Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations

(De)fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives

Anna Agathangelou, Kyle Killian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134670901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Time transforms the way we see world politics and insinuates itself into the ways we act. In this groundbreaking volume, Agathangelou and Killian bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to tackle time and temporality in international relations. The authors – critical theorists, artists, and poets – theorize and speak from the vantage point of the anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial event. They investigate an array of experiences and structures of violence – oppression, neocolonization, slavery, war, poverty and exploitation – focusing on the tensions produced by histories of slavery and colonization and disrupting dominant modes of how we understand present times.

This edited volume takes IR in a new direction, defatalizing the ways in which we think about dominant narratives of violence, 'peace' and 'liberation', and renewing what it means to decolonize today's world. It challenges us to confront violence and suffering and articulates another way to think the world, arguing for an understanding of the 'present' as a vulnerable space through which radically different temporal experiences appear. And it calls for a disruption of the "everyday politics of expediency" in the guise of neoliberalism and security.

This volume reorients the ethical and political assumptions that affectively, imaginatively, and practically captivate us, simultaneously unsettling the familiar, but dubious, promises of a modernity that decimates political life. Re-animating an international political, the authors evoke people's struggles and movements that are neither about redemption nor erasure, but a suspension of time for radical new beginnings.

1 International relations as a vulnerable space

A conversation with Fanon and Hartman about temporality and violence

Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian

Introduction

In the introduction to this book, we explored how dominant IR has conceptualized sovereignty and war (Hobbes 1996; also Ireland and Carvounas 2008) in spatialized terms. This spatialization poses theoretical limitations and practical problems, including masking and displacing time and implicating temporality. In spite of their ostensible differences, realists and critical theorists of sovereignty maintain their existing parameters when spatializing time (Walzer 1977). In this sense, the conventional dichotomy of space and time and the contours of their discourse obscure their shared assumptions and common blind spots.

Many realists present sovereignty as a formal, stable representation of an idealized vision of political order, a solution to war or brute violence; though embodied, these historical relations are rife with tensions (Krasner 2001; Morgenthau 1951; Waltz 1979). They contain an implicit or explicit axiological hierarchy, extrapolate an account of desirable political arrangements, and posit a stable and unified conception of the state and institutional arrangements and subjectivity primed to bring about that order. When sovereignty and war are used to produce certain behaviors, perspectives, or political outcomes, they work together as a particular kind of disciplinary construct that evades time, even though time binds them. The uncritical acceptance of this displacement of time from our conceptualization of the sovereign and war generates problems for our narration of history, the sovereign, war, violence, and political subjects. We must ask whether such limited and politically circumscribed accounts become the drivers of petrified relations and the mark of death, even when espoused otherwise.

Engaging with theorists who problematize the narrowly punctuated understandings of sovereignty, war, capital, and subjectivity (Hartman 2007; Marriott 2014; Mbembe 1992; Wilderson 2010) ought to yield insights. Even more important are Saidiya Hartman’s narration of the entanglements of time and slavery and Fanon’s account of violence, sovereignty, and capital. By superimposing time onto various other given states and racialized situations to show their ‘difference,’ both grapple with time in relation to slavery, colonization, and capitalism. They open up questions about sovereignty by creating theoretical concepts that traverse the gaps among theorists of sovereignty, history, war, violence, and capital.

When we think in terms of time and temporality, the parameters of the conceptualization of violence and fatalization of the present change dramatically, allowing us to consider the complexities of lived human experience and highlight dimensions of social life that IR and certain critical postcolonial theorists have seen as irrelevant. In this chapter, in conversation with Fanon and Hartman, we point to the ruptures/tensions accompanying material technologies/the inventions, the ‘real leap’s in Fanon’s words (Fanon 1952: 229). Fanon’s real leaps are radically untimely (Marriott 2014: 518). They cannot be speculated or preempted. They are a creative invention of a grammar that grapples with the ‘form of antinomies of redemption (a salvational principle that will help us overcome the injury of slavery and the long history of defeat) and irreparability’ (Hartman 2002: 759). Thinking of the force of time and the event via Hartman on slavery and colonization stretches our narrow understandings of sovereign power and forces of capture, allowing us to consider imaginaries, as well as the ways institutions such as the state and market consider some subjects mere flesh outside the dialectical movement of history or capital.

Although we cannot fully represent or narrate them, forces of time and the event produce problems. To a greater or lesser extent, we can mark their interjections and irruptions into life otherwise experienced as continuity: we can perceive their qualities, analyze indices of their interjection, and even make them somewhat predictable. We are affected by them; we intensify their force; we even precipitate their transformation.

This chapter takes seriously Fanon’s idea that ‘the problem to be considered here is one of time’ (Fanon 1952: 226–227). In conversation with Fanon and Hartman, we show the ways time and temporality inflect our imagination and engagement with time and vulnerability in international relations and world politics. One theorist takes the idea of time as a problem of time (Fanon 1952) and as a force, ‘arbitrary and violent, that positions [the racialized subject] globally’ (Murillo 2013). The other ruptures a linear understanding of the sovereign and the ways we narrate violence to exclude slavery and colonization in its gendered forms: her notion of an ‘original generative act,’ with the ‘centrality’ of its ‘blood-stained gate,’ posits the ontological destruction of the black woman as the ‘inaugurating moment in the formation of the enslaved’ within modernity’s violent arena of value (Hartman 2007: 18). Both authors take seriously the way the concept of time becomes a producer of a globality whose ‘ontological horizon is manufactured by scientific signifiers’ (the sovereign as analogy or anarchy as metaphor) and ‘the political-symbolic weapons’ (da Silva 1997: 5) that produce non-Europeans as non-existent ‘untimely’ subjects. Those ‘who thrive in the mark of death’ (ibid: 5) are not covered by the ethical principles governing post-Enlightenment social configurations.

In the first section, we explore temporality co-produced with a system of global raciality entangled with capital, stretching our understanding of the sovereign and its historicity. This global raciality encodes and embodies multiple orders of violence, with time a problem and a force, ‘basically a fundamental feature’ (Murillo 2013: 4) of politics that should not be taken for granted. In the second section, we consider colonial and postcolonial events that disrupt immersions into ‘temporal continuity,’ challenging easy conceptualizations of temporality and co-constituting a material indeterminacy. Slavery, coloniality, and multiple postcolonial struggles inflect the operating forces that disrupt, problematizing a present saturated with ideas about life as derivatives (i.e., financial investing in the future). We conclude with questions devised to contribute to the unthinking and untimeliness of the world, necessary to the collective designing of a decolonial project that recognizes and dismantles the mark of a fatalism and death.

Speculative times or speculations of the times?

We live in times of speculation and preemption. Time, slavery, and colonization are interrelated and co-constituted with the world and world economy. Temporal relations can be drawn on to determine the value of subjects (as commodities) and labor (in Marx’s abstract sense) in terms of market principles. Paradoxically, while modernity projects consistently argue their vision is of freedom, security, independence, and democracy for all by means of progress in science and technology, capital is a temporality seeking constant innovation at any price. This market is currently in crisis. Or so we are told. Financial derivatives dominate market scandals, and, in turn, the temporality and politics of debates about the financial crisis and the anthropocene stem from financial derivatives (Agathangelou 2013).

There was a time before capital’s spectacular self-imagining had fully colonized modern practices of knowledge, politics, and representation; still in the process of constituting its world, capitalism-to-be could not claim to have reached all natural or social limits to its self-actualization. Karl Marx calls this stage ‘primitive accumulation’ or the ‘historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’ (1990: 874–875). Outside Europe, ‘primitive’ accumulation came as direct force and theft: ‘the treasures captured was undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there’ (ibid: 924, 917). As van Fossen perceptively notes, part of the primitive accumulation of capital is the use of time to exploit people:

Accelerating production, exchange, and consumption raises profits and gives a comparative (or survival) advantage over competitors. The annihilation of spatial boundaries and the movement into new territories are particularly emphasized in crises, when the rate of change increases. In this ‘annihilation of space and time’ capitalism globalizes further and aggressively socializes new and existing workers into new time disciplines, while imposing novel conceptions of space.

(van Fossen 1998: 66–67, cited in Russ 2013: 168)

For Marx, as Russ points out, capitalism is the degradation of human time on two registers; one ‘corresponds to the history of our social relations and the other to the opposite history of our productive progress’ (Russ 2013: 170). Marx reads capitalism as the theft of the workers’ labor time and the ‘extraction of surplus time, converted into profit, which is used to massively expand our productive capacities and infrastructure’ (ibid: 170). Marx’s argument is circular, Russ says; it reinserts the dichotomy of time and timelessness by focusing on the future, generating what he calls the illusions of history or ‘privileged attempts by the timeless mind to transcend or annul history’ (ibid: 4).

The division of intellectual labor among the forefathers of modern reason (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Foucault) allows punctuations of linearity, hierarchizations, and divisions of past, present, and future. At the same time, it permits dichotomized distinctions between time and space, masculine and feminine, mind and body to be mapped onto the anarchy/sovereign/interstate structure. These produced binaries exist as analogical correlates of time/timelessness, material/transcendental, mind/body, state of nature/sovereign, and security/insecurity, ultimately associating time and mind with order, health, and purity and associating timelessness with disorder, disease, and impurity. The projection of the sovereign’s time imaginary onto a territory and onto the territory of its ‘bodies’ produces intersecting borders dividing mind from body, modernity from non-modernity, and order from disorder. When time is a linear movement from segmented and bounded ‘past’ into ‘present’ and on to the ‘future’ and vice versa, a progressive or developmental model ‘convert[s] historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines, which in turn organize the value and meaning of time’ (Freeman 2007: 3). To problematize this linear understanding of time is to acknowledge that within the lost moments of official history, slavery time generates a discontinuous history best told through the entanglements of multiple ‘time[s] out of joint,’ ‘heterogeneit[ies that] can be felt in the bones, as a kind of skeletal dislocation.’ Of course, in ‘this metaphor, time has, indeed is, a body’ (Freeman 2007: 1).

In its newer iterations, IR has systematically evaded grappling with slavery except for a few notable postcolonial theorists (Agathangelou 2009, 2011; Blaney and Inayatullah 2010; Du Bois 1999; Fanon 1967; Persuad and Walker 2001; Shilliam 2004, 2015; Vitalis 2010). Several scholars in other disciplines have written on the ‘Middle Passage’ as a form through which we can understand capitalism. Some work in the humanities argues the slave trade still haunts the market logic of the twentieth century; Baucom says temporality accumulates rather than recedes, and the ‘Middle Passage’ represents a passage into modernity (2005: 313). Thus, the slave ship, with all its overtones of illness, bodily corruption, and violence, is originary. A lieu de mémoire, it is the birthplace of a modern subjectivity at the junction of slavery and finance capital:

[It] needed not only a standard set of exchange mechanisms, but a standard imaginary, a standard grammar of trust, a standard ‘habit’ of crediting the ‘real’ existence of abstract values, such as credit, with abstract ‘slaves’ functioning as ‘a standard measure’ through which to express the value of the range of commodities and currencies available for exchange.

(ibid: 89–90)

He connects this to the Zong case, when the ship’s captain murdered African captives by throwing them into the sea so as to translate their bodies and their potential for labor via insurance into currency and evacuated them of their singular characteristics by turning them into abstract (and universal) units of exchange. This facet makes it a ‘truth event,’ identifying ‘not a marginal or local abnormality within the system but the global abnormality of the system itself’ (ibid: 118–22). Baucom’s reading places the historian as a melanchoic witness to history’s aggrieved. History, he says, is not a ‘property of the past but the property the present inherits as its structuring material and the property (both affective and instrumental) the past holds in the present’ (ibid: 330).

The body politics and power relations made possible by working with time, then, link temporality and raciality, temporality and sexuality. As categories, raciality and sexuality are more complex when we think them from the vantage of the slave and slavery, especially the flesh of the enslaved woman. Spillers tells us:

I would make a distinction … between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject positions. In that sense, before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography … If we think of the ‘flesh’ as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ overboard.

(1987: 66)

Making these distinctions depends on the gratuitous violence upon the slave, the object to whom anything anytime can be done and whose life can be squandered. The timely erection of this New World Order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and Indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. The enslavement marks a theft of the body and land and the willfully violent severing of the captive body from its motive will and its active desire, all the while generating fortunes for the captor. This gratuitous intimacy may take the form of a capture of a body, a source of irresistible, destructive sensuality, its translation into potential pornotroping, a thing, and/or property, as attempts to ‘emplot the slave in a narrative’ (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 184) or to incorporate slaves as sovereign subjects within official nationalist discourses (Spillers 1987: 66–69) may obliterate them.

This distinction between body and flesh (the captive body) is significant for knowledge/power and has a temporal politics in the form of evolutionary notions of flesh, such as throwbacks or ‘remnants,’ with (white) sexuality’s development following a linear trajectory of heterosexual reproduction (Freeman 2007). What precipitates the possibility of a coherent story, Wilderson tells us, following Hartman, is the act of murder and enslavement. The only means of entry into civil society, history, and temporality are entitlements, sovereignty, and immigration or ‘narratives of arrival’ (Wilderson 2003: 236). However, within these narratives the ‘black American subject does not generate historical categories of Entitlement, Sovereignty, and/or Immigration for the record,’ as if this ‘flesh’ constituted through gratuitous violence is ‘off the record’ (Hartman 1997: 24; Wilderson 2003: 236). So how do we write those ‘impossibilities to illuminate those practices that speak to the limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the enslaved’ (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 184)?

There is, in other words, a temporal gap in the production of a narrative that explains how discourses always articulate the slave as ‘lagging’ humanity, unable to be co-constituted even with work (Wilderson 2003) or integrated into civil society as a sovereign subject or sovereign laborer. These narrations bind labor in a way that keeps the afterlives of slavery (Hartman 1997) animated. How the black body is narrated has implications for the manner in which temporality becomes a dividing barometer of raciality: ‘From the very beginning, we were meant to be accumulated...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Contributor biographies
• Introduction: Of time and temporality in world politics
• 1 International relations as a vulnerable space: A conversation with Fanon and Hartman about temporality and violence
• Section I Contemporary problematics: Tensions, slavery, colonization and accumulation
• Section II Neoliberal temporalities
• Section III Poetic interventions for social transformation
• Bibliography
• Index