Motherhood and the temporal logic of the modern.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Sinclair, Jennifer
• Date: 22 March 2005

Time is one of the key flashpoints in contemporary debates about motherhood. Much of the discussion focuses on the lack of time and the time pressures that confront contemporary families. (1) Here, however, I am interested in drawing attention to the ways in which the cultural values and meanings of modern time have come to dominate a sense of self and identity and function to make motherhood and mothering problematic. Even if they are less often taken into account, the symbolic meanings and cultural values associated with modern time influence the ways motherhood is negotiated in contemporary culture as much as the very real practicalities of working conditions and social policies.

Once understood as an empty, neutral category, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the variability of time and has begun to recognize that conceptions of time are integral to values, ideals, experience and identity. (2) Time, Rita Felski suggests, 'is not just a measurement but a metaphor, dense in cultural meanings'. (3) Typically, 'modernity' is used as a periodizing term to differentiate industrialized societies from traditional societies. But the term 'modern' also has a 'distinctive rhetorical power'. (4) Felski writes that:

Modernity differs from other kinds of periodization in possessing a normative as well as a descriptive dimension--one can be 'for' or 'against' modernity in a way that one cannot be for or against the Renaissance, for example. The symbolic force of the term lies in its enunciation of a process of differentiation; an act of separation from the past. (5) 'The idea of the modern', Felski goes on, has an explicit 'polemical edge' that represents 'a rejection of the dead weight of history and tradition'. The idea of the 'modern' became 'synonymous with the repudiation of the past and a commitment to change and values of the future'. (6)

'Modern' is thus a thoroughly temporal term that signifies both a break with the past and tradition and also a valuing of the future; a commitment to change and innovation rather than a valuing of tradition and repetition. The cultural values of the modern identify time with the future, with movement and progress. In modernity, time is understood to be linear and is commonly differentiated from cyclical, repetitious, pre-modern time.

This division of time is tied to the division of labour that occurred with industrialization and which produced a set of binary oppositions: public and private, work and life, mind and body, culture and nature, male and female. The temporal articulation of this binary structure is the identification of women with cyclical, 'natural' time and men with linear, progressive time. As Zaretsky suggests, 'the association of the family with the most primary and impelling material processes [gave] it its connotations of backwardness as society advanced'.(7)

Modern feminism has sought to expose and to question the inherent value judgments such binary structures contain and to question the standpoint from which such representations are drawn and made. (8) Feminism itself, however, is implicated in, and a product of, 'forms of historical thinking made possible by modernity'. This is evident in feminism's conviction that:

the past does not define the present, and that women have the capacity to affect their own destiny. Feminism defines itself in a critical relationship to the past and aspires to a better future. Feminism is in other words a project, requiring a purposeful and hopeful relationship towards future time. (9) Feminism--as a project--therefore is enmeshed in the temporal logic of the modern, resolutely directed towards the future as the yet-to-be-realized site of a better life. The 'distinctive rhetorical power' of modernity and the values it represents together with feminism's focus on future time, I suggest, continue to animate contemporary debates about motherhood. My aim here is firstly, to briefly draw attention to some of the ways in which the values of modern time influence ideas about time and life; secondly, to elaborate the implications of these for motherhood; and finally, to suggest some alternative ways of understanding motherhood.

Time and Modernity

The temporal logic of the modern, as suggested above, involves a repudiation of the past and attachment to the future. This set of values works to privilege a particular style of identity formation. Freed from the chains of history and tradition, the modern subject's fate is imagined as full of possibilities that can be fashioned according to one's own making. 'You can be whoever you want to be' is a familiar refrain that reflects a structuring of the self as a master of one's fate and identity as freely chosen. Time is crucial to this formulation.

Integral to the idea of identity as freely chosen is an emphasis on future-directedness and becoming. The time of the modern, as Bauman suggests, is the time of 'living-towards-projects'. (10) One effect of this emphasis on becoming and straining towards the future is that the present is structured as a time of 'non-identity' or no identity. The present becomes the place 'we pass in a mad scramble to realise the future'. (11) The 'freedom' to become whoever we want to be is impelled by the insistent time pressure to arrive, to get there as quickly as possible, in order to 'be' someone. Here the polemical edge of the modern comes into play because it sets up a division and distinction between those who 'have' an identity, or those who have acquired or made an identity, and those who do not. This dynamic works to make acquiring an identity a primary 'life goal' and a pre-eminent value.

This style of identity formation is linked to the idea of 'self-actualization'--a modern concept in itself--that has come to be virtually synonymous with work as the privileged site of self-actualization. Zaretsky argues that 'the technological character of modern production has created a need for workers with abilities of self-expression, independence and creativity' and that 'men and women have been encouraged to dwell upon their own uniqueness and to understand themselves in terms of "brightness" and "talent"'. (12) 'Brightness' and 'talent', together with expressing individual uniqueness, however, do not sit easily with mothering, and notions such as these have helped to reinforce an idea of mothering as synonymous with 'the habitual, the ordinary and the mundane' (13) of the everyday and of 'everydayness'. This everydayness stands in contrast with the modern that, according to Henri Lefebvre, 'stands for what is novel, brilliant, paradoxical ... [The modern] is (apparently) daring, and transitory' whereas 'the quotidian is what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted ... and (apparently) insignificant'. (14)

Lefebvre suggests that processes of industrialization and capitalism partly produced or made visible the concept of the everyday since it produced lives characterized by routine, repetition and uniformity. But the everydayness of work has increasingly receded into the background and instead a market economy, and working within it, is increasingly glamourized as exciting and changeable. Nor is everyday life just 'a material byproduct of capitalism'. It is also 'a term that is deployed by intellectuals to describe a non-intellectual relationship to the world ... it is synonymous with the "natural attitude" rather than the "theoretical attitude"'. (15)

This distinction, as suggested earlier, alludes to the privileging of mind over body and the intellectual over the instinctive. As a corollary, 'being at home in the world is an implicit affront to the existential homelessness and anguish of the modern intellectual':

The vocabulary of modernity is a vocabulary of anti-home. It celebrates mobility, movement, exile, boundary crossing. It speaks enthusiastically about movement out into the world but is silent about the return home. (16) This brief sketch of...