Time and world politics

Thinking the present

Kimberly Hutchings

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719073021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847796455
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers the first authoritative guide to assumptions about time in theories of contemporary world politics. It demonstrates how predominant theories of the international or global 'present' are affected by temporal assumptions, grounded in western political thought, that fundamentally shape what we can and cannot know about world politics today.

The first part of the book traces the philosophical roots of assumptions about time in contemporary political theory. The second part examines contemporary theories of world politics, including liberal and realist International Relations theories and the work of Habermas, Hardt and Negri, Virilio and Agamben. In each case, it is argued, assumptions about political time ensure the identification of the particular temporality of western experience with the political temporality of the world as such and put the theorist in the unsustainable position of holding the key to the direction of world history. In the final chapter, the book draws on postcolonial and feminist thinking, and the philosophical accounts of political time in the work of Derrida and Deleuze, to develop a new 'untimely' way of thinking about time in world politics.

PART I
THEORIES OF WORLD-POLITICAL TIME

1

Introduction to the question of world-political time

Introduction

IN The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that our grasp of the world is inescapably structured through space and time. In other words, whether we like it or not, our experience of any object is always located in a spatial field and temporal duration, conceived in Newtonian terms. The novelty of Kant’s argument was that he effectively bracketed the question of the ontological status of space and time, thus evading long-standing philosophical problems, such as those inherent in Zeno’s paradox of the arrow.¹ Instead Kant focused on demonstrating that they (space and time) are transcendental conditions of sensible experience and, in combination with the categories of the understanding, of knowledge of the external world (1983: 67–68). For Kant, space and time are neither knowable in themselves nor subsumable under categories of the understanding. They are sensible intuitions, the inescapability of which is established not through a transcendental deduction, but through a transcendental aesthetic (1983: 65–91). Whereas space (our outer sense) is a condition of our sensible experience of external objects, time (our inner sense) conditions all our experience, including our experience of ourselves as thinking, feeling subjects (1983: 77). Kant traces this temporal condition of experience back to the transcendental unity of apperception and to the irreducibly mysterious human capacity for imagination and judgement (1983: 152–155). This suggests not only that questions about the nature of time may be incapable of being settled ontologically, but also that different accounts of time reflect different sensibilities or orientations underpinning experience and reason rather than either experience or reason themselves.

My concerns in this book are not the same as Kant’s in the Critique of Pure Reason, but they are post-Kantian, in the sense that they are concerned with the role of time in experience and understanding, that is to say with the connection between time and judgement rather than with the physics or metaphysics of time. Unlike the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason, however, I am concerned with the inter-subjective time of politics, rather than with time as a condition of individual sensible experience of empirical objects; and I take the conception of political time to be essentially contested, rather than being tied to a singular (in Kant’s case, Newtonian) definition.² The purpose of my argument is twofold. Firstly, my aim is to examine the role played by assumptions about time in different theories of contemporary world politics. In all cases, I will argue, such assumptions play a significant part in the analysis and normative judgement of what is happening (and what will happen) in world politics in the twenty-first century. Secondly, my aim is to examine the link between the operation of time in theories of the world-political present within the western academy and certain philosophical accounts of political time. I will argue that major differences between alternatives to thinking the world-political present conceal a common dependence on the idea that political time is unitary, and, in contrast to natural or sacred time, is constructed through the control and direction of other forms of temporality.³ Like Kant in relation to time as a condition of sensible experience, I do not think that the meaning of political time is subject to empirical verification. Nevertheless, it is possible to make a case that the analysis and judgement of world politics is unduly restricted by this dominant view about the nature of political time, which cuts across ideological and theoretical lines. In contrast to this predominant conception, following the arguments of postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists, I will argue that an alternative view, which conceives world-political time in terms of immanent, non-linear, plural ‘becoming’ opens up the analysis and judgement of the present(s) of world politics in interesting ways.

The aim of this chapter is to introduce the subject matter of the book and offer some preliminary arguments for why conceptions of time matter in theories of world politics. The first section examines the concept of time, and differentiates two aspects of temporal categorisation: chronos and kairos. It then goes on to offer a brief account of how both of these aspects have played a part in three familiar ways of conceptualising political time, in terms of narratives of repetition, progress and decline. The second section addresses the category of ‘world politics’, and traces the ways in which these familiar narratives of political time have figured in theories of international relations, globalisation and postmodernity. The third section outlines the argument of the rest of the book.

Time: chronos and kairos

My concern in this book is with inter-subjective, public constructions of time as they operate in theories of world politics. By ‘inter-subjective, public constructions of time’, I mean the ways in which the temporality of social life is categorised and theorised, whether explicitly or implicitly, both in the realm of social life itself and in the ways in which that life is explained and judged. There is now a well-established body of work on the anthropology and sociology of time that focuses on such assumptions.⁴ This body of work reminds us that different accounts of social temporality, which mediate both the experience of individuals and prevailing understandings of the social world, may co-exist within societies. For example, within many societies one finds the co-existence of constructions of everyday time, perhaps governed by, and understood through, sunrise and sunset, tide or season with various accounts of mythical or divine time, within which everyday time is both encompassed and surpassed. In the secularised and multicultural contexts of many societies, it is possible for several different, potentially conflicting, constructions of both mundane and divine time to co-exist in the public realm, along with a variety of metaphysical, scientific and subjective accounts of temporality. At the level of personal experience, most of us have experienced a lack of fit between our own experience of a particular time span and its publicly accepted measure. Time, as a (inter-subjective, public) category through which our experience of, and action in, the world is organised, has complex and multiple meanings. I suggest, however, that we can gain some analytic purchase on the category by distinguishing two aspects to the ways that social life is temporalised, a distinction captured by the terms chronos and kairos.⁵

The chronos/kairos distinction is often traced back to ancient Greek thought. In this context, a contrast was drawn between time as quantitatively measurable duration, associated with the inevitable birth–death life cycle of individuals (chronos), and time as a transformational time of action, in which the certainty of death and decay is challenged (kairos) (Smith, 1969, 1986; Lindroos, 1998: 11–12). The contrast between chronos and kairos in Greek thought captures a range of meanings. It distinguishes both analytically and evaluatively between normal and exceptional time. Analytically, it presents exceptional time as challenging or interrupting normal time, and it links ‘normal’ to the idea of time as a quantitatively infinite, divisible medium within which finite lives are lived out, and ‘exceptional’ to a qualitative event that creates, arrests or changes time, rather than endures it. Normatively, it links the kariotic challenge to chronos with an idea of ‘timeliness’, in which the overcoming of human subordination to natural chronotic⁶ temporality is celebrated (Smith, 1969).⁷

Most mundane ways of breaking down social time depend on thinking of time as a medium which can be represented and subdivided in a range of ways.⁸ The prevailing version of chronos in modern societies rests on Newtonian assumptions about time, in which time as linear, infinite succession conditions the possibility of counting time by means of the technologies of calendars, clocks and timetables (Nowotny, 1994: 13–14). Chronotic time renders life manageable, by providing a background frame in relation to which we can measure phenomena such as the length of the working day, the span of human life, or the duration of empires. But chronotic time is not reducible to the ways it is accessed via calendars or clocks; these are only able to accomplish their measuring work because they are rooted in the natural phenomenon of time.⁹ Precisely because chronos is not changeable, even though it may be known or represented in a range of different ways, it operates as a basis for prediction. The generalisation of clock time began with the advent of modern market relations and wage labour in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, which required the replacement of the imprecise, unevenly experienced temporality of sunrise and sunset, tide or season, by a universally shared, precisely regulated experience of time. Clock time transformed and has continued to transform, the ways in which people across the world experience and live their lives. The socially accepted temporality of clock time carries with it a whole set of related assumptions. On this account, time is universally the same, it proceeds at a constant pace, and it is infinitely divisible and linear. It is also a neutral medium and measure, events and experiences happen within it, novel and familiar, but time itself does not change qualitatively. It is also, of course, an instrument of discipline, through which the coordination of highly complex systems of production, exchange and distribution can be organised across vast ranges of space.¹⁰

The notion of time as a neutral, constant, measurable and measuring medium opens up a variety of possibilities for thinking about the relation of present to past and present to future in the natural and social sciences. For instance, it becomes possible to divide the past into specific periods, to make direct comparison between events at the same time or at different times, to make judgments about the sameness or novelty of now as opposed to then, and to speculate about the near or distant future. Newton’s theory of time does not presume an ‘arrow of time’, but eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments in physics (thermodynamics) and biology (evolution) suggested that time was not only infinite and linear but also uni-directional and irreversible.¹¹ On this view, chronos becomes bound up with a particular account of causation, in which, because time is irreversible, cause must precede effect, and in which the sequence of events potentially becomes the key to their explanation, whether in the natural or the social world.¹² It therefore becomes possible, with hindsight, to identify patterns of cause and effect, which in turn may enable prediction of what is to come. The historical and social sciences only emerged as systematic disciplinary fields because of the conceptions of chronos bound up with developments of Newtonian and post-Newtonian science. Clock and causal chronologies open up a variety of possibilities for how to think about the relation between past and present in the social world. However, in modern European thought, alongside chronotic conceptions of time, we also find a variety of ways of thinking about time that simultaneously rely on and are in kairotic tension with those conceptions. These ways of thinking about time establish patterns for political time that work across and through chronotic time, in a way reminiscent of the Greek interruption of chronos by kairos. They draw on qualitatively specific temporal categories, such as beginnings, ends, novelty, repetition, stasis and change. And they superimpose alternative linear and cyclical temporalities on the infinite, indifferent time of the clock.

The most obvious example of an account of political time that both feeds off and challenges clock and causal accounts of chronos is in the various theories of world history that played such an important role in accounts of world politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹³ Theories of world history depend on a capacity to divide historical time into periods and to tell a story about development through time, which rests on comparison between past, present and future. The interpretation of the meaning of historical development relies on the transparency of time, through which one can see the difference between stasis, progress and regress, and may identify the principles governing change. An infinite, linear and irreversible understanding of time enables the idea that the ‘end of history’ is not equivalent to the idea of an ‘end of time’, but may instead be thought of as an open, indefinite future in which things will not change (see Chapter 2 below).

At the same time, however, theories of history complicate the idea of chronotic time. The whole point of these theories is that the principle according to which the past, present and future is divided does not reflect the idea of time as a neutral measure or undifferentiable flow. Rather than world history being divided up into lumps of equal length, it is divided according to principles of comparative value, in which some times become seen as more significant, better or worse, than others. Moreover, the division into stages raises the problem of the boundary and of how one is to understand the points of transition between stages. Such theories invariably present time in terms of a succession of different values and intensities, and not simply as indifferent sameness. They enable distinctions between normal and revolutionary time, treating long periods of time as stasis and comparatively short ones as quantum leaps. They also enable the disassociation between space and time in the world, by raising the possibility that different places in effect inhabit different times, suggesting an a-chronotic world in which the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous holds true.¹⁴ In addition, in many cases theories of history challenge the supremacy of efficient causation (in which cause precedes effect) in human affairs, by raising the spectre of a teleological direction to world history. In a variety of ways, therefore, theories of world history characterise world-political time as an intersection between chronotic and kairotic temporalities.

Theories of history, as developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, present narratives of both progress and decline. As we shall see in later chapters, they continue to play a sometimes explicit, sometimes hidden role in a variety of accounts of contemporary world politics, even where temporal categorisations (for example between ‘pre-modern’, ‘modern’, ‘postmodern’) are assumed to be matters of classificatory convenience in the face of time’s indifference.¹⁵ However, an investment in notions of world history as a finite, linear process with an origin and end is not necessarily involved in every attempt to place either analysand or analyser in temporal context. Such theories of history are countered by alternative macro-level accounts, in which history is understood in terms of cycles rather than stages, repetition rather than change, or some kind of combination of the two (see Chapter 2). These accounts in turn both utilise and undermine the assumptions of chronotic time. In doing so, however, as with stadial theories of history, they embed alternative temporal orientations into their analyses, invoking kairos in the midst of chronos. But if kairos and chronos both play a part in theories of world-political time, then a series of questions is opened up, about different ways in which kairos and chronos may be thought and about the relation between them.

In a meditation on the relation between ‘politics’ as a practice in the present and ‘history’ as the inheritance of the past, Pocock refers to two of the ways in which the chronos/kairos distinction has been theorised in western political thought:

To the Florentines she was the maenad Fortune, an irrational and irresistible stream of happenings. To the Romantics she was (and is) the Goddess History, of their relationship with whom they expect a final consummation, only too likely to prove a Liebestod. (Pocock, 1973: 271)

The figures of Fortune and the Goddess History are drawn from a Machiavellian understanding of political time on the one hand, and, on the other, from teleological eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of history referred to above. In the case of Machiavelli, the temporality of politics is understood as an ongoing struggle between fortune and virtù for control.¹⁶ Both fortune and virtù have the capacity to direct natural chronotic time, though in rather different ways. Whilst fortune is kairotic, an external, arbitrary power behind what ‘happens’, virtù is the (always temporary) capacity to tap into that kairotic power, and re-shape what ‘happens’. Politics, as opposed to nature, is the sphere of a re-shaped nature, emerging out of the potential of kairos, whether as fortune or virtù, to interrupt chronos. In order to understand and judge politics one needs to take both fortune and virtù into account and see how they conflict with and may also be made to work together. Fortune is a woman, but she is also a river:

I compare fortune to one of those dangerous rivers that, when they become enraged, flood the plains, destroy trees and buildings, move earth from one place and deposit it in another. Everyone flees before it, everyone gives way to its thrust, without being able to halt it in any way. But this does not mean that, when the river is not in flood, men are unable to take precautions, by means of dykes and dams, so that when it rises next time, it will not overflow its banks or, if it does, its force will not be so uncontrolled and damaging. (Machiavelli, 1988: 85)

For Machiavelli, the struggle between fortune and virtù is not capable of being won by one side or the other. The most virtuous leader is liable to come unstuck through bad luck, the most profound bad luck may still be countered and even exploit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Theories of world-political time
• Part II: Diagnosing the times
• Bibliography
• Index