Geography and ethics I

I Introduction

Waiting and urgency are likely to be familiar experiences for the readers of this journal. We wait for green lights, phone calls, food, and test results. We teach our children socially appropriate ways to wait their turn. Daily we face urgent deadlines, urgent paperwork and urgent calls for our attention. Waiting and urgency can therefore feel banal and ubiquitous, and hardly of great ethical or moral consequence. Yet in the context of late liberalism and capitalism in crisis, geographers are drawing our attention to the ways that space and waiting come together to produce and maintain potentially abusive and harmful arrangements of power and inequality. Lines, lists, rooms and rosters dictate an order of being received, and in doing so they may also influence the dignity and safety of those who are required to wait for jobs, housing, asylum or security from intimate terrorism. Potentially unruly bodies are managed through increasingly sophisticated technologies that make some people wait longer, and in worse conditions, than others. How a person waits can also produce judgments about both her culture and her character. As it organizes the routines of our daily lives, waiting can serve – rightly or wrongly – as a measure of lawfulness or civility, and potentially as a justification for the removal or denial of rights. A worthy citizen waits appropriately or faces consequences. Martin Luther King wrote about this ethical dimension of waiting in relation to civil rights and the US military involvement in Vietnam, clarifying that a demand to wait can be immoral and therefore requires an apposite counterforce, what he called ‘the fierce urgency of now’ (King, 1963, 1967).

In this report, I consider the work of urgency and waiting as often unacknowledged ethical concepts. Both the conditions and the significance of waiting have shifted in response to the development of liberalized economies, global expertise and the institutionalization of chronological time (Auyero and Swistun, 2009; Jeffery, 2008, 2010). Within these conditions, things look increasingly urgent for humans and non-humans who are surplus to this system. Indeed, we have only to look towards ever more precise language developed to describe the extreme urgency of human conditions. Agamben’s (1998) bare life, Sassen’s (2014) expulsions and Povinelli’s (2011) abandonment and endurance are but a few examples of the intertwining of waiting and suffering as an expected consequence of late modernity, often in the form of the tortured, excluded, or indefinitely and obscurely detained body.

As with other deliberate engagements with geography and ethics, this report focuses on ‘the things that matter to geographers’ (Barnett, forthcoming; see also Barnett, 2011; Popke, 2003, 2010; Silvey, 2009; Tuan, 1989). Geographic engagement with normative ethics also matters, because our attentiveness to space has the potential to improve normative reasoning beyond our well-developed problematization of distance (e.g. Smith, 2000; Lawson, 2007). Interrogating ‘thick’ ethical concepts, such as suffering or justice (e.g. Olson, 2014; Olson and Sayer, 2009), is one method for exposing the otherwise hidden spatial dimensions of ethical reasoning. ¹ I begin with a necessarily selective introduction to urgency and its role in moral reasoning and ethics before turning to the somewhat unlikely bedfellows of toileting and emergency, and conclude by drawing urgency back into dialogue with waiting.

II Urgency and ethics

Miriam-Webster defines ‘urgent’ as calling for immediate attention. When the word is turned from an adjective into a noun – urgency – its relationship with power is more evident: ‘Insistence; a force or impulse that impels or constrains’. ² Urgency is thus temporal, pushing for resolution in the immediate present or very near future, and it is also authoritative, demanding attention, compelling action or preventing us from acting. From this definition alone, urgency would appear to fill an important role in moral reasoning by distinguishing those things that cannot wait and must or must not happen, depending upon the force implied in any given demand. Utilitarian approaches like the practical ethics of Peter Singer (1993) presume scarce resources (money, attention, ingenuity, respect, relationships) to be allocated according to various considerations, including but not limited to the urgency of the claim. In the mathematical representations of epistemic utility arguments, urgency can even be ‘scored’ according to the possibility of its accuracy (Leitgeb and Pettigrew, 2010). From this utilitarian perspective, urgency is one consideration in moral reasoning, but it is not ethical in its own right, nor is it a virtue that might form a basis for ethics, as might be done with hospitality (e.g. Barnett, 2005).

If the relationship between urgency and ethics was limited to a utilitarian ranking in moral reasoning, my analysis could turn to the challenging (and probably very interesting) task of surveying how geographers implicitly evoke a sense of urgency for the purpose of asserting hierarchies of concern. However, other trajectories within moral philosophy problematize the role of urgency as one amongst many variables that might factor in our moral reasoning. Scanlon and Wren incorporated urgency into non-utilitarian ethics in the 1970s, and their different approaches underscore some early alternatives within philosophy. ³ Scanlon (1975: 658) rejects utilitarian weighting of cost and benefit in favor of wellbeing criteria ‘independent of that person’s tastes and interests’. He identifies the main task of moral reasoning as resolving ‘equally strong preferences’ (1975: 660), some of which might be based on what he considers subjective needs related to satisfaction and taste (e.g. I need another car), and others on objective needs or basic needs (e.g. I need clean water). ⁴ The urgency of a particular need, according to Scanlon, suggests a hierarchy that can be useful in ethical reasoning. Yet he puzzles over the possibility that urgency ‘appears already to be a moral notion’ (Scanlon, 1975: 668), more thickly ethical than other considerations. Wren (1974) pushes this further, such that urgency signals the ‘overriding ought that is directed toward the ultimately serious end of interagential harmony’ (Wren, 1974: 90). Accordingly, urgency identifies the ultimate moral choice, that which constrains and compels agency itself. In contrast to approaches that treat urgency as one of a suite of considerations in ethical reasoning, here urgency delimits human agency, such that by the time we choose to undertake any particular action on moral grounds, we assume it to be the only choice we have.

Though different in intent and project, both Scanlon and Wren suggest urgency is constitutive of ethics, precipitating the normative impulse from which justice or alleviation from suffering might emerge. Put another way, urgency is not just a variable, but actually produces the conditions for morality. Derrida illustrates this characteristic as a discursive and historical turn in his reflections on justice, writing that ‘justice, however unrepresentable it may be, does not wait. It is that which must not wait’ (Derrida, 1990: 967). He continues:

a just decision is always required immediately, ‘right away.’ It cannot furnish itself with infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. And even if it did have all that at its disposal, even if it did give itself the time, all the time and all the necessary facts about the matter, the moment of decision, as such, always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation. (Derrida, 1990: 967, emphasis in original)

Despite this discursive relationship, Derrida does not reject a ‘classical emancipatory idea’ of justice (Derrida, 1990: 971), listing HIV-Aids, homelessness, and the death penalty as illustrations. These are urgencies that cannot wait, because justice is both anti-historical, interrupting that which came before, and a discursive construction that produces something – an idea, an action, a policy, a prisoner – from which the very ethics of justice emerges.

Divergent in their theoretical influences and aims, these theorizations of the ethical work of urgency point to its power and to its role in the construction of what we come to think of as ethical, moral, or just. Urgency can demand the curtailing of human agency and the disruption of history. However, the spatiality of urgency is only vaguely referenced in these works, at best inferred through references to the individual or collectivity, or through the acknowledgement that the urgency of justice emerges materially in places, bodies, and circumstances. In the next section, I therefore turn to geographical research on two interrelated extremes of scale, the body and the large-scale global event, in order to highlight a bias in the application of a thickly ethical concept of urgency in our time.

III The body and the emergency

Though the body is often presumed to be the most basic unit where urgency might be detected, only some dictionaries link urgency and the body through a ‘medical’ reference to the compelling need to defecate or urinate. ⁵ Focusing on the different meanings of urgency runs the risk of obscuring language categories, but pushing together the two definitions – urgency as the need to defecate and urinate, and urgency as overwhelming force – is useful here, because my aim is to illustrate that the ethical work of urgency has been hijacked by an hierarchical organization of scales of moral deliberation. Specifically, our research suggests that the urgent body is cast as subjective and impulsive, while larger scales, such as the region, state or society, emerge as the scale of a rational ethics. While these are not new arguments about states (Scott, 1998) and their institutions (Foucault, 1995), geographic insights into toileting and securitizations suggest that technocratic practices both require and perpetuate an ethical distinction between the body and the large-scale future event, with the latter emerging as the only legitimate site of urgent claims and thus the dominant subject of moral reasoning.

In research related to contemporary global toileting, the defecating body’s status as a legitimate ethical concern is more likely to be acknowledged when threatening the sanitation aims of cities and states. This is perhaps most evident in large metropolitan areas where uneven access to toilets amplifies social inequalities and human suffering (McFarlane, 2013). Jewitt’s (2011) examination of waste management in India and other countries in the Global South reveals that taboos around feces often justify inequality in two ways; first, by creating conditions of precarity through taboos in discussing personal sanitation and toilet practices, and second, by justifying social exclusion on the basis of inferior sanitation practices. The lack of access to sanitation infrastructure can also provide reasons for excluding informally settled populations from ambitiously modernizing cities. In cities like Kampala, Uganda, planners, development workers, and community organizers frame those who cannot use modern toilet facilities as threatening (Terreni-Brown, 2014a). Terreni-Brown (2014b) describes a group of female migrants selling goods outside of a large, upscale mall in Kampala, and their strategies for balancing the lack of access to a toilet with the danger and humiliation of going in the area behind their street-side location. Their desperate pain, induced by waiting hours until they can finally return to a more private location, contrasts with complaints of city planners and NGO workers who point to moral lethargy in the informal settlements that puts the city at risk. The poor, illegal, marginalized body is not a reasonable scale of urgency, nor is it the product of a thoughtful weighing of circumstances; in the face of a morally rational prioritization of a future Kampala, these bodily urgencies literally have no place in the modern city.

Though toileting might be thought of as a special case of bodily urgency, geographic research suggests that the body is increasingly set at odds with larger scale ethical concerns, especially large-scale future events of forecasted suffering. Emergency planning is a particularly good example in which the large-scale threats of future suffering can distort moral reasoning. Žižek (2006) lightly develops this point in the context of the war on terror, where in the presence of fictitious and real ticking clocks and warning systems, the urgent body must be bypassed because there are bigger scales to worry about:

What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they necessitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy. (Žižek, 2006)

In the presence of large-scale future emergency, the urgency to secure the state, the citizenry, the economy, or the climate creates new scales and new temporal orders of response (see Anderson, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Dalby, 2013; Morrissey, 2012), many of which treat the urgent body as impulsive and thus requiring management. McDonald’s (2013) analysis of three interconnected discourses of ‘climate security’ illustrates how bodily urgency in climate change is also recast as a menacing impulse that might require exclusion from moral reckoning. The logics of climate security, especially those related to national security, ‘can encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but may present victims of it as a threat’ (McDonald, 2013: 49). Bodies that are currently suffering cannot be urgent, because they are excluded from the potential collectivity that could be suffering everywhere in some future time. Similar bypassing of existing bodily urgency is echoed in writing about violent securitization, such as drone warfare (Shaw and Akhter, 2012), and also in intimate scales like the street and the school, especially in relation to race (Mitchell, 2009; Young et al., 2014).

As large-scale urgent concerns are institutionalized, the urgent body is increasingly obscured through technical planning and coordination (Anderson and Adey, 2012). The predominant characteristic of this institutionalization of large-scale emergency is a ‘built-in bias for action’ (Wuthnow, 2010: 212) that circumvents contingencies. The urgent body is at best an assumed eventuality, one that will likely require another state of waiting, such as triage (e.g. Greatbach et al., 2005). Amin (2013) cautions that in much of the West, governmental need to provide evidence of laissez-faire governing on the one hand, and assurance of strength in facing a threatening future on the other, produces ‘just-in-case preparedness’ (Amin, 2013: 151) of neoliberal risk management policies. In the US, ‘personal ingenuity’ is built into emergency response at the expense of the poor and vulnerable for whom ‘[t]he difference between abjection and bearable survival’ (Amin, 2013: 153) will not be determined by emergency planning, but in the material infrastructure of the city.

In short, the urgencies of the body provide justifications for social exclusion of the most marginalized based on impulse and perceived threat, while large-scale future emergencies effectively absorb the deliberative power of urgency into the institutions of preparedness and risk avoidance. Žižek references Arendt’s (2006) analysis of the banality of evil to explain the current state of ethical reasoning under the war on terror, noting that people who perform morally reprehensible actions under the conditions of urgency assume a ‘tragic-ethic grandeur’ (Žižek, 2006) by sacrificing their own morality for the good of the state. But his analysis fails to note that bodies are today so rarely legitimate sites for claiming urgency. In the context of the assumed priority of the large-scale future emergency, the urgent body becomes literally nonsense, a non sequitur within societies, states and worlds that will always be more urgent.

IV Waiting and the denial of urgency

If the important ethical work of urgency has been to identify that which must not wait, then the capture of the power and persuasiveness of urgency by large-scale future emergencies has consequences for the kinds of normative arguments we can raise on behalf of urgent bodies. How, then, might waiting compare as a normative description and critique in our own urgent time? Waiting can be categorized according to its purpose or outcome (see Corbridge, 2004; Gray, 2011), but it also modifies the place of the individual in society and her importance. As Ramdas (2012: 834) writes, ‘waiting … produces hierarchies which segregate people and places into those which matter and those which do not’. The segregation of waiting might produce effects that counteract suffering, however, and Jeffery (2008: 957) explains that though the ‘politics of waiting’ can be repressive, it can also engender creative political engagement. In his research with educated unemployed Jat youth who spend days and years waiting for desired employment, Jeffery finds that ‘the temporal suffering and sense of ambivalence experienced by young men can generate cultural and political experiments that, in turn, have marked social and spatial effects’ (Jeffery, 2010: 186). Though this is not the same as claiming normative neutrality for waiting, it does suggest that waiting is more ethically ambivalent and open than urgency.

In other contexts, however, our descriptions of waiting indicate a strong condemnation of its effects upon the subjects of study. Waiting can demobilize radical reform, depoliticizing ‘the insurrectionary possibilities of the present by delaying the revolutionary imperative to a future moment that is forever drifting towards infinity’ (Springer, 2014: 407). Yonucu’s (2011) analysis of the self-destructive activities of disrespected working-class youth in Istanbul suggests that this sense of infinite waiting can lead not only to depoliticization, but also to a disbelief in the possibility of a future self of any value. Waiting, like urgency, can undermine the possibility of self-care two-fold, first by making people wait for essential needs, and again by reinforcing that waiting is ‘[s]omething to be ashamed of because it may be noted or taken as evidence of indolence or low status, seen as a symptom of rejection or a signal to exclude’ (Bauman, 2004: 109). This is why Auyero (2012) suggests that waiting creates an ideal state subject, providing ‘temporal processes in and through which political subordination is produced’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 90; see also Secor, 2007). Furthermore, Auyero notes, it is not only political subordination, but the subjective effect of waiting that secures domination, as citizens and non-citizens find themselves ‘waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 123).

Waiting can therefore function as a potentially important spatial technology of the elite and powerful, mobilized not only for the purpose of governing individuals, but also to retain claims over moral urgency. But there is growing resistance to the capture of claims of urgency by the elite, and it is important to note that even in cases where the material conditions of containment are currently impenetrable, arguments based on human value are at the forefront of reclaiming urgency for the body. In detention centers, clandestine prisons, state borders and refugee camps, geographers point to ongoing struggles against the ethical impossibility of bodily urgency and a rejection of states of waiting (see Conlon, 2011; Darling, 2009, 2011; Garmany, 2012; Mountz et al., 2013; Schuster, 2011). Ramakrishnan’s (2014) analysis of a Delhi resettlement colony and Shewly’s (2013) discussion of the enclave between India and Bangladesh describe people who refuse to give up their own status as legitimately urgent, even in the context of larger scale politics. Similarly, Tyler’s (2013) account of desperate female detainees stripping off their clothes to expose their humanness and suffering in the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in the UK suggests that demands for recognition are not just about politics, but also about the acknowledgement of humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being that which cannot wait. The continued existence of places like Yarl’s Wood and similar institutions in the USA nonetheless points to the challenge of exposing the urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily hidden from view, and also reminds us that our research can help to explain the relationships between normative dimensions and the political and social conditions of struggle.

In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do seem to evocatively describe otherwise obscured suffering (e.g. Bennett, 2011), but it is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of urgency. Given the discussion above, what might be accomplished – and risked – by incorporating urgency more overtly and deliberately into our discussions of waiting, surplus and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify the implicit but understated ethical consequences and normativity associated with waiting, and encourage explicit discussion about harmful suffering. Waiting can be productive or unproductive for radical praxis, but urgency compels and requires response. Geographers could be instrumental in reclaiming the ethical work of urgency in ways that leave it open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and representations. There is good reason to be thoughtful in this process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure differentiated experiences of being human, dividing up ‘those for whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all’ (Butler, 2009: 50). But when the urgent body is rendered as only waiting, both materially and discursively, it is just as easily cast as impulsive, disgusting, animalistic (see also McKittrick, 2006). Feminist theory insists that the urgent body, whose encounters of violence are ‘usually framed as private, apolitical and mundane’ (Pain, 2014: 8), are as deeply political, public, and exceptional as other forms of violence (Phillips, 2008; Pratt, 2005). Insisting that a suffering body, now, is that which cannot wait, has the ethical effect of drawing it into consideration alongside the political, public and exceptional scope of large-scale futures. It may help us insist on the body, both as a single unit and a plurality, as a legitimate scale of normative priority and social care.

V Feeling urgent?

In this report, I have explored old and new reflections on the ethical work of urgency and waiting. Geographic research suggests a contemporary popular bias towards the urgency of large-scale futures, institutionalized in ways that further obscure and discredit the urgencies of the body. This bias also justifies the production of new waiting places in our material landscape, places like the detention center and the waiting room. In some cases, waiting is normatively neutral, even providing opportunities for alternative politics. In others, the technologies of waiting serve to manage potentially problematic bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination (e.g. Wright, 2013). One of my aims has been to suggest that moral reasoning is important both because it exposes normative biases against subjugated people, and because it potentially provides routes toward struggle where claims to urgency seem to foreclose the possibilities of alleviation of suffering. Saving the world still should require a debate about whose world is being saved, when, and at what cost – and this requires a debate about what really cannot wait. My next report will extend some of these concerns by reviewing how feelings of urgency, as well as hope, fear, and other emotions, have played a role in geography and ethical reasoning.

I conclude, however, by pulling together past and present. In 1972, Gilbert White asked why geographers were not engaging ‘the truly urgent questions’ (1972: 101) such as racial repression, decaying cities, economic inequality, and global environmental destruction. His question highlights just how much the discipline has changed, but it is also unnerving in its echoes of our contemporary problems. Since White’s writing, our moral reasoning has been stretched to consider the future body and the more-than-human, alongside the presently urgent body – topics and concerns that I have not taken up in this review but which will provide their own new possibilities for urgent concerns. My own hope presently is drawn from an acknowledgement that the temporal characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be interrupted in creative ways (Sharma, 2014), with the possibility of squaring the urgent body with our large-scale future concerns. Temporal alternatives already exist in ongoing and emerging revolutions and the disruption of claims of cycles and circular political processes (e.g. Lombard, 2013; Reyes, 2012). Though calls for urgency will certainly be used to obscure evasion of responsibility (e.g. Gilmore, 2008: 56, fn 6), they may also serve as fertile ground for radical critique, a truly fierce urgency for now.