Duree

Durée Definition

Durée is the stream of experience that constitutes our everyday lives — the continuous flow of conduct and cognition in social life. It is the unbroken series of events that we perform and experience, unthinkingly, as our social existence; its significance emerges precisely when it is broken, at the moments we stop to reflect on what is happening to us.

Giddens’s Usage

The concept plays an important part in Anthony Giddens’s social theory (1984). Viewed through the durée, social life is not “compounded of an aggregate or series of separate intentions, reasons and motives,” nor is it the product of fixed structure. It is instead a continuous process in which structure and agency both play a part: actors reproduce social structures in the very flow of their routine conduct, without needing to deliberate on each act. The durée thus underpins Giddens’s account of practical consciousness — the knowledge actors use to get through daily life without being able, or needing, to put it into words — and his broader theory of structuration.

The Longue Durée

Borrowing from the social historian Fernand Braudel, Giddens also distinguishes temporal scales of social life. Alongside the repetitive durée of day-to-day activity — the endlessly recurring routines of ordinary conduct — one may speak of the longue durée of institutions: the long-run historical time over which institutional forms persist, develop, and change. Individual lives unfold within both temporalities at once, the daily round reproducing, moment by moment, institutions whose existence stretches far beyond any single lifetime. The concept thereby links the micro-time of interaction to the macro-time of history, one of the central ambitions of structuration theory.