Taming an Uncertain Future: Temporality, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Anticipatory Governance (Future Perfect: Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy, Politics and Cultural Studies) - Softcover

Stockdale, Liam P.D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783485019 ISBN 13: 9781783485017

Verlag: Rli, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Examines the intersection between temporality, futurity, and the political in contemporary society by exploring how the imperative to govern an uncertain future affects the way political power is organized and exercised.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Liam P. D. Stockdale is a Postdoctoral Fellow jointly appointed to the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition and the Institute for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching and Learning at McMaster University, Canada.

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Taming an Uncertain Future

Temporality, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Anticipatory Governance

By Liam P. D. Stockdale

Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

Copyright © 2016 Liam P. D. Stockdale
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-501-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
1 Introduction: Temporality, Futurity, and the Political, 
PART ONE, 
2 The Politics of Temporal Control, 
3 "To Kill Him Who Is Making Ready to Kill": The Anticipatory Governance of (In)security, 
PART TWO, 
4 Anticipatory Political Timescapes, 
5 Preemptive Security and the Politics of Exceptionalism, 
6 Precarious Subjectivities, Drone Warfare, and Autoimmunity, 
7 Conclusion: Anticipatory Governance, Liberal Democracy, and the Politics of the Future, 
Bibliography, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Temporality, Futurity, and the Political

In one of the more memorable passages from his Confessions, Saint Augustine muses perplexedly about the nature of time. "What, then, is time?" he asks, before proceeding to offer what is perhaps the pithiest articulation of the paradoxical relationship between human subjectivity and temporality found in the canon of Western philosophy: "if no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not" (1968, 40). This at once simple and profound observation captures well the point that while all human subjects are in some way fundamentally aware of time, it remains perpetually beyond our capacity to fully grasp, and thus eludes cogent conceptual articulation. Indeed, even a cursory parsing of the voluminous philosophical literature on the subject reveals that, on the one hand, time is recognized as central to the most basic questions of intellectual inquiry and human existence — "[it] is a fundamental aspect of all that occurs, a boundary condition on phenomena" (Turetzky 1998, xi). On the other hand, it also becomes apparent that there likely exist as many temporal understandings as there are philosophical orientations; as many theoretical articulations of time as there are theorists to articulate them (see, for instance, Adam 2004; Bender and Wellbery 1991; Elias 1992; Gale 1968; Grosz 1999; Koselleck 1985; McClure 2005; McCumber 2011; Turetzky 1998). Thus, although humanity is unlikely to develop a universally accepted understanding or conceptualization of time, the point remains that our relations to time form a fundamental part of the human condition. As Kimberly Hutchings, paraphrasing Kant, puts it, "Time ... conditions all our experience of ourselves" (2008, 3).

Yet our interactions with time are by no means wholly harmonious. Quite the contrary, as it is our status as beings in time that is a primary source of the difficulties and insecurities that in many ways define the human experience. As Bonnie Honig argues, "Time and man ... are agonistically related," in that the free activities of human subjects "interrupt would-be time sequences," while the vicissitudes of time in turn impinge upon human freedom (Honig 2008, 108). In the context of this agonic relationship between humanity and temporality, the desire to manage the latter by exerting some degree of influence over it emerges as a critical imperative in human affairs. Thus, what social theorist Barbara Adam refers to as a "quest for time control" can be detected to varying extents across all forms of social and cultural production — from philosophic, to religious, to political activity — such that the social world as we know it is constituted to a significant extent by concepts and practices that are intimately concerned with the management, governance, and even mastery of time itself (Adam 2004, 19–20, 124, 152; see also Luhmann 1982, 274). Time is thus fundamental to shaping the human experience, and the imperative to control, or at least govern, time can be understood as a crucial undercurrent in the ongoing constitution and operation of the social world.

These two insights might initially appear to relate primarily to broad philosophical questions about the character of existence and the nature of being; however, they also serve as a point of departure for this book — a study whose subject matter is not the phenomenological or eschatological but the political. Indeed, in the chapters that follow, I am interested in critically exploring how temporality more broadly — and the imperative to control the unfolding of the future in particular — is embedded in the epistemic foundations and practical operations of contemporary rationalities and mechanisms of societal governance.

A TEMPORAL LENS

The analytical importance of time has long been recognized across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, whose primary subject matter is the realm(s) of human affairs. Indeed, prominent works from the past several decades in anthropology (such as Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other [1983]); sociology and social theory (such as Barbara Adam's Time and Social Theory [1994]); history and historiography (such as Hayden White's Metahistory [1973]); and (continental) philosophy (such as Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative [1990]) — among many others — have all dealt explicitly with humanity's relationship to time in their respective disciplinary contexts. In the study of politics more specifically, theorists have long recognized the centrality of temporal questions to the elemental issues of societal governance with which they are concerned. Major works of political theory such as John Gunnell's Political Philosophy and Time (1987) and Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision (2004) directly address the relationship between time and how we think about the political. To be sure, interest in time has ebbed and flowed with the intellectual currents of disciplinary inquiry, but an underlying sensitivity to the importance of taking time seriously has nonetheless characterized the scholarly ethos of these areas of study whose subject matter is the world created by humanity.

Moreover, we are currently witnessing a resurgent interest in questions of time more broadly, and futurity more specifically, among scholars in these and related fields. Most often prompted by normative concerns relating to such issues as the perceived acceleration of life in late modernity (Hassan and Purser 2007; Rosa and Scheuerman 2009), the specter of ecological collapse wrought by the increasingly unsustainable lifestyles many now take for granted (Atwood 2008; Bastian 2012), or the emergence of other ostensibly new threats whose catastrophic potentialities seem to destabilize our traditional relationships to the future (Beck 2002, 2008), a wide variety of authors are beginning to train their gazes upon the temporalities of the social world by adopting what can be termed a "temporal lens" that "puts time ... front and centre" in their analyses thereof (Ancona et al. 2001, 645). This scholarly trend is particularly constructive for examinations of contemporary politics, in that some of the most significant political dynamics of the current moment stem from shifts in the broader political imagination which have brought explicitly temporal questions very much to the fore (see Agathangelou and Killian 2016; Lundborg 2012; Hutchings 2008). For instance, the growing influence of narratives proclaiming the onset of a "world risk society" — characterized by the erosion of our ability to control the unfolding of the future to an extent that affords us an adequate...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rli
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783485019
• ISBN 13: 9781783485017
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 198
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland