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Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that as things now stand no state has reached, nor is it soon likely to reach, the point where it can comfortably abandon temporality altogether as a source of legitimacy. Even the most technocratic states today still rely on continuity and the "meaning systems' of the past in order to extract a measure of allegiance from their constituencies. Though a concern with history and time may not seem as important to state administrators as it once did, the value of temporal rationales nevertheless remains indispensable. This is particularly true in periods of crisis when state managers and ideologues feel compelled to resuscitate powerful memories of the genealogy of the state, or of the state's place in time, in order to strengthen their authority. In cases such as these, a politics of time is invaluable for at least formally authorizing the existence or role of the state in modern society.The political interpretation of the longue durée, then, still remains strongly entrenched. The challenge to it by contemporary capitalism has proven to be a strange one, for capitalism has not really succeeded in meeting the state on its own grounds. It has evaded confrontation by questioning not the shape or structure of a politics of time, but only its importance for the present. Capitalism has done little more than treat the longue durée as irrelevant, which is something different than vigorously contesting it or arguing that its meaning needs to be seriously reconsidered.Yet there have emerged two other, generally unnoticed, challenges to a statist temporality that have been less dismissive. Both are worth mentioning here, since they have political connotations. But both also need more empirical verification before they can be considered potential threats to existing political time-frames.The first of these has been established more theoretically than factually. To some recent observers it has seemed that the widespread diffusion of the state's perspective on duration has by no means guaranteed that this perspective will always be subjectively internalized in ways that best serve the state. Crucial discrepancies can exist between the way formal structures appear to be adopted by a population and the ways in which these structures are actually assimilated, psychologically and practically, by individuals in their daily lives. For instance, a political temporality may be superficially accepted by people, but given a quite different significance, or placed in an entirely different "register," than the one intended by the state.Bourdieu, for one, has tried to explain how this happens. He has noticed that it is invariably the policy of modern states to impose a variety of cognitive structures on their citizenry. The purpose is two-fold: to encourage people to think in patterns approved of by the state, and to encourage them to act (on the basis of these patterns) in a manner that best meets the state's needs. A politicized temporal orientation would be an example of such a cognitive structure. If it were accepted as "objective" rather than, as it in fact is, merely arbitrary, and if it were then reproduced in the minds of individuals, a "fit" would be established that would help solidify the existing "cosmological and political order."¹ People's values and judgments would be regulated, perhaps without them being fully aware of it. Furthermore, as a result of these cognitive structures certain desired practices might follow. By controlling how time is thought about, the state could plausibly affect, in almost imperceptible ways, not only the attitudes people hold, but their incentives and motivations as well.According to Bourdieu, this mainly works. What people internalize is most frequently what they reproduce in their behavior. But sometimes something different occurs. When people pay attention to their actual social practices instead of the objective structures conferred from without, they often reconceptualize and re-work what has been imposed upon them. This is the always present margin of creative freedom that lies within the grasp of all human beings. Individuals and social groups have a perpetual capacity to innovate; they are able, if they choose, to transform what they receive rather than simply repeat it. Even when the temporal classifications of the state are thoroughly known, people still have the leeway to decide when or how to apply them, or whether, in certain cases, to apply them at all. Hence, in Bourdieu's view, there is always room for a self-conscious social praxis to engender "heretical readings' of statist structures.² Heretical readings are ways of appropriating imposed forms instead of merely inculcating them - of subjectively modifying what is given instead of reproducing it. Whenever or wherever such readings are set in motion, the formal taxonomies of time are never as secure as they may seem. In light of this, Bourdieu and others have made it clear that today the taken-for-granted can no longer be automatically equated with the taken-as-legitimate.³Michel de Certeau has made a similar point in his discussion of the "oppositional practices' of everyday life. According to him, the powerless (the vast majority) inhabit frames and structures they did not create and cannot hope to abolish in a single lifetime. But they are able subtly to undermine these frames by means of a whole range of tactics that they in fact put into operation constantly. Hidden away in the interstices of contemporary life are all sorts of resistances, manipulative movements, reconversions, conscious maladaptations, and quasi-invisible ruses and avoidances that serve - on a practical if not a theoretical level - to de-legitimize the dominant structures and interpretations. Certeau has convincingly shown that under-neath even the (apparently) most undisputed political and ideological forms, including those claiming to explain time or duration, there are numerous acts of opposition and contestation working continuously to weaken the grip of the state over society.⁴There is a second way in which a statist time-frame is currently being challenged. Within civil society there are, it now appears evident, supressed or discarded modes of long-term temporality that have survived more or less intact despite the state's "war of annihilation" against them, and despite the triumph of the state's view of the longue durée during the last two centuries. These traces of traditional and religious time have persisted in fragments of communal life, ethnic groupings, church organizations, and other "antiquated" rituals or solidarities. No matter how attenuated or submerged these islands of duration may be, they are nevertheless capable of actively shaping people's perceptions of themselves and their world in ways not necessarily compatible with the goals of the state.⁵ Moreover, these half-hidden temporal orientations contain - often inadvertantly - a certain subversive weight. By their very nature, they call into question the state's one-dimensional account of historical time. What any state would prefer to have accepted as fixed and natural about the longue durée, these older temporalities undermine or discredit. Sometimes the results are bizzare and unsupportable, as is the case with the various temporal outlooks of today's millenial subcultures (where duration is still calculated in terms of God-ordained epochs and ages succeeding one another on the way toward the apocalypse).⁶ Yet at other times these earlier temporalities are worth remembering and perhaps even resuscitating. Some of them may represent a healthy return of the repressed. It is not impossible to think that an alternate view of the past could help activate communities of resistance informed by time perspectives entirely different from those promoted by the modern state. If so, it would not be the first instance in history where opposition to power and a thoroughgoing re-conceptualization of time went hand in hand.

DOI: 10.1007/BF00160928

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