Unequal times.
| Author | Elliott, Cathy |
| Position | EDITORIAL |
We have been talking for a long time about the politics of place. The seeming irreconcilability of deracinated citizens of nowhere, on the one hand, and the disempowered yet resurgent people of somewhere, on the other, has been the central preoccupation of post-2016 politics.
Yet perhaps this distinction between 'somewheres' and 'nowheres' has been overdone. As David Klemperer argues in this issue, David Lammy MP's recent book, Tribes, demonstrates a more nuanced view of place and belonging that offers promise to a politics of the left. We must find ways, as he puts it, 'to speak the language of community and belonging that cedes no ground to opponents of social progress and minority rights'. As this mention of progress suggests, at the root of these debates over the politics of place lies another about the politics of time. The latter has been rather more neglected. Until now.
Time is suddenly unavoidable. These are 'exceptional times', as we constantly remind ourselves. It sometimes feels as if we have been at once thrust into History writ large and wrested out of the predictability of the clock time that is often seen to mark the onset, not only of modernity, but of properly historical time. As Andrew Hom points out later in this issue, we have also seen a number of political battles being fought out through struggles over time, in ways that suggest a shift in how political time is regulated and experienced. Hom shows that time is not an objective metaphysical dimension which we can do nothing about. It is - just like place and space - a very human construction that we imbue with meaning. And those meanings seem to be changing.
The ability to control time, to shape it to our own meanings and rhythms, is one of the ways in which inequality is lived and felt. This has been both reinforced and up-ended by COVID-19. The time of the pandemic has been elongated, stretchy, shapeless, while simultaneously (for many) contracted, rushed, full. While some working lives have been brought to a standstill by furlough or redundancy, others have accelerated to meet the relentless demand for parcels, food deliveries, medical procedures. Social activities have dwindled, while caring responsibilities expanded.
While these experiences are inescapably racialised, classed and gendered, the disconcerting sense of living at an unfamiliar tempo has been widespread.
While we are all living in the heightened time of emergency, it is an emergency that requires most of us to contract our activities. To look after ourselves and those we live with. To stay at home. It is difficult to square this domestic-scale emergency of waiting with the usual temporal orientations of left politics. Even in striking, when we withdraw our labour and industriousness, we dedicate our time to coming together and creating a politics of community. As Cathy Elliott's account of the recent UCU strikes attests, the work of the picket line is often creative and busy in ways that seemed bigger than...
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