Professor Lisa Baraitser

Time Without Qualities

The pop anthem ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ that accompanied Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997 belongs to era in which the unfolding of a progressive future could still be confidently assumed. We currently live, however, with narratives of the ‘end times’ characterized by a continuous capitalist present that heads towards various catastrophic futures – climate change, conflict, resource scarcity and economic austerity for the planetary majority. This project seeks to understand the relation between time and social belonging now that the fantasy of a progressive future has collapsed. It challenges the common-sense view that time is a backdrop to social life, and proposes time as a vital way in which social life is organized, regulated, produced, felt and experienced. Through different temporal orchestrations, social bonds are precariously carved out and sustained. Many social groups in wealthy nations now live with receding expectations of fulfilling work, durable intimacy, and dependable forms of welfare brought about by neoliberal economic policies of the last four decades. Yet social projects involving forms of care, belonging and communality do persist, often through an alternative relation to time. Investigating these practices of belonging generates new ways of understanding the ‘time of our times’. The research involves a psychosocial analysis of a diverse range of cultural objects. These works are chosen because they do not simply propose ‘slowness’ as a deliberate attempt to counteract the speed of modernity, but involve forms of suspended time. The project tracks the temporality, for instance, of care in the context of both mothering and dying, and relations that develop in the stilled time of incarceration or waiting for political change. It aims to build new theoretical concepts for how time facilitates social belonging, making visible multiple ways time is lived and endured in the ‘end times’.