Psychosocial construction of time and social change

This paper analyzes the psychosocial construction of the conceptions of time and social change, and their relation with the notion of progress set up by modernity as well as their contradictory aspects, considering their historicity as psychosocial and social phenomena. The social construction of the notion of time is discussed; it responds to social organization forms, thus turning the social changes into historical and temporal landmarks. The association between social changes and social movements is argued and the concept of progress is deconstructed. Finally, the importance of the idea of movement in the construction of time, change and progress concepts is pointed out; it is also explained how modernity imbued such notions with direction and goals, in the direction of an arrow, according to the prevailing interests, while modeling them in its own image and likeness. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that drags me but I am the river; it is a fire that devours me, but I am the fire. Jorge Luis Borges (1947) Psychology and Temporality On considering time, psychology seems to have approached it as if it were a notion or concept of universal validity defined a priori. It was important to know how individuals had acquired that notion during the evolution process. Such consideration implicitly presupposed that once the notion was assimilated, the acquired object responded to a previously established canon which was fixed and invariable. Even taking into account cultural and historical differences as well as every variation they may introduce, the notion still supposes the existence of time as an entity in some way separate and independent to some extent from the subject that acquires it. From a psychosocial perspective, even though considerations of time received some attention within the social sciences and especially, in the emerging discipline of social and collective psychology at the beginning of the century Halbwachs' works on the social frameworks of collective memory (1907; 1925) are a salient examplelater on, time was restricted to the role of a mere "intervening variable", or of the object or content of mediating cognitive processes. In the psychological literature of the 40s, 50s and 60s it is possible to find more often than not that psychological phenomena are treated as time independent phenomena. Thus, the historical nature of psychological