This text is copyright Steven Connor 1996.
Comments to s.connor@eng.bbk.ac.uk
would be very welcome.
Summary of Argument/Skim-Reading
Aid.
1. Introduction: some different senses of `family
history'.
2. History is familial.
3. Families are historical; families as mobile
archives.
4. Autobiographical interlude; the making of a
family archivist.
5. Women as custodians of family time.
6. Relations between family time and industrial
time.
7. `Women's time' - an unsatisfactory notion;
preferable idea of women as `time-keepers'.
8. Historical privatisation of the family.
9. Temporal mobility of each family.
10. The mobility of its archive.
11. Struggles over family memory.
12. Synchronisations of family time and public
time(s).
13. Family time and technological time.
14. Increased longevity of the family.
15. `Syncopated contemporality'.
16. Conclusion; the family as `dissipative
structure' (Prigogine) and the importance of thinking the
temporality of the family.
Notes
[2] There are many ways in which historical time
recapitulates and amplifies family time. From Aristotle, who
defined familial association as the elementary form of society,
through an historical tradition running through Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau, the family has often been seen as the origin and source
of sociality as such. Historical time takes a familial form
whenever we construct it generationally; perhaps one of the
continuing purposes of the monarchy, in this country and
elsewhere in Europe, is to instantiate the analogy between the
succession of generations and the succession of epochs. The
horrible and obstinate attraction of race theory from the
nineteenth century onwards testifies to a close association
between historicised theories of national identity and a familial
idea of national identity as kinship. In the Christian West, a
powerful association has developed between the family and the
quasi-autonomous time of religion or the sacred. Unlike Judaism
or some Eastern religions, Christianity has never developed a
system of home or family rituals; but it appears to compensate
for this by the marked centrality of the familial relation within
its mythology and doctrine. The intertwining of family time with
religious belief and practice is demonstrated by the recurrent
concerns over Sunday shopping laws. Whenever the question of
extending Sunday opening arises bishops are to be heard warning
of the dangers of eroding the last islands of family time; it is
as though, with the withering of religious belief and practice,
the family has become a surrogate sacred space, a placeholder for
a once generalised sense of religious kinship and shared
eschatology. [Back to Summary]
[3] But, if history is familial, then families
themselves are also historical and historicising institutions.
For perhaps the most important function of a family is its
capacity to mediate between social and individual time, plotting,
parsing and so to speak imparting time. Families are built
around functions of recollection and protention; they are
temporal metabolisms, which are sustained, prolonged and
transformed by their accumulations and exchanges of narrative.
A family is characteristically a storehouse for evidences of an
individual's past, in documents, letters and, most particularly,
photographs. But, because the family itself passes (both builds
and dissipates) through time, it is not merely a mnemonic
repository, but also a mobile activity of archivisation, which
evolves its own shape and nature out of the production, exchange
and custody of memories, evidences and narratives. [Back to Summary]
[4] I offer a personal example of this, which I
hope will focus these rather abstract claims without fixating
them. My sense is that my own family - consisting of father,
mother, older brother, younger sister - was curiously lax or
illiterate in the affairs of time. To be sure, we managed to get
ourselves up in the morning and usually got to school and work
on time, and met necessary deadlines. But we were not good at
keeping records, or marking out the future; we had no photo
albums, birthdays were forgotten or remembered in the nick of
time, festivals stole up on us and were celebrated late or not
at all. One of my strangest memories is sitting in a room with
the curtains drawn against the sunlight, watching Wimbledon while
eating Christmas pudding. Christmas pudding in June became for
a while a curious achronic convention in the family. The
interesting thing about this achronicity was that it began very
early on to be experienced as a malady by my sister, who began
at an early age to undertake a work of temporal conservation and
reparation. She began to collect and store evidence of everything
that was past or passing or to come in our family, first of all
in tangible forms, letters, diaries and snapshots, and then,
increasingly, in terms of knowledge. By the age of about 7, she
was known as the keeper of the archives, who knew the dates of
all the birthdays of all the aunts, nieces and nephews we never
phoned or visited. With a kind of irresponsible relief, the
family came over the years to yield up all its temporal affairs
and effects to my sister. Unfortunately, the consensual amnesia
of the family was not so much embarrassed as confirmed by my
sister's assumption of the functions both of archive and
archivist. [Back to Summary]
[5] We must suppose that is very common for women
to assume and perhaps sometimes to feel driven into the role of
custodian and manager of family time. It may be that the
association of women with the management of time derives from the
more general responsibility for the running of domestic economies
exercised by women in Britain and Europe, at least until the
early 1950s. Running the household depends in the most obvious
way possible upon the control and ordering of time. It may also
be that the association of women with nurturing functions within
the family also associates them with points of temporal
transition in a larger sense; with birth, childhood, illness,
death. Tamara K. Hareven, one of the few historians to have
investigated the social and familial distributions of time in
detail, suggests that it is because of women's traditional
nurturing role at such critical points of transition that they
also came to have the main responsibility in maintaining
relationships between the family and the wider circle of its kin.
Women, she suggests `became the "kin keepers", who maintained
ties with kin over the life course and who held kinship networks
together across geographic distances' {1}. [Back to Summary]
[6] In some areas, this maintaining of relations
between family and kin has assisted the integration of families into patterns
of industrial production, for example by assisting the movement of the continuous
flow of labour from rural to industrial areas. Hareven's detailed work on the
relations between family and industrial time in the cotton mills of Manchester,
New Hampshire leads her to the conclusion that the historical separation of
family and work did not occur evenly through the nineteenth century, and that
`familial and industrial adaptation processes were not merely parallel but interrelated
as part of a personal and historical continuum'.{2} At the same time, the maintaining of kin
relations has also been a way of keeping a kind of second-degree coherence in
the face of the disintegrating effects of industrialisation, imperialism and
slavery, as has been shown, for example, in Herbert Gutman's history of the
family under conditions of slavery.{3} [Back to Summary]
[7] The close identification
of women with the distinctive temporalities which arose from the
much-publicised invention of the private family during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the consequent
withdrawal of the family from the central economic functions of
society, with their dependence upon the increasingly homogeneous
regimes of public time, has perhaps encouraged some of the more
exaggerated philosophical accounts of the particularity of
`women's time', in Julia Kristeva's phrase. One often hears of
a division between male time or experience of time, as linear,
purposive and public, and female time, which is cyclical,
biological, subjective. In cultural terms, it is a distinction
embodied in the quite conscious embrace in the modernist novel
of forms of nonlinear temporal experience which are clearly
identified as female (Mrs. Dalloway, Molly Bloom), as opposed to
the officious clock-watching of earlier realist-masculinist
narrative modes. [Back to Summary]
[7] But it would be a mistake to read the
experience of family time in these terms, as a kind of matrix,
out of which differentiated, lengthened, public time may evolve.
This would be to fall in with the model of the family as the
`haven in a heartless world' as Christopher Lasch has put it. But
the time of the family is never merely a kind of pretemporal
pocket or parenthesis in the regimes of public time. To be the
manager of time in the family is to mediate private and public
time. For the keeper of archives, the embodiment of memory, can
also have a crucial role in making temporal decisions - which
would include, for example, decisions about the timing of when
to have children, and to stop having them, and decisions about
when members leave the family. So, rather than constituting the
womb of time, the woman often fulfils the role of time-
keeper; managing the relations and exchanges between the
inside and the outside of the family. [Back
to Summary]
[8] Traditional histories of the family suggest
three phases in its relationship to the exterior social world.
Before the coming of industrial modernity and in its early
period, during what has become known as the proto-capitalist
arrangements in seventeenth-century Europe, the family was
regarded primarily as a work unit, and was integrated into
patterns and processes of economic and cultural production at
every level. With the coming of industrial capitalism, families
became more and more privatised, giving up one by one their
economic functions. In the most recent phase of advanced consumer
capitalism, the family is reintegrated into economic patterns,
but passively rather than actively. The family becomes thoroughly
saturated by, and even constituted by patterns of and processes
of consumption, as economic processes reach further and further
down into every area of social life. The three stages in this
traditional chronology of the family may be called the actively
integrated, the privatised and the passively integrated. [Back to Summary]
[9] It is often said or assumed that the
incursion of the public world into the private realm of the
family - in the form, nowadays, not so much of the demands of
work and a production economy as the various solicitations of
consumption, spectacle and commodity - has produced or is
producing a simple dispersal or evacuation of the private or
familial - the `colonisation of the lifeworld' in Habermas's
memorable but much-buffeted slogan. Much recent work on the
history of the family has suggested that these models are too
generalising. Above all, they fail to account for the temporal
process that characterises the family; the fact that families
have not only history, but historicity. It is not just the
institution of the family that has changed over time; for it is
in the nature of each individual family to undergo changes in
time. [Back to Summary]
[10] That time is in this way of the essence for
the family is borne out by the temporal mobility of the family
archive. For, if a family is in one sense itself an archive,
families and familial relationships are increasingly becoming
defined in terms of more complex contests and collaborations over
the domestic archive. Among the many transitions to be negotiated
over time in any family is the passage of responsibility for this
archive. A family mediates the passing on not only of mnemic
contents, but also of mnemic agency and responsibility. One
development in family life in particular appears to have driven
this, namely the concentration of family function around the
nurture and education of children, or at least the steadily
hardening perception that this is the primary function of the
family - dating, if we are to believe Philippe Ariès, from the
establishment of the `conjugal family' in the early modern
period. [Back to Summary]
[11] Often this passage is not a smooth one. The
growth of children into adulthood can often portend a bitter
struggle over memory and narrative, as children begin to
challenge and rewrite what tend to be the increasingly
repetitive, retentive and self-referential narratives of the
family maintained by its senior members. This process is given
impetus by the much-increased levels of interference between the
interior time of the family and exterior temporalities and forms
of remembering. Of particular concern here would be the effects
of so-called false memory syndrome, and the highly public
struggles for the ownership of and authority over the memory of
the family which such cases precipitate. [Back
to Summary]
[12] This sense of the mobility of the family
archive must be seen alongside the increasingly complex
synchronisation of family time with other kinds of temporality,
or plotted movement through time - leisure time, educational
time, career and economic time, the cycles of sexual maturation
and decline (I don't imply that there is only one in every life),
reproductive time, and increasingly what can be called morbid or
medical time - the semi-constructed sequences and expectations
of illness and mortality. In a society which is unable in any of
its public forms and institutions to acknowledge and incorporate
the realities of ageing and mortality, it may often fall to the
family to integrate a Heideggerean being-towards-death of
individual experience with all the other durations, sequences,
and cycles of individual and social life. [Back to Summary]
[13] Of particular concern to many recently have
been the relations between family times and technological times,
with the new configurations of time characteristic of and
consequent upon more various patterns both of work and leisure.
No better image of the change in the relations between technology
and the family form can be imagined than the video-recorder,
which allows family time to be stored, split and redistributed,
breaking up the synchronicity of the nation-at-its hearth that
lay at the heart of programming structures in the early days of
television and in a sense defined the very form of television
itself. It is tempting to see these kind of development as a
further incursion of technology in the service of the commodity
into the family. But if the fission of the family allows in one
sense for a more refined packaging and refinement of marketing
strategies, the splitting of reception from use, the capacity of
families and their various subsections to redeploy and even to
reinvent the temporalities of their leisure makes it much harder
to target the family as such, which still remains the great
marketing prize. Increasingly, it is impossible to determine
where and when the family is to be assembled and addressed. In
Britain, a symbol of this might be the practice instituted about
5 years ago of broadcasting the Queen's Broadcast at different
moments through Christmas Day, testifying to a slightly anxious
sense that even on this most ritualised of days, it was no longer
possible to predict the traditional semi-comatose convocation of
the family at 3.00 pm, stretched out on sofas with their
Christmas pudding. (of course, even in the 1960s, catching the
Connor family with their Christmas pudding would have meant
broadcasting the Queen's Speech after the Men's Singles Final in
June.) [Back to Summary]
[14] This dual sense, both of the temporality
of the family as such, and of its interruption by and interaction
with other durations, periodicities and time-scales, may be
partly determined by the increased longevity of the family, or
the protraction of its life-cycles. Human beings are one of the
only species in which grandparents stay around long enough to see
and participate in the lives of their grandchildren. Now, there
are more four-generation families now than at any other time in
history. [Back to Summary]
[15] The increased longevity of the family may
also be an important factor in producing those phenomena which
suggest to many the breakdown or dissipation of the family;
divorce, one-parent families. My point here is that the fact of
the family's disappearance from public view, and the increasing
difficulty of generalising about, which is perhaps to say
synchronising, the experiences of different family, need not
imply the disappearance of the family as such, or the dissipation
of family values. I think that the increasing exposure of
families to time, in the more protracted, and therefore more
complex and interrupted life-cycle of the family, along with the
diversification both of temporal experiences within the family
and the increasing complexity of the exchanges between family
time and other times - a condition which I want to call
syncopated contemporality - is resulting, not in the
dissolution of the family, but a loosening and multiplication of
its forms. [Back to Summary]
[16] Adapting to the fact that families are what
the chemist Ilya Prigogine, writing of thermodynamic physical
systems, has called `dissipative structures', which take their
always-unfinished shape from time and change themselves has been
easier, I think, for families than for family historians.{4} The centralising of the
function of reproduction and nurturing of children that really
perhaps defines the form of the idealised modern, privatised
family has resulted in a curious effect of temporal arrest in our
cultural thinking about the family. We tend to think of a family
as being in existence only when there are children, and in a
sense only for its children. This has the effect of
detemporalising the experience of the family, fixating it upon
the imaginary, timeless meeting of generations in the nurturing
of the young child. Such myths are having to give way to a new
sense of the mobility and plurality of family experience; as
families, or their different members begin to generate new
conceptions of experiences, for example in the new kinds of
affiliation and kinship resulting from divorce, remarriage, same-
sex and other unorthodox parenting patterns, as well as all many
other kinds of quasi- post- or parafamilial arrangements. The
family, like everything else, is becoming the kind of thing that
cannot be thought outside of its temporality; less than ever is
the family available to be grasped all at once, all in one place,
all at one time. [Back to Summary]