Future Emergencies: Temporal Politics in Law and Economy

Abstract

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.

Reformulating ‘Holism' in hydropower decision‐making

“…Of course, visibilising the alternativity of DRIFT results will inevitably increase the likelihood that selected results will become even less clear cut. They may even visibilise the ‘emergency imaginaries' (Opitz & Tellmann, ) of the ‘co‐evolution of unsustainability' (Kang, ) and subsequently perturbate ‘degrowth' policies (Plaza‐Úbeda, Pérez‐Valls, Céspedes‐Lorente, & Payán‐Sánchez, ). Yet this permanent oscillation between present futures and future presents, the invisibility and visibility of alternative results, or selection and variation, is in fact necessary for the MRC's DRIFT retention.…”

Uncertain futures and everyday hedging in a humanitarian city

“…There has been growing interest among geographers and other social scientists in considering the ways in which the future organises social action. Suffused with disaster, many recent geographic analyses of futurity have considered how dystopian visions of the future elicit various governance responses that seek control – to avert, or at the very least mitigate – what might come (Anderson ; de Goede and Randalls ; Opitz and Tellmann ). For some, the financial crisis of 2008 laid bare the extent of society's and individuals’ enrolment in complex financial and actuarial technologies of foretelling and accounting for the future (Christophers ; Hall ; Opitz and Tellmann ; Pollard ).…”

“…Suffused with disaster, many recent geographic analyses of futurity have considered how dystopian visions of the future elicit various governance responses that seek control – to avert, or at the very least mitigate – what might come (Anderson ; de Goede and Randalls ; Opitz and Tellmann ). For some, the financial crisis of 2008 laid bare the extent of society's and individuals’ enrolment in complex financial and actuarial technologies of foretelling and accounting for the future (Christophers ; Hall ; Opitz and Tellmann ; Pollard ). For others, anthropogenic climate change and corresponding increased stochasticity of weather and climate has meant the need to revisit (or even jettison) assumptions that the future will continue to resemble the past (Braun ; Yusoff ).…”

Reactions to the Future: the Chronopolitics of Prevention and Preemption

“…By drawing upon the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, de Goede calls critical attention to preemption's violence-a violence discursively made plausible as the legitimate answer to almost unimaginable threats in the future. Besides the question of whether preemption operates inside or outside the law, some scholars have started to examine the temporal aspects of preemption [4][5][6].…”