temporal dis:connectivity: a new blog series

susanne quitmann

This series of blog posts explores how time – both as an idea and as a lived experience – has shaped our global world. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, it examines what happens when global connections are delayed or rushed, and how societies have understood and organised time in a modern, increasingly interconnected world. By focusing on these shifting rhythms and perceptions, we’re exploring what they reveal about the nature of both globalisation and about time itself.

Globalisation is often described in simple terms: either the world is becoming more connected, or it is pulling apart. The concept of global dis:connectivity, developed at gd:c, challenges this binary view. It argues that connection and disconnection are not opposites but exist side by side and constantly shape one another. Interruptions, resistances, absences and detours are not exceptions to globalisation; they are a central part of globalisation. We often become most aware of our interconnectedness when it falters: wars, economic crises, pandemics and supply chain disruptions remind us how deeply entangled our lives are. Even nationalist or isolationist movements, which appear to reject globalisation, operate through international networks, revealing the paradoxes at the heart of our global age.

Temporalities is one of three research focusses at gd:c. Much research on globalisation has focused on space. As a case in point, the three previous research focusses at gd:c were disruptions, absences and detours. However, those are not only spatial phenomena; they are temporal too. They involve pauses, delays and acceleration.

Historians and scholars from other fields have increasingly turned their attention to how societies understand and experience time. Particularly over the past two decades, research has shown that time is not simply a neutral backdrop to events. It is shaped by culture, politics, technology and power. As early as the 1970s and 1980s, thinkers such as Reinhart Koselleck argued that modern societies developed a new sense of historical time, one in which the future was no longer seen as predetermined but open and fundamentally different from the past. Stephen Jay Gould, in his reflections on geological time, explored how cultural narratives shape our understanding time and history. His work continues to influence debates about the Anthropocene and Big History, which stretch our sense of both time and space.

 

In the modern era, experiences of and ideas about time were closely tied to globalisation. Steamships, railways and the telegraph seemed to shrink space and time, bridging geographical distances and accelerating life. Migrants and traders experienced both rapid movement and prolonged waiting. The introduction of Greenwich Mean Time as an international standard in 1884 created a shared global reference point for communication and commerce, even as it divided the world into time zones and met significant resistance.

Global time zones necessitated precise technology to quantify time objectively. Such technology spread around the world, but Sebastian Conrad has shown that they could also be adapted to fit local customs of timekeeping.^[1] Time was a political tool as well. European powers used temporal terms to justify colonial domination, casting non-Western societies into what Dipesh Chakrabarty memorably calls the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’.^[2]

This blog series invites readers to rethink globalisation and global history through the lens of time. By focusing on interruptions, accelerations, time keeping and competing temporalities, we explore how attention to time can transform our understanding of global processes, past and present, and our understanding of history itself.

[1] Sebastian Conrad, ‘”Nothing is the Way it Should Be”: Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century’, Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018): 821n doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391.

[2] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8.

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bibliography

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Conrad, Sebastian. ‘”Nothing is the Way it Should Be”: Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century’. Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018): 821-48. https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391.