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Abstract
Are humans born into a phenomenon, time, that has an eternally anterior origin and whose source is outside humanity? A permanently preexisting,external time-source can explain the objectivity which conditions social synchronisation. If time inaccessibly transcends human interference, then humans co-synchronise by collectively adhering to clocked and calendared representations of an objectively separate rhythm. Human bodies seemingly also exemplify an objectively transcendent time-source if spatial change, such as ageing, is an unavoidable ramification, and corporeal registration, of time’s omnipresent force.
These interpretations inform the conception that time is an opponent which controls and restricts our everyday endeavours. Time looms large, yet there is often not enough of it. This positions time combatively against humanity, with a transcendent source and origin. Given that the realm in which time manifests is spatial, however, it can be asked whether the source and the origin of time are spatial. This question engenders reconsiderations of the relation of spatially embodied humans to a supposedly objectively transcendent, adversarial time-source.
This thesis opens these inquiries by exploring the collective temporalities of objective, social rhythms through the structural sociology of Émile Durkheim. The relation between human subjects and these collective social temporalities is extensively examined via the context of body modification practices, questioning whether what is collectively social pre-exists individual subjects. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction frames consequent considerations concerning the timing of subjectivity and bodies. Is all such incarnation and modification an inescapably structural, spatial and intersubjective (social) phenomenon, and could such ontological origination be time’s source?
By engaging the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty it is asked if all spatialities share intersubjective, social origins. Investigating the potentially synchronous origins of spatial intersubjectivities interrogates the notion of social synchronisation, which is typically defined in terms of human subjects cohering via common representations of the aforementioned, objectively external and anterior time-source. In unpacking spatial and temporal origination, a discussion develops with Henri Bergson’s assertion that the conditions of space and time are incompatible. Throughout this thesis, sociological accounts of the collective human management of an external time-source are queried, as are philosophies which conceptually polarise space from time.