By Professor Dawn Lyon, University of Kent
It’s August 2020 and a young woman who is mother to a five-year-old boy is grappling with the relationship between the present and the future.
In an account to Mass Observation, she writes:
The uncertainty and not knowing how long the wait for ‘normality’ will be is the hardest part of this for me. It’s difficult to look forward to things in the future because we have no way of knowing whether they’ll happen. […] Usually I see August bank holiday as a real checkpoint in the year; summer is all but over and I’d be looking forward to my favourite bit of the year, especially now I have a child. I love going out trick or treating with my son on Hallowe’en. Bonfire night has always been a favourite of mine and although I find Christmas stressful, I do enjoy the run up – that festive feeling, the food, the time off. But this year, who knows which bits of Autumn will happen.
The rupture of the pandemic prompts this writer to articulate her ordinary, repetitive ways of marking time. The social rhythms of the year – Hallowe’en and Bonfire night – offer anchor points and are part and parcel of the everyday present.
However, the future can no longer be counted on with a sense of predictability and security. The uncertainty of a longed-for future creates an absence where the ‘not knowing’ ‘which bits […] will happen’ is the ‘hardest part’. Its past iterations haunt the present, intensified in the face of disruption and delay. The writer remains tethered to a sense in which time progresses, believing that the future will come with a return to ‘normality’ as it always has and in forms they can recognise – just not yet.
The crisis of the pandemic was a crisis in part because it was a radically liminal time of not-knowing the future. The rupture and reconfiguring of everyday rhythms brought about by the pandemic and resulting lockdowns demonstrate how uncertain futures project into, act upon, and shape the present – which in turn, informs the future that can be imagined.
I keep returning to this diary extract as I think it shows how rhythm (present or absent) ‘gathers’ the elements of these present-future relations. It ‘ties together critical moments’ – those important social markers of the year – and felt experiences of time.
This blog further explores how the notion of rhythm helps to understand how actors navigate across different temporal horizons, including ambivalent and non-linear connections between present and future. To date, multi-disciplinary ‘rhythm studies’ (Barletta, 2020) have not been fully integrated into social sciences scholarship on time. Rhythm – and the associated practice of ‘rhythmanalysis’ (Lefebvre, 2004) – enables us to grasp the lived and dynamic unfolding of time and place, the ebbs and flows, stumbles and glitches of the everyday. And research from the period of the pandemic offers insight into wider present-future relations[1].
The Mass Observation archive
Mass Observation (MO) in the UK is an archive which seeks to ‘record everyday life in Britain’ based on volunteer writers’ accounts and often in collaboration with researchers. In summer 2020, together with Beckie Coleman and other colleagues in our A Day at a Time project, we co-commissioned a ‘directive’ on COVID-19 and Time with the archivists at MO. We invited panellists to ‘look back on your experiences of time and COVID-19 so far, consider what it means to you for life to get ‘back to normal’ (if it is) in the present day, and imagine what you think the future might hold’. The writer’s lines above were part of those responses.
Overall, the COVID-19 and Time directive stimulated a strong response. We received electronic copies of the 228 submissions ranging from a few lines to eight pages in late 2020.
The diaries offer fragments or small stories about mundane things and everyday occurrences which point to emergent forms of sense-making. Many of the accounts have a grappling quality as they seek to capture a ‘live present’ in the context of the unfolding pandemic and in spite of the omnipresent language of linear time.
Rupture and the dissolution of rhythm
‘I was stopped in my tracks’ – writes a ‘78 years “young”’ woman as she describes herself, conveying a sense of her energy being halted by the pandemic.
In unleashing a form of rupture – or arrhythmia – in the present, COVID-19 dissembled temporal connections to past and future as time became ‘more elastic’, lacking its usual framework or tethering, including a sense of being ‘less anchored in time, I suppose’, as one writer eloquently articulates:
The COVID19 pandemic has certainly affected me, but at what you might call the surface level you wouldn’t know it just from looking at me. It’s affecting me most at what for lack of any better term I’ll call ‘deep time’: the temporal framework within which we live our lives and locate our experiences and form expectations.
One writer asks ‘Where has the time gone, where is it going?’ as they feel that ‘time itself has lost its rhythm’.
Following the summer 2020 return to some sort of ‘normality’ in their perspective, they continue:
And the uncertainty, too, gives a flavour of strangeness to time. There is a disordering of time, it is no longer linear as there is no clear direction in which we are headed.
These extracts refer to the direction of time that can no longer be counted on – what happened to ‘time’, where has it gone, ‘where is it going’? They eloquently capture the multi-directionality of time and how important the future is to people’s everyday lives and sense of what it means to inhabit the world.
This disordering of time makes for a fluctuating present, unsettled by the prospect of ‘no future’. It shows both that the present leads into the future and that the future loops into the present, intensifying it. The curtailed, unimaginable, or absent future creates an uncertain present. Rhythm cannot do its work of connecting and moving everyday in time, shaping time as it does.
Standby: the alert present and the (constrained) energy of rhythm
We explicitly asked writers about their experience of waiting, and whilst reflections ranged from the concrete and mundane to the more diffuse, they evoke a sense of constrained energy. For example, writer says they are ‘champing at the bit to get back to the real thing!’ by which they mean waiting to be able to meet in person. ‘Standby’ suggests this dynamic experience of waiting in a paused present.
Indeed, writers reflect on the simultaneity of a cancelled future and a future that is also imaginable, as plans are made with the recognition that they may be ‘abandoned’. For instance:
There is so much unknown. I keep in mind that full lock-down might occur again. I try to be optimistic, and make plans. But I try to remain realistic – that all plans may be abandoned. I have scrap booked all my cancelled tickets for this year. But I have optimistically purchased a scrapbook for next year.
Reconfiguring rhythm: Everyday practices of ma(r)king time
Some of the writers talk quite explicitly about time-reckoning practices and the ways they are refusing or using them to reconfigure rhythm. For instance, many remarked that their usual ways of marking and organising their time had become useless. Calendars and diaries were ‘redundant’, ‘abandoned’ or conspicuous for ‘a lot of empty space’, Some writers even throwing them away, feeling that there was little point in marking the days.
Despite not performing their usual planning functions, for others, they remained important in order to sustain awareness of the succession of time in terms of days and weeks and being part of the collective rhythm of the year. ‘We started putting a line across the date on the calendar so she could see where we were’ holding onto the shape of time, so it would no longer be ‘endless’.
In conclusion
The pandemic was a temporal portal, jolt and possibly a revelation for how we live through which people developed awareness of multiple rhythms that shape everyday life. Working with rhythm offers insight into how people live with, within and across different spatio-temporal registers, especially in the time of the pandemic – and what may have unfolded from it. It allows us to tune into the cultivation of alternative, multiple and co-existent rhythms, and how people challenge, refuse and remake practices and relations of temporal power and domination (Sharma, 2014).
If, as Keri Facer (2023: 62) argues, ‘the question of time and our relationship to it is such a powerful force in structuring the perception of possibility’, keeping a finger on the (temporal) pulse is vital for tracing change as it unfolds, and for cultivating or promoting new forms of temporal attentiveness and imagination which help expose systemic injustice.
This can be relevant for thinking about contexts beyond COVID-19 too. If we are always enmeshed in several temporalities simultaneously, especially and increasingly, digital timescapes (Kitchin, 2023: 8), how might the ‘extraordinary period’ of the pandemic illuminate concerns about uncertain sociodigital futures?
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[1] See Coleman, R, D Lyon and C Turner (forthcoming, 2025) ‘Present feelings, feeling present: Liveness in research on time and feeling during the Covid-19 pandemic’, The Sociological Review; van Emmerik, C, R Coleman, and D Lyon (2024) ‘Minor reclamations of time and shifting futures during COVID-19: an analysis of writings from the Mass Observation Project in the UK’, Journal of Sociology , 0(0): https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833241248672; Lyon, D and R Coleman (2023) ‘Rupture, repetition and new rhythms for pandemic times: Mass Observation, everyday life and COVID-19’, History of the Human Sciences, 36(2): 26-48: https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951221133983; Coleman, R and D Lyon (2023) ‘Recalibrating everyday futures during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Futures fissured, on standby and reset in Mass Observation Diaries’, Sociology, 57(2) 421-437: https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385231156651.
References
Barletta, V. (2020) Rhythm: Form & Dispossession, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Facer, K. (2023) Possibility and the temporal imagination. Possibility Studies & Society, 1(1-2): 60-66: https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699231171797
Kitchin, R. (2023) Digital Timescapes: Technology, Temporality and Society, Cambridge: Polity.
Lefebvre, H. (2004[1992]) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum.
Sharma, S. (2014) In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.