Indefinite Delay: On (Post)Apartheid Temporality

Abstract

My objective in this chapter is to show how we might read temporality-that is, the psychical and social experience of time-as an index of the prevailing impasses, both political and (inter)subjective in nature, that characterize a given society. That is to say, I want to draw attention to how paradoxes and apparent distortions of temporality might express a variety of underlying (psycho)social contradictions. Elsewhere (Hook, 2013), I have provided a cursory overview of a series of psychoanalytic 'time signatures' that helpfully characterize aspects of the temporality of (post)apartheid South Africa. Rather than duplicate that material here, I have opted to extend and particularize my own earlier (and rather schematic) theoretical analysis by turning to a variety of forms of temporal delay as indicative of both contemporary post-apartheid and late apartheid South Africa. I start by making reference to the work of Achille Mbembe (2008, 2013), whose thoughts on repetition and nostalgia provide instances of a characteristically post-apartheid mode of temporality: that of suspended history. I then discuss Crapanzano's (1985) notion of waiting, which enables us to think temporality as infused with desire, and which provides useful suggestions regarding how we might develop a psychosocial examination of political temporality. Following this, I turn to an unpublished source, a narrative contributed to the Apartheid Archive Project. The analysis of the text-a fantasized scene of violence-enables us to sketch a form of temporal experience common to apartheid and post-apartheid experiences alike, that of the temporality of dread. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)