In the cultural sector as elsewhere, this sentence comes up again and again: we don’t have the time. It serves to explain why we don’t tell the story of what we do, why we don’t cooperate, why we don’t think. Yet time-use surveys show that we have never had so much free time. I propose to look at this sentence differently: it is not about a quantity, it is about a dispossession. What is missing is proper time, the time whose use we decide ourselves. And this reading makes possible an action that the idea of a shortage of time ruled out.
Four hours of free time a day, and no time
In meetings of cultural professionals, the sentence never takes long to arrive. We don’t have the time to tell the story of what we do, no time to meet colleagues from the neighbouring organisation, no time to read, no time to think about what we are doing. I hear it in local authorities, in theatres, in libraries, and I have said it myself many times. Its peculiarity is that it closes the discussion: you don’t argue with someone who has no time.
Yet the figures show something else. Since 1986, INSEE, the French national statistics institute, has been carrying out time-use surveys in which thousands of people write down in a diary, in ten-minute slots, everything they do with their days. According to the latest one published, for 2010, people in work have about four hours of free time a day, television remains the main leisure activity, time spent on the Internet doubled in ten years, and people sleep eight and a half hours on average. A new survey is under way in 2025-2026, and we shall see whether the hours have shifted towards screens, but nothing suggests that the total amount of available time has melted away. We have twenty-four hours a day, like the generations before us, and we spend more of them than they did outside work.
The sociologist Judy Wajcman has called this discrepancy the time-pressure paradox. In Pressed for Time (2015), she points out that working hours have not increased in Europe, that they have even fallen in France, and that the feeling of lacking time is nonetheless growing. She shows that this feeling is not randomly distributed. It affects first of all people who combine a skilled job with family responsibilities, it is stronger among women, and it depends less on the number of hours than on the control one has over them. She also rejects the easy explanation by technology: it is not our devices that create the pressure, it is the demands of other human beings, which the devices merely pass on.
Clock time against task time
The time we think we lack has not always existed in this form. The historian E. P. Thompson showed, in an article from 1967 that has become a classic, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, how, with the first factories, clock time prevailed over task time. Before the factory, people worked until the job was done, the day was measured by the tasks completed, and work mingled with the rest of life. Workers had to be taught this discipline of the clock, often by coercion. The anthropologist Tim Ingold took up this analysis to show that task time has never entirely disappeared and that it persists in all concrete work. Counted time is therefore not a fact of nature, but an instrument, which appeared at a precise moment in history, in the service of a particular organisation of production.
Günther Anders took the analysis one step further in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Man, 1956). He observes there that free time itself has been conquered by industry. By consuming mass-produced goods during his leisure, the worker performs an additional task, that of turning himself into a mass man, and he pays himself for the means of this transformation: the device, the subscription, the broadcasts. He becomes, in Anders’s phrase, a home worker of a new kind, who buys his own servitude.
"Everyone is, in a certain way, occupied and employed as a home worker. A home worker of a very peculiar kind, however. For it is by consuming mass-produced goods, that is to say thanks to his leisure, that he performs his task, which consists in turning himself into a mass man.
Whereas the classic home worker manufactured products in order to secure a minimum of consumer goods and leisure, today’s home worker consumes during his leisure a maximum of products in order, in doing so, to collaborate in the production of mass men. The process even turns resolutely paradoxical, since the home worker, instead of being paid for his collaboration, must on the contrary pay for it himself, that is to say pay for the means of production whose use makes him a mass man: the device and, where applicable, in many countries, the broadcasts themselves.
He therefore pays in order to sell himself. His own servitude, the very one he helps to produce, he must acquire by buying it, since it too has become a commodity.“Günther Anders,”The World as Phantom and as Matrix“, in”Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen", volume 1, 1956, translated here from the French edition (2002), p. 121.
Anders was writing about radio and television. Since then, the arrangement has been further perfected, with streaming series and social media feeds. In the preface he wrote for the fifth edition, in 1979, he notes that his book has not aged, and he specifies that his analyses were not prognoses but diagnoses. That preface is now nearly fifty years old, and the diagnosis still holds.
“Not only does this volume, which I completed more than a quarter of a century ago, not seem to me to have aged, it seems to me today even more topical. That proves nothing about the pertinence of my analyses of the time: it proves only that the state of the world and the human condition I was describing were already badly degraded, that they have hardly changed in substance since 1956, and indeed could not have. These observations were not prognoses but diagnoses.”
Günther Anders, preface to the fifth edition (1979) of “Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen”, volume 1, translated here from the French edition (2002).
In another essay from the same volume, “Being without Time”, Anders reads Waiting for Godot as the description of existences deprived of any task, and he specifies in 1979 that he was describing the world of the unemployed. There are therefore two figures of dispossession: that of people who have a “world”, a job, children, files, and do not have their time at their disposal, and that of people who have all their time and potentially more freedom, but cannot make anything of it. Both are produced by the same organisation, and neither is the result of a choice.
When someone says “I don’t have the time”, they are not talking about a clock, they are talking about what others have decided to do with their hours.
The simplism of “take your time”
Today’s philosophers have paid a great deal of attention to the time we lack, and not always where they should. Hartmut Rosa described, in Social Acceleration (2005, English translation 2013), the three accelerations of modernity, of technology, of social change and of the pace of life, and in Resonance (2016, English translation 2019) he proposed a relationship to the world that escapes this logic, a relationship in which we let ourselves be touched and transformed. The notion is useful, and Pascal Le Brun-Cordier has taken it up for his resonance contract, which I come back to below. But it carries a risk, that of concluding that each of us, individually, should slow down, disconnect, take our time. This injunction is found in self-help books, in “digital detox” seminars and in the slogans of local authorities, and it addresses dispossessed people as if they decided their own time. It adds guilt to dispossession. It also feeds a nostalgia, for a “before” in which people supposedly knew how to live slowly, and Thompson shows precisely that there was no such thing: task time was not leisure time, it was another regime of constraint.
Vincent de Gaulejac described, in La société malade de la gestion (Society Sick with Management, 2005), how managerial ideology colonises organisations and even the psyche of the people who work in them. Everyone becomes the manager of themselves, counts their hours, reproaches themselves for their lack of productivity. That is where the lack of time lodges: we have internalised the “boss’s” clock, and the boss along with it.
We are just as uncritical of the language itself. “Remember that time is money”, Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1748 in his Advice to a Young Tradesman, and Thompson notes that in the factory time became currency: it is no longer passed but spent. Hence two expressions we use without thinking, selling one’s time and buying time. They do not describe the same position. The employee sells their time, or more exactly, as Marx specifies in Wage Labour and Capital (1849), their labour power for a period fixed by the contract, and it is the employer who buys that time. The rich, for their part, buy other people’s time to free up their own: they pay someone for the cleaning, the cooking, the shopping, the childcare. Ashley Whillans and her colleagues even established in 2017, from surveys in four countries, that people who spend money to spare themselves chores report greater satisfaction with their lives (Buying time promotes happiness), and the study circulated as well-being advice: buy time. What it mainly shows is that some people’s proper time is made of the time others have sold.
In France, this sale is the model of a normal life, and we take hardly any distance from it. Robert Castel recounted, in Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale (From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, 1995), how wage labour, for a long time the most wretched condition, that of someone with nothing to sell but their arms, became in the twentieth century the envied status, because social protection attached itself to it: pensions, health insurance, unemployment insurance. Being an employee is today the ideal of security, what people wish for their children, what banks require before lending. Yet the employment contract is defined in French law by the relationship of subordination, that is, in the wording of the Court of Cassation (Société Générale ruling, 13 November 1996), the employer’s power to give orders, to monitor their execution and to sanction failures. This power is exercised first of all over time. The law sets working hours, the employer sets the order of departures on leave, each employee requests their dates and may have them refused, and in many companies a time clock records the hour of arrival and the hour of departure. The only proper time left is holiday time, and even that has to be applied for.
We call this behaving “en bon père de famille”, like a good father of a family. The expression comes from Roman law, the bonus pater familias, and the Civil Code of 1804 used it for two centuries to designate the prudent and diligent conduct expected of anyone in charge of an asset, until the law of 4 August 2014 replaced it with the word “reasonable”. The father in question was the head of the household, the one who decided for everyone else. In everyday usage, he has come to mean the man who takes no risks and hands his time over to whoever pays for it. The ideal of prudence we pass on to our children is thus an ideal of consented dispossession.
I therefore propose to shift the focus, from quantity to ownership. In physics, proper time is the time measured by the clock the observer carries with them. There is no absolute time; each trajectory has its own. I borrow the term. A person’s proper time is the time whose use, rhythm and meaning they decide. What those who never have the time are missing is not time, it is proper time. And the dispossession of proper time has a name, domination: the situation in which someone else decides what I do with my hours. I had approached this phenomenon from the side of the person, in Presence and submission, where I described submission as leaving one’s time to the other, and from the side of collective rhythm, in Imminence and law. Here it is its institutional side: who, in an organisation, in a public policy, in a professional relationship, decides whose time.
As long as we believe we lack time, the only answer is to run faster. Once we understand that we have been dispossessed of our proper time, other questions can be asked: who decided, in whose name, and how do we regain control.
Presence matters more than duration
I have argued for several years that presence, that is, the way we inhabit the moment, gives time its substance (Presence and time). I explained in Engagement in Time that the length of cultural actions is no guarantee of quality, and in The workshop we will only run once that a workshop run only once obeys its own laws, which are in no way a degraded version of a longer project, in which duration, that is, participants’ submission to time, is held to be the alpha and omega. Let me restate the argument here: something decisive for a person can happen in an hour, in half a day. And deplorable things can happen over several years: four years with a destructive teacher leave marks all the deeper for having lasted. I studied Spanish at secondary school for seven years, for instance, a huge amount of regular time, and today I have strictly no competence left from it; what was the quality of that time, my presence in it? Did the education system ever take that squandering of time into account?
Of course, things take time to ripen and each person takes time to build themselves. But this time of construction is not time spent together. A brief encounter can work its way through someone for months. A fully inhabited moment counts for more, in a life, than a long stretch of time passed through without being there.
When people in the cultural sector say they don’t have the time to do things well, they assume that doing things well requires long time, repeated meetings, continuous availability. This is the ideal of the long-term project, and it is what makes impossible what could be done right away. If quality depends on presence and not on duration, then the proper time we need to reclaim does not need to be long, it needs to be our own.
Giving people back their proper time: five proposals for the cultural field
I conclude with five proposals, each of which aims to give proper time back to the people who work in the cultural field and to those they work with:
- Stop making duration a criterion. In calls for projects, agreements and reports, the length of programmes and the number of sessions are what count. I propose evaluating the quality of presence and of what was shared, and treating short formats as fully-fledged forms. This gives proper time back to teams, who no longer have to apologise for keeping things short, and to participants, who are no longer asked for an availability they don’t have.
- Cooperate without everyone having to be there at the same time. The digital cooperation tools I set up allow each person to contribute at the moment that suits them, to read what the others have brought before them, to remain a full member of the group without having attended every session (Listener contributions via digital tool, The sovereign contribution wall). Nobody is excluded from the collective because their time is not the calendar’s time. It is a very concrete way of instituting proper time, by accepting that the right moment is not the same for everyone and that nobody knows better than anyone else what to do with their own time.
- Do and tell. In the cultural sector, people do important things and don’t tell the story of them. Libraries, for instance, carry out considerable cultural work of which nothing remains but quarterly programmes, and no narrative. The reason given is always the same: no time. Yet it is the narrative that makes long-term work exist in the eyes of elected officials. A cultural policy that is not narrated depends, in order to last, on the clear-sightedness of officials who would know without being told. A policy that is narrated can be understood, defended, passed on from one term of office to the next. Giving people in the field the means to tell what they do, with collective intelligence methods and artificial intelligence (Crafting cultural narratives with artificial intelligence, Beyond Mobilizing Audiences : Building Democratic Narratives), is giving them back proper time: the time of their action becomes their own, because they are the ones telling it. Pascal Le Brun-Cordier, in the interview he gave to the Observatoire des politiques culturelles about his resonance contract, says that evaluation has more to do with what is recounted than with what is counted, and proposes a narrated, polyphonic evaluation, shared among all the people involved in the project. That is the kind of movement I stand for and propose.
- Write relational time into contracts. The resonance contract devotes its last part to rhythms and temporalities: the duration of agreements, the time given to directors to get to know a territory, the handover between teams. I propose going as far as job descriptions and organisation charts. As long as the time of the relationship, the time for welcoming, listening and inquiring, does not appear there, it is taken from people’s proper time, and they take it from their evenings and reproach themselves for it the next day.
- Recognise the right to one’s own time as a cultural right. Cultural rights, as I define them in The presumption of competence, address people in positions of power and ask them to presume the competence of the other. This presumption applies to the use of time. The person who programmes, trains, facilitates or directs is no better placed than the people they work with to decide what an hour of their life is worth. Recognising this right means designing cultural proposals that everyone can enter at their own pace, leave and come back to, without being reproached for the way they inhabit time.
None of these proposals manufactures extra time. They shift the question: it is no longer a matter of how many hours we have, but of who decides. That, it seems to me, is where those who work in culture can act, for themselves and for the people they welcome.
