The untimely

In all contexts at whatever scale, many things happen, take place at the same time. But what is this “same time” given innumerable events, entities and sites reach toward and detach from each other in oscillating, indeterminable chains of implication? Almost instantaneously, the same time becomes a different time, where the possibilities of repetition depend upon how the discreteness of scenarios is framed. Each of those things that might be said to share the same time themselves emerge from specific trajectories of duration, constitute the response to multiple series of events and instigate scenarios yet to come, but when exactly what will come remains uncertain despite whatever degrees of probability attributed to them. The vicissitudes entailed in representing such simultaneity have compelled countless categorizations and ordering, hierarchies of salience and boundary making, which is why perhaps we talk about things “taking their place” as if aspects of successively larger scales of functionality.

Time taken as duration, then, is impossibly messy, which is why time engaged as a multiplicity of practices, as a matter of composition and choreography is a more manageable exercise; a toolbox that might include presencing, foregrounding, foreclosing, instigating, foregoing, foreshadowing, luring, assembling, improvising, inventing, and so on. In a world of intra-active matter whose self-touching continuously cuts and pastes, detaches and sutures in a process that is simultaneously relational and non-relational, everyone must become an auteur of one kind or another. For what gets generated is a thicket of traces of many processes underway, forces from both the inside and outside across boundaries that are always shifting. In their notion of “cutting together/apart”, Barad (2017) emphasizes that these seemingly successive actions take place at the same time—so that something exists to be divided and that which is divided exists to be articulated, and both are the results of simultaneous actions, undergirding a sense of difference and sameness that has nothing to do with identities but rather actions. One is too few, two is too many (Barad, 2010).

For example, the future may inspire all kinds of feelings: hopefulness, dread, anticipation, concern and indifference. But perhaps it's more important function is to occasion and serve as a platform for a broad range of practices. From owing, deferring, speculating, planning, praying, predicting, protecting, avoiding, insuring, and saving, the future is the locus of many different concrete practices that materialize the sense of time, that detract from living simply “in the moment”, that compel activities to “mean something.” Across cities, the future is increasing something that is “here today, gone tomorrow”—a notion that fuels an exigency for inhabitants to be as opportunistic as possible, to grab whatever opportunity presents itself. This is certainly the case in much of urban Africa characterized by an absolute exigency on the part of residents to get land no matter its location or viability, no matter whether one has the financial resources to do anything with it. Here land is something both concrete and singular—land for land's sake, and as a necessary accompaniment to a viable existence—and something eminently fungible, something convertible into some other entity and disposition. As a result, there is the proliferation of interminable disputes, circumventions, contingencies, and exceptions, which in turn compel a need for order, for more efficient archives, and digitalization, not only of land, but of citizenship status, eligibility,

In “The state as auteur: Timing digitisation in Africa's Silicon Savannah,” Datta and Hoefsloot are exemplary auteurs. For one, they portray the Kenya state as auteur, generating the impression of a seamless “sequencing of actions across different actors, scales and spaces” that produce a “structure of synchronization” while enacting itself across intensely divergent temporalities, causal loops and geographies absent the possibilities of discernible structure. But equally important, they bring to the discussion an interweaving of investigations and discourses that is rarely assembled, drawing from theorists of state operations in Africa, Deleuzian theory, theorizations of temporality, digital media, assemblages, and the political economy of land. They reframe the state, not only as a “director of timing, sequencing and duration of actions related to – laws, policies, documents, information flows across departments and so on”, but also as a distributed, often inchoate choreographer that intersects different temporalities that imbue the transition from governance centered on the analogue to the digital with meaning and an image of coherence.

As Althusser emphasized, such choreography is not an easy task, despite the impulsions of the World Bank that has long been obsessed with functional cadastral systems as the key element for the transparency of rule. Such obsession for cadastrals as a manifestation of transparency on the part of the Bank and others disregards the fact that rule is largely undermined by transparency, that its pretensions to linearity and always discernible causal loops impedes the capacity of the state to insinuate itself in the unruly complexions of the “same time” that, after all, is the objective of rule. As Althusser (2016: 99–100) contends:

We can and must say: for each mode of production there is a peculiar time and history, punctuated in a specific way by the development of productive forces; the relations of production have their peculiar time and history, punctuated in a specific way; the political superstructure has its own history…; philosophy has its own time and history…; aesthetic productions have their own time and history…; scientific formations have their own time and history, etc.

The sheer synchronous multiplicity of times and their consequent dispositions exceed the cognitive capacities of any human processing system to account for how this vast array composes and is composed. As such, Althusser resorts to invocations of commonality derived from “a last instance”—which for him is found in the economic structuration of capital—or perhaps more precisely, capital's structuration of a determinate economic logic. Perhaps this is why the algorithmic as a means of tracing and calculating relationality is commonly viewed as imbuing the future with a sense of greater immediacy and indeterminacy in terms of consciously directing the scope of human impacts. The ancillary obsession with data and measurement, of capturing processes in their aggregates, on the other hand, instills greater confidence in the design of interventions more capable of defining a prospective future. Again, the aspiration to engage a “totality” of conjunctions is thought to make available those points of intervention that might generate the most sweeping of virtuous multiplier effects. The digitalization of land thus is not simply a new form of the archive but a platform for an imagined comparability—that land can be ontologized as a univocal entity situated in clearly discernible relational webs according to specifiable values, assembled and re-assembled as coherent building blocks for a panoply of economic games.

Yet, at “the same time”, the multiplicity of rhythms and facets do not necessarily come together in any reliable way, not only because of their divergent characters and agendas, but also because there may not be an available vernacular to describe their interactions. Things do not necessarily have to relate; they may remain removed as a matter of ontology or simply point to trajectories headed in very different directions. Datta and Hoefsloot powerfully account for this messy ground. After all, how could the state possibly be one thing, with its street level bureaucrats, political department heads that rarely leave the country club, its minions of secretaries, janitors and drivers, its backroom deals and parliamentary performances. It might be expected that within the state there are many actors that would not have desire to have their landholdings codified, as there are those who eagerly await new opportunities for plunder and aggregation. What is the time of ambivalence, particularly for those who seek the recognition afforded by registration but are uncertain about its multiple implications and financial responsibilities.

Coursing through and underneath the sensibilities of the state as auteur are not only polyrhythmic reverberations but the untimely—all of that which is “out of time” or alongside time or before time. “Something that, working within chronological time, urges, presses, and transforms it. And this urgency is the untimeliness, the anachronism that permits us to grasp our time in the form of a “too soon” that is also “too late”; of an “already” that is also a “not yet”. Moreover, it allows us to recognize in the obscurity of the present the light that, without ever being able to reach us, is perpetually voyaging towards us (Agamben, 2009, p. 47). Agamben talks about a present that does not “regress to a historical past” but delves into “the life of the contemporary” and the “the unlived element in everything that is lived” (p. 51), to “read history in unforeseen ways.” It's in the untimeliness of the contemporary that the future smoulders, ready in the gap between the already and not yet, potentially in nourishing ways for things, places, and creatures let down by the arc of urban time unfolding or bent in domineering ways, depending on the capacity to capture that elusive light in the obscurity of the present perpetually voyaging towards us. (Agamben, 2009, p. 53).

As such, the auteur is not simply a “director” that interweaves the fragments of heterogeneous temporalities, but also the trickster, the sorcerer, and the hustler that engages multiple terrain to lure, coax, and compel, to enter the gaps of uncertainty, where things could go many different ways, maybe this disposition or that, one doesn’t really know until one is in the middle of a conundrum and must deploy what Massumi (2018) has called “bare activity”—all of the spur of the moment improvisations necessary to steer through the unlived element(s).

For the state, as an institution, must also live through what Massumi (2024) has labelled, the para institutional. For a certain harnessing of the force of disorganization, “paradoxically provides the occasion for organization to recompose itself around it”, attracting “a certain directionality vectoring from its impact … that presents more like a tendency to precipitate a tendency, or an oriented or open-ended determination to be determined, than a forecast conclusion” (p. 14). As Ash Amin (2024) points out in a crucial intervention on urban chronotopes, for such steadiness of impact and precipitation to mimic instituted force, Massumi considers ‘techniques of attunement’ to be integral in order to “maintain the anarchic element, in its oscillatory co-implication with its contrasting pole of directed activity” (p. 28), to provide “address to transformative powers of collective existence, leveraging powers of relation” (p. 30), and to bring “a tensional field to a resolution”, cutting back after each resolution “to the relational field and enable a subsidence into the mute, silent, background operations of technicity bustling with quasi-chaos” (p. 31). This attunement to the untimely becomes an integral aspect of the capacity of the state to play the role of auteur in the choreographing of time.

Finally, what might be the ordinary time of land itself? The ordinary not as a specific signifier, but a conceptual device to grasp, if only partially, the stretched nature of the embodied operations crisscrossing the various times and spaces where land operates while being present now. The ordinary experience is both within the capture of expulsion and extraction, while pointing laterally and beyond it. Just as the Bolivian Aymara speak of the memory of land as that which actively spreads out to read the horizon for signals of possibility, allowing in certain circumstances for what might be experienced as definitive “cuts” from the present. This constitutes a wholesale jettisoning of a way of life for what is seen as “already there”, if only one peels back the veneer of conventional assessment and normative action. Or, as Morten Nielsen (2014) describes land politics in a suburb of Maputo, as a matter where things might be opened for everyone according to different times. The rules, regulations, customs, and informal practices are ignored to spur a heightened attentiveness to the specificity of a situation, where all these things then are reintroduced in ways that often have little to do with the history of their past usage, but still are authorized as important and legitimate tools. In a context of the failed realization of imaginaries and governmental actions to build model houses a low-income population, rampant informal land markets, competing tenures and land claims, and the proliferation of layering facts of the ground provide a measure of ad hoc order from the sheer inversion of the chaos expected from the multiple contestations, fault lines, and breakages of official plans and developments. The untimely proves essential to keeping time.