waiting as domination

In " Moving beyond social categories by incorporating context more deeply in social psychological theory ", I advocate for social psychologists to stop essentializing social categories by treating them as the explanatory cause of societal dynamics. They should be understood as consequences or symptoms of political processes & social practices, not antecedent causes. An important part of the story, but not the complete picture.

This quote sums it up:

Once categories become “understood as expressions not of objectified social relations but of the struggle to objectify them”, it follows that they can only operate as an indication of the background social processes forcing those categories into social life. Locating explanations in categories allows categories to act as scapegoats for the social practices (such as racism, racialization or gendering) that are actually producing the consequences and illusory naturalness of categories in the first place

Or in the words of Karen and Barbara Fields in " Racecraft: The soul of inequality in American life ":

Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once. Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race, as just defined, so it is important to register their distinctness. The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss...

Race and racism belong to different families of social construction, and that neither belongs to the same family as the United States of America or the London Underground. Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity.

While writing our review, I was in the early-mid process of finding, learning, understanding critical scholarship and philosophies that challenged how social psychology (and honestly, the public) thought about social categories. Due to timing & word limits, there was a lot left out of that review that I wish was there.

In hindsight, I wish I dove deeper into how to study discrimination using social science methods, but in a distinctly assemblage theory way that emphasizes how “entities" (e.g., individuals, groups, a norm, an ideology, a mountain) dynamically emerge from (re)constructions of discursive and material flows - something social psych is not very good at, theoretically and methodologically. The final section on how current studies are already doing some of this was meant to be motivational, to help social scientists feel better about what they are up to. But I think instead it ends up functioning as an attempt to domesticate radical theories to fit into social psych's own familiar vocab/methodologies. This is a comforting strategy to assuage the threat of external and challenging philosophies, necessary for publication in these kinds of top/generalist journals - unfortunately you can't just dog the shit out of a field, they expect or desire handholding and uplifting constructiveness. But this forced epistemic translation can be a problem, catering (translating) too much means you can't push as far as you need to because you're bogged down trying to teach basics and a new way of seeing.

In this case, I wish we attempted to show how one can study power without making social categories the causal center of the investigation/explanation. That can be a scary thought for a social psychologist trained in mainstream identity theories:

"if we move beyond social categories, then what in the hell are we supposed to measure/analyze/theorize?"

Look at the Time

With all this in mind, there's a dimension of oppression that keeps popping up across my various research domains that I have found compelling and surprisingly obvious yet elusive: time. Thinking about people and power not primarily through social categories but through the concept of time shifts focus to the temporal flows of everyday living, to the physical & sensory intensities of life's speed, rhythm, pacing.

Jasbir Puar coined the term “slow life” ( book here ) to call attention to how time is used as a tool of surveillant control in Palestine under Israeli occupation. Life is deliberately slowed down as physical architectures “are constructed as obstacles to ‘free-flowing’ speed, rhythm, and pace: checkpoints, circuitous highways, settlement locations, and the partitioning of land and populations into Areas A, B, and C. Nothing ever happens ‘on time’”. The techno-colonial modulation of the rhythmic patterns and speed of life limits not only mobility, but ruptures how people experience themselves in daily living, primarily through a disorienting uncertainty - needing to be prepared for anything to happen at any time. This regulation of time and affect is a “racializing affect” where bodies are situated “in the specificity of technosocial systems that interface and instrumentalize the historicity of colonialism.” Put differently, this forced emotional and bodily labor of enduring uncertainty is a temporal experience produced by the infrastructures of a “bio-necro-political state”. A governance of affect “that contributes to the capitalist profitability, expansion, and in the case of Palestine, entrenchment of technologies of containment, of occupation as land use.”

Now shifting towards rural United States, Christopher Ali has done extensive research on the experience and “digital indignity” of lacking broadband connectivity in rural communities due to market and policy failures. Similar to Puar, Ali emphasizes how time (specifically an open-ended chronic waiting for connectivity that never truly comes) is used “as a form of social control and an exercise of power” (i.e., temporal domination): “those waiting on connection are powerless to end the waiting, increasingly frustrated with the powerful—the governmental officials, policy makers, and broadband providers—who control their waiting”. This imposed waiting illustrates how one is truly not in command of oneself and limits the ability to plan for future (i.e., produces uncertainty and a paralyzed sense of time). Waiting in the United States is stratified, those with more resources wait less, while “the end-result for rural Americans is a perpetual condition of waiting: waiting for telecommunications companies to wire a community, waiting on policymakers to recognize broadband limitations, waiting on state officials to allow cooperatives and municipalities to fill the gaps, and waiting on a webpage to load because of inadequate service”. Side note: I definitely see how forms of this bureaucratic-imposed waiting as temporal domination operate within the immigration system.

Notice that in both accounts, social categories (e.g., Palestinians, rural Americans) remain relevant to how time is experienced, but not as causal explanations. Temporal experience is not produced by being Palestinian or rural American. Rather, these categories and their associated consequences are dynamically constructed through the same political processes and social practices that regulate and distribute temporal flows. In this sense, social categories emerge as effects or end-points of the machinery that organizes time, crystallizing a systematic and negative relation to whoever controls that machinery. This point might be harder to see for these specific categories because they might seem natural, but Barbara Fields makes the same exact point in the case of race : “W.E.B. Du Bois reached a similar conclusion in discarding the academic race dogma within which he had once sought to discover a space for the aspirations of Afro-American people. "[T]he black man," he eventually concluded, is simply "a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia.”

This is where Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “On difference without separability” links these observations through a critique of Enlightenment philosophy and science, which violently ordered the modern Subject and the world through the logic of time. Difference within these frameworks is explained through sequential time, spatial separation, and causal development, making human variation legible only within frameworks of progress, evolution, and historical ordering. As Puar observes, the result is that “all relations of time, whether slow or speedy, are subject to capture, extraction, and exploitation”.

da Silva’s counter-intervention is to “re-imagine sociality” through “the principle of nonlocality” which “supports a kind of thinking that does not reproduce the methodological and ontological grounds of the modern subject, namely linear temporality and spatial separation… What if, instead of The Ordered World, we could image The World as a Plenum, an infinite composition in which each existant’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible expression of all the other existants, with which it is entangled beyond space and time.” Put differently, to counter the colonial modulation of time and its projection of illusory separabilities between people, we need to refuse allowing colonial time to form our understanding of the world and each other, we need an exploration of what hidden modes of relation appear when we start disrupting our ingrained way of seeing time in a linear way, where “the past” is very much still as present as “the future”, allowing difference to emerge as entangled.

Prob not a conclusion we would arrive at through the category-first approach