Abstract
Recent studies dedicated to time in IR often begin with the claim that the field has long relegated time to a background position, and only recently begun taking the concept seriously, with many fruitful insights. In this article, I refuse this interpellation to ‘take time seriously’, instead proposing we read these claims as part of a discourse, that is, a set of regularities through which we organise and distribute time as an object of knowledge in IR, and through which we come to govern ourselves and others. First, by engaging works of the ‘temporal turn’, I describe four procedures through which the discourse of time in IR is organised: opposing conceptual fields, scaling objects, naturalising and repressing desires, and strategic inverting. Second, I argue this reading shows that the temporal turn might ultimately fall short of realising its proclaimed aims. However, and third, I propose we take this not as a failure, but as the effective working of the discourse. Fourth, in doing so, I suggest the discourse of time effectively ‘changes the subject’ in terms of both the problems posed and the subjectivities constituted in relation to them – in the field of IR, but possibly also more broadly.
Keywords
Introduction
In reading a work dedicated to the study of time, one can predict with almost dead certainty the appearance of Augustine’s famous aphorism on time.
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Noting such practice, Johannes Fabian begins his own book on the subject with a pun on repetition, reflexivity and how thinking (critically) about something – specifically, Time – often engenders taking part in it: When they approach the problem of Time, certain philosophers feel the need to fortify themselves with a ritual incantation. They quote Augustine: “what is time? If no one asks me about it, I know; if I want to explain it to the one who asks, I don’t know”. In fact, I have just joined that chorus.
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Similarly, in reading recent studies on time in IR, one can expect to encounter the claim that they fill a lack in a discipline which has long relegated the concept to a background position in theorising. Thus, the introduction of a recent edited volume dedicated to time in IR affirms not only that ‘IR as a whole exhibits something of a “temporal blindness” compared to other disciplines’, but also that ‘[i]n recent years, some IR scholars have turned their attention to time and the temporal dimension of international politics. Writers have shown how the adoption of what could be described as a ‘temporal lens’ can greater enhance our understanding of various human phenomena’. 3 Inspired by Fabian’s ironic note, in this article, I suggest we read this repetition as taking part in a ‘ritual incantation’ that provides its own kind of ‘fortifying effects’.
Taken at face value, these claims about absence and presence affirm that the lack of temporal reflections in IR is an epistemological problem that is beginning to be corrected by a change of perspective that, at last, takes time seriously. In this sense, Hom suggests that ‘it is unclear whether most IR scholars have thought about Time thoroughly enough to provide an adequate framework for understanding its role in international political phenomena or their study’. 4 More directly, Hutchings argues that critical IR theorists fail to achieve their aim of addressing plurality and difference in world politics because although they ‘do much to undermine the role of the idea of progress in accounts of international political time, they are less successful in undermining the notion that a singular temporal perspective has a privileged status within international politics’. 5 In what appears as a particularly normalising version – the insertion of ‘time’ within the well-established disciplinary history of successive ‘turns’ – a commentator claimed that ‘following the various critical, linguistic, sociological, and practical turns in IR scholarship, we now may be witnessing a temporal turn’. 6 Following these claims, the novelty and importance of temporal readings of IR signal a theoretical breakthrough responding to previous failures at theorising (the times of) international politics. 7
Notwithstanding the important insights emerging from this expanding literature, I want to explore what can be taken away from reading claims to temporal blindness, novelty, and improvement as something akin to Fabian’s ‘ritual incantations’. In doing so, I follow Foucault’s suggestion that, as discursive practices, rituals set limits to discourses by establishing: the qualification which must be possessed by individuals who […] occupy such-and-such a position and formulate such-and-such a type of statement, in the play of a dialogue, of interrogation or recitation […]; the gestures, behaviour, circumstances, and the whole set of signs which must accompany discourse; […] [and] the supposed or imposed efficacity of the words, their effect on those to whom they are addressed, and the limits of their constraining value.
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We could then read the ritual incantation of the temporal turn in IR as organising the ways of talking about time that must be engaged by those who endeavour to do so, the effects expected from such discourse in the researching subject, its expected audience, and the object itself: the ‘needed fortification’ for a knowing subject to engage in existing discussions on time.
Therefore, insofar as seriousness is confined to an established field of proper thinking, I start from the refusal to be interpellated by the imperative to ‘take time seriously’. By suspending the self-evidence of the object of knowledge – ‘time in IR’ – and of the historical and thematic continuity implied in a narrative of conceptual improvement, the object of this article is best described as the discourse of time: the regularities through which we talk about time as an object of knowledge, the ways we organise, control, and distribute such talk, and the ways we come to govern ourselves and others through them. 9 Hence, I ask what does the ritualised invocation of the novelty and importance of reflections about time to international politics do? Or, in the vocabulary that guides me through this article, what power effects are organised around a discourse in which the novelty and importance of time are central matters of serious debates – that is, organised within specific limits?
In this sense, I do not develop a theorisation on time. First, I do not offer an investigation into the hidden or unacknowledged assumptions about time underlying IR theories 10 or modern politics, 11 although this project moves towards understanding what is at stake in attempting to answer these questions. Second, I do not offer an alternative conceptualisation of time to advance theoretical work in the field, 12 although time, as a concept and object of knowledge, could be affected by the interrogation of the practices constituting the discourse of time. Third, I do not propose to advance the theorisation of time in IR by thinking through the relation between accepted assumptions and possible alternatives, 13 although, as I will argue below, this project moves towards a particular version of this endeavour. Finally, I do not turn to time in order to advance reflections in particular issue areas of international politics or IR theory, 14 although this project is born out of the intuition that the discursive regime and modes of government relating to the ‘temporal turn’ might extend beyond a particular debate in academia.
Instead, I will work in two steps to explore the conditions of existence of the discourse of time in IR. First, following Foucault’s injunction to describe the surface discursive relations making for a discourse, I will describe the domains of coexistence of concepts, objects, affects, and strategies that establish the conditions of existence of the discourse of time. Second, I propose to displace our seriousness from ‘time’ to ‘turning’, highlighting the importance of the ‘turn’ not as a meta-narrative of (disciplinary) knowledge, but as the mode of existence of a discursive economy. 15
In doing so, I will make four arguments. First, I argue that, read as a discourse, discussions on time in IR operate through fields of concepts, objects, desires, and strategies that are entangled with power effects. Second, I argue that the temporal turn might at least partially fall short of realising its proclaimed aims of being more sensitive to plurality, difference, contingency, and uncertainty. However, I suggest that such failure can also be read as the effective workings of discourse, and that rather than correcting the possible shortcomings or erasures of the temporal turn, we should enquire how it works towards ‘changing the subject’ in IR. More specifically, and third, I argue that it tends to erase questions of discursivity and insights from the debates on modern sovereignty not only through explicit critiques, but mostly through how it disposes concepts and objects. Fourth and finally, I suggest that we can read the discourse of time in IR as producing subjectivities that are in line not only with movements in the field of IR, but possibly also in contemporary politics.
Before getting to these arguments, I want to indicate two caveats. First, many of the arguments developed here involve what would promptly be regarded as substantial ‘temporal assumptions’. This much is inevitable: within a discourse of time, every utterance appears as a time-utterance or as heavy with temporal assumptions. For the moment, I propose to sidestep this question by openly deproblematising time. As I think about the way in which time has become a subject of meaningful discussion in the temporal turn in IR, I deliberately ignore my own so-called temporal assumptions. This might seem like a cop-out; it might also seem like a reasonable initial decision, as the circle of reflexivity would quickly become overwhelming – itself a discursive effect. Indeed, as I hope to show, some of the effects of this almost intuitive alarm are precisely what is at stake. Thus, if we can endure through such indifference, there might be conclusions in the end to which we could identify. Our retained capacity to do so positively, negatively, and/or (in)differently – and to do so variedly at different moments – might unburden us from excessive prevention.
Second, many of the themes that I highlight will feel familiar to those accustomed to Enlightenment debates on time, history, and historico-political transformation. This might lead to a sense of ahistoricity in both my method and argument. I believe we might calm our (shared) suspicions in considering that to understand the field of forces in which a discourse emerges is a step in the investigation of its history or genealogical descent. Said differently, that the questions raised here are familiar does not mean we must read them as variations upon a theme – often found in canonical texts. We might, instead, ponder seriously about the theme, and then trace its trajectories to those places – and/or different ones. That these analyses don’t impede each other might allow our familiarity to incite curiosity instead of suspicion, or to make space for a productive sense of estrangement.
Taking Time for Time
In one of his early formulations, Foucault distinguishes three types of relations. Primary or real relations are established independently of discourse, such as those between technological development, acceleration, and daily lives. Secondary or reflexive relations are established inside a particular discourse, such as what IR has to say of the relation between time and the State, or acceleration and sovereignty. In contrast to both, discursive relations make for a discourse by offering sets of objects, subjects, concepts and strategies through which it can exist; they are ‘the group of relations that discourse must establish to speak of this or that object’. 16 It is this type of relation that I endeavour to describe below in order to uncover the conditions of existence that are the discourse of time in IR.
The analysis of discursive relations is of the order of the pure description of ‘fields of coexistence’: the relations of proximity, distance, contact, and ignorance that make domains of objects, sets of possible positions for subjects, dispersed conceptual fields, and diverse repeatable strategies. 17 In other words, we are to stay at the surface of a discourse, to describe the relations that effectively establish in it, instead of looking for relations beneath or beyond discourse: ‘[o]ne is led therefore to the project of a pure description of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the unities that form within it’. 18
Furthermore, to investigate discursive relations calls for a displacement of the question of knowledge from the domain of truth, meaning, and legitimacy to that of conditions of existence, power effects, and modes of government. 19 More specifically, as we describe the surface relations of discourses, we ask not about the legitimacy of those relations – the epistemological question, ‘what false idea has knowledge gotten of itself’, and the correlate political question ‘to what domination is it therefore linked?’ 20 – but about their effectivity – ‘what power relations they establish and support in the way they exist?’ In other words, we elucidate the regularities through which certain forms of knowledge become possible in relation to specific practices of power, and through which certain practices of power become legitimate in relation to specific fields of knowledge. We henceforth move from the question of the legitimacy of theoretical and political projects deriving from appropriate knowledge towards that of the conditions under which certain forms of knowing and knowledge claims become acceptable, in relation to which practices of power, and to which constituencies. In sum, we ask the question of discourse and of ‘how men govern (themselves and others) by […] the establishment of [discursive] domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent’. 21
To reconstruct the discourse of time in IR, I will refer to those interventions that have become references in the ‘temporal turn’, being regularly interpellated. The approaches and problems they undertake are different enough that we would find ourselves at pains to unite them in terms of a specific intellectual heritage, conceptual framework, object of analysis, set of metaphors, or methodology. 22 In this sense, they form a good entry point to identify the set of relations that might allow us to speak of a single discursive formation. Although I believe much of what I’ll say relates to adjacent topics – such as critical historiographies and practice-centred or process-oriented analyses – I leave them aside for this analysis. Indeed, the proliferation of claims around time specifically is the starting point of this article. That such unity might end up dissolving in regimes of knowledge-power that cut across themes, disciplines, and institutions is all the more reason to start there.
I will argue that four interconnected procedures make for the discourse of time in IR. First, the formation of a conceptual field through the constitution of an analytical tradition of the modern/Western conception of time and the opposition of this tradition to an alternative conceptualisation of time that the discourse constructs as better. Second, the articulation of the field of objects correlate to the politics of time – and, more specifically, the better conceptualisation of time being argued for – through scalar metaphors on levels and complexity. Third, the naturalisation of a desire for the tradition of time and of the need to overcome or repress this desire in order to achieve better knowledge and politics. Fourth, the construction of inversion – or turning away and towards something – as the central strategic move in the discourse. I present each of these procedures in the four subsections below, simultaneously suggesting how they build on each other and establish conditions of existence.
Traditional Time and An-other Time
Despite the variations in the ways in which the Western tradition is depicted in the ‘temporal turn’ in IR, and despite each author’s different influences and points of entry, a more or less stabilised set of concepts can be traced in association to it.
Quite commonly, this tradition is associated with so-called ‘linear time’. This conceptualisation may be the most recurrent geometrical metaphor for time – alongside what sometimes appears as its opposite, cyclical or circular time 23 – and has become central to many works. One exemplary case within the ‘temporal turn’ is Edkins’ work, where linear time refers to the conception of time through which the nation-state formulates its own historical continuity, suiting ‘a particular form of power – sovereign power, the power of the modern nation-state’. 24 Linear time is necessary to ‘close things down […] [and] remember through linear narratives of nationhood’, 25 to ‘any view of history as a progression’ and thus to ‘any concept of the nation’ as ‘a sovereign body that exists in parallel with and alongside other nations’. 26 Likewise, Shapiro speaks of ‘the linear time of the calendars of the West’ consolidated over the 17th century and fully expressed in Hegel’s philosophy of history. 27 Thus, it not only makes for national time, but also for a historical process understood – under the hedge of unity – as the necessary self-reconciliation of Reason. 28
These conceptualisations of ‘linear time’ in relation to the nation and World History articulate a broader set of concepts and practices. For Edkins, ‘linear time’ is variably associated with closure, forgetting, progress, clear distinctions, the separation of past, present, and future, and the objectification of persons. For Shapiro, the reproduction of gender-roles and generational dynamics within the family, 29 the erasure of urban life and plurality, 30 the temporal hierarchisation of races, the mechanical rhythm of capital and labour, and the security practices of profiling. 31 For Stephens, the ‘idea of time as progressive, linear, and unified’ is also the time of modern citizenship; 32 for McIntosh, such ‘common representation of time as linear, neutral, and unitary’ is a ‘classical view’ that ‘encourages a view of reality that strives for laws, theories, and hypotheses that apply across time and are generalizable’; 33 and for Hom and Steele, both ‘linear-progressive time’ and ‘cyclical time’ endeavour to close possibilities by invoking the certainties and closed temporality of transhistorical universal solutions, of the directionality and directability of history and of fixed identities. 34
Moving away from geometrical metaphors, Hutchings and Hom also affirm a temporal tradition. For Hutchings, it is the tradition of Western political thought which ranges from Machiavelli to contemporary theories of world politics, passing through the Enlightenment philosophies of history such as expressed in historicism. 35 Such tradition assumes that (i) politics is about controlling and creating new time, (ii) the temporal experience of Western modernity is the universal reference for all political times, and (iii) theorists must be timely to direct the present correctly. 36 In sum, it assumes time to be unified, universal, and singular. Something similar appears in Hom’s reference to a ‘venerable tradition’ going back to Near Eastern Antiquity and constituting time as ‘a malevolent force’, ‘symbol of wreck and ruin’, the passage of which ‘brings dissolution, discord, death, and other disturbing experiences to human existence’ and that can only be evaded through passing escapes towards eternity, such as those that have come to be expressed in claims to time as ‘a neutral dimension’, an ‘abstract, unified, and unthreatening feature of existence’. 37 The intermeshing of these two descriptions of time in the tradition leads academic and political projects to read the taming of the flow of time as a condition of their viability. Thus, Hom affirms a millennia-old tradition that unites thousands of years of history within a framework in which the taming of time is the main form of human existence.
Bringing these different formulations together, a field of concepts begins to emerge around the so-called Western/modern tradition of political time: linearity, unity, continuity, universality, determinacy, eternity, closure, control, taming, timeliness, reconciliation, generalised laws, clear-cut distinctions, the nation-state, sovereign state/power, and progressive history. While it is arguable that none of these metaphors in themselves do much to advance a clear conceptualisation of political time, 38 it is noteworthy that they are disposed as a field of proximate or associated concepts relating to ‘tradition’ in the discourse of time.
In doing so, it constitutes what Schmidt has called an ‘analytical tradition’, that is, an ‘intellectual construction in which a scholar may stipulate certain ideas, themes, genres, or texts as functionally similar […] a retrospectively created construct determined by present criteria and concerns’. 39 To Schmidt, the problem with these traditions is that (i) they tend to substitute epic renditions for the analysis of the practices making for a particular present, and (ii) these epic renditions tend to be retrospective constructs elicited for legitimating purposes that remain unthematised. 40 Hence, with Schmidt, we might wonder about the present that is constructed and legitimised through this analytical tradition, and the specific discursive practices through which it comes to be.
In the present discourse, this tradition of time is opposed to a different – and considered better – conceptualisation of time that articulates its own more or less stabilised set of concepts. Hutchings calls this alternative perspective ‘heterotemporality’: time as both plural and untimely. Neither a singular time – imperial or subaltern – nor multiple disconnected times, heterotemporality speaks to the disjunction that comes from multiple temporalities crossing each other without a common timeline or present to share as a framework. 41 Following her oft-used formulations, heterotemporality is about thinking world political time ‘in plural rather than unitary terms’, emphasising ‘a logic of plurality and difference’ instead of ‘subsuming plurality under the logic of an overarching unity’. 42 To Hom, this heterotemporality is itself the expression of the empirical reality of international politics, since ‘the more discordant aspects of Time’s flow such as dissolution, imperfection, and discomfiting surprise […] are just what international politics is composed of and what sets it apart from other domains of inquiry’. 43 Such distinctiveness evokes the need for more flexible timing standards than the ones adequate to so-called simpler domains. Furthermore, ‘since IR must reckon ruin, we […] must begin by developing timing standards scrubbed clean of the smell and taint of eternity’. 44 Thus, a more sanitised approach to international politics would call for ‘much more supple themes that not only accommodate but privilege the idiographic, the inconsistent, and the ephemeral aspects of international life.’ 45
These formulations are consistent with those of a previous collaborative work, in which Hom and Steele counterpose ‘linear time’ to ‘open time’: a temporality that invites prudence and scepticism by remaining unfounded and attuned to contingency and the flow of becoming. 46 Similarly, for Edkins, linear time is opposed to ‘trauma time’, the time that marks the traumatic in the social order or, better said, that marks the social order as traumatic and fragmentary: ‘trauma time is of the order of the recognition and surrounding of the trauma at the heart of any social or symbolic order’, 47 thus exposing ‘the lack that underpins a sovereign political symbolic order and reveal[ing] the radical relationality of life’. 48 It is the time of not-forgetting, 49 of the recognition of the other as missing, of the agony of not knowing, 50 of photography. 51 Similarly, Shapiro first calls for acknowledging the existence of other times alongside linear time – such as capital time, family time, women’s time, non-Western times. 52 Later, he notes how alternative temporalities are not about a given ‘reality’, nor the effect of a better ethico-political disposition of the scholar, but what emerges through specific encounters that challenges dominant practices of temporal and subjective management. 53 By staging these encounters, he highlights non-presence and disjuncture, 54 contingency, lived temporality, and the multiplicity of the city and its inhabitants 55 , the historicity, contingency, and irreducibility of the event. 56
I want to point to two dimensions of the constructions beginning to emerge in this overview. First, the invocation of another temporality often avoids an easy opposition: Hutchings’ heterotemporality is not simply ‘multiple temporalities’, Edkins ‘trauma time’ is not only the opposite pole of a dichotomy, and Shapiro’s alternative temporalities are not simply there to be identified. In other words, the set of concepts being articulated attempts to place this ‘other time’ in an oblique relation to the tradition of time. Second, this nonetheless involves establishing a set of concepts that seems to invoke some form of opposition with those associated with tradition: plurality, multiplicity, relationality, fragmentary, discontinuity, interruption, contingency, flexibility, ephemerality, openness, untimeliness, disjuncture, ideography, inconsistency, unexpectedness. 57
Scaling Objects: Levels and Complexity
The above conceptual field also relates to the field of objects associated with international politics. Hutchings reminds us that debates about the meaning of the ‘world’ reflect differences in understandings of ‘politics’ – explicating political and disciplinary tensions between International Relations, Political Theory, and the Sociology of Globalisation. 58 As conceptions of time change in this discourse, so do understandings of ‘the world’ and, therefore, at least potentially, of politics.
As part of the project of thinking heterotemporality, Hutchings establishes her own use of ‘the world’ as referring to ‘political developments that are not confined to any particular state or region in their origins and effects’, that is, that pertains to ‘the world as a whole’. 59 I read Hutchings to mean that to embrace heterotemporality leads us to reconfigure politics beyond the limits of the state as a category of intelligibility: to understand politics heterotemporally is also to understand politics as overflowing territorial containers. In this sense, ‘the world’ changes from a set of confined territories as the point of reference for politics to an apparently more complex and certainly more encompassing ‘wholeness’. In a similar vein, Hom claims that international politics includes ‘all the totality of change continua that might possibly require integration and coordination’. 60 Hence, it is ‘the realm in which paeans to academic progress lose their seductive harmony, where scientistic epics are exposed as tall tales, and where the glib elegance, dear stability, and eternalist certitude of more domesticated pursuits are baptised in the river of Time’. 61 As rigid timing standards lose their hold, so do more limited understandings of international politics as involving the coordination of change continua only in terms of given territorial units. The opening to the river of Time is also the opening to all possible irruption of the will to integrate and coordinate and, therefore, to a much more encompassing understanding of (international) politics.
Edkins’ association of trauma time with radical relationality and the gap in the symbolic order leads to subjects and objects that remain ontologically missing and to a world that is never fully present. 62 In such a world, international politics is not about clear delimitations – we may assume, among others, of territories and sovereign authority – but favours the ‘acknowledgement of the inevitable openness of possibilities, and the impossibility, and risks, of attempts at closure […] the recognition of radical relationality and the inevitability, and indeed the necessity, of vulnerability’. 63 According to Edkins, this is not a matter of achieving a new condition, but of grasping a politics ‘that we already have’ by looking at the right places and times: a politics that operates ‘locally, on a small scale, face-to-face’, that ‘it is in everyday life’, and that we can look for it ‘in the realm of the everyday, in the lives of the oppressed, the missing, the formerly disappeared, the survivors of betrayals… in anything and everything that escapes the attention or capture of sovereign power’. 64 Faced with the difficult problem of re-introducing into politics a world that must remain ontologically missing, Edkins turns to scalar metaphors that can only tenuously respond to her dilemma, as it remains unclear how the local and the everyday escape sovereignty or recognise radical relationality. In a related move, Shapiro’s association of the tradition of time with Hegel’s philosophy of history accompanies an association of alternative temporalities with a different scale of analysis – most notably, though not only, the global city, the city-dweller, and the complex connections established in those sites. 65 A similar move from the national delimitation of citizenship towards the city as a site of alternative political engagement appears in Stephens. 66
On the one hand, heterotemporality and flexible timing standards invoke a field of objects that refuses the limitation of progressive history, the nation-state, and sovereign politics, instead embracing the ‘wholeness’ of world processes. It is nonetheless striking that these movements say very little about changes in politics itself. In Hutchings, ‘political processes’ are taken as a given, despite the change of scales in which they take place, and Hom’s main preoccupation seems to be with the scale in which the will to integrate and coordinate change continua operate. On the other hand, trauma time and disjunctive time lay claims to a world of incompleteness and lack, not of excesses that, while hard to confine, remains known. Even in those cases, however, questions about the changing nature of politics can be kept out of sight through scalar metaphors moving from national and sovereign limits towards local, face-to-face, everyday relations such as those taking place in global cities. Thus, in each case, changes in the scale of politics work to ease questions and tensions about conceptions of politics.
Of course, the State and sovereignty do not disappear as objects of knowledge in the discourse of time; they are, however, repositioned. The State and the system of States appear as specific scales – both a specific level and a set degree of complexity – that can be opposed to other scalar possibilities of objects, such as the whole world and the local, both of higher complexity. Likewise, sovereignty becomes a form of power and a set of delimitations mostly associated with a particular level and simplicity of form. Finally, the scales of the State and international politics are set to be overcome in favour of more complex, wider and/or local processes for either better ethico-political purposes or epistemological and empirical adequacy.
Beware: Time Attachments
A further procedure constitutive of the discursive field of time relates the conceptual field above to a set of affects. In other words, what is at stake in the construction of the terms of debates is not only a matter of how we think, but also of how we want to think, how we desire to be, and how we are tempted into being political. To be subject to the discourse of time is also to take part in a specific economy of affects and desires.
This is explicit in Hutchings argument that the problems of the traditional assumptions of world political time seen above are inseparable from an attachment to unity, a temptation for timeliness and prophetisation, and the hubris of intellectualism: In the first place, [temporal assumptions of theories of world politics] are inadequate because […] they are profoundly blinkered by their attachment to the idea that we can use western modernity as the key to making sense of the past, present and future of the world as such. In the second place, they are unsatisfactory because they put the theorist in the position of time-traveler and prophet, thus succumbing to an old temptation about the nature of political time within western political thought. This is the temptation of thinking that politics is conditioned by the possibility of making or controlling time.
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In other words, singular and timely world political time goes beyond a mode of thinking that we traditionally assume; it is also something that we want and desire, that tempts us and to which we are attached. We find the same claim in Hom, to whom ‘the problem of Time has long engendered a strong desire for the eternal’. 68 And if we return to the Fuentes’s story often quoted by Shapiro, we are told that ‘the West has been in love with its successive, linear, and positivistic notion of time’: 69 nothing short of love is at stake.
Though the same postulates appear in Edkins’ work, her reading posits not one but two simultaneous and contradictory desires. On the one hand, in the face of trauma, such as the horrors of the Nazi camps, ‘there is a temptation to retreat into the comfort of easy solutions to the question of memory […] [and to] represent what happened in a linear narrative’. 70 On the other hand, some memorials, like the Cenotaph and the Vietnam Wall, ‘respond to some desire other than the need to celebrate and re-narrate national glory in the aftermath of trauma’ 71 as they endeavour to mark trauma. Despite being attentive to contending desires, Edkins’ position towards them is made explicit in the call to ‘find a way of remaining faithful to [trauma’s] different temporality’. 72 In other words, although she exposes two desires, it is to one of them that we must respond if one’s faith is to remain unshaken, trauma is to be marked, and subversion is to be achieved or sustained.
We might find similar implications in other constructions of the conceptual field of the discourse of time in IR. For instance, although Shapiro himself does not always foreground love and impulse in Fuentes’ text, he does point out that his own approach is devoted to ‘resist the closural impulses in […] texts (e.g. official histories) that invent a singular, prepolitical culture as the legitimating condition of state boundaries’. 73 To resist an impulse towards closure appears as a way to resist the grasp of linear time. In a similar vein, Hom argues that ‘all projects – critical or otherwise – need to temper the desire for stable factors, durable structures, accurate predictions, or any sort of fixed outcomes’, 74 all of which he associates with non-flexible timing standards. As if to ascertain this, an affective economy is associated to these concepts: ‘[i]f IR scholars necessarily reckon a ruinous realm, as the historical record and their own remarks suggest, then the “smell” of Time is the essence of intellectual courage, not a “taint” on their academic honor’: flexible timing standards are either ‘the essence of intellectual courage’ or ‘a taint on academic honor’. 75 We might sense a blackmail imposing itself: face the smell of Time, or be a coward; keep your academic honour, or taint it (possibly, with eternity). 76 We might wonder about the dangers lying ahead that such heavy stakes must be hung over our heads. But we might also wonder about the strength of the posited desire for stability that would call for such an intransigent voice to keep us on the right path, to keep us faithful.
Bringing these claims together, we see a particular set of attachments, temptation, desire, impulse, love, or affection appearing as part of this discourse. More specifically, we can identify a triple movement of acknowledgement, naturalisation, and call for repression. By acknowledgement and naturalisation, I mean that a set of attachments to and temptations for tradition is identified as a given disposition of subjects in this discourse. Furthermore, its simple postulation seems to imply that it is a natural result of the long-standing existence of the analytical tradition – a model of subject-power relation that all too commonly resort to images of the reproduction of modes of thinking and their imposition upon subjects. It therefore follows that such (inherited, imposed) desire must somehow be resisted, tempered, tamed, or controlled for a better conceptualisation of time – and, we could add, a better international politics – to emerge.
Strategies of (Redemptive) Inversion
The available strategies for those engaging in the discourse of time in IR seem to be prefigured by the above discursive procedures. Specifically, as the domain of concepts is increasingly split and associated with different constitutions of the fields of objects and problems, movements from one side to the other – or the perhaps subtler balance between the poles – emerge as dominant strategies.
In this sense, accompanying the trajectory of the discipline narrated in the ‘temporal turn’ in terms of a conceptual improvement from temporal blindness to taking time seriously, the discourse predominantly authorises inversions moving (and inviting movement) away from tradition and towards heterotemporality, flexible standards, trauma time, disjunction; away from the sovereign power of the nation-state and towards other scales – worldly or local – of higher complexity; away from a desire for tradition, eternity, and linearity and towards the more adequate unwavering faith on plural, fragmented, contingent, and open times.
The opposite inversion – from the ‘temporal turn’ towards a recovery of traditional concepts of time – is substantially underplayed. Often, it appears as an unintentional effect of residues from the tradition of time that remain despite the turn – residues that are anticipated (we might say, preempted) in the economy of desires accompanying this discourse. Indeed, though the dominant strategy is an inversion away from traditional time and towards other times, the contrary inversion remains part of the discourse as an always present possibility conditioning our determination. Here, we might expect demands for more seriousness about time and more righteousness in our control of our temptations. Nonetheless, the discourse is set up in ways that allow for a return towards the set of concepts and objects making for the tradition of time 77 (I come back to what I take to be the more provocative movements in this direction in the next section).
In reading Shapiro’s recent work, Klausen speaks of a ‘contrast between two kinds of texts or representational effects, the aesthetic and critical as against the unreflective and therefore anesthetic’. 78 This opposition, through which aesthetic encounters are supposed to correct our unreflexive modes of being, constitutes what he calls an ‘aesthetic of redemption’: thinking redeems us from the violence of the ordinary. 79 This redemptive move seems to also guide Shapiro’s use of thinking encounters to bring about disjunctive and contingent temporalities against what he calls Hegelian linear time. Speaking more broadly, I believe we can read the strategies available to those taking part in struggles within and through this discursive formation in similar terms. In this sense, substantial authority – to the point of a ‘redemption from the violence of the ordinary’ – accrues from strategies of inversion in this discourse, also leading subjects to look for redemption by turning, accompanying the discursive movement – even if this might require a fair share of repression. 80
In sum, two (hierarchically valued) strategies are available within this discursive formation: either one turns from tradition to alternative temporalities, or one returns towards tradition despite calls for turning. This discursive configuration creates what Foucault called the speaker’s benefit: the kind of authority that comes to those who are positioned as speaking truth to power.
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In the riven field of the discourse of time, inversions accrue authority. Such speaker’s benefit transpires in the surprising subject-position who is invoked to argue for the dominant inversions of the temporal turn: World politics is a shifting and unpredictable conjunction of times, and so is the theorist seeking to render the times of world politics intelligible. Thinking the present without the authority of kairos to ground and orient judgement [heterotemporality] is profoundly destabilising for those of us used to taking for granted the kind of temporal meta-narratives discussed in this book. But this destabilising is equally the freeing up of our sociological and political imaginations’.
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[T]he only way to truly reconcile the problem of Time is to dissolve it by engaging its purportedly troubling features and standardising them as minimally as possible. This would further suggest that the way out of the problem of Time is a delicate balancing act that avoids laments but also refuses transcendent tropes.
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[There is] a struggle over whether to tell the story as part of a linear narrative or whether to mark the trauma without compromise. […] [S]ome people want to try to hold on to the openness that trauma produces. They do not want to forget, or to express the trauma in standard narratives that entail a form of forgetting. They see trauma as something that unsettles authority, and that should make settled stories impossible in the future.
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We might note the teleology of understanding through which destabilising is equated with freedom of imagination, flexible timing standards become the only way to dissolve the problem of Time, and the negation of linear time is enlisted in a politics of continuity that reduces narrativity to participation in sovereign power and the Nation-State and establishes ‘marking’ as the sole subversive strategy towards constituting a better future of unsettled authority. 85 We might also ponder about the temporal status of ontological claims about the nature of ‘world politics’ and ‘the theorist’. Finally, in both cases, it would seem the intervention against tradition appears as a timely contribution to the debate in IR. After all, no theoretical intervention can escape a dimension of timeliness, if only because it produces a present in which its relevance is affirmed.
These elements of temporal unity and timeliness seem at odds with the proclaimed calls for plurality, heterogeneity, contingency, and disjunction that accompany the temporal turn in IR. Indeed, they are the kind of dispositions against which so many of these aims have been formulated, and they tend to be associated with the kind of political limits that were intended to be overcome by scaling beyond (and beneath) them. Nonetheless, they seem to constitute an inseparable part of the conditions of existence of the temporal turn, as splits lead to inversion, and inversions to fixed authority. We might note the strange mixture that comes from the appeal to an improvement of the temporal concepts of IR theory away from the temporal assumptions that are the condition of that very improvement: a paradoxical improvement away from improvement, we might say. To call this a ‘paradox’ is not to invalidate the important insights that have already been articulated in this literature, nor the ones that will continue to be. However, it might invite us to wonder whether, given these conditions of existence and despite its insights, the temporal turn can really succeed in realising its proclaimed aims – or if it will have to do so on the condition of keeping the unity, homogeneity, and determinacy embedded in its discourse well away from view, at most as unintentional (though tempting) residues of tradition.
To point to this structured realm of thought and to the existence of such paradox at its heart might close the subject. If we can indeed read in the temporal turn in IR a discourse of time that unveils the self-defeating nature of its proclaimed aims, we might feel authorised to give up on it – much of our training has come to invite just such chastising of paradoxes. However, we have also come to know that to point to a structured realm of thought and to the existence of paradoxes falls short of a full-fledged immanent reading of discourse and, therefore, of the full potential of critique as a way of narrating one’s wound through another’s. More likely, paradoxes indicate a point of departure, since they are common ways through which discourses operate and sustain their workings, and through which we are sustained through discourses. Hence, we might stop to ponder what the paradox mentioned above, and the fields of concepts, objects, and desires that make for it, effectively affirm – an avenue I explore in the next section.
Changing the Subject: Taking the ‘Turn’ Seriously
In speaking of the temporal turn taking place in contemporary art, Christine Ross argues that turning is ‘a generative moment in which a new horizon emerges in the process – leaving behind the practice that was its originating point […]. In a “turn,” we shift away from something or towards or around something, and it is we who are in movement, rather than it’. 86 This position mobilises ‘turning’ to indicate the movement of a preexisting (collective) subject away, towards, or around a preexisting ‘something’. Hence, the knowing subjects, their objects, and their practices effectively constitute the fixed point from the perspective of which the movement of the turn can be identified and valued. Read in terms of the simultaneous emergence of what must be kept in place and what can move, ‘turning’ appears as generative not only of new horizons, but also of fixed fields. 87 It is by understanding the double edge of this generative moment that we can take ‘turning’ seriously as a discursive practice. In this sense, I propose that the paradox of redemptive inversions should be taken seriously not only – or even mainly – as an indication that the temporal turn falls short of its proclaimed aims, but as a suggestion that there is more at stake in this turn than such aims. Indeed, endeavouring to purge ourselves of the traces of tradition, we might deepen the operation of the temporal turn hoping that, in our next turn, we finally find ourselves on a different road. As the paradox continues to call for more, better, and serious ‘turning’ to correct its ‘unintentional’ returns, we might benefit from asking not what it fails to do, but what it quite effectively succeeds in doing.
I suggest that the temporal turn in IR effectively changes the subject. And it does so in the double (and inseparable) senses of changing what is being talked about – what we might call the terms of the problems being addressed and, more broadly, the grounds affirmed by such problematisation – and the subjectivities to which those problems are addressed and that address them in response – in the field of IR, but maybe not only. To say this at the end of an article is to say too much, too late. Still, I would like to propose two avenues for unravelling this suggestion.
First, as the wheels of the discourse of time turn, it effectively invokes the fields of concepts, objects, and problems that coexist in it. Divided as it is in opposite fields, we might expect the division to entrench. As this takes place, we might sense – and identify in – the prohibition to resort with too much verve to those concepts that have become associated with the tradition of time and to indulge in the desires with which they tempt us – even if we know that repressed desires tend to return as symptoms and acting out. In doing so, we are not so much turning from one concept to the other, but importantly, we are entrenching a mutually exclusive distinction that might be costly to sustain. We might also sense – and identify in – the invitation to change scales towards the higher complexities of face-to-face interaction in everyday life and of the plurality of disjunctive processes that cannot be confined to the state and the system of States. In doing so, the question is not that we turn from one scale to the other, but that this turning generates a field of scalar and scaled objects and political possibilities. It is not difficult to see different trends in the field of IR calling for similar things – the focus on critical historiographies, on specific understandings of practice, on processes, on connections as opposed to limits, or on everyday life as the sum of the above; i.e. on what was recently called ‘micro-moves’ in IR. 88 This much might begin dissolving the initial boundaries of this analysis in the temporal turn towards connecting this discourse of time to broader processes in the field. There are, of course, too many important and pressing issues at stake to make little of these foci, but for that very reason, we might also take time to ask further questions.
Indeed, relating these two avenues, I must note that contributions to the theorisation of time in modern political discourse such as that by R.B.J. Walker and by Jens Bartelson’s read IR theory not as a set of more or less useful tools to understand processes taking place under the name of ‘international politics’, but as an expression of the limits and conditions of the modern political discourse. In turn, these limits are articulated as the ambiguous entanglements of both time and space, time and history, history and structure, determinacy and contingency, simplicity and complexity, the international and the world, the social and the political. For instance, Walker argues that unless we grasp modern politics as upholding modern subjectivities by articulating order and violence ambiguously in space (a territorial order authorising histories and violence) and in time (a break in time authorising borders and violence), we risk reproducing the limits of modern politics as we try to escape them. 89 Likewise, Bartelson argues that the ‘historicization of all beings’ in the modern episteme configures modern sovereignty in an international order that articulates the possibility and the limits of both expansion and transcendence. 90 Starting from such tensions, these works invite scepticism towards attempts – critical or otherwise – to sever these connections through the privileging of one pole over the other. This also means being sceptical of the way in which the inversion from a tradition of time towards a superior alternative accompanies the inversion from the problem of sovereignty to a politics of the ‘world’ or ‘small scale, local’ politics, 91 as well as of the effective role of the practice of temporalisation as a ‘way out’ of statism 92 and sovereignty. 93 That these discussions are often left out of the so-called temporal turn in IR is symptomatic – however we want to valuate those symptoms.
We might respond to these displacements by calling for the recovery of (perhaps more complex) discussions whose forgetting has resulted in theoretical and political deficiencies. 94 However, I would expect us to be unwilling to discard the valuable insights brought together in the ‘temporal turn’. Indeed, if both Walker and Bartelson can be read as inviting reflections on how calls for more contingency can operate as part of mechanisms of reification and reproduction of modern sovereignty, Hutchings can be read as responding that such claims to ‘modern sovereignty’ remain trapped within a singular and unified timeline precisely because they lack a sustained reflection on time – indeed making them not contingent enough. 95 This point is further strengthened by the mutual criticism between Walker and Bartelson on the undue freezing of time and history in each other’s work. 96 In bringing these two moments into conversation – the time-space of modern sovereignty and the temporal turn in IR – we might prefer to follow Lundborg’s provocative suggestion that ‘both of these kinds of engagements with time must be taken seriously and that, perhaps, it is the relationship between them that raises the most challenging questions’. 97
As I have pointed out, however, I am not interested in taking time seriously – much less two different types of engagements with it. Nonetheless, if Lundborg is right about the need to pay close attention to this relation – and I believe he is – then a complete analysis of the discourse of time in IR needs to account for the non-space in which these positions meet. In other words, if one truth effect of the discourse of time in IR is to erase themes and insights I identify in the literature on modern sovereignty, I would be less tempted to return to this literature or to balance it out with complex temporalities then to understand the knowledge and power effects established through their encounter. In this sense, I would venture that a recovery of more nuanced interpretations of Western or modern time results not in discourses of time, in the plural, but in a more complex version of the discourse of time presented in this article.
Second, I believe that turning not only changes the ways in which problems are posed to IR, but also that it affects the subject being addressed by these problems. A valuable point of entry to this suggestion comes from Butler’s reading of ‘turning’ in terms of foreclosure and melancholia. To Butler, subjectivation takes place through foreclosure, that is, a prohibition that works not as a repressive force on existing objects and desires, but as a generative force that constitutes domains of existence by barring others from becoming possible, effectively turning desire on it/self. 98 Foreclosure, concedes the possibility it denies, establishing the ‘I’ as predicated upon that foreclosure, grounded in and by that firmly imagined possibility. 99 This turning of desire, institutes a space of interiority as the locus of self-vigilance and self-beratement – what we often call reflexivity. To Butler, this emergence of the subject under foreclosure leads to melancholia: the preservation of a loss through ego identification that leads to the simultaneous incapacity to grief, incorporation of loss, and displacement of aggression. Taking foreclosure not as an individual disposition, but as something enforced through socially accepted modes of regulation – the power-knowledge nexus I have been referring to as discourse – we might read melancholia as a mode of existence of discourses. 100
We might thus read the discourse of time in IR as existing through the foreclosure of the tradition of time. 101 This interpretation points to the formation of subjects through circuits of self-examination for traces of the tradition of time (that are inscribed through their disavowal) and for desires for such tradition (that are reproduced through their repression). In this sense, I propose that the discourse of time is productive of subjects that are caught in circuits of self-examination and self-beratement that produce and reproduce the discourse in its melancholic forms. Strategies of inversion and their paradoxes, naturalised desires and calls for repression, dualistic concepts and objects: these are all products of foreclosure as a mode of existence of discourse and, therefore, elements of melancholic circuits of power. We might wonder about the contemporary resonances of a spreading of melancholia in a discourse that calls for vigilance against forms of unity, closure, fixity, universality, and eternity (to name a few) in favour of the positive description of flexibility, plurality, openness, and contingency (again, to name a few), all the while retaining a deep identification with the former and reliving it through its prohibition.
Concluding Remarks
While the temporal turn has been effective in revealing the power effects of progressive and singular timelines, rigid timing standards, and modern time in the field of IR and in international politics in general, it has often done so in the spirit of vindication. Henceforth, it has led itself to side with legitimacy against domination in ways that make it susceptible to establish its own regime of truth with its correlate power effects. As it gains traction expanding in numbers and scope, so do modes of government operating through its regime of truth – at the very least, in the field of IR.
Read as part of the discourse of time in IR, the so-called ‘temporal turn’ articulates a double bind. On the one hand, it operates an incitement to discourse: by affirming the need to apply temporal lenses to correct a long-standing silence or misunderstanding about time, it incites a ‘putting into discourse of time’. That is, it interpellates subjects in the field by calling them to become self-aware about the temporal dimensions of their own work. On the other hand, the temporal turn inserts such coming-to-awareness within a specific discourse, thus organising the ways of talking about time that must be engaged by those who do so. In this sense, it is also a taming of discourse. In sum, the temporal turn not only invites us to talk more about time, but also to do so seriously, to talk better about time – which is also to do so from within specific conditions of existence. We might wonder if IR’s recent love of the unruliness of time doesn’t walk hand in hand with a fear of the unruliness of the discourse of time. A fear that calls not for its defeating through proper courage, but for its analysis in terms of conditions of existence and power effects, of discursive and political orders legitimised through it.
To conclude, I invite the reader to come back to the quotation by Fabian with which we began these reflections. Having explored the potential of reading the temporal turn in terms of its ritualistic ‘fortifying effects’ – the ways in which it sets a discourse that gives time as an object of knowledge and critical tool in IR – we should not let Fabian’s irony slide. To engage the ritual incantation is also to join its chorus. Indeed, in speaking of the discourse of time instead of the many ways in which ‘time’ appears in the temporal turn in IR, this work has nonetheless become part of the proliferating discussions on the topic in the field. After all, it would be difficult to imagine someone uninterested in the subject both taking up and reading through this work. I would like to suggest, however, that while taking part in the chorus, this investigation also invites a transformation of at least some of its tunes; that critique always takes part in its object is no reason for anxiety, but an opportunity to intervene in the world from within – an inescapable position in any case.
And so, as we forwent seriousness about ‘time’ and shifted it towards ‘turning’, our engagement with the literature also became an engagement with what the temporal turn in IR does beyond its proclaimed aims. In this sense, to join the chorus of time in IR has also been to talk about other things – not due to personal creativity, but because the temporal turn in IR has been shown to have more at stake than ‘only’ more, better, and serious time. In ways that I began to unravel, the temporal turn relies on particular dispositions of concepts, objects, desires, and strategies that are far from given or natural – despite its efforts to make them look so. These configurations have various impacts on what we take international politics to be and how we understand the field of International Relations, but also how the world appears as a problem and how subjects are constituted in relation to it. Glancing at the booming proliferation of uses of ‘time’ as a critical category in the social sciences and the humanities since the late 20th century, we might feel invited, from here, to wonder about the resonances that these conclusions about the temporal turn in IR can have for our understanding of contemporary (trans)formations of both knowledge and politics.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rahul Rao for his comments on the first draft of this article, as well as the participants and audience in the Roundtable ‘Theorising Time and Temporality’ at the 2017 Millennium Annual Conference, from which I gained the feedback and incentive to pursue this work. I am also deeply thankful to Paulo Esteves, Stefano Guzzini, and Manuela Trindade Viana for their long-term engagement and their comments on different versions of this article, as well as to Victor Lage and Lara Selis for discussing these ideas and for their support during the research and writing. Finally, I am grateful for the provocative and useful comments from two anonymous reviewers and from the editorial team at Millennium, which not only improved the work, but also made the whole process one of deep learning.
Funding
I have received funding from Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) and Coordenação de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) for the research from which this article stems.
