“Time is in your hands”: Body, sensitivity and technique in Córdoba city

In the contemporary social forms, time vector orientations have been radicalized: considering from time related to daily shores, to its discipline in factories, and finally a tendency to “leisure time” –also productive-, changes have taken place in its forms, mechanisms and the agents for its regulation. At the same time, new forms of circulation between bodies, goods and ideas, hence affectivities, has been established. The development of technique is its main mediation.

In this article we analyze some of the cited transformations in Cordoba City, Argentina. We take two cases into consideration: some urban decisions that changed the order of the classist relation body/place -‘flesh and stone’ in Sennett’s way (1997)- since the renovations for the Bicentennial celebration; and the consumptions of NTIC (New Technologies of Information and Communication) by the city’s subaltern classes. Our hypothesis focuses on establishing a link between the two phenomena as spaces of the reconfiguration of social sensitivity: from architecture to 'customized objects' (such as cell phone) are oriented to optical and tactile reorganization of experience in which the ‘time’ dimension becomes essential. The feeling -allowed by the cell phone- of having 'time in hands' appears as a fanciful possibility of 'independence' experiences for the subaltern classes whose mobility has been stopped in the space of the city, from some operatories that fix in a classist way the limits and forms of motion.