical circles. Combined, these reasons suggest that juxtaposing Bergson’s account of ongoing human life and neoBergsonian conceptions of historicity with my account of activity and the conception of historicity rising from it will enhance understanding of activity and social life. I should add that my interpretation of Bergson goes into considerable detail. I do this because of the intriguing mix of outdated architectonic and penetrating insight that characterizes his work. Bergson on Human Activity Bergson conceptualized time as an absolute reality consummated in the continuous unfolding of processes. The following discussion focuses on one sort of process involved, human consciousness, and puts other processes largely aside. I do this because unfolding consciousness embraces activity, the topic of this book. It is important to note, however, that Bergson thought that reality contains a continuum of durations of different scales, or breadths. Entities of different sorts exhibit durations of different breadths, matter having the narrowest, living beings broader ones, human consciousness still broader ones, and the universe, or God, the largest.33 Bergson also believed that all durations are integrated into an overall hierarchy. In this hierarchy, shorter durations are “incorporated into,” or “part of,” longer ones. In particular,

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the duration of consciousness incorporates the duration of matter and is itself incorporated into the duration of the universe.34 All these durations are instances of real time. As suggested, Bergson’s account of human consciousness is central to his account of human activity. In explaining the nature of consciousness, Bergson distinguished between unfolding consciousness as a process and states of affairs as results of that process. Vis-à-vis human activity, which Bergson thought of as external bodily action, this contrast is one between motion and movement: If I draw my finger across a sheet of paper without looking at it, the motion I perform is, perceived from within, a continuity of consciousness, something of my own flow, in a word, duration. If I now open my eyes, I see that my finger is tracing on the sheet of paper a line that is preserved, where all is juxtaposition and no longer succession; this is the unfolded, which is the record of the result of motion, and which will be its symbol as well.35

In this example, the motion is drawing a finger across a sheet of paper (this motion, “perceived from within,” is a continuous unfolding of consciousness), whereas the movement is the displacement of the finger from one spot to another. The traced line is the record and symbol of that movement. According to Bergson, real time is paradigmatically consummated in the flowing of consciousness36 In this example, as a result, the duration of consciousness that is real time is the performing of the action. Bergson claimed that conceptual analysis cannot grasp the “thick” duration of consciousness that is real time, the motion—the drawing—of the finger in its unfolding. This duration can only be intuited. Intuition alone, consequently, can grasp the real time that is the unfolding of the motion.37 Conceptual analysis, can, however, grasp the movement involved, or rather, the symbol of that movement, the line. Indeed, conceptual thought takes the line to be, not just a record of the movement (the finger’s displacement), but a representative of the motion (moving the finger), thence a representation of the continuous unfolding of the duration of consciousness. This duration, however, it time. So conceptual thought takes the line to represent time (e.g., the t axis). Since, geometrically, a line can be measured and divided, ultimately into points, time thereby becomes conceptualized as a measurable continuum decomposable into “points” called instants. Time conceived of as a one-dimensional axis or as a series of instants (both notions of objective time) are products of conceptual thought. Bergson claimed that to conceptualize time thus is to spatialize it, to translate the flow of the unfolding of consciousness into a line or a juxtaposition of points. In claiming this, Bergson conceptualized space as homogeneity, as an

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infinitely divisible empty homogenous medium.38 It is through the spatialization of time in this and other ways that humans quantify time and both coordinate their lives and investigate the world by relation to it. It is important to stress that there is nothing wrong with spatialized time per se. The problem is mistaking it for real time. Real time is not a line and neither has instants nor is decomposable into instants. Real time is “thick,” a continuous unfolding of processes. Bergson described this thick duration as “the continuation of what precedes into what follows . . . uninterrupted transition, multiplicity without divisibility, and succession without separation.39 Conscious activity, for example, is a continuous flowing that is not, in itself, composed of distinct moments that occur before and after one another. Consider an example discussed in chapter 3. I first composed a paragraph on the computer, listened to music on the radio, and pondered what to write next, before replying “Come in” to a knock on the door, saying “Hello” to the colleague who entered my office, and celebrating with her an increase in the department’s operating budget. Bergson contended that separating out and describing these various goings-on is an accomplishment of memory and intellect: memory records and houses recollections of these goings-on,40 whereas intellect leaps into memory and makes recollections conscious. In “real time,” by contrast Bergson claimed, actions and perceptions form an “undivided whole” (MM 138). In conscious life as it unfolds, what memorially is held apart from and subsequently remembered as preceding something else—I pondered what to write next and then said “Come in”—extends into it: an uninterrupted transitioning segues from composing the paragraph to listening to music to pondering what to do next to saying “Come in.” Unfolding conscious activity contains succession without distinct events or states following one another, a “mutual penetration” of all elements (TFW 101), an “uninterrupted solidarity of before and after.”41 In real time, that is. In memory, before and after are distinct, different transitions are separately recorded, and these different recollections can become conscious. For Bergson, the root sense of time is succession, before and after, even though real time is a succession without separation. Often, however, he conceptualized real time succession via notions of past, present, and future. The center of gravity of his concept of real time lies in these notions. “Duration,” he wrote, “is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and swells as it advances”42 (cf. MM 150). It involves the “past, in its entirety, [being] prolonged into [the] present, and abid[ing] there, actual and active.”43 Bergson also characterized each moment of life’s duration as original, as invention, as a kind of creation.44 Duration is not just unsegmented transition and succession, but also perpetual expanse, diversification, and change; in the

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philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s terms, becoming is becoming different.45 In affirming originality and creation, Bergson maintained that the future is open. The succession that composes time is the pressing of a person’s past into his present towards an open future. As this formulation suggests, the past is the paramount dimension of time. A person’s present is a prolongation of his past, and his future is what his expanding past will become. The openness of the future closely resembles the indeterminacy of activity. Bergson’s initial account of this openness occurs in his analysis of freedom. According to Bergson, the long-standing argument between libertarians (defenders of free will) and determinists concerns whether, given a set of antecedent conditions, a person can perform just one act or several equally possible ones (TFW 175). To press their cases, Bergson claimed (TFW 176–7), both sides imagine a person oscillating between courses of action right before acting. Libertarians claim that the alternative courses were equally possible at that moment. Determinists take into account the future, the fact that the person chose one alternative rather than the other, and declare that the reasons for this alternative were decisive, that the person at the alleged moment of choice was in fact determined, and that the alternative courses of action were thus not really possible. Libertarians have trouble explaining how the person made his choice; determinists have difficulty explaining why people think they are free (TFW 181). Bergson argued that this disagreement rests on a sleight of hand. The picture of a person standing before alternatives is an ex post facto representation of the actor’s predicament before he acts. It looks backward at “the deed already done” and is oblivious to its “doing.” In unfolding activity, a person never stands before or oscillates between alternatives. At best, he successively considers and leans towards this and that course of action, in doing so affecting the standings of courses already considered. Real time performance, moreover, involves an actor’s past prolonging itself into present circumstances towards the future. It is false that the person could have acted differently than he did: circumstances and personality (see below) joined to produce just this action. A person enjoys possibilities only in a ex post reconstruction of what he did that condenses a temporally extended process of considering different courses of action into a static standing before alternatives. In short, Bergson averred, libertarians misinterpret the fact that before the action is performed it is not yet performed as implying that multiple possibilities then existed. It is also false, however, that the person had to do whatever he did. The future was open: just what circumstances and personality conspired to produce was not settled until the deed was performed. “Action issues from its antecedents by an evolution sui generis . . .” (MM 186).46 Personality and circumstances predate activity (TFW 148), but they do not necessitate what people

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do. Determinists thus misinterpret the fact that the act, once performed, is performed as implying that it had to occur. For Bergson, freedom is nothing more than activity issuing from the self (TFW 172–3): “free action drops from [the self] like an over-ripe fruit (TFW 176). Freedom does not consist in a relation of the act to what it is not or might have been (e.g., the still today classic definition of freedom as it having been possible to act otherwise; TFW 183). Bergson recognized that what personality and circumstances bring about is not settled until activity occurs. He also came close to affirming the second component of indeterminacy, viz., that until a person acts it is not settled what determines what she does. Bergson did hold that, prior to activity, it is settled that circumstances and personality, more specifically, circumstances and relevant recollections (see below), codetermine action. This fixation of factors that determine what a person does leaves open, however, which aspects of the circumstances and, thus, which recollections are involved. It also grants considerable leeway for what other factors codetermine action. For instance, it leaves open what ends a person pursues and also the possibility of a person suddenly pursuing an end for which she has hitherto never acted. Openness, in short, converges with indeterminacy. Bergson accorded consciousness and memory architectonic prominence in his account of human life. The significance of consciousness is embodied in his thesis that time is the continuous unfolding of consciousness. It is also embodied in his claim that the present is consciousness (MM 141). According to Bergson, the present is what is actually lived. What is actually lived is constituted by perception, and perception is inherently a state of consciousness. Memory is just as central to Bergson’s account of mind-action as is consciousness. Bergson claimed that the brains of humans and other higher animals open a gap between impulses received from the world and actions (i.e., bodily motions) performed on it. This gap permits responses to the world to be intelligent. In humans, what fills the gap and governs action are conscious memory-images that the intellect inserts into present perception between sensation (and bodily habits) and impending action. These memory-images are contractions of relevant memories that guide nascent action in providing something useful to it (MM 168–9). “There is no perception that is not full of memories” (MM 33; cf. MM 34, 101). When a person is “attending to life” and thereby focused on acting, what she presently perceives and does is a product of her history, indeed of her entire history (ibid.). This is how the past extends into the present. Memory, accordingly, is the past. It is a storehouse of unconscious (inactive, virtual, latent) recollections (MM 140–1). Bergson claimed that the entire past informs present activity. The bearing on present activity of this entire past, of the entire range of unconscious recollections, is called “personality” or “character.”

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For Bergson, accordingly, mind is perception, or consciousness, plus memory, the present and the past (plus an indeterminate future). Insofar as the present is the prolongation of the past, Bergson grants priority to memory over consciousness. Since, at the same time, the past and present are defined as what is inactive and active, respectively, consciousness enjoys priority over memory: memory is what, unlike consciousness, is impotent.47 Consciousness and memory thus fill out Bergson’s account of mind-action. In bestowing great architectonic prominence on consciousness and memory, Bergson’s account, I believe, lacks the resources to analyze either action or the full range of mental conditions. My present concern is with human activity. Bergson held that actions are both identical with bodily motions (actions are bodily interventions in the world) and determined by conscious ideas-images and sensations. The conscious ideas-images that govern action are inserted by intellect into the gap between world and bodily movement.48 Lifting an arm, for example, encompasses the conscious picturing of the goal of activity, the absence of “antagonistic” ideas that neutralize the effect of this idea, and the movements of the arm “com[ing] of themselves to fill in the plan.”49 Actors also experience conscious feelings of coming towards their ends.50 Bergson’s account thus ascribes great significance to states of consciousness in the etiology of activity. I do not believe, however, that human action is illuminated by treating the determinants of action as conscious, motion-governing ideas-images-sensations. Neither the determination of practical intelligibility nor desiring, believing, hoping, expecting etc. are states of consciousness. Nor are alternative contemporary action-explaining entities such as habitus (Bourdieu), skills, cognitive processes, and utility maximization apparatuses. Bergson’s conception of bodily habits covers a subset of the “spontaneous” or situational “reactions” that some of these phenomena explain (though hardly all: Bergson’s habits underlie only those actions that occur in situations that resemble past situations, e.g., approaching a red light). His account of intelligent human action, however, is stylized and rigid. According to Bergson, action is intelligent, or reasonable, because it results from intellect leaping into memory and contracting relevant memories into action-governing schemas that determine responses appropriate to present circumstances (thus from a way the past is prolonged into the present). This, by its own admission, neo-associationist account of practical intellect (and also of remembering) overmechanizes the role of intellect in action. In short, Bergson’s account suffers from the overestimation of consciousness that characterized many accounts of human life prior to the middle of the twentieth century. Despite these criticisms, there is something compelling about Bergson’s vision of the advance of consciousness as a continuous unfolding. Something

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about human activity must make this vision intuitively plausible. Indeed, various theorists, often in a Bergsonian vein, have pictured ongoing life as a flow of activity. Examples are Wilhelm Dilthey, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, George Herbert Mead, Anthony Giddens, and Gilles Deleuze. Not all flows, however, are Bergsonian. Ongoing life may flow, but it instantiates Bergsonian duration only if it evinces uninterrupted transition and development, as well as succession without separation: as life unfolds, what is subsequently remembered as earlier actions or phases of action must not be distinct from what is likewise subsequently recalled as later actions or phases. I’m sitting at my desk reading. The phone rings. I turn toward the phone, lift the receiver, and answer it, noticing, as I turn, that a pile of paper is about to fall and thinking to myself, “If only the phone would stop ringing.” This description of my recent past suggests that the “flow” of activity possesses significant segmentation: I’m performing one action, a perceived event leads me to abandon this action and to take up others, in the process of which I notice something about the world and think something. Any passage of moment-to-moment life has a parsing similar to this one. As indicated, Bergson would have argued that this segmentation of my life was a product of memory and intellect; as it unfolded, it was a thick duration, an undivided amalgamation of action, sensation, and memories. As Deleuze might have put it, my life, as it unfolds, contained differences, but none of the named actions and perceptions as distinct moments. It seems to me, however, that the job of memory in this context is to preserve and to re-member the segmentations that were there in my life, not to introduce ones or to articulate ones that were “latently,” “virtually,” or (to use a word Bergson did not) “implicitly” there.51 Breaking off from reading, turning to the phone, and answering it were set out as such in my activity prior to my attending ex post facto to what I had been doing. True, both my performances of these actions and my lived-through experiences of this series were continuous. But the continuous performance of action was of precisely these actions, and my continuous experience took precisely these turns. True, too, I do not attend to, and am not thematically aware of, the segmentation of my ongoing life as it transpires. I know of it, however. It is available to me as my life transpires (if you ask me, I can tell you). I possess knowledge of the performances that compose my unfolding activity; I also have knowledge of my perceptions. This knowledge, in turn, is the basis of ex post facto articulations. My knowledge of the segmentation of my ongoing life is not the product of observation. I do not observe the unfolding of my life or its segments, either implicitly or explicitly: my thematic awareness of such matters is ex post facto. This knowledge is, instead, a self-knowledge that I eo ipso possess because I am what is known: performing certain actions and having certain

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perceptions.52 Of course, a person might not know everything about his or her unfolding life. A person can also have false beliefs about the matter. These possibilities do not, however, affect the current point. In defense of the absence of discreteness and separation in ongoing activity, it might be claimed (1) that any stretch of the flow of life can be articulated into different series of actions and perceptions53 and (2) that how finely the continuum of activity and perception should be broken up is inherently uncertain.54 The first point is an illusion. Only to the extent that a person is ignorant of the segmentation of activity can it seem to hold true, and a person usually has pretty good knowledge of the segmentation of his own life. All the second point reveals, moreover, is that the segmentation of life is limited and leaves much open: what a person more particularly—in greater detail—does and undergoes in and while carrying out actions is fleeting. Is it true that I first read one word and then another, that I heard the different peals of the phone’s ring, that I looked up from my book, tensed my stomach muscles, and lifted my left leg first, that I noticed that the phone is beige? Did I hear the proverbial ringing of the courtyard bells? I lean toward saying that there are facts of these matters and that uncertainty arises from the infirmity of memory. These matters, however, might very well be indefinite. Either way, ongoing life possesses a definite “higherlevel” segmentation. What is the continuum that is segmented? Continuous performing. Performing is constant, ongoing, uninterrupted. The actions performed, by contrast, are defined and discrete. Recall that Bergson contrasted motion to movement: the motion (moving) of the flying bird versus the movement this flying accomplishes (see the preface). I am transposing this thought to human action, contrasting performing, voluntary doing (activity), to actions as performed accomplishments. Ongoing life is marked by continuous performing, continuous voluntary doing. What in human existence, consequently, promotes Bergson’s idea of an interpenetrating, separation-less flow is the continuum of performance, in conjunction with the continuousness of attention and the fleetingness of the details of action and experience. Ongoing activity, however, is not Bergsonian duration. It is segmented into distinct episodes (performances of actions) that do not instantiate his notion of a qualitative multiplicity in succession. My neoHeideggerian account of action provides a propitious account of these episodes. Each of the performances into which the continuum of voluntary doing is segmented is an event. Each such event occupies a certain length or moment of time and also has a past, present, and future. Its past and future dimensions specify what is done and why. In addition, performance events can occur simultaneously, discontinuously, overlappingly etc. Ongoing life is

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an activity continuum segmented into successive, simultaneous, and overlapping performance events. Performances, as explained in section 1, happen. Happening, however, differs from flowing. In contrast to Bergson’s vision of the past persisting into the present toward the future, as well as the equally familiar sense of the future becoming present and then past, neither the past nor the future of activity flow into the present: they remain the past and future of activity so long as the activity occurs. When the performance is concluded and the action performed, past, present, and future cease together, at one stroke. It is worth recalling, however, that Heidegger attributed to life a movement that bears some resemblance to flow. This movement is the being on the move (Bewegtheit) inherent to life, the thrown-acting-projecting structure of being-in-the-world. This is a directional phenomenon, a doing-from-toward. The performance events into which the continuum of activity is articulated generally have this three-dimensional directional heading; a person, that is, is almost always directionally on the move. This state of affairs contains a sense of motion that converges with Bergson’s sense of flow. The motion involved, however, is not flow: it is, instead, an always directionally acting. Heidegger, in effect, redescribed the directional “extent” (l’étendue) of Bergson’s continuously unfolding passage as the directional dimensionality of certain events. Space-Time Flow Time, Bergson held, is the unfolding of processes, archetypically, the unfolding of human consciousness. Time is thereby associated with flow (or, rather, flowing). It seems, by contrast, that Bergson associated space with stability or stasis: it is an empty homogeneous medium that exhibits neither succession, transition, nor flow. Time and Free Will encourages this assimilation of space to stasis. Whereas time is succession without mutual externality, “there is . . . in pure space, mutual externality without succession” (TFW 108). “Mutual externality without succession” means two things. It means, first, that things in space coexist. As distinct things they are mutually exclusive, but as coexisting things they do not form successions. The above phrase means, second, that space embraces change but not succession. Bergson claimed that, qua spatial, a process such as the oscillation of a pendulum consists in a series of distinct states of affairs: the pendulum in a particular location, the pendulum not at that location but at another, the pendulum not at that second location but at a third, and so on. By itself, Bergson claimed, this series fails to form a succession—to exhibit before and after relations—because there is no consciousness able to retain the one state of affairs (in memory) as it perceives the next in the sequence and, thereby, to qualify the one as before and the

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other as after.55 “No doubt external things change, but their moments do not succeed one another . . . except for a consciousness which keeps them in mind” (TFW 227). The series becomes a succession only through the simultaneity of the appearance and disappearance of spatial states of affair with states of consciousness (TFW 110). Bergson assigned all duration to consciousness and withheld it from things in space: “We observe outside us at a given moment a whole system of simultaneous positions; of the simultaneities which have preceded them nothing remains. To put duration in space is really to contradict oneself and place succession within simultaneity” (TFW 227). The associations of time and of space with flowing and stasis, respectively, are widely attributed to Bergson in the secondary literature. Things, however, are not that tidy. In fact, a conception of space-time flows lurks in Bergson’s texts. In Time and Free Will, Bergson wrote of the simultaneity of states of consciousness with the appearance and disappearance of phenomena (by virtue of this simultaneity, phenomena can form successions and states of consciousness can be separated). In later books, however, Bergson spoke of the simultaneity and even coincidence of external and internal durations: When we are seated on the bank of a river, the flowing of the water, the gliding of a boat or the flight of a bird, the ceaseless murmur in our life’s deeps are for us three separate things or only one, as we choose. We can interiorize the whole, dealing with a single perception that carries along the three flows, mingled; or we can leave the first two outside and then divide our attention between the inner and outer; or . . . We therefore call two external flows that occupy the same duration “simultaneous” because they both depend upon the duration of a like third, our own; this duration is ours only when our consciousness is concerned with us alone, but it becomes equally theirs when our attention embraces the three in a single indivisible act.56

As this passage indicates, after Time and Free Will duration and flowing are not assigned to consciousness alone. Worldly processes, too, exhibit these properties, as does the universe as a whole. Worldly processes—the flowing of the water, the gliding of a boat, the flying of a bird—are all spatial phenomena. Space, consequently, is no stranger to duration, flow, and time. Bergson evaded the alleged contradiction incurred by the insertion of duration into space by ceasing to consign duration to something that is opposed to space—consciousness—and acknowledging that spatial processes evince it. It turns out, moreover, that Bergson thought that space qua homogenous medium is just as much an abstract construction as is time spatially conceived of as a line or as a succession of instants. Homogeneous space, he wrote, is a

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mental diagram of infinite divisibility (MM 206) that people “stretch” under things for the purposes of action, ultimately so as to be able to master the world (MM 211, 219, 231, 245).57 It is not a property of things. This conceptual homogeneous medium contrasts with the concrete extensity (l’extension) of perceived things. Concrete extensity is “the most salient quality of perception” (MM 245); it is also indivisible. Only the abstract extension (l’étendue) that redounds to things from the homogeneous space spun under them is arbitrarily and infinitely divisible.58 Concrete extensity also precedes homogenous space in the sense that the latter is thrown under the former and thus presupposes it. Bergson further claimed that the articulation of perception into distinct things reflects people’s potential actions on them: “the objects that surround us represent, in varying degrees, an action that we can accomplish upon things or which we must experience from them” (MM 144; cf. MM 20–1, 232–3). Greater and smaller distances in space reflect the longer or shorter times required for the fulfillment of actions: “distance in space represents the proximity of a threat or of a promise in time” (ibid.). It is clear that homogenous space is not at issue here. Bergson counterposed homogeneous space to the concrete extensity of perceived entities whose distinctness and distance reflect potential interactions between them and people. Perceptual objects, moreover, are enfolded in processes, to which Bergson attributed duration. It turns out, therefore, that he conceptualized the perceptual world as flowing ensembles of changing extensive, action-relative entities, as a spatial-temporal phenomenon whose spatial aspects are flowing and whose temporal aspects (flows) are spatially located. Reality “has extension [l’extension] just as it has duration.”59 Unfortunately, Bergson never developed this conception beyond the above description of it. The geographer Doreen Massey is among those who claim that Bergson associated space with stasis: “in the association of [space] with representation [space] was deprived of dynamism, and radically counterposed to time.”60 In the book from which this quote is taken, Massey aims to develop a conception of space that accommodates dynamism as well as interrelatedness, heterogeneity, and openness. The conceptions of space and of space-time that she fashions are Bergsonian in spirit. Examining them will at once link with earlier discussions of space-time and prepare the upcoming discussion of temporalspatial history. Believing that space must be thought together with time (18), Massey pursues her goal of developing a conception of dynamic space by appropriating Bergson’s notion of duration. She shrinks, however, from the radicalness of Bergson’s idea that duration is always something ongoing: an unfolding from the past into the present toward the future. Like most readers of Bergson, she

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associates duration simply with “continuity, flow, and movement” (20). For Massey, accordingly, duration is a continuous directional flow. She claims, further, that Bergson equated time with change (21): time, she writes, unfolds as change (61). The change involved is continuous. Duration, consequently, is continuous open-ended change (and not, note, continuously open-ended changing). The conception of space that Massey seeks to develop cannot be appropriated from Bergson; for Bergson, Massey claims, construed space as a static phenomenon. Massey conceptualizes space, instead, as the “dimension of a multiplicity of durations,” the dimension of a multiplicity of trajectories (24), thus as the dimension of multiple streams of continuous change. The entities that have trajectories include living beings, scientific attitudes, collectivities, social conventions, and geological formations (12). Massy also characterizes space as the “simultaneity” of multiple durations or trajectories. In claiming that space is the “dimension of dynamic simultaneous multiplicity” (61), Massey consciously opposes a popular conception of space that construes it as the simultaneity of things at an instant. This conception of space as, so to speak, frozen simultaneity contravenes the fact that “the elements of the multiplicity are themselves imbued with temporality” (55). Massey holds, in addition, that the dimension of multiple durations that is space is also the “sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality” (9). This dimension-sphere, she adds, is itself the product of “interrelations,” that is, interactions among trajectories (these interactions are material practices). Because trajectories continuously unfold, interactions among them always take place, open-endedly and sometimes haphazardly. Space, as a result, is forever under construction. The expressions “dimension” (of multiple durations) and “sphere” (of the possibility of multiple durations) recall absolute space. The comparability of absolute space to space as Massey conceives of it is enhanced when she writes that space and multiplicity are “co-constitutive” (9). For this claim implies that space is distinct from the multiple trajectories of which it is the dimension (cf. her claim that “for there to be interaction there must be discrete multiplicity; and for there to be (such a form of) multiplicity there must be space” [56]). To be sure, the co-constitution of space and multiplicity distinguishes Massey’s space from absolute space since absolute space is not constituted by what occurs or exists in it. Still, the two sorts of space converge. Indeed, Massey’s conception of space is a reified version of the notion of space as homogeneous medium that Bergson treated as a conceptual construction and opposed to the concrete flowing extensity of perceptual objects. It is also a version of objective space.

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Massey does not note the resemblance of space as she conceives of it to either absolute space or space as homogeneous medium. Nor does she indicate what the content or character of this “dimension” or “sphere” might be that makes it distinct from the multiplicity of durations. Instead, she occasionally describes space as “relational space.” This is a confused description, for a relational space does not co-constitute the entities, in this case, the intersecting trajectories it characterizes. It instead arises from these entities. As Massey writes regarding space-time, space is “constructed out of the articulation of trajectories” (179). I can hold together Massey’s statements about space only by interpreting them temporally. Treat space—the dimension of multiplicity and the sphere of the possibility of multiplicity—as a particular configuration of interweaving trajectories from which nascent change (changes in trajectories and their interactions) is arising. This configuration itself arose out of a prior such configuration; this is the sense in which space is the product of interactions. The co-constitution of space and multiplicity lies, moreover, in the dependencies of this configuration on the prior one and of the emerging configuration on this one. Space, then, is the dimension of multiple trajectories in the sense that configurations of interweaving trajectories always arise out of other such configurations. Indeed, interrelated multiplicities continuously change. The coconstitution of space and multiplicity is nothing but this continuous change. If this interpretation holds water, Massey is committed either to a conception of time other than and in addition to duration or to something resembling Bergson’s idea of a universal duration. I explained that Massey sometimes describes space as the simultaneity (or contemporaneousness) of multiple durations. This simultaneity (or contemporaneousness) can be understood in two ways. It can be construed, first, as each of a set of durations occurring during the same stretch of objective time. It can be understood, second, as durations co-occurring as components of a nexus of interacting durations that itself has duration. According to this second interpretation, the nexus as a whole continuously changes open-endedly. The duration of a nexus differs from Bergson’s universal duration in its narrower scope and also because many exist, not just one. The duration of a nexus is nonetheless kin to universal duration in being the duration of something whose parts also have durations. I assume that Massey would endorse the first of these two interpretations of simultaneity. This interpretation seems to entail that she affirms two—not one—conceptions of time: time as duration and time as objective succession. Her occasional references to history, successions, and time scales signal her acknowledgment of the latter (e.g., 130, 141). As a matter of fact, however, the only notion of time that continuous change—as opposed to continuous

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changing—implies is objective succession: continuous change is uninterrupted successive changes.61 Consequently, in abandoning the radicalness of Bergson’s conception of duration, Massey affirms objective succession alone as time. Massey’s conception of the space-time of social reality falls out of the above theses. It can be presented in the form of three propositions: (1) the elements of the world continuously change and continually interweave; (2) time is the relational ordering into successions of continuous changes in entities, continual interactions, and thus constant changes in configurations of interacting entities; and (3) space is the continuously evolving relational configuration of interweaving entities over time, whereby interactions and changes in entities have spatial positions. My formulation of these propositions eschews the notion of a duration that encompasses other durations, which Massey probably does not endorse, and jettisons the idea of a dimension or sphere of multiplicity that is distinct from multiplicity, which she does promulgate. All in all, Massey’s neoBergsonian notion of space-time is an orthodox, if more complex, version of objective space-time. Her vision of dynamic space is simply an updated version of relational space that highlights the dynamic character of the entities whose relations constitute or underlie it.62 Massey’s conception of space-time as dynamic reality exemplifies the growing prominence of Bergson as reference point for the theorization of social life. The geographers Mike Crang and Penny Travlou maintain, for instance, that the ideas of Bergson (and of Deleuze, whose rise to prominence has spurred attention to Bergson)63 are needed to theorize change, diversity/ difference, and the presence of the past in social life.64 Crang, furthermore, echoes Massey and also speaks for many in holding that everyday space-time is a realm of constant movement or becoming.65 Theorists such as Massey and Crang carry the dynamization of the social too far. A human life, for instance, embraces continuous happenings. It is not, however, constant movement or transition. Nor, pace Deleuze, is it constantly becoming different (except in trivial regards, for example, a person’s objective past continuously expanding). Interwoven timespaces likewise happen, but they, too, do not constantly change or become different. An event is not ipso facto a becoming or a change: only some events are occasions of change or becoming. Indeed, human lives and the timespaces and interwoven timespaces that characterize them usually contain more continuity and sameness over time than they do difference, change, and becoming. The centrality of activity and interwoven timespaces to social phenomena entail that the same holds of these phenomena. Social affairs encompass—in some sense consist in—multitudinous events, but sameness and stasis mark their course through time as much as difference and change do.

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4. On History and Historicity The chief aim of this final section is to examine history construed as a realm encompassing temporalspatial events. I will focus on one fundamental feature of history on any construal, namely, the existence of the past in the present. I call this feature “historicity.”66 Many thinkers have held that a basic difference between human history and the temporal progression of the nonhuman world is that history exhibits historicity, whereas the nonhuman world is largely nonhistorical, i.e., devoid of historicity. Different conceptions of historicity also help mark off categorically different conceptions of history. With Bergson’s and Massey’s conceptions of consciousness and of space-time in the background, I will begin by considering what the presence of the past amounts to when history is interpreted in a Bergsonian fashion as a realm of spatial-temporal flows. According to the Bergsonian accounts to be examined, the historicity of the flows, becomings, or continuous changes marking history is the prolongation of the past into the present. After criticizing these accounts, I will consider what historicity consists in when history is construed as a realm encompassing indeterminate temporalspatial activity events. By “history,” I mean, at a first approximation, the realm and course of human life through time. Because human activity is central—constitutively and causally—to human affairs, history can be, and often has been, viewed as the realm and course of human activity through time. I will later revise this delimitation. Both history conceived of as a realm of temporalspatial activity events and history construed as a realm of spatial-temporal flows oppose an interpretation of history familiar in academic work, namely, history as series of events— as “one damn thing after another.” Although the interpretation of history as event series is opposed by more conceptions of history than the former two alone, it will usefully focus my discussion to set it over against them. The expression “one damn thing after another” does not denote the arbitrariness of history. The interpretation of history in question does not hold that what follows what in a series is random: the events that form series are causally linked and form successions by virtue of their causal relations. The expression “one damn thing after another” instead captures the seriatim nature of history, in particular, the seriatim nature of the event series that criss-cross history: the fact that, in these series, one event causes another that causes another and so on. According to this interpretation of history, what happens next in such a series depends solely on what precedes it. The remainder of the past falls away, irrelevant to what happens next: earlier components of successions do not help determine what happens next, and how things got to their current state makes no difference to what is happening

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now.67 The past, in short, is no longer present. Or, rather, only those events that precede and cause current events in such series are in some sense present. Sometimes the causality that is attributed to successive events in these Markov68 chains is Humean causality, that is, constant conjunction. Constant conjunction represents a kind of connection between past and present that goes beyond the dependence of what presently happens on what precedes it in whatever successions of which it is part: the wider past foreshadows the present (and future) insofar as particular conjunctions have reappeared in it. Constant conjunction does not imply, however, that either earlier events or how things got to where they now are make a difference to what happens. For what presently happens in any series is simply an event of the sort an instance of which has regularly followed the sort of event that the previous series element instantiated. Earlier components of the succession fall away, irrelevant to what happens. This conception of history is the notion of event history (l’historie événementielle) that the historian Fernand Braudel made famous, shorn of the history of the long time span (longue durée) that he thought necessarily accompanies it. The history of the long time span is the history of features of human life that take long lengths of time to evolve. Examples are uses of building materials and of food stuffs. Interestingly, Braudel conceived of the long time span as a kind of temporal context for events, something of the ilk I just claimed the conception of history as event series does not brook. Events, Braudel wrote, are denizens of the short time span; they are “matters of moment”69 whose time is that of the chronicler and journalist. The long time span, by contrast, encompasses interacting currents, movements, and patterns, “multiple rivers of time.”70 Successions of short term events fit into—are grounded in—these currents and patterns. Consequently, much more of the past than preceding events alone bears on what happens next in event history. Historicity as the Prolongation of the Past into the Present Bergson’s intuition that the past extends into the present lies behind several conceptions of history. Joining them is a particular notion of historicity, according to which the past is present in pushing or carrying across the alleged gap or boundary between it and the present, present events dropping “like . . . over-ripe fruit[s]” as the past presses into the future. These conceptions thus hold that the gap between past and present is an illusion. The past is in the present. It has not fallen away behind the present, consigned to inertness, irrelevance, or inexistence. Conceptions of history that appropriate this understanding of the relation between past and present must be distinguished from so-called unfolding

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models of historical change. Unfolding models portray history as implementing a script that was present at its inception, as carrying out a plot with a predetermined end that was present from the beginning of history. “Classical” examples of such models are the theories of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. More recent examples are the energetic or ecological models of, among others, the anthropologist and ecologists Leslie White, Richard Adams, and Murray Bookchin.71 Bergsonian models do not attribute a telos to history that is present from its inception. Nor do they recognize any sequences or mechanisms as inevitable in the course of human affairs. Which activities are left behind by the past as it pushes through the present toward the future is open and depends on contingent circumstances. History embraces open flows. It has determinate form only once it has occurred. Bergson believed that the universe as a whole has duration. The pendent of this belief vis-à-vis history is that history, the realm and course of human activity, flows as a whole. The anthropologist Tim Ingold has come close to defending such a notion. His conception of history is of particular interest to the present discussion because he subsumes a neoHeideggerian interpretation of life into a Bergsonian metaphysics. Ingold describes human life as dwelling, dwelling being his gloss of Heidegger’s being-in(-the-world). Dwelling is composed of acts of dwelling (“tasks”). Such acts, or tasks, are purposeful in nature and linked together in a nexus which Ingold calls the “taskscape.” Implicitly drawing on the intuition that “time is intrinsic to the performance of skilled activity,”72 Ingold describes time as the “movement or flow that inheres” in the taskscape (325). This flow does not so much consist in the unfolding of individual tasks as it encompasses complex relations between the “multiple rhythms of which the taskscape is itself constituted” (197); these rhythms characterize people’s journey from one task to another. Like time, moreover, landscape is a feature or dimension of dwelling. Landscape is not the same as land (a homogeneous quantitative property common to all planetary topologies), nature (what has not been shaped by human hands or cognitive apparatuses), or geometric space. Rather, landscape is the “familiar domain of dwelling” (191), the world as it is known to those who dwell in it (193). Landscapes are organized into places and paths that form regions, where places and paths are defined by repeated movements at given material locations, through which people are afforded particular experiences (192, 219). Landscapes are also the product, or “embodied form” (198), of the taskscape. Because time is the flow and rhythms of the taskscape, it follows that landscapes as products of the taskscape are temporal phenomena, not just spatial ones. According to Ingold (as on my account), time and space are features of being-in-the-world: time is the flow of being-in, space the world where this

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flow occurs. History qua realm and course of human affairs over time thus consists in the interconnected flows of multiple taskscapes transpiring in associated landscapes. Ingold’s account, however, contains a further twist. Interpreting the notions of agent, activity, and action broadly, he claims that the landscape is replete with nonhuman actors, that these nonhuman actors shape human activity, and that the landscape is as much the product of nonhuman actors as of human ones.73 Accordingly, he expands the notion of taskscape to embrace the actions of nonhumans, animate and inanimate alike. Because, moreover, more or less all entities do things, everything that helps make up a landscape is an actor. Landscapes, as a result, are parts of the taskscape, not products of it. Indeed, Ingold conceptualizes the reality that encompasses human activity as one immense metamorphosing field of “interactivity” that comprises the doings of everything.74 Drawing on Bergson’s intuition that the universe is one all-encompassing flow, Ingold even describes the world as “a total movement of becoming which builds itself into all the forms we see” (200), including landscapes, human bodies, nonhuman entities, and the actions of these entities. History, accordingly, is the realm and course of this overall becoming out of which humans, nonhumans, and actions precipitate.75 In note 5, I affirmed the idea that nonhumans are actors. I likewise endorse the claim that human activity and the worlds in which people act are partly the products of nonhuman agency. It strikes me, however, that the neoBergsonian idea of a total becoming of the field of inter-activity is an unnecessary metaphysical supplement. I see little reason to think that the myriad “flows” of activity (in my scheme, the myriad continuums of performance) that mark the taskscape (or, in my scheme, social life) are parts of one overall flow. Bergson himself regarded the idea of a universal duration as just a hypothesis. The best argument that he offered for this hypothesis, moreover, shows only that the unfoldings of different people’s experiences can be synchronized by reference to events that they experience in common.76 Ingold, meanwhile, gives no account of how these flows are joined in a greater one, no account of the relation between the myriad flows and the flow of the whole. (Bergson is not much better in this regard.) At times it seems like the flow of the whole is simply the sum of the myriad flows, though such a sum is not something over beyond the myriad flows. In any event, even if these difficulties and obscurities were dissolved, it is not obvious what social theory would gain by joining these flows in a greater one. History as interconnected “flows” (unfolding consciousnesses, continuous task series, or performance continuums) need not be sublated into a larger temporal flow. Indeed, most Bergsonian accounts of history depict it à la Massey as multiple interconnected flows, not as ultimately a single flow that subsumes

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multiplicity. A good example of such an account is that of the historian Preston King. King depicts history as a maze of extended events, each of which occupies a certain stretch of chronological time. An extended event is one that evolves, develops, or unfolds. Examples are “an embrace, a quarrel, a discussion, trial, concert, tennis match . . . a protracted set of negotiations, a lifelong rivalry, a great depression, a world war, an attempt to control world population growth, or to develop energy resources alternative to fossil fuels.”77 Each of these events consists in the persistence of human activities through chronological time. As each such event occurs, moreover, it defines what King calls an “unfolding present.” An unfolding present embraces everything that is contemporaneous with any moment or phase of the unfolding event that defines it. The unfolding present of a set of negotiations, for example, is everything that occurs simultaneous with any moment or phase of the negotiations from beginning to end. When the event that defines an unfolding present concludes, the unfolding present becomes an unfolded past. Each unfolding present also contains multiple pasts of two sorts. The first sort encompasses phases of the unfolding event that occurred chronologically prior to and gave rise to other phases of it; these earlier phases constitute the past of the event as it occurs. The second type of past contained in the unfolding present encompasses events chronologically preceding the defining event that either caused (or “influenced”) it or have lingering effects on it. Pasts of this sort are contained in unfolding presents because, on King’s account, the causes of an event are part of it. (Because chains of causes can be traced back without limit, unfolding events can be indefinitely extensive chronologically.) In these ways, “the past” is present—not chronologically, but substantively. For King, the present is a prolongation of the past in two senses: (1) what happens in any instantaneous chronological present is a later phase of already unfolding events, in part because it is caused by earlier phases of these events, and (2) any present is caused by events occurring chronologically before it, thereby becoming part of even larger unfolding events that encompass the present and these earlier events. King’s account construes causality differently than does Bergson’s. His account also implies that phases of unfolding events can be separated in chronological time: unfolding events need not continuously unfold. Yet, his emphasis on unfolding, evolution, and the presence of the past in the present gives his views a distinct Bergsonian cast.78 Like Bergson, King treats the past as rolling into the present and the present as falling out of its steady advance. Closely related to King’s version of the prolongation of the past into the present is the idea that the past is present in a trajectory. As discussed, for example, Massey treats a trajectory as the path, or history, of a person’s, collectivity’s, social convention’s, geological formation’s etc. continuous changes

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(i.e., its career or development).79 What presently happens on any such path is the leading edge of a journey set into motion in the past: it extends the path that led to it and launches a future that will extend this path further. As such, it is a prolongation of the past. According to the sociologist Andrew Abbot, meanwhile, trajectories are “interlocked and interdependent sequences of events.”80 Any such sequence has an inertial quality due to its “consistent causal regime,”81 a stable set of rules that “coerces” or “enchains” subsequent events. By virtue of this regime, the past is prolonged into the present. Trajectories resemble King’s unfolding events in being unrolling movements whose later phases arise from earlier ones. Trajectories are also spatial entities. As discussed, for example, Massey writes that a trajectory is always spatially positioned relative to other trajectories simultaneous with it. Trajectories as she conceives of them are spatialtemporal affairs, not temporal ones alone. When, moreover, trajectories are so construed, history, the realm of social trajectories, is likewise a spatial-temporal domain, not just a temporal one. This interpretation contrasts, incidentally, with that lion’s share of interpretations of history that treat history as a temporal affair alone. King, for instance, nowhere acknowledges the necessary spatial dimension of unfolding events. History is, of course, intimately related to time—nothing qualifies as historical unless it helps compose or pertains to the course of human affairs through time. Yet, what occurs in the passage of time is also intrinsically spatial in nature: activities, practices, and social phenomena alike evince spatiality and take up objective space. Substantively, therefore, history is a temporalspatial, spatial-temporal affair. The same holds of geography. The historian Michael Bentley’s conception of history is more overtly Bergsonian than are those of Massey and Abbot. Inspired by “Taine’s vision of a temporal moment through which the past presses on the present and perhaps ‘presents’ itself in indirect ways,”82 Bentley suggests that Bergson’s idea of conscious succession be expanded to history. The enlarged notion holds “that historical entities . . . are what they have been and were what they had been; that their pasts could literally present themselves as indirect forces, impetuses, and logics through the mechanism of interpenetrative succession.”83 The implication of this notion for historians is that they will understand events rightly only if they resist abstracting them from the successions that help constitute them. Unfortunately, Bentley does not spell out what interpenetrative succession is. His essay goes no further than formulating the idea of a Bergsonian vision of history. The notion of group duration due to the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs precedes Massey’s, Abbott’s, and Bentley’s understanding of what it is for the historical past to press into the present. Halbwachs took Bergson’s concept of

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duration seriously. He assigned the primary durations in social life to groups, however, and argued that individual lives and durations are subsumed and founded in group ones. These ideas reflect Halbwachs’s Durkheimian background, according to which groups are the fundamental units of social life. Halbwachs claimed that group durations exhibit the properties of succession without separation and of the prolongation of the past into the present that Bergson attributed to individual consciousness. He also followed Bergson in conceptualizing this prolongation as memory (see below): a group’s past presses into its present, its consciousness, via group, or collective, memory—the living memory of collective existence. Another name for collective memory is “living history”; what it contrasts with is “historical memory,” i.e., history writing.84 The notion of group duration is likewise central to Halbwachs’s vision of history qua realm and course of human affairs. Halbwachs believed that history consists in myriad group flows: events, he wrote, occur in local histories, in particular real times, that constitute “distinctive lines of evolution.”85 Halbwachs, finally, recognized the spatial character of group lives. Not only are groups located in objective space and time, but their collective memories have spatial (as well as temporal) coordinates and boundaries.86 Unfolding events and trajectories are closely related to human activities. Unfolding events as King conceives of them are defined by persisting activities, trajectories as Abbott construes them are streams of actions and interactions, and activities are central to most trajectories à la Massey, although not all trajectories as she understands them are streams of activity.87 A problem with these alleged phenomena, consequently, is that they run afoul of the indeterminacy of activity. They all presume a prolongation of the past into the present that consists in past activities and events causing or impelling present activity. King, Abbott, and Massey do not suggest that social scientists, journalists, futurists, and others can know for sure what is to come. But their accounts entail that what people do, or at least what determines this, is settled before people act. Human activity, however, is indeterminate. What people do can always break with the past; what they do can always abruptly abandon or break off an unfolding event or trajectory. Unfolding events and trajectories, in other words, are not responsible for, and cannot ensure, their own perpetuation. Present activity alone is responsible for already taken paths continuing or terminating.88 Historicity and Temporalspatial Activity Events The present section presents my account of historicity. After first re-specifying the domain of history, I will elucidate the event-character of history and explore multiple facets of activity and social phenomena as events. I will then

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explicate what historicity amounts to on my account. Doing this will reveal that the activity events that comprise history both effect and compose the very interrelated practices, arrangements, and interwoven timespaces—which themselves make up social phenomena—that determine these activities. I will focus on how the activities that maintain practice organizations are circumscribed by these organizations. History, I wrote, is the realm and course of human affairs over time. Because activity, I also wrote, is central to human affairs, history is, centrally, the realm and course of human activity through time. Indeed, history has long been, and today still is, widely construed as the realm and course of human activity.89 This venerable conception implies that historians study human actions, what determines actions, and what actions bring about. Anything constituted by, bearing on, or brought about by action qualifies as historical fodder. According to my account of activity, human activities are moments of practice(s) and occur amid material arrangements. It follows that history, construed as the realm and course of past human activity, inherently transpires within practice-arrangement nexuses: human activity and its course are an abstraction from a fuller reality, viz, the realm and course of such nexuses. Whatever, consequently, justifies dignifying the course of human activity with a name (“history”) and making it the topic of its own academic discipline at once justifies conceptualizing history more fully as the course of that complete phenomenon of which human activity is inherently a part. History, accordingly, is the realm and course of past practice-arrangement nexuses.90 Because social phenomena either consist in or are aspects of such nexuses, history can also be described as the realm and course of past social phenomena.91 Activity, as the venerable conception maintains, is central to history. So, too, however, are practices, arrangements, interwoven timespaces, and social phenomena. In order to avoid misunderstandings, I should acknowledge that the remainder of this book pays relatively little attention to the role of arrangements, that is, materiality, in history. It does so because my present interest lies in exploring what difference is made to the nature of historicity by treating human activity as an indeterminate temporalspatial event. I do not deny the significant contribution made to history by nonhuman entities, for example, horses, insects, storms, and geological forces.92 A fuller account of history than the one presented here must consider the role of materiality. Practices are tied to other practices, just as arrangements are connected to further arrangements. Horse farm tour practices are tied to those of tour company accounting, regional tourist publicity, fuel distribution, and eating, and each of these is connected to numerous further practices. Similarly, the

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layout of a horse farm is contiguous with those of other farms and connected to further-flung arrangements such as those at banks, power stations, and overseas residences (e.g., via transportation, satellite communication, and electricity distribution systems). Indeed, over any period of time, human practices link and form gigantic nets, just as arrangements are connected into immense material structures and practices and arrangements relate in myriad ways. Over any such period, the sum-total of linked practices and arrangements, thus of linked interwoven timespaces and linked practice-arrangement bundles (social phenomena), amounts to a gigantic, intricate, and constantly metamorphosing web that forms the overall site of social existence. This immense plenum defines the total objective temporal and spatial spread of social life and also demarcates the realm of history. Section 1 of the current chapter analyzed activity as indeterminate temporalspatial event. The event-character of history centers in such events. To begin with, because practices are composed of doings and sayings, they are organized configurations of temporalspatial activity events. Horse farm tour practices, for instance, are an organized, unfolding configuration of such activities as holding back from the group, gazing at landscapes, asking questions, walking around barns, and entering and exiting vans. As discussed in chapter 2, furthermore, social phenomena are practice-arrangement bundles or aspects thereof. A social organization such as the tour company is a bundle of practices and arrangements. A social event such as a race day at Keeneland Race Track is a nexus of activities, nonhuman doings, and events that befall the actors involved and/or the settings in which they act. And a social system such as the colonial New England fur trade is a confederation of practicearrangement bundles. Social phenomena, accordingly, encompass multiple organized, unfolding activity event configurations that transpire amid interconnected arrangements. Practices and social phenomena generally—and not just social “events” such as a race day—are event-like in character. It follows that history, the realm and course of practice-arrangement bundles, encompasses metamorphosing constellations of organized temporalspatial activity event configurations that transpire amid changing nexuses of arrangements. History is, in that sense, a labyrinthine temporalspatial happening. To elucidate the presence of the past that characterizes history so construed, it is necessary to explore further facets of human activity and social phenomena as events. The temporalspatial events out of which history consists are not simple. Not only does history embrace untold event-like social phenomena, each encompassing multiple complex constellations of performance events; the event of human activity itself is more than just the performance of an action, and in two ways. First, because an activity helps compose a practice(s), it is at once a carrying on of the practice(s) involved. Second, as I will explain

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below, in performing an action and thereby carrying on a practice people also usually help maintain the organization of the practice. It is worth adding that because performances are temporalspatial events, material arrangements are taken up into them as anchoring the places and paths where they occur. This appropriation of the material world is a facet of activity.93 Human activity thus embraces the performance of an action (for the sake of X, given Y(s), at a place or path anchored at objects), the carrying on of a practice(s), and, usually, the maintenance of the practice’s organization. Human activities also, of course, bring about and change the material arrangements amid which they happen. The event character of social phenomena such as the tour company, the race day, and the fur trade exhibits a parallel multiplicity. Like the event of human activity, the happening of a social phenomenon embraces (1) performances of its constituent actions, (2) carryings on of the practices of which these activities are moments, and (3) the maintenance of the organizations of the practices bundled in the phenomenon. The happening of a social phenomenon goes beyond that of an activity, however, in three ways. First, material arrangements do not contribute to the happening of a social phenomenon only by way of objects anchoring places and paths where activities that compose the phenomenon happen and bring about and change arrangements; material arrangements also do so by way of objects causally supporting the social phenomenon’s actions and practices. A computer system, for example, supports the practices of the tour company or the race day even though many of its components do not anchor places or paths for tour company or race day activities. Second, because performances are temporalspatial events, social phenomena exhibit an elaborate infrastructure of interwoven timespaces (see chapter 2). Essential to the tour company and the race day are intricate interwoven timespaces that happen as feature-effects of the activities that compose these social phenomena. Third, the practices that make up a social phenomenon are linked via performances of actions, among other things. The tour company, for instance, combines practices of accounting, public relations, scheduling, and the like. Like the interwoven timespaces that characterize the company, this bundling partly happens as a feature-effect of the action performances that compose these practices. All told, then, what is event-like about a social phenomenon, and hence about the wider plenum of practice-arrangement bundles, is (1) the performance of actions—and thus the carrying on and interrelating of practices, the maintenance of these practices’ organizations, the interweaving of timespaces, and the alteration of arrangements—and (2) arrangements supporting actions and practices. I suggested above that history, the realm and course of practice-arrangement nexuses, encompasses metamorphosing constellations of organized

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activity event configurations. The preceding discussion of the event-character of activity and social phenomena reveals that the constellations and configurations involved comprise events of two sorts: (1) organized temporalspatial performances, through which timespaces interweave, practices are carried on and interrelated, and arrangements are brought about and changed, and (2) events that befall material arrangements, whereby arrangements support or otherwise impinge (e.g., earthquakes, disease) on activities. As myriad events of both sorts occur, practices arise, evolve, connect, and dissolve; changing material arrangements anchor new, persisting, and evolving place-path arrays; and practices and arrangements link in varied and changing ways, such that social phenomena arise, persist, change, and dissipate. The practices, arrangements, social affairs, and constellations thereof involved metamorphose at different celerities, thereby making of history a multicolored pageant. Practices and the like do not, however, simply arise from performances and material events. As I explain below, they themselves help determine activities and material events. Differentially evolving activities and material events, on the one hand, and practices, arrangements, social phenomena, and constellations thereof on the other, are mutually dependent phenomena. I explained at the beginning of this section that construing history as a realm of either spatial-temporal flows or indeterminate temporalspatial activity events differs from treating it as Markov event series in holding that the past robustly exists in the present. For the past to be robustly present, more of it than immediately preceding series events alone must bear on (current) activity. NeoBergsonian theories claim that the past accomplishes this by pressing into the present. As discussed, however, these theories’ conception of how the past presses into the present contravenes the indeterminacy of activity. My neoHeideggerian activity event conception of history treats the past as present in other ways. One important past phenomenon that is present bearing on present activity is practice organization. Practice organizations are vital to the course of human activity and to the social affairs that performances constitute or effect and that, in turn, determine activity. I have already indicated that organizations bear on activities by circumscribing them. Practice organizations circumscribe activities in the sense that human activity—and thus whatever series and constellations (social phenomena) activities and practices form—is sensitive to the normative organizations of the practices people carry on: sensitive to the normative environments of enjoined and acceptable matters (ends, rules, actions, and understandings) that mark these practices. Activity is sensitive to these environments because people, generally, uphold normativity. People, moreover, uphold normativity due to experiences, conversations, arguments, training, threats, remonstrations, and the like that they

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have undergone; this includes having been convinced by argument. There might also be a genetic background to this situation.94 (Humans are also creatures who, through interactions, experience, and maybe again a genetic background, tend to fall into line with regularities in action.) Practice organizations circumscribe activity, then, by comprising items—prescribed and acceptable ends, rules, actions, and understandings—that people, as creatures who uphold the normativity that imbues the practices they enact, tend to pursue, observe, or express. Strictly speaking, moreover, what circumscribes activity is past practice organization: what, at the time of acting, has or had been organizing the pertinent practices. Because of this, the circumscription of activity by practice organization is a way the past is present. Incidentally, “conditionings” of the above sorts that make of people upholders of normativity cannot, before people act, settle or predetermine what they do or what determines this. In particular, these conditionings cannot guarantee that people will uphold the normativity that has been imbuing the practices they carry on (or even act normatively at all). Conditionings simply make them people who tend to uphold normativity and who also believe in observing these and those normative elements. This position differs from Joas’s invocation of tendencies (see section 1) because it neither accords tendencies causal powers nor claims that people are guaranteed to follow them. Practice organizations circumscribe activity. In turn, activity maintains practice organizations. To see this, consider a rule such as No Smoking in Tour Vans. This rule organizes horse farm tour practices even on days when tours do not occur. Similarly, the tour company has offices even at night when they are dark and unoccupied, and ends such as making money and having fun organize track betting practices even when people are not betting or pursue other ends in betting. Philosophers often analyze states of affairs such as these counterfactually. For instance, the fact that the rule organizes tour practices even when no tours occur might be analyzed as consisting in such counterfactuals as that, if people were taking a tour, they would refrain from smoking and ask fellow tourers who start smoking to stop. On my view, the status of the rule as organizational element at the times in question only implies such counterfactuals. What it is for the rule to organize tour practices at those times is for people, once the practice is resumed, actually to perform such actions as refraining from smoking, admonishing others, and frowning when others light up: the rule organizes the practice from the time it was last carried out to the time it is resumed just in case people act in light of the rule when it is resumed. Otherwise stated: whether or not the rule continues to organize the practice during the hiatus depends on what happens once the hiatus is concluded. If it comes to pass that the practice is never resumed, then the practice ceased existing when its last constituent activity occurred—and

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the rule against smoking ceased organizing it at that time. If the practice is resumed but participants happen no longer to sanction violators or to refrain from smoking etc., the rule no longer organizes it. Of course, it cannot be excluded, say, that in the future tourers never want to smoke or that nonsmokers alone take future horse farm tours. If either possibility comes to pass, people will no longer, as a matter of fact, refrain from smoking or sanction violators etc. Scenarios such as these do not show, however, that a rule can continue to organize practices in the absence of people acting in its light. For if tourers never again feel the urge to smoke or if nonsmokers alone take future tours, it will turn out that the rule had earlier ceased organizing the practice. A rule organizes a practice only so long as participants act in its light: its maintenance—as some contemporary theorists recognize—requires continuing observance. Parallel analyses hold of the persistence of any element of practice organization: what, in general, maintains practice organization is activity. Note that this conclusion is the one affirmed by my criticisms in section 2 of Shils’s account of tradition. What is responsible for the activities that maintain particular rules, ends etc. as practice-organizing elements? It cannot be the continuing status of these items as such elements. As with activity generally, it is, instead, the future and past dimensions of performance. Suppose, for instance, that it makes sense to someone to remonstrate a person who begins smoking (1) given that that person lights up, (2) given the rule against smoking, and (3) for the sake of either following rules or avoiding smoke. Acting given, i.e., because of the rule might make it sound like the person acts in its light because it continues in force. In fact, however, the rule remains in force because the person acts in its light;95 he could not, therefore, have acted in its light because it continues in force. What is responsible for his acting because of—and thus his affirming—the rule are two other facts: his knowing, prior to acting, that the rule has been in effect, and his being someone who generally upholds normativity. As indicated, moreover, what, in turn, makes him someone who upholds normativity are past experiences, conversations, arguments, training, threats, remonstrations, and the like. Hence, past practice organizations form a context for the current actions that carry on the practices involved and maintain their organizations.96 The same holds of interwoven timespaces. The interwoven timespaces that have been characterizing the practices people carry on form a context for the current activities through which the timespaces involved persist or do not persist. For instance, the persistence of interwoven anchorings of the same and different place-path arrays at particular arrangements consists in continuing nonindependent performances that appropriate the objects involved as anchoring these arrays. In fact, because the common and shared dimensions

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of interwoven timespaces are, respectively, laid down and underwritten by practice organizations (see chapter 2), the maintenance of the common and shared dimensions of interwoven timespaces is partly a feature of persisting practice organizations. Notice that the maintenance of spatiality also requires the persistence of material objects over objective time. I have just explained one way the past is present in activities and in the series and constellations they form: past practice organizations circumscribing activity. The past inhabits present activity in two further ways. The first is the past determining activity by way of filling out the past dimension of temporality. Many states of affairs to which a person reacts, or in whose light she acts, occurred in the objective past. These states of affairs can concern anything, including the person’s own past and the pasts of both the practices she carries on and the social phenomena of which she is part. This type of presence can also be described as past states of affairs filling out the contents of present mental conditions such as belief. The other way the past is present in activity concerns the manifestation of action in public space. Recall that a person’s bodily repertoire comprises bodily actions that she can directly perform, that is, perform without having to do something else. This repertoire gives public presence to what a person does by containing bodily actions that (1) are carried out in performances of what makes sense to her to do and (2) make manifest that a performance is occurring. (Unintentional movements also make performance publicly manifest.) Because a person’s bodily repertoire is chiefly a product of training, experience, learning, and activities, it is a way the past is present. Closely related to a person’s bodily repertoire are her practical understandings, her knowing how to carry out this and that action through the performance of particular bodily actions (e.g., getting someone’s attention by waving an arm). Like repertoires, practical understandings result from past training, experience, learning, and action. Human activity is laden with the past. Past practice organizations circumscribe present activity, people react to and act in the light of past states of affairs, and the bodily actions that publicly manifest performances reflect bodily repertoires and practical understandings that are left behind by past activity and experience. Activity is circumscribed, induced/oriented, and given public presence by the past. It follows that practices, arrangements, interwoven timespaces, and the social phenomena that they compose, are also beholden to the past. For the emergence, persistence, and transformation of these entities are rooted in unfolding constellations of activity events. As noted, however, the pasts of practices, arrangements, interwoven timespaces, and social phenomena are among the items that circumscribe, induce, and underwrite the public presence of activity—and, thus, their own emergence, persistence,

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and transformation. The practices, arrangements etc. that arise from human activity in turn contextualize activity. History thus embraces mutually dependent activities, arrangements, practices, and social phenomena. History, the realm and course of practice-arrangement nexuses, is a churning labyrinth. It contains unfolding constellations of events of two sorts: (1) organized temporalspatial activities that befall bodily agents, who therewith carry out and link practices amid persisting or evolving practice organizations, material arrangements, and interwoven timespaces that their activities maintain and transform, and (2) events that befall material arrangements, whereby arrangements support or otherwise impinge on activities. The activity events involved are laden with the past: with past experiences and activities, with the pasts of practices, arrangements, and social phenomena (including their organizations and interwoven timespaces), and with past states of affairs more broadly. An activity, therefore, is not simply the product of the events that immediately precede it in the series it forms with them, as the conception of history as Markov chains would have it. Rather, the wider past is present in what people do. Human history, accordingly, is not one damn thing after another. History does contain series of events, most prominently, series of activities that react to other activities and events. But what people do, how they react to things, is circumscribed, oriented, and given public presence by or through the past. This fact is the source of the irreversibility and path-dependence of history. Activities and events effect the pasts that inhabit the activities that come after these activities and events in time. Activities reinstate practice organizations and interwoven timespaces, become part of the stock of states of affairs that people can react to and take account of, shape bodily repertoires and practical understandings, and alter the arrangements and practice-arrangement bundles which subsequent actions continue or transform. Because earlier events form the context of later ones in these ways, historical sequences are irreversible. History might double back, but when this occurs the developments involved are not reverses, but advances toward new states of affairs that resemble previous ones. The fact that people react to past states of affairs and take them into account also ensures that activities—and therewith the emergence, persistence, and transformation of practices, arrangements, and social phenomena—are sensitive to the specific trajectories by which present situations arose. In short, historical events cannot be dehistoricized. The course of human affairs through time embraces unfolding constellations of organized indeterminate activity events that are laden with a past that is extended or transformed through them. History also encompasses material events that causally support or impinge on people’s activities. These activities and events unfold practices, arrangements, and interwoven timespaces that

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themselves effect and fill out the evolution, maintenance, and transformation of social affairs. In turn, practices, arrangements, interwoven timespaces, and social affairs bear on ensuing activity. All historical events—from the most significant to the most mundane—consist of activity-event configurations and embroil practices, arrangements, timespaces, and social phenomena. Every action, meanwhile, is the restarting of history; every action is potentially the beginning of something new. History advances one contingent micro step at a time. The implications of this ontology for history qua the study of the past cannot be presently considered. Practice Memory Bergson described the prolongation of the past into the present as memory: the past is present via memory. Similarly, I believe, it is illuminating to characterize the just detailed ways the past inhabits activity as forms of memory. For they, too, are ways the past is present: the past is present in circumscribing, in inducing or orienting, and in underwriting the public presence of current activity. According to Bergson, memory comes in two varieties: body (or habit) memory and memory as unconscious recollections (see MM 79ff). “Body memory” denotes habits deposited in the body through past experiences. What I call “bodily repertoires” and “practical understandings” resemble the habits that Bergson called body memory in being vestiges of past training, learning, and activity. The second type of memory, unconscious recollections, resembles what today is sometimes called “autobiographical memory”97: a person’s memory of his own past. Autobiographical memory is often implicated when people react to or act in the light of past states of affairs. For it is largely by virtue of autobiographical memory that past states of one’s own life are available to induce and orient activity. States of affairs are also available to do this through semantic/declarative memory (memory of language and facts),98 others’ speech acts, writing, films, monuments, and the like. Another type of memory is past practice organizations (and those aspects of interwoven timespaces that devolve from them) circumscribing activity. This type of memory has no pendent in Bergson’s account. It is not, moreover, a form of personal memory (autobiographical plus semantic/declarative memory). For individual participants in a given practice remember different subsets of the elements of that practice’s organization: no participant remembers the complete organization. Consequently, the presence of the complete organization cannot be a matter of personal memory; it is, instead, a type of social memory (see below). I will call it “practice memory.” Justifying the label “memory” requires some background.

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As discussed, Bergson attributed duration to processes other than human consciousness, including the processes that enfold objects, species, life in general, and the universe as a whole. He used the word “memory” to name the prolongation of the past into the present that is inherent to any duration. Duration, he wrote, implies succession, a before and after, and thus “a bridge between” what is before and after. Without such a bridge, there would be either that which is before or that which is after, “a single instance,” but not both, one before and one after. Bergson claimed, moreover, that “[i]t is impossible to imagine or conceive of a connecting link between the before and after without an element of memory,” though this memory element might be nothing more than “a mere continuing of the before into the immediate after.”99 This claim holds of all durations, not just those of consciousness. Social theorists have often accused Bergson of subjectivism, even solipsism, meaning that he theorized the experiences of individual people in abstraction from the contexts, above all the social contexts, in which they occur.100 Bergson did largely ignore the social contexts of the phenomena he analyzed, for example, memory and action.101 The charge is false, however, because Bergson did not lock each person’s consciousness in a hermetic capsule disconnected from everything else. What is true, however, is that Bergson, unlike his pupil Halbwachs, never asked whether social phenomena endure and have memory (or whether durations of consciousness are incorporated into those of groups). Since his day, the idea of social or collective memory has gained currency. There are two basic conceptions of social memory. The first is that of the dependency of personal memory on social phenomena. A person’s memories of her childhood, for example, depend to no small degree on what is said to her about her past by family members and childhood friends. Today, in the wake of the work of Halbwachs, the social psychologist Lev Vygotsky, and the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, the thesis that the contents and uses of an individual’s memory are shaped by social phenomena such as texts, media, communication, and rituals, is no longer controversial.102 The second conception of social memory is that of memory as a property of social entities as opposed to individual people. Prominent examples of the sort of entities concerned are groups, nations, and organizations. Attributing memories to social entities raises the question of whether these memories can be analyzed as aggregates of individual memories. I think that they cannot but will not address the issue here. Readers of Bergson might shrink from attributing to inanimate entities memory as the prolongation of the past into the present. The present reader might similarly resist attributing to social entities memory as the presence of the past. A diffuse intuition in the intellectual world seems to be that memory is an attribute of individual people, that memory is personal memory,

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however socially shaped. Bergson challenged this intuition. He is not alone, moreover. Many prominent social theorists, especially in the past twenty years, have conceptualized types of memory other than personal memory. Some of these further types instantiate social memory as a property of social entities. Some are versions of Bergson’s intuition that the prolongation of the past into the present is a phenomenon of memory. Examples of the latter are Halbwachs’s collective memory and Abbott’s idea that social structure is the memory of the social process.103 Some thinkers oppose the attribution of memory to social entities on the grounds that this extension requires illegitimately ascribing to the social entities credited with memory some social version of mind. Halbwachs in effect committed this error since his attribution of collective memory to groups involves attributing to these groups collective versions of both the duration and the consciousness that Bergson attributed to individual lives. Another example is the following. Some contemporary thinkers associate collective memory with collective identity in the belief that what a group, community, or nation remembers founds its sense of who it is. This connection parallels the connection between personal memory and personal identity that is well-known to philosophers, psychologists, biographers, and novelists. The connection thus reflects an analogy between individuals and certain collectivities. It is possible to attribute memory to social entities without ascribing them some sort of reified or quasi-reified mind or consciousness. Social memories can, for instance, be analyzed individualistically. The sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel, for instance, defines a community of memory as a group of people held together by shared memories.104 The memories involved come to be shared through such devices as narrative, pictures, and monuments under the aegis of “norms of resemblance” that determine both the socially appropriate matters to remember and the appropriate ways of doing so. Zerubavel conceptualizes social memories as memories that are shared in a group, i.e., as memories that different members individually possess due to the social context of group existence. Others have avoided the hypostatization of collective minds by treating social memories as memories of, or ideas about, the past that circulate within, and help constitute the identity of, a group, organization, or nation etc. through interaction among members and the circulation of narratives, pictures, and monuments.105 The memories involved are not so much possessed by individual members (let alone by all members) as present in public space in principle available to all. Practice memory is a property of a practice. It is an instance, therefore, of the second sort of social memory distinguished above, memory as a property of social entities. Practice memory is analogous, moreover, to the social

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memories just mentioned that are denizens of public space. Like the maintenance of ideas about the past through interaction (and narratives, pictures etc.), the presence of past practice organizations is an interactionally secured achievement of public practice. For the circumscription of activity by normative practice environments is secured through the conversations, arguments, remonstrations, training, and the like by which people come (1) generally to uphold normativity and (2) to learn about, and help determine (e.g., through discussion), what ends, rules, actions etc. should be or are acceptably pursued or performed in particular practices. Practice memory, however, differs from other memories attributed to social entities in two important ways. First, what is kept alive in practice memories are not ideas, beliefs, or thoughts about the past. Rather, it is the presence of practice organizations, their circumscription of present activity. This will seem problematic if it is assumed that memory is inherently the past for the present, i.e., knowledge and recollection of the past. The existence, however, of practical memory shows that memory need not be like this. Practical memory is a person’s memory of how to do something. It is the continuing presence of an ability acquired in the past, not knowledge, belief, or thought about the past. Second, practice memory need not contribute to the identity of participants in a practice, as is enshrined in Assmann’s notion of collective memory and upheld by many other advocates of this second conception of social memory. Again, it is the existence of practical memory that makes clear that memory per se has no intrinsic connection to identity. This is so regardless of how strongly a given ability contributes to a person’s identity and how strongly individual memory and identity, or their collective cousins, are sometimes yoked. Notice that the maintenance or present existence of past entities or states of affairs does not automatically qualify as memory. The presence of ancient farming implements or a tour van “No Smoking” sign in a museum does not by itself amount to memory. One condition of the maintenance or presence of the past qualifying as memory is that it bear on how people act (I will not essay to make this necessary condition sufficient). The farm implements constitute memory, for instance, when people make models of them for use in historical recreations or dioramas. Practice memory passes this test because it consists in past practice organizations (and normatively underlain interwoven timespaces) circumscribing activity. The most serious obstacles to describing this circumscription as memory are two biases that are fading in contemporary social thought: toward attributing memories to individual people alone106 and toward construing memories as knowledge and recollection alone. In sum, memory is the presence of the past in human activity, its determining, circumscribing, and securing the public presence of what makes sense to people to do. States of affairs that are reacted to are personally (or

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historically or collectively or ceremonially etc.) remembered; circumscribing practice organizations are practice memory; and bodily repertoires and practical understandings are body and practical memory. Human activity—and thus the emergence, persistence, and transformation of practices, arrangements, interwoven timespaces, and social phenomena, in short, the course of history—is tied to personal, practice, body, and other types of memory. What secures the presence of past practice organizations in current activities? I have already stressed that interactions (training, instruction, discussion, arguments, threats) and genetically underwritten developmental processes so form people that they are sensitive to normative environments, i.e., that they tend to uphold what is prescribed, to stick with what is acceptable, and to fall into line with regularities. Other phenomena that help ensure the presence of practice organization are personal memory (whereby people remember what has been enjoined, deemed acceptable, or regularly done), writing and symbols, including methodic reconstructions of the past,107 pronouncements and rulings, and the persistence of both human bodies and built or arranged environments. These phenomena differentially contribute to the securement of different practice memories. Note that writing and reconstruction sometimes play little role; they do not, for instance, help ensure horse farm touring memory. Writing, moreover, is much more significant than is reconstruction in this regard; tour company memory is partly secured by documents, but not by reconstructions. Indeed, methodic reconstructions usually play little role in practice memory; they rarely either settle questions about what is and is not acceptable or prescribed in a practice or promote acquiescence to the answers. More often, dialogue among participants, dictates from those occupying particular roles, or attention to texts provide settled answers. Personal and practical memories, as well as the persistence of bodies and arrangements, almost always contribute to the existence of practice memory. Practice memory, additionally, is a temporalspatial affair, not a temporal one alone. Among other things, practice memory embraces enjoined, acceptable, and interwoven spatialities;108 the continuity of geometrically arranged entities underwrites the presence of the past; spatial states of affairs (e.g., landscapes) can fill out the contents of enjoined or acceptable ends, rules, and actions; and some interactions and texts, for example, the coronation of a king or a sacred book, take place or exist at specific physical locations amid spatialities crucial to them. In these and other ways, practice memory, like social phenomena generally, is a temporalspatial affair. I believe that there is a theory of tradition to be found in these remarks. Gadamer wrote that “the carrier of tradition (Überlieferung) is the continuity of

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memory.”109 This comment echoes Shils’s idea that tradition is deposited in memory. Issues about the persistence of the past and about social or collective memory strongly overlap with those that theorists have addressed under the label “tradition.” Indeed, the all-encompassing nature of memory promulgated in Assmann’s notion of cultural memory and in the social psychologist Jens Brockmeier’s notion of the cultural process of memory110 equals the allencompassing character of tradition as Shils (and Gadamer) analyzed it. Assmann even likens cultural memory as he conceives of it to Jacques Derrida’s notion of the archive and Richard Bernstein’s appropriation of Derrida’s notion as tradition.111 This widely construed, cultural memory begins to converge with Husserl’s life world and even with Heidegger’s clearing.112 It is not possible to pursue this thought presently. I have aimed, simply, to articulate the idea of practice memory. Together with body/practical memory and the past dimension of activity temporality, practice memory fills out how present activity is laden with the past. Human history, the realm and course of past practice-arrangement nexuses, embraces myriad configurations of activities and material events that occur to and within bundles of persisting and metamorphosing practices and arrangements. History is not just a series of events. Nor is it a constellation of space-time flows that spill out of the past into the present on the way to the future. It is a maze of temporalspatial events of varying durations that (1) are oriented, induced, and given public form by past structures and states of affairs and (2) both underlie and are beholden to the emergence, maintenance, and transformation of larger social events and phenomena, including governments, economic systems, wars, and organizations of all sorts.

Notes 1. Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in his Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3–19. 2. A good example of such a theory is John Searle, Intentionality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 3. For discussion, see Frederick Stoutland, “Interpreting Davidson on Intentional Action,” in Dialogues with Davidson: New Perspectives on His Philosophy, ed. Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming). 4. For a contrasting view, see, for instance, Jennifer Hornsby, “Agency and Actions,” in Agency and Action, ed. John Hyman and Helen Steward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–24. 5. The following discussion is concerned with human activity alone. This is why I construe actions as things people do. I am well aware that theorists have extended the notion of action to nonhuman entities, even to all entities that do things. Indeed, I advocated such an extension in chapter 4 of The Site of the Social: A Philosophical

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Exploration of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). For present purposes, however, I will treat the entities that perform actions as people alone. 6. For considerations underlying the idea that a performance is always someone’s performance, see P.F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), chapter 3. For a parallel discussion, see Hornsby, “Agency and Actions,” 19. 7. In an otherwise most interesting recent article, for instance, Mariam Thalos restates a venerable position in writing of “quite unchallengeable cases where an agent voluntarily produces an action, through first voluntarily producing an act of willing it.” Mariam Thalos, “The Sources of Behavior: Toward a Naturalistic, Control Account of Agency,” in Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context, ed. Don Ross, David Spurrett, Harold Kinkaid, and G. Lynn Stephens (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 123–67, here 123. 8. Scott Sehon, Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 149. 9. I should add a note about the relation between, on the one hand, practical intelligibility and its determination and, on the other, the dimensionality of activity. The event of performing an action is, more fully stated, the event of performing the action that makes sense to the person (whom the event befalls) to perform. The action’s making sense is how the actor is immersed in the event that befalls him. The future and past dimensions of this event at once structure its making sense to perform this action: the event of performing X for the sake of Y given Z is the event of performing the action that makes sense to perform for the sake of Y given Z. In this way, the determination of practical intelligibility and the determination of activity are the same: states of affairs and ways of being determine activity in determining what makes sense to the actor to do, and vice versa. 10. Sehon, Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation, 178. 11. For extensive discussion of a particularly insightful version of this view, that of David Carr, see Theodore R. Schatzki, “The Temporality of Teleology: Against the Narrativity of Action,” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research V, ed. Burt Hopkins and Steven Crowell (Seattle: Noesis Press, 2005), 123– 42. Carr’s account is found in Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 12. This characteristic of ends features prominently in John Dewey’s account of action. See, for example, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1925). 13. Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” 9. 14. Davidson, incidentally, also located the circumscription of the causal relation behind an action in a realm other than that of causality: which reason it is, an event associated with which causes a given action, is which reason best explains the action given the totality of the actor’s behavior and the norms of rationality. 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1956), A91–2/B124. Italics in original. 16. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 [1992]), 148–67.

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17. For another account of action of Heideggarian provenance that upholds this proposition, see Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), especially chapter 11. 18. Joas, The Creativity of Action, 158; italics in original. 19. Ibid., p. 161. 20. Colleagues tell me that Hegel and Fichte were the first thinkers to conceptualize indeterminacy. My understanding of these two thinkers is such I cannot comment on this attribution. For a recently attempt to work out Hegel’s conception of indeterminacy, see Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also Charles Taylor, “Hegel and the Philosophy of Action,” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Action, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich and David Lamb (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1983), 1–18 and Michael Quante, Hegels Begriff der Handlung (Stuttgart—Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993). 21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, third edition, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958 [1953]), sections 143–242 and On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), sections 110, 204, 475; H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, second, revised translation, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989 [1960]), part 3, chapter 2, section c; Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” Cardozo Law Review 11, no. 5–6 (1990); and Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York, Routledge, 1993), chapter 7 and Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997), chapter 4. Regarding Sartre, see note 32. 22. On page 16 of “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” for example, Davidson approvingly cites the idea that desires have strengths in describing what is required for a predictive theory of human action. 23. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 218. 24. Hesse, Barnes, and Bloor have extended ideas closely related to this to issues of concepts, meaning, and extension and dubbed the resulting position “meaning finitism.” See Mary Hesse, The Structure of Scientific Inference (London: Macmillan, 1974), Barry Barnes, T.S. Kuhn and Social Science (London: Macmillan, 1982), and David Bloor, Wittgenstein: Rules and Institutions (London: Routledge, 1997). 25. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 199. 26. Donald Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 55. My very brief description of this research is based on Wegner’s account of it. For a subsequent report, see Patrick Haggard, “Conscious Intention and Motor Cognition,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 290–5. 27. Because brain and body are complexly related, there is no reason to make the commencement of acting coincident with the start of the bodily movement, e.g., the movement of the finger. This movement is the effect of brain processes and, in the experimental setup involved, inseparable from these processes. The commencement of these brain processes is a more plausible place to locate the beginning of the acting. The issue on which I am taking a stand here points to general difficulties that attend attempts to draw implications from such research for the nature of agency.

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28. Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 12. Ensuing references to this book are placed in the text. 29. For a similar conception presented as part of an interpretation of Heidegger, see John Haugeland, “Heidegger on Being a Person,” Noûs 16 (1982): 15–26. 30. Barry Barnes, The Elements of Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 68. Ensuing references to this book are contained in the text. 31. For a parallel argument to the effect that a person can accomplish nothing by possessing power because a person possesses power only by accomplishing things, see Bruno Latour, “Associations of Power,” in Power, Action, Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge? ed. John Law (London: Routledge, Kegan, and Paul, 1986), 264–80. 32. My account of indeterminate action bears a strong resemblance to Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of freedom in Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956 [1943], part 4, chapter 1). This resemblance reflects the common provenance of the two accounts in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Sartre analyzed activity as a three dimensional temporal event whose future is projecting an end, whose past is the cause of action (the state of affairs because of which the person does what he does), and whose present is the “upsurge of the act” (563). The end and cause are dimensions of the activity: all determination of action is action (613); intention cannot be separated from the act (622). Action, consequently, is indeterminate: “The existence of the act implies its autonomy” (613). What’s more, Sartre’s use of the term “upsurge” (surgissement; Heidegger’s physus) emphasizes the event-like quality of activity, as does his claim that freedom—this upsurge in its quality as projecting an end—is contingent, absurd: es gibt freedom. Sartre denied, finally, that prior states of affairs—including worldly matters and the actor’s past—cause human action. Human activity is a spontaneous freedom that spurns all “horizontal” (before-after) causality and can only be understood “vertically,” in terms of deeper layers of projection, on which rest the intelligibility of the bearing of intentions, ends, states of affairs, emotions, and explicit reflection on what a person does. The notion of vertical causality points to Sartre’s idea that a person’s activities are organized under a succession of fundamental projects, each pursued for a certain length of time (599). Each such fundamental end (1) institutes an ensemble of possible actions and “secondary” ends whose pursuit is part of this fundamental project and (2) informs the bearing, not just of these ends, but also of causes and emotions on human activity. I think that this idea is a mistake. The ends people seek might sometimes be grounded in wider projects they pursue, but this need not be the case. People often perform series of actions whose ends neither add up to nor have a place in a fundamental project as their “unitary synthesis” (593). These mythical fundamental projects led Sartre, moreover, to grant systematic priority to the future over the past in the determination of action (e.g., 562, 564, 578). Rejecting the existence of these projects restores equal primacy to and mutual dependence between past and future in this determination. In addition, although Sartre noted the event-character of the upsurge of activity = freedom, he also conceptualized this event as one of self-determination. The spontaneous upsurge “produces itself” (570). This is why he claimed that freedom is choice

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(cf. 584, 616), that the upsurge of a fundamental project is a choice of fundamental end: “human reality in and through its very upsurge decides to define its own being by its ends. It is therefore the positing of my ultimate ends which characterizes my being and which is identical with the sudden thrust of the freedom that is mine” (572). Human activity is not, as on my account, an event whose occurrence is at once the person it befalls doing something. Rather, human activity is a self-determining happening—a doing, not an event. The “event-like” quality of this activity lies simply in its contingency, or absurdity: the fact that a person is condemned to be free, to be such a self-determination. 33. For discussion, see Pete A.Y. Gunter, “Temporal Hierarchy in Bergson and Whitehead,” Interchange 36, no. 1–2 (2005): 139–57. 34. See Henri Bergson, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” trans. T.E. Huline (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999 [1903]), 49. 35. Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory, trans. Leon Jacobson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965 [1922]), 34. 36. It is worth adding that Bergson wrote that the flow of consciousness is the principal instance from which human beings are acquainted with duration (“duration is at first identical with the continuity of our inner life”) and, more strongly, that “time is the stuff out of which psychic life is made.” Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory, 44 and Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911 [1907]), 4. 37. Bergson also claimed, however, that what is intuited can and should be expressed in new modes of analysis utilizing new symbols. See Gunter, “Temporal Hierarchy in Bergson and Whitehead.” 38. See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2001 [1889]), 91–7. Further references to this book will be marked in the text by “TFW.” 39. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory, 44. 40. See, for example, Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone, 1988 [1896]), 151. Further references to this book will be marked in the text with a “MM.” 41. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory, 35. 42. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 4. 43. Ibid., 15. 44. Ibid., 6. 45. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1988 [1966]). 46. In Creative Evolution (pp. 6, 28), Bergson attributed the sui generis character of action to the unique and “original” organization of the elements (personality and circumstances) responsible for it. This organization underwrites the singleness and indivisibility of what is done. 47. On this point, see Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2003), 39. 48. Bergson, incidentally, offered an ingenious antidualist explanation of how ideaimages govern bodily movements (MM 220; cf. 130–1): as an idea approaches insertion

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into the gap between sensations and impending motion, it gains extension—it turns into an image—and thence becomes part of objective spatial reality (it becomes, for instance, a bodily attitude or uttered word; MM 161). The idea thereby becomes a cause of action, though not a cause that necessitates what it effects: the movements that would realize the idea might not occur. 49. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 299–300. 50. Henri Bergson, “Memory of the Present and False Recognition,” in MindEnergy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920 [1908]), 134–85, here 179. 51. A reader conversant with Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson might think that Bergson held that this segmentation exists virtually in unfolding consciousness. It is true that, in Matter and Memory, Bergson argued that memory (the past) is virtual and that memory is actualized through recollections entering conscious perception. These facts simply clarify my claim, however, that according to Bergson the flow of consciousness is segmented via memory and intellect: the segmentation is virtual in memory and not present in any way in unfolding consciousness. Bergson also wrote, in a different context, that instants exist virtually (Duration and Simultaneity, p. 53). Duration, as explained, is “thick.” The idea of an instant arises from the practice of representing duration as a line, dividing the line into its “extremities,” i.e., points, and conceiving of a temporal pendent to these extremities, i.e., instants. Instants exist virtually in the sense that time can always be decomposed into instants. The decomposition, however, is performed on the representation of time, the line, not on time itself, i.e., duration in consciousness; it is a feature of abstract time, as Bergson called it. By contrast, the segmentation of the continuum of activity is a feature of concrete life. The ontological status of this structure, accordingly, cannot be that of instants. 52. For discussion of this sort of knowledge, see G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), Brian O’Shaughnessy, The Will, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), James Russell, Agency: Its Role in Mental Development (East Sussex: Erlbaum [UK] Taylor and Francis, 1996), and Richard Moran, “Anscombe on ‘Practical Knowledge,’” in Agency and Action, ed. John Hyman and Helen Steward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 43–68. 53. Somewhat in odds with the account he provided in MM, Bergson later argued that any breaking up of the continuity of perception that is recorded in memory is relative to perspective or interest (“Memory of the Present and False Recognition,” 158–9). It is not necessary to reconcile these divergent formulations for present purposes. 54. See Marvin Harris’s attribution of 480 separate episodes to twenty minutes of his wife’s conduct in The Nature of Cultural Things (New York: Random House, 1964), 74–5. 55. Norbert Elias elaborates this argument for the necessity of consciousness or experience for time in Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 [1984]). 56. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory, 36. 57. See also Bergson, Creative Evolution, 202. 58. Ibid., 154. 59. Henri Bergson, “The Possible and the Real,” in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946 [1911]), 107–25, here 113.

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60. Doreen Massey, for space (London: Sage, 2005), 21. Further references to this book are placed in the text. 61. On Deleuze’s interpretation of becoming as becoming different, for example, differences that come about form successions. 62. I add, with reference to the discussion of the unity of time and space in chapter 2, that time and space are not unified on Massey’s account. Time and space implicate one another. Their mutual implication arises from the fact that time and space are necessary attributes of the entities that populate social reality: these entities, existing in time, are also spatial, just as they, being spatial, also exist in time. 63. See, for example, Elizabeth Grosz, ed., Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 64. Mike Crang and Penny Travlou, “The city and topologies of memory,” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 18 (2001): 161–77. 65. “[T]ime-space practice . . . is a becoming of velocities, directions, turnings, detours, exits and entries.” Mike Crang, “Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion,” in Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. Jon May and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 2001), 208–25, here 206. 66. I argue that the existence of the past in the present is the root sense of historicity in the work of Dilthey and Heidegger in “Living Out of the Past: Dilthey and Heidegger on Life and History,” Inquiry 46 (2003): 301–23. 67. In recent decades consequent to the work of the physicist Ilya Prigogine, the issue of whether or not at least some physical processes are, not Markov, but, as it is put, “historical” in character, has become prominent. The present discussion will ignore this debate. I will focus solely on the contrast between the two aforementioned conceptions, using as foil the Markov conception of history as one damn thing after another. 68. In statistics, a Markov process or chain is a process or chain of which it is true, at any instant, that the state of the process at the succeeding instant or the succeeding event in the chain (or the probability distributions of the succeeding state or event) depends solely on the present state of the process or the current event in the chain and not also on any past states or events. 69. Fernand Braudel, “History and the Human Sciences,” in On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1958]), 25–54, here 27. 70. Ibid., 41. 71. Leslie White, “Energy and the Evolution of Culture,” American Anthropologist 45 (1943): 335–56, Richard Newbold Adams, The Eighth Day: Social Evolution as the Self-Organization of Energy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), and Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1996). 72. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 328. Further references to this book are placed in the text. 73. See also Tim Ingold, “Life Beyond the Edge of Nature? or the Mirage of Society,” in The Mark of the Social: Discovery or Invention? ed. David D. Greenwood (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 231–52.

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74. For a similar view of the reality that encompasses human activity, see Bruno Latour, Irreductions, part two of The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988 [1984]). 75. On this, see also Ingold, “Life Beyond the Edge of Nature? or the Mirage of Society,” 244–6. 76. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory, 32–3. 77. Preston T. King, “Thinking Past a Problem,” in his Thinking Past a Problem: Essays on the History of Ideas (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 25–67, here 37. 78. Indeed, Andrew Abbot describes causal chains of the sort central to King’s account as Bergsonian durations; Andrew Abbott, “Temporality and Process in Social Life,” in his Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 209–39, here 220. 79. Massey, for space, e.g., 12, 119–20. 80. Andrew Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point,” in Time Matters: On Theory and Method, 240–60, here 243. 81. Ibid., 250. 82. Michael Bentley, “Past and ‘Presence’: Revisiting Historical Ontology,” History and Theory 45, Forum: On Presence (October 2006): 349–61, here 358. 83. Ibid., 359. 84. See Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Potter Jr. (New York: Harper and Row, 1980 [1950]), 64, 80. 85. Ibid., 105. 86. On this, see also Maurice Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971). The conclusion to this book is found in Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. & ed. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 193–235. 87. I believe that group durations as Halbwachs thinks of them likewise encompass the activities of individuals, though explaining this would take the discussion too far afield. 88. Before turning to history as a realm of temporalspatial events, I should mention a conception of the presence of the past that is often mistakenly associated with Bergson. According to this conception, the past is virtual, the present is actual, and the virtual past presses into the present as a depository of forces, tendencies, or, in most versions, possibilities that can be realized in the present. A prominent text that attributes this conception—among others—to Bergson is Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 251–6, “The virtual is the resonance of potential that ladens the present as more than itself” (252). I will limit my perfunctory comments to the most common conception of a virtual past, namely, the past as storehouse of possibilities. The problem with attributing to Bergson a conception of history according to which the past presses into the present as a virtual plenitude of possibilities is that Bergson maintained that possibilities follow, and do not precede, actuality. See Henri Bergson, “The Real and the Possible,” in The Creative Mind, 91–106. Taken for itself, moreover, the idea mistakenly presupposes that possibilities are definite. On this, see Schatzki, The Site of the Social, chapter 4, section 2. Bergson’s position is, strictly, that the inactive

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(unconscious, virtual) past that presses into the present comprises recollections. The above conceptions of a “virtual past” are more Deleuzian than Bergsonian, although Deleuze and his interpreters distinguish the virtual from the possible (see, e.g., Constantine V. Boundas, “Deleuze-Bergson: an Ontology of the Virtual,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 81–106). I should add that Grosz also conceptualizes the virtual past that presses into the present as a reservoir of resources. This is an eminently sensible idea so long as resources are not interpreted as forces, tendencies, or possibilities. My comment about the indefiniteness of possibilities also entails that I reject Heidegger’s understanding in Being and Time of how the past shapes the present. Human activity, Heidegger claimed, always presses into a possibility of itself that it projects. The possibility it projects is one into which it is thrown. And a possibility into which it is thrown is one handed down in the past of its generation. Hence, “Its own past—and this always means the past of its generation—is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes before” (SZ 20; italics in original). A person is not thrown into a pool of possibilities (Heidegger’s heritage [Erbe]; SZ 383). Moreover, the notion of a generation does not successfully differentiate what of the past does from what of the past does not shape an individual’s life. 89. A particularly forceful statement of this conception is found in R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of History, ed. W.H. Dray and W.J. van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 90. I suggest that the realm and development of past practice-arrangement nexuses is the domain of historical phenomena. A historian is under no obligation to study nexuses or social phenomena, or biological or physiological factors for that matter, as opposed to activities. My point is simply that any study of human activities abstracts its subject matter from a broader realm to which it inherently belongs. 91. According to Bernard Lepetit, “[t]he referent of history is the constitution of the social bond taken in all its sides, at the point of intersection of practices and representations.” (Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 (2000)], 379.) See Bernard Lepetit, “De l’échelle en histoire,” in Jeux d’échelles: La Microanalyse de l’expérience, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris: EHESS-Gallimard-Seuil, 1996), 71–94. Ricoeur endorsed Lepetit’s claim, writing that “the final referent of the discourse of history is social action in its capacity to produce the social bond and social identities” (p. 384). 92. Indeed, I explore this contribution in my essay, “Materiality and Social Life,” Nature ⫹ Culture, forthcoming; for earlier discussion, see Schatzki, The Site of the Social, chapters 2 and 3. The contribution of materiality notwithstanding, human activity bears primary responsibility for what happens in history. 93. Material arrangements such as horse farm layouts, van interiors, track grandstands, and forests obviously subsist as physical configurations regardless of whether they anchor places and paths. This fact underwrites a distinction among events that befall material arrangements between those that are and those that are not facets of action performances. Examples of the former are horses lining up at the starting gate or being paraded in an interior paddock, computer monitors displaying information,

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and a thicket serving as hiding place, which are facets of activities that make up racing, pre-race preparations, betting, and fur trading. Examples of the latter are a horse pulling up lame, termites eating grandstands, computers malfunctioning, and a nighttime forest rainstorm. 94. There might equally be a role for such psychological phenomena as the deference-emotion system that Scheff describes; T.J. Scheff, “Shame and Conformity: the Deference-Emotion System,” American Sociological Review 53 (1988): 395–406. 95. Recalling my discussion in chapter 3 of the determination of ritual action, notice that the same conclusion follows if the determination of practical intelligibility takes the following less complex forms: (1) it makes sense to remonstrate the smoker given that he lights up and the rule exists or (2) it makes sense to remonstrate the smoker given that he lights up. 96. Practice organizations do, of course, evolve. The organization of a practice evolves when (1) participants in a practice observe rules, pursue ends or end-action combinations, express action understandings, or act out of general understandings that had not previously organized the practice and (2) the rules, ends, and understandings become enjoined or acceptable. Rules, ends etc. can acquire normative status in many ways. 97. See, for example, Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Memory (Maidenhead: Open Press University, 2003), 9–10. 98. Ibid. 99. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory, 33. 100. For examples of such criticisms, see Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 90–8 and Abbott, “Temporality and Process in Social Life,” especially 214–24. 101. I believe that it is profitable to read George Herbert Mead’s The Philosophy of the Present (ed. Arthur Murphy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 (1932)]) as an account of conscious activity—conceived of à la Bergson—in society, that is, as detailing the social dimension of conscious activity that commentators have found missing in Bergson’s work. I can neither develop nor defend this claim presently. 102. See Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, chapter 1, Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society, eds. Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Elen Souberman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), and Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Errinerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992). For a discussion of Vygotsky in this context, see David Bakhurst, “Social Memory in Soviet Thought,” in Collective Remembering, eds. David Middleton and Derek Edwards (London: Sage, 1990), 203–26. Assmann’s account of collective and cultural memory is perhaps the most prominent contemporary theory of social memory in this first sense. The function of collective memory as Assmann conceives of it is to transmit and maintain the collective identity of a social unit by outfitting members of the unit with representations and images of past events that befell it. Individual people are, strictly, the entities who remember, but what they remember is so shaped by the unit’s practices and arrangements that members of the unit come to share a perspective on the past, to identify themselves as members, and to be bound to the unit. These shared perspectives that bind are collective memory. Cultural memory, meanwhile, is information about the past that is handed

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down, learned, taught, interpreted, and/or archived. It extends well beyond collective memory and represents a sort of store-house of potential collective memories and potential transformations of current collective memories. Cultural memory is housed primarily in language. 103. Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point,” 258. 104. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 105. In this group I include Durkheimian theorists who emphasize the role of public entities such as monuments, festivals, and symbols in maintaining social memory. See, for instance, Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), chapter 1 and Jeffrey Olick, “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,” Sociological Theory 17, no. 3 (1999): 333–48. 106. Another consideration in favor of attributing memory to entities other than individuals is the following. For many centuries, writing, picture, and symbols were widely used as mnemonic props. More recently, the spread of writing via printing and, more decisively, the development and pervasive implementation of computer technology, have brought it about that computer systems are no longer mere props for memory, but are now indispensible for, and in some cases more essential than people are to, memory. Memory, accordingly, has become—or, maybe, always was—a property of technohuman systems. This argument parallels conceptions of extended cognition, cf. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997) and Mark Rowlands, The Body in Mind: Understanding Cognitive Processes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Bruce Brown, “Is This Life—or Is This Just Memorex? The First GRADE Lecture (Association of Graphic Design Educators, 1997). 107. The contribution of methodic historical reconstruction to the presence of the past has recently received attention in Runia’s notion of the past as a stowaway in the materials from which historians reconstruct it. See Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 1–29, also the special issue dedicated to his essay, History and Theory 45 (October 2006), Forum: On Presence. Runia’s notion resembles Ricoeur’s idea that historians treat the materials they attend to in interpreting the past as traces: as sign-effects that result from past activity and point toward actions and events, including those that caused them. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1985]), part 4, section 2, chapter 4, “Between Lived Time and Universal Time: Historical Time.” 108. This implies, incidentally, that there are two kinds of places or settings of memory. There are first, the sort of settings and places of memory that Pierre Nora famously identified: respectively, settings in which people’s memory of the past is a living part of everyday experience, and material arrangements (monuments, calendars, battlefields, buildings, cemeteries, festivals etc.) that are constructed or consecrated with the intention of instituting, shaping, and maintaining a group’s memory of the past and its sense of continuity with it. The second type of place of memory comprises places and paths as forms of social (practice) memory, the maintenance of anchored place-path arrays through time as a living social memory carried in practices.

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See Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [1984]), 1–20. 109. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 390. 110. “Cultural process of memory” names memory as a cultural process. More specifically, Brockmeier construes cultural memory—of which individual and social (community and organizational) memories are parts—as a social process that is (1) effected in practices of memory such as narrative and (2) situated in a symbolic space laid out in sign and symbol systems, documents, texts, monuments, pictures, architectures, and geographies. See Jens Brockmeier, “Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory,” Culture and Psychology 8, no. 1 (2002): 15–43. 111. Jan Assmann, “Introduction: What Is Cultural Memory? in Religion and Cultural Memory, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–30, here 26. See Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive (Paris: Galilée, 1995) and Richard Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 112. See John Thompson, “Tradition and Self in a Mediated World,” in Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, ed. Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 89–108. For the life world, see Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

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Index

Abbot, Anthony, 206–7, 218, 228n78 absolute space, 4–5, 7, 55n3, 198–99 activity (action; performance): bodily, 47, 116–17; central to society and history, ix, x; determination, of 39–40, 114–15, 128, 152, 171, 175–6; explanations, of 39, 119–21, 123, 156n16, 168, 171, 172; expressive, 132–37; and free will, 170; intentional, 116, 117, 128, 154n6; mental, 114–15, 134n4, 171; of nonhumans, 204, 221n5; rational, 112, 126, 127, 154n1; versus action, xv, 170, 194; voluntary, 114, 116, 117, 128, 182. See also causal account of action, causality, chains of action, coordination of actions, emotional activity, emotions, events, interwoven timespaces, material arrangements, practices, practice organizations, temporality activity timespace, ix, xii, 38, 40, 41, 65, passim; as event-like, 171; concept thereof not in Being and Time, 25, 41, 58n39; as a feature of individual activities, 46, 50, 63n79, 65; as a

feature of persons or their lives, 47, 49; multiplicity of, 46, 62n73, 105; personal, 54; unity of, xii, 38, 111. See also indeterminacy of activity, interwoven timespaces, practices, practice organizations, teleology, timespaces (types of) Adam, Barbara, 61n62 Allen John, 109n23 Aristotle, 38, 45, 46, 116, 126–7 Assmann, Jan, 217, 219, 221, 230n102 Augé, Mark, 161n73 Augustine, Saint, 45 Baert, Patrick, 103 Barnes, Barry, 185–6, 223n24 Beattie, John, 135–6, 137, 140 Being and Time, x, xii, xvii, 2, 25–33, 35–37, 40, 41, 47, 49, 58n37, 58n39, 58n44, 62n72–73, 165–67, 174, 228n88. See also activity, spatiality, temporality Bentley, Michael, 206 Bergson, Henri, xiv, xviii, 27, 36, 165, 179, 187–97, 199, 200, 204, 206–7, 225n36–7; on conscious activity,

— 247 —

248

Index

188–92, 225n46, 225n48; on freedom, 190–91; and indeterminacy of activity, 190–91; on memory, 189, 191, 216–17, 218, 226n51, 226n53 IV 53; on space, 188–89, 195–97; on time, 188–91, 195–96, 226n51. See also flow, historicity, indeterminacy of activity Bernstein, Richard, 221 Betzler, Monika, 157n26 Blessing of the Hounds, 137, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 160n60 Bluegrass Region, xviii-xix, 102 body, human, 78, 154n8, 176, 179; and emotion, 128; Heidegger silent on, 32–22. See also bodily repertoire bodily action. See activity bodily repertoire, 116, 154n8, 214, 216, 200. See also historicity Bourdieu, Pierre, 117, 192 Boyer, Pascal, 159n53 Braudel, Fernand, 202 Brockmeier, Jens, 221, 232n110 “Building Dwelling Thinking” (Heidegger), 34, 50; bridge example, 35, 47, 50 Casey, Edward 46 causal account of action, xiv, 39, 123, 165, 167–69; contravenes indeterminacy of action, 176–77; Davidson’s account as example of, 123, 168; on emotional activity, 123– 25, 158n35, 168–9; incompatible with some emotional activities, 128 causality (and action), 39, 115–16, 120, 127, 155n12, 167–69, 173–75, 176–77, 179–80, 183, 222n14, 224n32, 225n48; and determination of activity by emotions, 127–29; temporal structure of, 168, 177. See also indeterminacy of activity ceremonial grammar (James), 139–40; laid down in practice organizations, 140–41; specifies interwoven

timespaces, 139, 141; specifies times and spaces, 139, 141. ceremony 112; actions versus practices as, 141, 146; and custom, 144, 145–46; examples of contemporary, 137, 161n65; James’s conception of, 139; in the modern world, 131, 137, 138–39, 147; practical intelligibility involved in, 144–47; presumption of nonteleological character of, xiii, 130–31; role of rules in, 138–39, 140–41. teleological character of, 137, 142–44, 145–46, 162n75. See also ends, practice organization, ritual, teleology chains of action, 66, 68, 76, 77, 87 Charles, David, 124 clearing, the (Heidegger), 21–24, 27, 34, 35, 47, 48, 165, 166, 169, 221; and das Man, 48 cognitive science, 60n 54, 182 commands, 94, 186 Connerton, Paul, 138 Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger), 2, 20, 21–25, 47, 57n30, 59n52, 62n72; moment-site, 58n37; timespace in, 21–25, 63n83, 165. coordination of actions, 68–72, 143; individual and collective, 70; and interwoven timespaces, 69–70, 176; objective temporal and spatial features of, 69, 71–72; three features of, 69 Crang, Mike, 61n59, 200 Dancy, Jonathan, 171 Davidson, Donald, xiv, xviii, 117, 123, 135, 167–69, 171–74, 179, 222n14, 223n22. See also causal account of action De Beistegui, Miguel, 58n38 Deleuze, Gilles, 190, 193, 200, 226n51, 227n61 Derrida, Jacques, 179, 221 Dewey, John, 26, 222n12

Index

Dilthey, Wilhelm, 27, 36, 158n39, 166, 179, 193, 227n66, 229n88 Döring, Sabine, 128–9 Dreyfus, Hubert, 63n78, 223n17 Einstein, Albert, 5 Einstein-Minkowski space-time, 9, 11–12 Elden, Stuart, 56n17 Eliade, Mircea. See sacred worlds Elias, Norbert, 158n37, 226n55 emotional activity, xiii, 121–30; examples of 121–22; existence of does not refute teleological character of activity, 121, 130; not necessarily indeterminate, 176; three types of, 122–30. See also causal account of action, emotions, indeterminacy of activity emotional sense, 125–27 emotions, 51, 66, 112; can abrogate temporality, 130, 145; can determine actions independently of desire, 125, 130, 157n26–27; can determine ends, 128, 130; can inflect practical intelligibility, 125–27, 130, 176; can directly cause activities 126, 127–29, 130, 157n32, 158n36, 176; “fix” desires 124, 168; and involuntary actions, 128; can pick out what determines practical intelligibility, 122, 124, 130, 144, 176; occurrent versus standing, 123; opposition of to reason, 126–27; social circumscription of effect of on activity, 129–30. See also body, emotional activity, emotional sense, teleology ends, 32, 48–49, 53–54, 66, 68, 88, 90, 93, 94, 115, 118–19, 124, 128, 130, 132, 144, 172, 177–79, 213, 222n12; and general understandings, 152–53; as determinant of equipment, 31, 152; as determinant of spatiality, 30, 33, 37–38, 41, 150, 171; as element of

249

practice organization, 51, 52, 104–5, 140, 141, 142, 184–85, 211–12, 219; as element of temporality, 29, 37, 39, 120, 172; final, 180, 184, 224n32; of ceremonies and rituals, 133, 135, 136, 141–42, 143–44, 146–47, 151; versus functions, 143–44. See also emotions, projects, Schutz, teleology equipment (Heidegger), 29–31, 41, 58n44; and places, 30; nexuses thereof, 29, 30. See also ends event, the (Heidegger) , x, xiv, 22, 23, 25, 34, 165–66, 169 events: activities as events (happenings), x, xi, 39, 165, 167, 169–75, 194–95, 201–11, 215, 222n9; activity events versus mere occurrences, 169; not ipso facto changes, 200; that befall material arrangements, 74, 107n9, 210–11, 215, 229n93; social, 74. See also activity timespace, history, indeterminacy of activity, interwoven timespaces, practices, social phenomenon experiential acting, xvii, 27–28, 38, 119, 155n13 expression, 158n39 farness, 29, 31, 32, 48, 171 flat ontology, 83 flow, flowing, 36, 113–14, 187–200, 203–4; human activity as, 165, 189, 193–95; performance continuum, 194–95, 204; segmentation of, 193– 95, 226n51 formal causality (Aristotle), 114 Foucault, Michel. See power Fraser, J.T., 45, 61n63 Frazer, Sir James, 132–33 fur trading, in colonial New England, 78, 79, 82, 87, 90–92, 209; as example of social system, 76; general description of, 74–76 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 179, 220–21 Galilean space-time, 11

250

Index

Giddens, Anthony, 107n13, 108n15, 108n17, 117, 161n74, 186, 193. See also power global professional services, 85–87 Goldie, Peter, 124, 158n35 Gosden, Christopher, xii, 18–20, 56n27, 103; on memories and expectations, 19–20 Grosz, Elizabeth, 228n88 group duration. See Halbwachs Habermas, Jürgen, 12, 131 Hägerstrand, Torsten, xii, 11, 89 Halbwachs, Maurice, 206–7, 217–18, 228n87 Harré, Rom, 160n59 Harvey, David, xiii, xviii, 9, 10, 11, 55n3, 79–86; on places, 81, 83–85, 108n14; on relationship between space and place, 83; on space-time compressions, 86–87; on spacetimes of economic systems; 79–81, 82–84; on spatial-temporalities of experience, 81–84 Hegel, G.W.F., 127, 186, 203, 223n20 Heidegger, Martin, x, xi, 2, 20–41, 56n28, 57n35, 60n57, 81–82, 84, 118, 127, 156n18, 165–67, 169, 174, 221, 227n62, 229n88; being with, 47, 49, 63n83; das Man, 48–49, 62n73, 63n78; dis-tance, 31, 48, 68n78; historicality, 166, 228n88; mortals, 47, 50; movement of human existence, 36, 59n52, 166, 195; orientation, 31, 48, 68n78; people, the (Volk), 62n72, 47. See also body, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” clearing, Contributions to Philosophy, equipment, event, regions, spatiality here (a person’s or a situation’s), 32 historicity, x, xiv, 201; in Bergsonian theories, xiv, 201, 202–7, 211, 228n88; and bodily repertoires & practical understanding, 214, 221; persistence of practice organizations, 211–14;

presence of past in past dimension of temporality, 214, 215, 221. See also indeterminacy of activity history, x; and causality, 201–2, 205; demarcation of realm of, 201, 208–9, 229n90; as embracing practices, arrangements, and social phenomena, 208–9; as encompassing indeterminate activity events, x, xiv, 209, 211, 215–16, 221; as encompassing space-time flows, 201, 204–7, 211, 221; event character of, 165, 209, 211, 215; irreversibility of, 215; as one damn thing after another (Markov chains), 201–2, 215, 221; unfolding model of, 203 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 34, 47 horse farms, xviii-xix, 72, 209; as landscape, 99–106 horse farm tours, xix, 51–52, 66–67, 68–69, 77, 88–89, 173, 208–9, 212 human coexistence, 47–48, 49, 65–68; four ways lives hang together, 66–67; and interwoven timespaces, 66–68 human time, tradition of conceptualizing a, xii, 9, 39, 45, 187 Humphrey, Caroline, and James Laidlaw, 161n74–75, 162n79 Hursthouse, Rosalind, 124, 129, 136 Husserl, Edmund 27, 81, 166, 221 indeterminacy of activity, xiv, 175–87; and causality, 177; contravenes Bergsonian accounts of historicity, 207, 211; follows from nature of performance as an event, 175–76; other versions of, 179, 224n32; and social determination of activity, xiv, 182–83, 185–86; of social phenomena, 176, 186; of timespace and interwoven timespaces, 176, 186. See also causal account of action, emotional activity Ingold, Tim, 203–4. interwoven timespaces, 2, 50, 210, 213; action

Index

regularities and 53; common timespaces, 52, 54; constrained by objective time and space, 72; determine objective time and space, 71–72, 78, 79; eventlike, 173, 200; maintained by activity, 211, 213–14, 215, 220; practice organizations and, 52–54; orchestrated timespaces, 54, 66, 71; shared timespaces, 53–54. See also ceremonial grammar, coordination of actions, human coexistence, indeterminacy of activity, material arrangements, power, practices, social phenomenon James, Wendy, xiii, xviii, 138, 161n74, 162n79. See also ceremonial grammar, ceremony Joas, Hans, 177–79, 180 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 126, 177, 203 Keeneland Race Track, 76–77, 79, 88, 209; general information about, xix; race day at an example of a social event, 74 King, Preston. See unfolding events Kisiel, Theodore, 59n51 Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 62n72, 108n3 landscapes, xiii, 97–106, 203; definition of, 98; as objects of memory, 103–5; plurality of, 105–6; and relations between timespace and space-times, 97, 103–5; relations to interwoven timespaces, 100–102; as spatial phenomena, 97, 98–100. See also horse farms Latour, Bruno, 224n31, 228n74 Lefebvre, Henri, xii, xviii, 10, 11, 12–16, 56n13, 90; rhythmanalysis, 12–16; on moments, 15–16; on space, 14–15; on space-time, 13, 16 Lepetit, Bernard, 229n91 levels, of social reality, xiii, 83

251

Lewis, Gilbert, 138 Lukes, Steven, 109n26, 137, 140 Malinowski, Bronislav, 160n55 Malpas, Jeff, 58n44 Markov process, 202, 211, 215, 227n76– 68. See also history Marx, Karl, 84, 135, 203 Massey, Doreen, xiv, xviii, 197–200, 205–7, 227n62 material arrangements, xi-xii, 53, 215 IV 93; as anchoring places and paths, 53, 171, 210–11; as component of social phenomena, 73, 76, 209; downplayed in discussion of history, 208, 229n92; as medium of interwoven timespaces, 67, 214; nonteleological significances of, xiv, 38, 148, 153; and society, 107n8; support activities, 210, 215. See also events, sacred worlds McTaggart, J.E., 42–45 Mead, George Herbert, 103, 104, 193, 230n101 memory, 103–5, 216–21, 231n106; and identity, 218, 219; personal memory, 216, 217, 219–220; practical memory, 219; Shils on, 183–84; social memory, 216, 217, 218; and tradition, 183–84, 221. See also Bergson, Halbwachs, landscapes, practice memory, public space mental condition terms, xiii, 119–21, 155n12; use of articulates practical intelligibility, 119–21 motivation, 28–29, 38, 39, 40, 42, 115, 145–46, 170–71, 175, 186 movement. See Bergson, Heidegger Munn, Nancy, 80–81 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 63n82 nearness, 29, 31, 32, 48, 171 Needham, Rodney, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36, 127

252

Index

Nora, Pierre, 231n108 normativity, 49–50, 112–13, 144–46; can preempt teleology, 45; defined, 62n76–77; and places and paths, 52; and tradition (in Shils), 183–84; why people uphold, 184–85, 211–13, 219, 220. See also practice organization, teleology, worlds Nowotny, Helga, 4, 6–7 objective space, xi, 1, 3, 4, 6, 33–34, 40, 42, 46, 89, 102, 174, 198; defined for purposes of book, 7. See also Bergson, coordination of actions, interwoven timespaces, spatiality objective time, xi, xii, 1, 3, 4, 6, 26–27, 39, 40, 42, 46, 72, 102, 115, 174, 175, 199–200; defined for purposes of book, 6. See also Bergson, coordination of actions, interwoven timespaces Parkes, Don, and Nigel Thrift, xii, 16–18, 56n23; on places, 16–17; on space-times, 17–18 Parkin, David, 161n68 past-present-future, 27, 42–45; as dimensions of human life, 43, 44–45; not a feature of objective reality, 44; as ordering system for events, 42–44 person, 47, 61n70 places (and paths), 30, 35–36, 37–38, 40, 46, 50, 52, 67; and spatiality, 37; teleological character of, 37. See also “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Harvey, material arrangements, Nora, normativity, Parkes and Thrift, regions Plato, 38, 45–46 Plotinus, 45 power, 87–88, 92–96; as temporalspatial phenomenon, 93; domination, 93; in Foucault, 95–96, 109n32; in Giddens, 94–95 practical intelligibility, xiii, 114–15, 118, 119–20, 122–23, 125–26,

127, 155n11–12, 174, 192; and temporality, 222n9. See also ceremony, emotions, mental condition terms, teleology practical reasoning (or deliberation), 118, 125, 126, 155n12, 172 practical understanding, 117, 141, 155n12, 214, 216, 220. See also historicity practice memory, 104–5, 166, 216, 218–20, 221 practice organization, 51, 140–41, 173, 230n96; circumscribes activity or timespaces, 52–53, 142, 184, 208, 211–12, 214, 219–20; maintained by activity, 210, 212–13; is a normative phenomenon, 51–53; persistence of past organization, 185; shape ceremony, 141–42. See also ends, interwoven timespaces, projects practices, xi, 50, 140, 171, 210–11; activities carry on or link, 209, 210, 211, 214, 215, 220; bundling of and interwoven timespaces, 76–78; eventlike, 173, 209–10; regularities of, 53, 54, 171, 212; spatiality of worlds relative to, 171; Taylor on expressive vs. instrumental, 134–35; and the timespaces of activities, xii, 50, 52, 53, 54 Prigogine, Ilya, 227n67 primitive magic and religion, xiii, 11, 131, 132–37; mix expression and instrumentality, 135–36. See also teleology projects, 28, 66, 68, 79, 88, 92, 151, 171; as aspect of temporality, 120; as component of practice organization, 51, 52, 104–5, 140, 141, 184–85; determine spatiality, 31, 37–38; ends a type of, 118 public space, 63n78, 63n82; and social memory, 218–19, 231n105; manifestation of activity in, xiv, 214–15, 216

Index

rationality, 112, 125, 132. See also activity, teleology reasons, 39, 120, 126, 127, 129, 156n15, 167, 171–73, 175 regions (of places), 29, 30, 35, 41, 46; two versions of in Heidegger, 35–36, 40 relational space, 4, 199 relativistic space and time, 4, 5–6, 7, 8 rhythmanalysis. See Lefebvre Ricoeur, Paul, 229n91, 231n107 ritual, 112, 131, 139, 149, 161n73; and rules, 137–38. See also ceremony, ends, Lukes, sacred worlds, teleology, Wittgenstein rules, 51, 52, 161n74, 162n75, 212–13. See also ceremony, Wittgenstein Runia, Eelco, 231n107 sacred worlds (Eliade), xiii, xviii, 112, 131, 148–53; centered spaces, 149–50, 151; meanings of entities in, 150–52; role of general understandings in, 150–52, 163n93. See also teleology Sartre, Jean-Paul, 179, 224n32 Schueler, Frederick, 171 Schutz, Alfred, 115, 124 Sehon, Scott, 171 Shaker Sunday services, 122, 127, 128, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 156n19 Shils, Edward, xiv, xviii, 183–84, 221. See also memory social conflict, 79, 87–92; social construct (space and time as), 4, 6–7 social phenomenon, 51, 72–79; as bundles of practices and arrangements, 73, 209–11; event character of, 165, 173, 209–10; interwoven timespaces essential to, x, xi, xii, 76–77, 78, 165, 210; objective spatial-temporal properties of, 78. See also indeterminacy of activity, material arrangements social space-time, xi, 9–20, 82–84, 86– 87; three features of theories of, 10.

253

See also Gosden, Harvey, Lefebvre, Parkes and Thrift space, as something seated in human life, 45–46 space-time flows, 197, 200, 206. See also history spatiality, 40; in Being and Time, 29–33, 36, 58n44; and being-in, 31, 58n44; different from space, 29, 31; priority of over space (Heidegger), 33–34; as teleological phenomenon, 37–38; underpinned by general understandings, 150, 153. See also ends, practices, projects, teleology Strawson, Peter, 61n71, 222n6 strength of desires, 180 subjective time and space, 3–4, 8, 9 succession(s), xii, 6, 27, 42–45, 169, 189, 195–96 Taylor, Charles, 134–35, 147, 158n39. See also practices teleology, 39, 132, 177; as basic feature of human life, xiii, 127, 153; compatible with emotion, xiii, 121, 130, 133; compatible with ritual and ceremony, xiii, 130–31, 137, 147, 153; compatible with sacred worlds, 153; entwined with general understandings, 151–53; and normativity, 62n77; practical intelligibility a teleological phenomenon, 127; teleological character of primitive magic and religion, 133–36; and temporality, 28, 37, 115; underpins spatiality, 37, 38, 147–48, 150, 153; unity of timespace lies in, 37, 38, 147–48, 150, 153; versus rationality, 112–13. See also ceremony, emotional activity, ends, normativity, spatiality temporality: as basic feature of activity, 27; in Being and Time, 26–29, 36–37, 174; different from time, 26; dimensions of, xii, 28, 39, 42, 172;

254

and teleology, 28–29, 37, 39. See also emotions, ends, historicity, projects, teleology Thalos, Mariam, 222n 7 time, as something seated in human life, 43 time geography. See Hägerstrand timespace, in Heidegger. See Heidegger timespaces, types of (Rämö), 41–42 tour company, 73, 92, 94–96, 173 tradition, 220–21. See also memory, normativity, Shils trajectories, 198–200, 205–7 Turner, Stephen, 60n54 understanding: actional, 51, 141; general, 51, 52, 141, 142, 150–52, 163n93–94. See also ends, practical understanding, sacred worlds, teleology, spatiality

Index

unfolding events. See King universal duration, 188, 196, 199, 203–4 Vygotsky, Lev, 217 Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, 109n25 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 61n59 Winch, Peter, 132–33, 135 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xiv, xvi, 26, 114, 158n39; on expressive versus teleological actions and practices, 132–34; on rule following, 161n74, 179, 181–82, 185; versus intellectual interpretation of ritual, 133–34. worlds, 29, 41, 48, 148, 58n44; normative structure of , 48–49, 62n77. See also practices, sacred worlds Zerubavel, Eviatar, 218

About the Author

Theodore R. Schatzki is dean of faculty and professor of philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (1996), The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (2002), and Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space (2007). He is also coeditor of, among other works, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (2001). Professor Schatzki publishes widely in philosophy and the social disciplines on topics in social theory, action theory, and the philosophy of social science.

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