Existential threat construction is a coercive psychological operation. You have an ethical imperative to flip their calculations of urgency to prioritize structural violence

(Elizabeth, ‘Geography and Ethics I: Waiting and Urgency,’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 39 no. 4, pp. 517-526) *Bodies Refers to groups of people, not meant to be discriminatory – thanks Leo :)

Though toileting might be thought of as a special case of bodily urgency, geographic research suggests that the body is increasingly set at odds with larger scale ethical concerns, especially large-scale future events of forecasted suffering. Emergency planning is a particularly good example in which the large-scale threats of future suffering can distort moral reasoning. Žižek (2006) lightly develops this point in the context of the war on terror, where in the presence of fictitious and real ticking clocks and warning systems, the urgent body must be bypassed because there are bigger scales to worry about:¶ What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they nec essitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy. (Žižek, 2006)¶ In the presence of large-scale future emergency, the urgency to secure the state, the citizenry, the economy, or the climate creates new scales and new temporal orders of response (see Anderson, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Dalby, 2013; Morrissey, 2012), many of which treat the urgent body as impulsive and thus requiring management. McDonald’s (2013) analysis of three interconnected discourses of ‘climate security’ illustrates how bodily urgency in climate change is also recast as a menacing impulse that might require exclusion from moral reckoning. The logics of climate security, especially those related to national security, ‘can encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but may present victims of it as a threat’ (McDonald, 2013: 49). Bodies that are currently suffering cannot be urgent, because they are excluded from the potential collectivity that could be suffering everywhere in some future time. Similar bypassing of existing bodily urgency is echoed in writing about violent securitization, such as drone warfare (Shaw and Akhter, 2012), and also in intimate scales like the street and the school, especially in relation to race (Mitchell, 2009; Young et al., 2014).¶ As large-scale urgent concerns are institutionalized, the urgent body is increasingly obscured through technical planning and coordination (Anderson and Adey, 2012). The predominant characteristic of this institutionalization of large-scale emergency is a ‘built-in bias for action’ (Wuthnow, 2010: 212) that circumvents contingencies. The urgent body is at best an assumed eventuality, one that will likely require another state of waiting, such as triage (e.g. Greatbach et al., 2005). Amin (2013) cautions that in much of the West, governmental need to provide evidence of laissez-faire governing on the one hand, and assurance of strength in facing a threatening future on the other, produces ‘just-in-case preparedness’ (Amin, 2013: 151) of neoliberal risk management policies. In the US, ‘personal ingenuity’ is built into emergency response at the expense of the poor and vulnerable for whom ‘[t]he difference between abjection and bearable survival’ (Amin, 2013: 153) will not be determined by emergency planning, but in the material infrastructure of the city.¶ In short, the urgencies of the body provide justifications for social exclusion of the most marginalized based on impulse and perceived threat, while large-scale future emergencies effectively absorb the deliberative power of urgency into the institutions of preparedness and risk avoidance. Žižek references Arendt’s (2006) analysis of the banality of evil to explain the current state of ethical reasoning under the war on terror, noting that people who perform morally reprehensible actions under the conditions of urgency assume a ‘tragic-ethic grandeur’ (Žižek, 2006) by sacrificing their own morality for the good of the state. But his analysis fails to note that bodies are today so rarely legitimate sites for claiming urgency. In the context of the assumed priority of the large-scale future emergency, the urgent body becomes literally nonsense, a non sequitur within societies, states and worlds that will always be more urgent.¶ If the important ethical work of urgency has been to identify that which must not wait, then the capture of the power and persuasiveness of urgency by large-scale future emergencies has consequences for the kinds of normative arguments we can raise on behalf of urgent bodies. How, then, might waiting compare as a normative description and critique in our own urgent time? Waiting can be categorized according to its purpose or outcome (see Corbridge, 2004; Gray, 2011), but it also modifies the place of the individual in society and her importance. As Ramdas (2012: 834) writes, ‘waiting … produces hierarchies which segregate people and places into those which matter and those which do not’. The segregation of waiting might produce effects that counteract suffering, however, and Jeffery (2008: 957) explains that though the ‘politics of waiting’ can be repressive, it can also engender creative political engagement. In his research with educated unemployed Jat youth who spend days and years waiting for desired employment, Jeffery finds that ‘the temporal suffering and sense of ambivalence experienced by young men can generate cultural and political experiments that, in turn, have marked social and spatial effects’ (Jeffery, 2010: 186). Though this is not the same as claiming normative neutrality for waiting, it does suggest that waiting is more ethically ambivalent and open than urgency.¶ In other contexts, however, our descriptions of waiting indicate a strong condemnation of its effects upon the subjects of study. Waiting can demobilize radical reform, depoliticizing ‘the insurrectionary possibilities of the present by delaying the revolutionary imperative to a future moment that is forever drifting towards infinity’ (Springer, 2014: 407). Yonucu’s (2011) analysis of the self-destructive activities of disrespected working-class youth in Istanbul suggests that this sense of infinite waiting can lead not only to depoliticization, but also to a disbelief in the possibility of a future self of any value. Waiting, like urgency, can undermine the possibility of self-care two-fold, first by making people wait for essential needs, and again by reinforcing that waiting is ‘[s]omething to be ashamed of because it may be noted or taken as evidence of indolence or low status, seen as a symptom of rejection or a signal to exclude’ (Bauman, 2004: 109). This is why Auyero (2012) suggests that waiting creates an ideal state subject, providing ‘temporal processes in and through which political subordination is produced’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 90; see also Secor, 2007). Furthermore, Auyero notes, it is not only political subordination, but the subjective effect of waiting that secures domination, as citizens and non-citizens find themselves ‘waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 123).¶ Waiting can therefore function as a potentially important spatial technology of the elite and powerful, mobilized not only for the purpose of governing individuals, but also to retain claims over moral urgency. But there is growing resistance to the capture of claims of urgency by the elite, and it is important to note that even in cases where the material conditions of containment are currently impenetrable, arguments based on human value are at the forefront of reclaiming urgency for the body. In detention centers, clandestine prisons, state borders and refugee camps, geographers point to ongoing struggles against the ethical impossibility of bodily urgency and a rejection of states of waiting (see Conlon, 2011; Darling, 2009, 2011; Garmany, 2012; Mountz et al., 2013; Schuster, 2011). Ramakrishnan’s (2014) analysis of a Delhi resettlement colony and Shewly’s (2013) discussion of the enclave between India and Bangladesh describe people who refuse to give up their own status as legitimately urgent, even in the context of larger scale politics. Similarly, Tyler’s (2013) account of desperate female detainees stripping off their clothes to expose their humanness and suffering in the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in the UK suggests that demands for recognition are not just about politics, but also about the acknowledgement of humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being that which cannot wait. The continued existence of places like Yarl’s Wood and similar institutions in the USA nonetheless points to the challenge of exposing the urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily hidden from view, and also reminds us that our research can help to explain the relationships between normative dimensions and the political and social conditions of struggle.¶ In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do seem to evocatively describe otherwise obscured suffering (e.g. Bennett, 2011), but it is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of urgency. Given the discussion above, what might be accomplished – and risked – by incorporating urgency more overtly and deliberately into our discussions of waiting, surplus and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify the implicit but understated ethical consequences and normativity associated with waiting, and encourage explicit discussion about harmful suffering. Waiting can be productive or unproductive for radical praxis, but urgency compels and requires response. Geographers could be instrumental in reclaiming the ethical work of urgency in ways that leave it open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and representations. There is good reason to be thoughtful in this process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure differentiated experiences of being human, dividing up ‘those for whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all’ (Butler, 2009: 50). But when the urgent body is rendered as only waiting, both materially and discursively, it is just as easily cast as impulsive, disgusting, animalistic (see also McKittrick, 2006). Feminist theory insists that the urgent body, whose encounters of violence are ‘usually framed as private, apolitical and mundane’ (Pain, 2014: 8), are as deeply political, public, and exceptional as other forms of violence (Phillips, 2008; Pratt, 2005). Insisting that a suffering body, now, is that which cannot wait, has the ethical effect of drawing it into consideration alongside the political, public and exceptional scope of large-scale futures. It may help us insist on the body, both as a single unit and a plurality, as a legitimate scale of normative priority and social care.¶ In this report, I have explored old and new reflections on the ethical work of urgency and waiting. Geographic research suggests a contemporary popular bias towards the urgency of large-scale futures, institutionalized in ways that further obscure and discredit the urgencies of the body. This bias also justifies the production of new waiting places in our material landscape, places like the detention center and the waiting room. In some cases, waiting is normatively neutral, even providing opportunities for alternative politics. In others, the technologies of waiting serve to manage potentially problematic bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination (e.g. Wright, 2013). One of my aims has been to suggest that moral reasoning is important both because it exposes normative biases against subjugated people, and because it potentially provides routes toward struggle where claims to urgency seem to foreclose the possibilities of alleviation of suffering. Saving the world still should require a debate about whose world is being saved, when, and at what cost – and this requires a debate about what really cannot wait. My next report will extend some of these concerns by reviewing how feelings of urgency, as well as hope, fear, and other emotions, have played a role in geography and ethical reasoning.¶ I conclude, however, by pulling together past and present. In 1972, Gilbert White asked why geographers were not engaging ‘the truly urgent questions’ (1972: 101) such as racial repression, decaying cities, economic inequality, and global environmental destruction. His question highlights just how much the discipline has changed, but it is also unnerving in its echoes of our contemporary problems. Since White’s writing, our moral reasoning has been stretched to consider the future body and the more-than-human, alongside the presently urgent body – topics and concerns that I have not taken up in this review but which will provide their own new possibilities for urgent concerns. My own hope presently is drawn from an acknowledgement that the temporal characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be interrupted in creative ways (Sharma, 2014), with the possibility of squaring the urgent body with our large-scale future concerns. Temporal alternatives already exist in ongoing and emerging revolutions and the disruption of claims of cycles and circular political processes (e.g. Lombard, 2013; Reyes, 2012). Though calls for urgency will certainly be used to obscure evasion of responsibility (e.g. Gilmore, 2008: 56, fn 6), they may also serve as fertile ground for radical critique, a truly fierce urgency for now.