Timescape

Our timescape of life is really a picture showing the fluctuating diversity of life over the past 700 million years. There was little diversity before that time owing to the dominance of blue-green algae. What our timescape shows is, as expected, a number of surges in the diversity of life: […]

With the idea of the timescape, I seek to achieve an extension of the landscape perspective, that is, to develop an analogous receptiveness to temporal interdependencies and absences, and to grasp environmental phenomena as complex temporal, contextually specific wholes. This involves a shift in emphasis not just from space to time but, more importantly, to that which is invisible and outside the capacity of our senses.

[Albert] Einstein […] believed in a ‘block’ conception of time – or ‘timescape’, as it is more popularly known – where all events in the temporal series are, as it were, laid out alongside one another tenselessly. On these terms, the flow of time from past to future, in particular the notion of the presentness of the Now, should at best be seen as functions of a finite subject’s limited perspective on the timescape.

The painter's term landscape refers to a picture representing a given scenery, as distinct from a portrait or a still life depicting objects. A timescape is made of recognizable time areas, with permeable borders—private and public time, past, present and future time, home time and work time, etc.—all of which exist within a geography of space.

Faust I grew from the basis of a Sturm-und-Drang text concerned with addressing contemporary problems through culturally original and relevant materials into a fully-fledged representation of the cultural historicity of modernity. This development was driven by the desire to approach universals by integrating historical particulars into a temporally progressive and cumulative structure. It produced a complex mythic timescape, which stretches throughout modernity, but frequently also alludes to pre-modern elements, both classical-ancient and Northern-archaic. Contained in this timescape [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe presents complex constellations within modernity between the "original" and the "advanced", and between ancient and modern.

The entire human and most of the animal and vegetable genetic stock now found in Britain and Ireland arrived (and continues to arrive) over the last 12,000 years. That fact alone, it is suggested, offers a new longue duree (or ‘timescape’) for population history.

When these three dimensions of temporal meaning [historicity, domestic time, and familial time] are considered as part of [Barbara] Adam's timescapes which combine the other times of social experience, we can begin to see how media and communications technologies contribute to our social experiences of time in complex ways. The simultaneity of communications technology might contribute to a particular timescape, but this may well be in tension with the temporality of its communicative content or social application. It is through their interpenetration in any given moment or context that temporal meaning is produced.

We have borrowed the notion of a timescape from the sociologist Barbara Adam (1998, 2004, 2008), who defines a timescape as a ‘cluster of temporal features, each implicated in all the others, but not necessarily of equal importance in each instance’ (Adam 2004: 143). Its key elements include time-frames, temporality, timing, tempo, duration, sequence and temporal modalities (past, present, future) (Adam 2008). […] [A]s Adam (2009; 1; emphasis in the original) notes, ‘the “scape” part of the concept acknowledges that we cannot embrace time without simultaneously encompassing space and matter … a timescape’s perspective acknowledges this spatiality, materiality and contextuality but foregrounds the temporal side of the interdependency.’ […] [T]he timescape concept invites a focus on the linkages and interdependencies between different dimensions of the temporal constitution of a political system.