This article develops a notion of the ‘politics of time’ in order to analyse the effects that imaginations of future emergencies have in the fields of law and economy. Building on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social time, it focuses on the multiplex temporalities in contemporary society, which are shown to interact differently with the ‘emergency imaginary’. We demonstrate that the apprehension of the future in terms of sudden, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events reinforces current modes of producing financial futurity, while it undermines the procedural rhythm and retroactive sentencing of liberal law. As a whole, the article supplements the analysis of the ‘politics of truth’ prevalent in the current debate about precaution and pre-emption with a theoretical perspective on social temporality.
This article analyzes how infrastructures take part in constituting Europe as a material collectivity. To that end, it modifies Bruno Latour’s sociology of associations in two respects: In order to theorize the relation between connectivity and collectivity, we consider the political rationalities that infrastructures embody and the political spatiality that they configure. This theoretical perspective is put to a test in exploring the “infrastructuralism” that lies at the core of the European project. After tracing both the operative and imaginary significance of infrastructure policy historically, the analysis concentrates on the most recent initiative to build trans-European energy networks. We demonstrate that the neoliberal configuration of infrastructural collectivity manifests itself in a specific spatial configuration of the market. Europe’s infrastructuralism defines the common as a topological space of corridors and high-voltage lines, which align territorial cohesion with fragmentation.
Kettling has emerged in recent decades as an established, if controversial, tactic of public order policing. Departing from a historical emphasis on dispersal, kettling instead acts to contain protesters within a police cordon for sustained periods of time. In this article, we seek to elaborate upon the spatial and temporal logics of kettling by investigating the conditions of is historical emergence. We argue that 'kettling' has to be understood as a territorial strategy that co-evolved in relation to new forms of disruptive protest. Whereas older techniques of crowd dispersal serve to diffuse a unified collective, 'kettling' aims at capturing the highly volatile and 'swarming' movements characteristic of contemporary choreographies of dissent. Drawing on police manuals, media coverage, accounts from activists and expert interviews, we show how the 'kettle' re-territorializes protest by acting on its spatio-temporal and affective constitution. By fabricating an inner outside of the urban milieu, freezing the time of collective mobilization and inducing debilitating affects such as fear and boredom kettling intervenes into the scene of political subjectification that each congregation of protesting bodies seeks to fashion.
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