Is Clock Time the Boss of Me?
Part 2 on Barkley’s theory of self-control, which is also a libertarian theory of time
I’m working on a critique of the politics that shaped Barkley’s concept of executive function, and invite you to follow along as I explore and build my analysis. See Part One here, which questions his genetic ideas about self-control. This one is about time, mostly, but tangents include: the literary history of the Robinsonade, how libertarians ethically justify free markets, and why it’s prob not accurate to say we have ‘an internal clock’.
I made a couple podcast episodes analyzing the concept of timeblindness in 2022, and in true spiral fashion, I have realized that I probably, definitely should have read Barkley’s ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control back then, but you know, time is a flat circle.
No wait, actually — time is the central executive, at least according to Barkley:
“More specifically, it is the conjecturing of the future that arises out of reconstruction of the past and the goal-directed behaviors that are predicated on these activities.”1
In other words, being able to take our past experiences, think about them in the present, and project ourselves into the future is what enables us to make and achieve goals. If you can’t remember the past, that makes it really hard to extrapolate from your experiences to make goals toward the future.2
Immediately after this, Barkley goes on a tangent about free will, and the great irony that a person who is more in control of themselves is also more controlled by their environment, so they are ‘less free’ in the moment but ‘more free’ in the long-term — and that in a sense, you could say living-in-the-moment ADHDers are ‘more free’ because ‘time has lost its grip upon them.’ He writes:
“Self-regulation increases the effectiveness of control of the individual by the physical world, a world in which time is an inherent feature.”
Barkley is assuming two things here — that a perception of time as linear and regimented is part of the natural world, and that freedom means ‘an absolute reduction in the sources of control that affect the individual’s behavior.’ This is a very classic liberal way to define freedom — freedom from obstacles. (Barkley actually concludes that no one is really free, because everyone is constrained by time.)
If you, like me, have forgotten all your middle school American History lessons on Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes: classical liberalism was all about free markets, freedom of speech, and minimal government interference. That probably sounds familiar because since the 1980’s, we have been experiencing a mega-redux of classic liberalism in the form of neoliberalism — these 18th century ideas came back around in a much more global way at the turn of the 21st.
What I want to do here is pull some of Barkley’s political influences out of his footnotes and examine them in the light. I am not arguing that executive function is a social construct — I know what it’s like to have a working memory so bad it causes real problems in my life, I struggle to prioritize tasks and manage linear time, and I find it impossible to work a regular job because of these things.
In my work on ADHD, I aim to be a critical realist, ‘complicating-without-dismissing’ the diagnosis, to borrow from Merri Lisa Johnson.3 Executive dysfunction is real, and also, what counts as dysfunction has a lot to do with power, history, and political economy. Disability is both biological and relational.
Neoliberal economic policies force us all be self-sufficient little managers of our own lives, and this is the context in which Barkley created his theory of EF.4 I’m interested in trying to chart his intellectual lineage a bit, because it’s pretty clear to me that political ideas about what it means to be human slipped into his evolutionary theories about self-regulation.
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