Years ago now, writing about interactions between individuals and small-scale social groups, Pierre Bourdieu declared that strategies of power consist of “playing on the time, or rather the tempo, of the action,” mainly through managing delay and surprise.1 Yet this chronopolitics extends beyond local conflicts to the management of entire populations: both the state and the market produce biopolitical status relations not only through borders, the establishment of private and public zones, and other strategies of spatial containment, but also and crucially through temporal mechanisms. Some groups have their needs and freedoms deferred or snatched away, and some don’t. Some cultural practices are given the means to continue; others are squelched or allowed to die on the vine. Some events count as historically significant, some don’t; some are choreographed as such from the first instance and thereby overtake others. Most intimately, some human experiences officially count as a life or one of its parts, and some don’t. Those forced to wait or startled by violence, whose activities do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often simultaneously black, female, queer.
