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In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. By Sarah Sharma. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 196 pp. ISBN: 9780822354772.
The spatial turn in studies of communication and culture opened up new methodologies for critical scholars eager to reveal the inner workings of late capitalism and globalization. Everyday spaces have been explored by scholars such as Morris (1998), Dickinson (2009), (1984), Bourdieu (1977), and Benjamin (2002). Sarah Sharma's book, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics, brings forth the notion that for all the work done by spatial rhetorics and imagined geographies, now is the time to redress the balance in our inquiries towards temporality. Where there is much talk of the subject being located in culture and space/place, Sharma encourages readers to think in terms of subjects being calibrated to temporalities, or, in other words, "how individuals and groups synchronize their body clocks, their senses of the future or the present, to an exterior relation" (p. 18). In a Foucauldian tradition, Sharma uses the notion of biopolitics to examine which bodies receive investment and which receive disinvestment in the biopolitical economy of time. In so doing, Sharma continues the project started by Marx (1992) to examine how time structures our abilities to participate in society and democracy.
According to Sharma, experiences of time, although individualized, intersect with others' experiences of time to create a grid of temporalities or relations of power upon which discourses are framed. To demonstrate the multitude of different experiences of time, Sharma introduces us to a series of individuals, each occupying different positions of power within a series of enmeshed temporalities. The frequent business traveller, also referred to as Liquid Man, is served by a temporal architecture encapsulated within the contemporary airport.
A temporal architecture is comprised of "technologies, commodities, policies, plans, programs, and the labour of others" (Sharma, p. 139), and these elements combine to keep these valued members of the political economy of time either productive and awake or blissfully asleep so that productivity...