March 19, 2026 | 17 minute read

In the Meantime

by Sarah Sharma

Critical Analysis

Introduction

In the introduction to this text, the author describes their argument: that time as experienced is not uniform, and is always a construct of power dynamics; it is a chronography of power, “where individuals’ and social groups’ sense of time and possibility are shaped by a differential economy, limited or expanded by the ways and means that they find themselves in and out of time.”

Using an intersection in Tokyo as a point of reference, the author describes the space as hypermediated. Everything in the space is instant; “fashions can go out of style before they reach the other side of the street.” Some view this as a techno utopia, one that is inhabited by “creative, energetic, tech-savvy, and forward-thinking types.” Others criticize this as being an architectural space that is displaced by a technological space. A common way of viewing this intersection, or those like it, is through a lens of space. But there is another way of examining it, which is through a lens of time, or temporality: an “awareness of power relations as they play out in time.”

The author’s research is a form of mixed-methods, and began with two weeks of observation of the single intersection; this introduced the idea that the people that move through the space “represent discrepant forms of labor constituted in time in a variety of inequitable ways.” This observation is related to a larger form of inquiry called speed theory. This theory is a view of a culture of speed, where culture in its entirety is accelerating, and this is the primary starting point for critical analysis of the socio-political world. The theory views a culture of speed as “antithetical to democracy,” and presents it as an infringement on the politics based in space. The author describes that this is too simplistic, because it ignores the idea of “lived time.” The argument instead is one of a “generalized individual—an everyday subject—who is suddenly out of time.”

Synchronicity is the main center of everyday relationships, particularly micropolitics of time and social control related to and deployed through time; the text argues that simply viewing the world as “getting faster” does not understand the nature of temporal power relations that are not uniform. The author introduces the term “power-chronography” to describe a differential of time based on under-considered aspects of gender, class, race, and so-on.

This relationship has been underexplored for a variety of reasons, but one is the bias in exploration towards space as the grounding element of social relations. In this way of thinking about political life, “time is treated as a mode, a way of being communicative or present. Certain temporal modes are valorized as appropriate to political space.” This implies that time must be uncomplicated in order to allow someone to be contemplative of democracy and politics. This, in turn, describes time as how it sets a pace within a space, rather than how people are constituted in that time. “Time is worked on and differentially experienced at the intersections of inequity.” Chronographies of power include a description and understanding of how time constructs are produced, and that they are lived and always political.

The author further explains her methodology, which was a mixed methods approach including observation, economic analysis, descriptions, discourse analysis, and interviews. A large part of the work was immersion in places where people labor, live, and rest.

Returning to the idea of speed, the author notes that “one of the most powerful conceptual commitments in popular discourses today is that the world is getting faster.” But time can be “had” by means of switching time to others, such as offshoring data entry. Time-based value emerges differently “at the expense of bodies.” Interventions related to time are interjected into the lives of some people; what is shared across all is that time needs to be recalibrated.

The author concludes by stating that institutions are to blame for a power directive that “derive and exert power through their investment and control of people’s time. More significantly, institutions establish this control through the production and enhancement of people’s qualitative experience of time.” This is not a notion of speed; it is a notion of privilege. It is a differential time.

Chapter 1 - Jet-lag Luxury, The Architecture of Time Maintenance

In this chapter, the author explores the nature of time as it pertains to business travelers, with a focus on travelers and their relationship to airports.

Speed theory describes an airport as a “structural transformation of the public sphere and material evidence of the fall of the public man… [they are] the demise of political space and the rise of an apolitical time.” This perspective imagines people as passengers rather than citizens. The author views this as overly narrow and uncomplicated. The airport is a node in a larger reproduction and maintenance of global capital; the passenger is the most valuable part of this system.

The author describes interviews she conducted with various frequent travelers. They all speak of balancing work and life, humanizing travel, and the idea of handling and responding to the increasing speed of life. They view this acceleration as an “economic condition that requires increasing amounts of self-sufficiency. Yet they are highly commodified bodies; the market and corporate world have invested in them.”

Some frequent travelers refer to themselves as road warriors—those who are “ready to do business” and are technically savvy. For them, speed challenges their business abilities; it is the “basis on which these folks’ livelihoods thrive.” These travelers need to understand and believe that speed defines their work, because that justifies their existence and their value; “reserve labor must be extracted from their bodies.” These people are “subjects of value within global capital.”

Jet lag has shifted from a medical diagnosis to a social diagnosis (“social jet lag”) which describes a change in how the body and the environment around it works, as the body can be managed to become more effective for longer periods of time, and can then labor for longer: “the body’s labor time has no foreseeable limit.” The author describes a variety of innovations that support this argument, including drugs that are used by the military to create a 24-hour warrior by limiting a need for sleep.

The author notes that the infrastructure of time-based experiences, such as airports, “normalizes a set of mutually reinforcing conceptions of time: (1) time management is the individual’s responsibility; (2) one must work harder to stay in time; and (3) being tired is a slow person’s excuse for being unproductive.”

However, sleep takes a different role in airports and for business travelers, and sleep in the public space of the airport becomes a badge of honor for hard work. The author describes that sleeping in public is largely illegal, except for these travelers—“it depends on who is falling asleep and how they sleep.” Business and technology combine to offer sleep-based experiences that acknowledge the hard work, such as massage chairs; “time (and space) for sleep is present in the capitalist grid, and is therefore able to be bought and sold.”

Some time in airports is wasted, such as waiting in security lines, which makes it an open opportunity for retailers. People then become, as Jeremy Rifkin describes, “prisoners of the present.” Those in business produce value in these times by speaking loudly on their phones as they conduct transactions.

The author concludes by grouping these ideas of time in air travel as an “emerging culture of re-temporalization.” The structures that suck time or life also offer energy, albeit artificial energy. These are technology solutions and corporate solutions, responding to time of one (the business traveler) and then disseminating implications to others in that ecosystem. A “tired body of the frequent business travelers is a grave economic risk for global capital.”

Chapter 2 - Temporal Labor and the Taxicab

Temporal Labor is an experience of “laboring within a temporal infrastructure while being cast outside it.” Taxi driving is a form of temporal labor: drivers have little to no autonomy of the way their time is spent or saved, yet time is one of the most important defining qualities of their job and of the infrastructure of travel. An experience of time has edges and centricity, and a participant in an experience has a “horizon of possibility” to their engagement with time. That horizon changes for taxi drivers, and is largely out of their control, yet ironically, when interviewed, drivers continually claim control over their working schedule as the largest benefit of the job. This works “almost as a technology in itself,” as a thing that one can do to themselves in order to achieve a certain way of being. There is a pull and push of control, with a perception of control as a “coping mechanism” on behalf of the driver, and a reality of out-of-control forced on by the entire machine of travel and city-work. The driver exists in a “state of exception” to the temporal order.

Bourdieu is referenced as describing the power implicit in ownership of time, as “waiting is one of the privileged ways of experiencing the effect of power.” Making people wait is an exertion of power; waiting is to be powerless. Taxi drivers attempt to reclaim that power through modes of “time maintenance,” such as waiting in a space with similar people, waiting for similar things. But the majority of the technology of self as related to time is “synchronizing to the time of others.” This is a necessary capitulation to the tempo of time that is “neither an equitable or egalitarian rhythm.”

The negotiation of power in time is conditioned. Time, “as it is constrained in terms of power, must be acknowledged as differential, relational, and tangled.”

Chapter 3 - Dharma at the desk, Recalibrating the sedentary worker

In this chapter, the author investigates the phenomenon of yoga being introduced into the workplace. This seemingly beneficial practice reinforces the idea of work as the basis from which time is compared, and acts as a power mechanism to keep workers working longer and harder.

The author begins by highlighting the presence of the nine-to-five worker. This type of job is common, and individuals in this type of work “are in time and out of time simultaneously.” At the desk, those workers are sedentary, and they are a subject of global capital. The author views yoga introduced into a corporate setting as “indicative of the importance of maintaining time sensibilities as a form of social control,” a phenomenon that works as recalibration (continuing a Marxist view of capital over workers, but “updated” for the new context of the modern workplace). Yoga-in-the-workplace appears as a form of free time, but in fact reinforces the power structures in place by placing it in existing, assumed paradigms of event-based, work-focused time.

Yoga instructors view themselves as independent of or rebels against an economic system that they are outside of. They view yoga as a form of resistance, but “the yoga instructor has a parasitic role within the biopolitical economy of time. Armed with a concomitant mix of esoteric knowledge consistenting of wild aphorisms about technology and speed, the mobile yoga instructor turns the imperiled desk worker into a renewed temporal subject better adapted to a life spent at the desk.”

The author describes fieldwork with various yoga instructors who offer in-office services. She observes the common reference to a fast-paced world and a culture of speed, and a view that these instructors are fighting against that system; they are “self-identified speed therapists.” But, the author argues, their work is actually reinforcing the sedentary life and temporal order that exists.

Samsara, a core element of yoga, is an idea of time as a cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. Linear time is nothing, as it rejects this cycle, and so accepting Samsara “allows one to shed attachment to the heavy burden of linear time,” and a way to understand no limits on the possibilities of time. Yoga as practiced in a corporate environment is understood as linear, bounded, and event-based, fundamentally at odds with this way of understanding time.

Sedentary work and life is “a significant conduit for capitalism’s dream of an unfettered flow… [it is] actually required by global capital… the body’s capacity to sit and work as well as the growing need to foster a particular meaning of time for workers while at work requires techniques of recalibration.” Time becomes about what can be created, and yoga in a corporation acts as “an extension of a set of previously calculated, strategic initiatives used in offices for keeping workers at the desk all day.” It serves to make work endurable, and the author argues that it is similar to the Marxist view of a social factory—a corporate factory that exists to “extract more labor from tired bodies.” Energy is a common word used in yoga practices, and in a corporation, this energy can then be tapped into for work; it is viewed as renewable and save-able and spend-able.

The author observes that some view this practice as better than nothing. But “better than nothing” rejects the idea of time as material struggle; it capitulates to a structure of nine to five work, rather than working to reject the structure entirely. Yoga in the workplace actually “makes life at the desk temporally maintainable,” ironically reinforcing the structures of oppression, and “may make a shorter workweek harder to fight for.” Work-life balance is this idea, packaged; it constructs a structure that assumes work, and “is a time claim that further institutionalizes the space and time of work as being fundamental to a person’s identity.” Nine to five becomes a point of reference that is axiomatic, and a point of reference against which things are compared.

Chapter 4 - Slow Space, Another Pace and Time

In this chapter, the author explores various slow movements, such as slow food and slow buildings, identifying that these movements position slowness as an individual lifestyle choice and judge those who do not engage in that slowness—without recognizing that many people have no choice in the speed or pace in which they experience the world.

The author notes that a variety of new experiences have been marketed to consumers around the idea of slowness as a lifestyle choice. These include specific resorts, hotels, and so-on; many position their slowness as a response to the busy electronic and technological lifestyle that many people experience. McLuhan viewed technology as something that would unify a global era of responsibility, where speed of communication meant “connection, deepening empathy, and the eradication of margins and centers on a planetary scale,” and today’s push towards slowness is framed in the same way.

Individuals feel that they have no time, and “in terms of democracy, it may also be the case that our political processes are suffocated by short-term thinking.” The author argues, however, that it’s necessary to look at the multiple temporalities that are impacted or ignored in a claim of slowness: “Slowness is the privileged tempo within theories of democracy and the public sphere.”

The various slow experiences introduced are spatial solutions, not time-based considerations, and don’t actually address the power dimensions at play related to time. Time is slowed for some, but not for others, and slowness offers “its own particular ideological time claims and beholds its own exclusive temporal practices.”

The author presents a variety of case examples of cultural places and spaces organized around a slogan of slowness; each is used to illustrate that a pursuit of slow time experiences is privileged for only some. Slow food in-particular is framed as problematic, as it not only is exclusive but also has extended this exclusivity into other “socially conscious areas” with the same lack of care. For example, slowness in food is associated with natural, high-quality ingredients, and this champions the idea of someone in another country following their traditions, ignoring that those traditions are largely centered around basic subsistence, cheap labor and long hours.

The author concludes that “within this slow living imaginary, time is treated as something to which we all have equal access,” available to those who have the ability to make individualized choices around the pace of their lived experiences. But it ignores the uneven nature of who is making choices, and who is working fast to ensure the slowness of others.

Conclusion - Toward a Temporal Public

In the conclusion to this text, the author re-presents and summarizes her primary argument: that time is political and asymmetrical; that the idea of “individual time” is wrong, because time for one always impacts time for another; and that a conversation of spatial inequality is incomplete without recognizing space as inextricably tied to time inequality.

The common view that the world is speeding up is inaccurate, as it does not recognize for whom it is speeding and what control different people have over that change. Arguments for speed-up have “not paid sufficient attention to the institutional, cultural and economic arrangements that produce specific tempos for different populations.” A temporal perspective forces discussion of inequality. The author introduces the idea of “temporality” as a way of including time in a larger argument of this inequality, and “temporal inequalities” show how different populations “recalibrate” in order to fit into different institutional spaces and social relationships.

Temporal architecture of time maintenance describes the infrastructure established to support entrepreneurial time management, and “power-chronography forces us to recognize how the off-hours of social possibility” that are afforded through this infrastructure “become increasingly marginalized for many so that every moment can be made rich, meaningful and productive for another.”

The author concludes that we need to establish a new and radical view of time and space, joined, and the power dynamic that is at play within this combination. To fully embrace and understand a politics of time means focusing not on the individualistic nature of time management, but on “freeing time from this bind.” It “reimagines time, not as being singularly yours or mine for the taking but as uncompromisingly tethered and collective.”