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Lateness: Time, Power, and Resistance

 
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Lateness: Time, Power, and Resistance

Benedikt Rudischhauser

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      • Lateness: Time, Power, and Resistance
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      Date
      • 16.05.2022
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      • In this thesis, I construct lateness as a disobedient stance against the temporal domination by narratives of progress. Arguing that these narratives have played a significant role in, firstly, the making of global inequality and, secondly, the bringing forth of plantetary warming, lateness could offer a vocabulary to bridge both issues in the need for a fundamental reimagination of time. Intrinsic to the idea of progress is
        the modern conception of time as unilinear, homogenous, and empty; but rather than seeing this as a natural characteristic of time, this thesis emphasizes its power-sustaining function. Against this imagination of time and the derived narrative of progress, lateness resists the synchronizing imperative to follow a normative path of development and embraces heterogeneity as the condition for commonality.
        In a theoretical argument, I seize lateness from its negative connotation in the geopolitical context of development, where the so-called West is seen as ‘advanced’, ‘civilized’, and ‘timely’, while the Rest is imagined as ‘backward’, ‘uncivilized’, ‘belated’. Instead of regarding the command to catch-up, develop, and modernize as keys to a hopeful future, I argue that this rhetoric performs a demand for complacency against which lateness positions itself in undisciplined defiance. It is, therefore, a refusal to sustain the colonial mechanism of temporal difference that postulates a naturalized timeline of developmental progress in order to justify its expansionary and exploitative missions. This refusal, by not following the predetermined path towards the western civilizational model, also holds the possiblity for alternative ways of living and
        conceptualizing the relationship between humans and nature that are vital to prevent the worst effects of climate change. I mainly discerned three types of lateness that are genealogically connected: a cultural symbol of subordination, an existential condition in the face of climate change, and a disobedient position towards temporal domination.

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