From Wasted Lives pg 104. Power is expressed chronopolitically through the capacity to electively withdraw from temporal regimes (or evade them all together) while influencing the way others are subject to them:
The drama of power hierarchy is daily restaged (with the secretaries and personal assistants, but ever more often the security guards, cast in the role of stage managers) in innumerable entrance lobbies and waiting rooms, where some (inferior) people are asked ‘to take a seat’ and kept waiting until some other (superior) people are ‘free to see them now’. The badge of privilege (arguably, one of the most potent stratifying factors) is the access to shortcuts, to the means of making the gratification instantaneous. Position in the hierarchy is measured by skill (or ineptitude) in reducing or cutting out completely the timespan separating a want from its fulfilment. Climbing the social hierarchy is measured by rises in the ability to have what one wants (whatever it may be) now –without delay.
Mark Carrigan 