Between concepts and thought: digital technologies and temporal relationality

Abstract

This article advances the argument that the acceleration of practices introduced by digital technologies also impact key concepts of social theory. Digital technologies not only give rise to new concepts, but they also reconfigure our entire socio-political conceptual vocabulary. In particular, this acceleration reorganises the relationship between the spatial and temporal dimensions of political concepts. As a consequence, our spatially defined understanding of authority, hierarchy or relation underestimates the repercussions of shifting temporalities. This article pursues this shift from space to time and outlines how temporal relationality is gradually impacting the representations and images we live by.

Peace needs constant reproduction: The temporality of the diplomatic system

“…‘Under the condition of high complexity, time becomes scarce’ (Luhmann, 1976: 142); that is, strands of new peace-mediated communications may arise that are never continued because the diplomatic apparatus lacks resources for overseeing them (Amoureux, 2020: 175). On a fundamental level, the problem that arises from an ever speedier and ever abundant, ever cheaper and ever quicker diplomacy is entropy – or an increasing uncertainty over the next event because expected responses may fail to arise (Kessler and Lenglet, 2020; cf. Surowiec and Long, 2020).…”

Working on relationalism

“…In the lower-left-hand corner, we find bodies of scholarship like social network theory, clearly and obviously relational theoretically —the “anticategorical imperative” (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994) of social network scholarship means that all groupings of entities are empirically emergent rather than ontologically fundamental, and the positional logic of explanation (Padgett and Ansell 1993; Tilly 1998) ensures that no attributes of entities are causally responsible for observed outcomes—but methodologically premised on a separation of observer and observed that makes causal explanation possible (Nexon and Wright 2007; Hafner-Burton et al 2009). More recently, Kim (2020) shows how the institutional fragmentation, polycentricity, and complexity of global governance architecture understood in network terms generates outcomes, while Kessler and Lenglet (2020) point out the dominance of spatial dimensions in the social network approach and highlight temporal relationality in the context of digital technologies. Work in this quadrant can also incorporate the self-understandings of the actors themselves.…”