I'm just beginning Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity on a recommendation from a legal-philosopher friend. Judging by the introduction, I doubt that it's going to have an account of normativity that much resembles the one that we, insofar as we are critics, and therefore default New Historicists/post-structuralists/etc. assume. Time, we tend to think, is a great worker of normativity, transforming 'is' to 'ought' (pace Hume) across the span of years or centuries, like Euhemerus' princes becoming gods.
The law explicitly allows time this privilege. I'm thinking, in particular, of possession--a factual thing--and property--a normative one. In the Roman law system possession becomes property after a certain period by a process called usucaption, originally instituted as a solution to defective property titles. In the early Republic, one year was required for usucaption of land, two for usucaption of movable real property (slaves, animals, certain farm implements). The same amount of time was required for some types of rights to disappear by non-use (servitudes: as the right to channel water through a neighbor's field, and so forth), and when Justinian lengthened the time needed for usucaption--a practical necessity given imperial expansion--the amount of time required for servitudes to become invalid changed symmetrically. The designated period, then, was the period required for relations to land or goods to become normative, in one way or another.
What I am wondering, then, is whether you can think of any other systems in which time is explicitly considered to create normative relations? I suppose the other example that comes to mind is the philosophy of conservativism, but I rather suspect that's usually an epistemological claim, a claim, that is, that time sorts out which practices are best, not that it in itself legitimates them. Examples? Limit cases?
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This is a tough one, Julianne. If I follow you, then we begin with a possession, which is an 'object' owned by a given individual (or entity, I suppose). After a certain passage of time in which this ownership continues, a possession becomes property though what's called usucaption.
I'm not sure that I can think of any real examples of "other systems in which time is explicitly considered to create normative relations?" BUT, what if we re-read the contemporary conception of "normative relations" back into your post? I'm thinking here, of marriage (probably because I was at an abject bachelorette party this weekend). I need to be very reductive here, so please forgive me. In the most traditional rubric of marriage, when a woman becomes "wife," she becomes the "possession" of her husband. But in the age of pre-nups and divorce, I wonder if time has additional normative power. Does a wife ever become "property" in this account of marriage? Or does marriage presuppose the collapse of the "is" and the "ought" from the get-go?
Or what about parenthood, a 'system' in which time works the opposite way--we begin as our parents possessions and then at age 18, 21, etc. we relinquish their 'ownership.'
I know these examples are much cruder than perhaps you were thinking of, but they nonetheless seem to provoke some of the same questions you're asking.
n.b. There's a post on DuBois coming soon from me!
If I may be permitted to stay in a Roman law framework for just a moment, Sarah, the example of marriage is far from crude--in the early period of Roman law, under the Republic, it's entirely accurate: married women were subject to usucaption too (since people were, like land, real property for the Romans). Women who wanted to avoid this (in order to retain ownership of property held before marriage) would leave their husbands' houses three nights a year, interrupting the expanse of time required for usucaption.
As to more modern conceptions of marriage and parenthood, I do think they raise some interesting questions about how authority works differently (or not) in cases of guardianship versus ownership. The example of the age of majority is also an interesting example of law & time, I think, since it's a perfect instance of the law's arbitrary demarcation states.
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