Social change does not follow a single instrumental motive because people inhabit multiple temporalities

Evidence

Thus theoretically, Schulze’s perspective on the reasons behind discursive and behavioral shifts in Islamic tradition is too instrumental. … When major social changes occur people are often unclear about precisely what kind of event it is they are witnessing and uncertain about the practice that would be appropriate or possible in response to it. And it is not easy to shed attitudes, sensibilities, and memories as though they were so many garments inappropriate to a singular historical movement. New vocabularies (“civilization,” “progress,” “history,” “agency,” “liberty,” and so on) are acquired and linked to older ones. Would-be reformers, as well as those who oppose them, imagine and inhabit multiple temporalities. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1064

Categorization

• XREF: This stakes out Asad’s methodological position against mono-causal instrumental readings of Islamic reform — the same anti-instrumentalist critique that runs through his secularism argument and complicates Cooper’s tidy culture/class readings. — connects to: War displaces people out of institutional calendrical time into survival time — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 558; Modernity’s own self-observation forces time structures to become sociology’s central object — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 123; The temporal structures of a society shape our sense of being in the world — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 65 (+3 more)