Passing the Time in Pastimes, Professionalism and Politics

Abstract

This article may be seen as in search of time but with no ‘real’ prospect of finding it since it is believed that time reflects and reinforces the relations in which it is embedded. The article will focus on pastimes, professionalism, and politics, arguing that while these diverse activities would appear to have no more than their alliteration in common, they share a similar orientation to time that is informed by a phenomenological consciousness of intentionality. This involves a linear sense of time as representing the gap that can only be bridged by intentions being realized instrumentally in specific results through means-end chains. Time then becomes filled up with activities that leave little space for reflection. This raises some issues regarding time that, outside of philosophy and even there only occasionally, would not ordinarily be aired. Some of these issues will be ethical, epistemological and methodological. The ethics will be drawn through an examination of Levinas’s misgivings about the phenomenology of Heidegger, the epistemology and methodology from some deliberations on time in relation to Foucault’s discourse on epistemic regimes, and methodology as one possible implication of those deliberations.