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Time and Subjectivity in World Politics

Ty Solomon University of Glasgow

International Studies Quarterly

58(4), December 2014, Pgs. 671-681 Critically-inclined International Relations (IR) scholars have recently turned to examining the issue of time and its implications for world politics. However, there has yet to be a thorough account of how a focus on temporality deepens our understanding of one of the field’s core concepts: subjectivity. Drawing upon insights from psychoanalytic theory, the paper argues that the discursive decentering of subjectivity (long a focus in poststructuralist IR) is bound to the subject’s temporal decentering. Moreover, conceptualizing these together helps to account for the underexplored role of desire in subject formation. The paper thus draws together insights regarding discourse, desire, and identity to offer a more comprehensive theory of the subject in IR, and a richer account of the social construction process in general. The empirical import of these ideas is illustrated with regards to the function of temporality and desire in the politics of the US-led war on terror.

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Introduction

Nietzsche (2003:46) famously understood time not as a Newtonian universal constant, but

as an experience marked by flux, producing not static being but more life-affirming possibilities of

“becoming.” The recent interest in time shown by International Relations (IR) scholars seems, in

many ways, to broadly follow this trail blazed by Nietzsche. Several recent studies understand

time less as ticking constancy than as opening for political possibility in constructivism and realism

(Berenskoetter 2011; Hom and Steele 2010), and have examined its neglected role in the relations

between agents and structures (Nishimura 2011), its function in the historical construction of

sovereignty (Hom 2010; Walker 1993), and its central yet under-acknowledged role in scholars’

theorizing about international politics (Hutchings 2008).

While these inquiries into this previously neglected concept in IR are certainly encouraging,

work remains to more comprehensively draw out the significance of time for the study of global

politics. Questions raised by the relative neglect of temporality are manifested in long-established

poststructuralist approaches in IR (see Ashley and Walker 1990; Campbell 1998; Doty 1996;

Epstein 2008; Hansen 2006; Zehfuss 2002). For example, the place of time in relation to one of the

field’s core concepts – subjectivity – has yet to be fully unfolded. The concept of the subject has

been at the forefront of critically-oriented IR studies for some time, particularly those works

emphasizing the role of discourse. Many here contend that subjects are not pre-defined prior to

social interaction, but rather are performatively constructed through discourse. As Campbell

(1998: x, emphasis added) stated, poststructuralism is concerned with “the problematic of

subjectivity in international politics rather than with the international relations of pre-given

subjects.” In other words, in contrast to traditional rationalist, actor-centered approaches, and even

conventional constructivism (see Wendt 1999: 7), poststructuralism takes agents’ social

constitution as a problem to be interrogated rather than an analytical starting point. Moreover,

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poststructuralism generally contends that because of the instability of language itself, subjectivities

produced through discourse are themselves ultimately unstable and without firm ontological

grounding. The subject is, in other words, de-centered off of the traditional Cartesian foundations

of self-contained unity (Odysseos 2007).

Yet, there are at least two critical gaps in these approaches to subjectivity when considering

the complicating factor of time/temporality. First, this paper contends that not only are subjects

discursively de-centered, but argues that this discursive decentering is intimately bound up with

temporal de-centering. Agents’ “sense of self” is continually produced in and through time, and

this plays a constitutive role in the production of the subject. Subjects continually re-imagine

themselves as they “are,” who or what they “have been,” and who they hope to be. Performativity,

crucial to much research in the field that explores discourse and subjectivity, is a process whose

temporal aspects have yet to be fully incorporated into IR theorizing on these issues. Second,

perhaps part of the reason for the neglect of the function of time in subjectivity is due to the

underappreciated function of time in the production of meaning. The process of meaning-making

itself is temporally registered and significant. The role of time in the unfolding of meaning – and

thus the production of meaningful subjectivities in discourse – is ripe for a more thorough

investigation. These concerns can be enveloped within the broader question of the role of

temporality in identification practices. As the production of meaning and subjectivity are

constitutive of social practices, their mutual interweaving with temporality suggests a richer and

more theoretically comprehensive understanding of the social construction process. Moreover,

analyzing the temporal dimensions of these issues offer an understanding of how key affective

aspects of subjectivity come into view. The subject seeks security in its identification practices,

and, as argued below, its temporal decentering sparks desire for ontological stability. In this

manner, this paper aims to build upon and shore-up the theoretical bases for poststructuralist and

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anti-essentialist approaches to subjectivity in IR, rather than attempting to “falsify” this well-

established line of research.

This article contends that insights from psychoanalytic theory can be usefully employed to

theorize the mutual interweaving of temporality, meaning, and subjectivity. Specifically, the work

of Jacques Lacan (2006) and the Lacanian-inspired approach of Slavoj Žižek (1989; 1997) offer

resources whose express concern has been the mutual relationships among these factors. For

Lacan and Žižek, temporality plays a key role in both the production of meaning and in subject

formation. A key argument here is that meaning production is constituted retroactively after a

discourse has been articulated. Signifiers (words and phrases) draw their meaning not only through

differences from other signifiers (an aspect that the field has thoroughly explored), but also through

a kind of temporal loop where their significance is only fully registered once the final signifier has

been articulated. Building upon this idea, the subject itself is continually constituted through a

retroactive temporality, whereby the subject posits itself as “having always been” a full and

complete “self.” However, this is a kind of “fantasy” (in Lacanian terms), since the subject is

always marked by a lack, a perpetual sense of incompleteness. In this view of identification

practices, desire is the driving element that sparks the subject’s continual search for a “full” sense

of self, even though this is ultimately impossible. Analyzing the issue of temporality quickly

brings us to the need to analyze the central role of desire in subjectivity. In this sense, this

framework usefully interweaves both temporality and desire as constitutive in the production of

meaning and subjectivity.1

1 Several IR scholars have recently utilized Lacanian theory: see Arfi’s (2010) critique of IR theory, Debrix’s (1999) use of Lacan’s “gaze” concept in the politics of peacekeeping, Epstein’s (2011) critique of constructivism’s notion of the unitary “self,” Edkins’s (1999) exploration of “the political,” and Uluorta’s (2008) analysis of neoliberal hegemony in the US. Many of these works pertinently utilize Lacan’s ideas on lack and decentered subjectivity, yet tend to downplay the unique function of temporality in this framework. One exception is Edkins’s (2003) excellent work on “trauma time.” While Edkins analyzes how trauma disrupts notions of normal linear time, I argue here that multiple temporalities are continual features of subjectivity beyond trauma as such.

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Importantly, this analysis of temporality, meaning, and subjectivity offers a fresh lens

through which to interrogate the US-led war on terror. Poststructuralist approaches have rightly

emphasized the role of difference here through the production of “good” and “evil” binaries.

However, they have often downplayed the function of temporality in the war on terror, most

notably in the (re)production of the American “Nation” – the collective “we” – following 9/11.

Here I build upon recent work on subjectivity and temporality in the war on terror (Debrix 2008;

Jarvis 2009; Lundborg 2012; Steele 2010) to argue that although representations of time in official

discourses worked to solidify their perceived legitimacy, a focus on the function of temporality and

desire stresses their constitutive role in the construction of a collective subject – the “grounding”

that political discourses (such as the war on terror) often strive for.

This paper develops these ideas in the following sections. First, I make explicit these

theoretical gaps in the relevant discourse and identity literatures, focusing on how poststructuralism

conceptualizes the core idea of the instability of language, and thus the instability of identities, and

how this framework can productively benefit from a more comprehensive conceptualization of

meaning and subject formation. Second, I offer an overview of relevant concepts from Lacanian

theory on the production of meaning and the constitution of the subject. Although Lacan’s

framework is extensive – as are its deployments by scholars such as Žižek – here I focus on the

role of retroactivity and desire in meaning-making and subjectivity. In the third section, I

empirically illustrate these arguments in an analysis of the US-based “war on terror” discourse

following the 9/11 attacks. The conclusion briefly reiterates the paper’s main arguments, and

suggests directions for future research.

Meaning-making and Subjectivity in IR

Since the “third debate” raised questions of culture and identity (Lapid and Kratochwil

1996), the issue of meaning has often been at the forefront of IR scholarly concern. In many ways,

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one of the major contributions of these literatures was to re-focus concerns away from the

materialism and rationalism of neorealist and neoliberal theory to a focus on how agents “made

sense” of the social structures within which they operated. Rather than conceptualizing agents and

structures in terms of material capabilities (in the traditional sense) and assuming causal relations

among them, constructivists, poststructuralists, and others have explored (albeit, in quite different

ways) the production of meaningful identities.2

When meaning-making in global politics has been emphasized, it has often been

poststructuralist scholars who have focused on unraveling its linguistic structures – with particular

attention paid to the role of difference. This work has tended to focus on the “slippery” aspects of

discourse. That is, many have emphasized how the ungrounded “nature” of language produces

both the conditions of possibility of meaning and the conditions for its undermining. Discourses,

in this sense, are ontologically primary and can be understood as “framings of meaning and lenses

of interpretation, rather than objective, historical truths” (Hansen 2006: 7). The role of difference

is key here. Following Saussure (2011), language is understood as a system within which

signifiers draw their meaning not from their “intrinsic” connotation, but from their relationship to

other signifiers. Words do not take on meaning naturally, but are produced as “signs” through the

linking of signifiers and signifieds, or, words and the objects or concepts that words purport to

represent. To take a common example, the signifier “dog” refers to the animal not because the

animal is innately called “dog,” but rather because of the arbitrary assignment of the signifier

“dog” in the English language, and because of its “play of differences” from “cat,” “bat,” etc.

(Milliken 1999). Discourses produce meaning through the articulating together of chains of

signifiers in a relational manner (Epstein 2008: 6-8; Milliken 1999: 229; Hansen 2006: 18-23).

2 While there are many points of contention between these schools, the one most relevant here – the reasons for which become clear below – is the essentialism of constructivism (see Wendt 1999) and the anti-essentialism of poststructuralism (see Zehfuss 2002). For a view of constructivism as a “middle ground” between rationalism and poststructuralism, see Adler (1997). For an overview of poststructuralism in IR, see Hansen (2010).

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Moreover, different signifiers may represent different signifieds. For instance, “freedom” and

“democracy” can have many different meanings, depending upon the other signifiers with which

they are articulated. Not only are such terms “essentially contested concepts” (Gallie 1956), but

since they ultimately have no direct tie to material grounding, their ambiguity renders them as sites

of political contestation.

This view of meaning-making is central to both the politics of discourse and of

contemporary understandings of subjectivity. Through discursive practices, signifiers and

meanings are brought together to produce particular constructions of the world. These practices do

not merely reflect or describe social relations that pre-exist their linking within discourse. Rather,

such relations do not exist for speaking subjects outside of the discursive practices that constitute

these relations. Through this lens, politics is played out not between agents or actors that have

fully-formed identities prior to political struggle. Rather, politics is the very process through which

identities are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed, and through which discourses struggle

to achieve dominance or hegemony (Doty 1996; Hansen 2006; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Like

signifiers themselves, social subjects become meaningful in relation to what they are not. For

instance, as discussed below, in US security discourses after 9/11 the discursive subject “America”

was constructed as “good” in reference to “evil” terrorists and “rogue” states (Jackson 2005). The

subject “America” – this collective “us” – was produced as one side of a binary that was valued

over an “other” (“terrorist”) yet both were mutually constitutive within the same discursive sign

system constructed after 9/11.

However, the role of difference is but one part of how meaningful subjects were produced

in post-9/11 US terrorism discourses. As thoroughly as IR scholars have explored these plays of

differences, there is another key but underexplored element in meaning-making. For a signifier to

register as socially significant, it is not only differentially produced, but is simultaneously

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temporally generated. Relations of difference are bound to the temporal movements of

signification itself. To more fully understand meaning making – and the production of meaningful

subjects in post-9/11 US security discourses – the role of time in the production and temporary

stabilization of difference should be accounted for. The following section develops this idea with

an eye towards further unfolding IR theories of meaning and subjectivity.

Retroactivity, Desire, and Subjectivity

Lacan’s theory of meaning-making through signification in many ways builds upon

Saussure’s work on difference, and thus shares a similar starting point with many studies of

difference in IR. However, despite his emphasis on meaning-making through difference, Saussure

understood signifier and signified to be inextricably tied together – that they were “intimately

united” in the production of the sign (Saussure 2011: 66). Lacan, in contrast, contends that they are

not connected in any necessary or foundational way. Whereas Saussure’s work often implied that

meaning originates from signified and flows to signifier (with both together producing the overall

sign) (Stavrakakis 1999: 24), Lacan (1997: 227) built upon critiques of Saussure (Benveniste 1966)

and rejected this notion, insisting upon the “independence of the signifier and the signified” rather

than their tying together.

Lacan thus diverges from Saussure on a key issue. Difference is essential for meaning and

subject construction, yet Lacan emphasizes that the tensions of difference are continually bound to

the workings of time in the unfolding of meaning. To unpack this, it is first necessary to note that

Lacan (2006: 677) follows classical linguistic theory (including Saussure and Roman Jakobson

[Williams 1999:56]) in arguing that signifiers are bound to both “diachronic” and “synchronic”

dimensions, or as Johnston (2008: 248) explains, “temporal as well as spatial differentiation is

essential to the status of the signifier.” Put differently, groups of words (phrases, sentences) have

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both differential and temporal relationships with each other in how they are interpreted as

meaningful (Johnston 2008: 248).

To explain this – and to see how Lacan moves beyond Saussure and other theorists focusing

solely on difference – Bruce Fink (one of Lacan’s contemporary interpreters) walks through

Lacan’s argument. Fink begins by noting Lacan’s (2006: 419) oft-cited notion of the “sliding of

the signified under the signifier,” or as commonly understood, that some signifiers can stand-in for

many different “signifieds” (for example, that the signifier “democracy” can have many meanings).

Fink argues that – contrary to most understandings – the phrase “sliding of the signified under the

signifier” refers not simply to the assertion that a word may have many different meanings in

different contexts. Rather, the phrase refers to Lacan’s interpretation of Saussure’s original

argument that “the signified unfolds contemporaneously with speech, meaning being accretive or

additive in nature, each later part of a sentence adding a portion of the meaning to the portions

already provided at the beginning of the sentence” (Fink 2004: 112). To see this (that is, Lacan’s

understanding of Saussure’s argument), Fink offers a helpful example (2004: 112-13). Take the

sentence “Dick and Jane were exposed, when they were young children and in a repeated manner,

to harmful radiation.” We can map Saussure’s theory of how the meaning of this sentence unfolds,

and then contrast it to Lacan’s approach.

______Clause A________ _________________Clause B___________________ _____Clause C_____

Dick and Jane were exposed, when they were young children and in a repeated manner, to harmful radiation.

Lacan interprets Saussure to be claiming that a string of signifiers such as this becomes meaningful

to a receiver as the meaning of each clause is progressively added to the meanings of the

subsequent clauses. Thus, in Saussure’s view, Clause A of the sentence has a meaning, Clause B

has a meaning, Clause C has a meaning, and that the meaning of the entire sentence is disclosed

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chronologically as the meaning of each clause is added up (A + B + C) (Fink 2004: 112). In other

words, “the signified can be thought of as unfolding or ‘sliding’ along with the signifier (or ‘under’

the signifier), the signifier being the sound-image (or sound pattern) produced by the enunciation

of the three clauses” (Fink 2004: 112). Meaning, as understood by Saussure, is produced through

additive signification of the clauses, and is formed both differentially (each word draws meaning

from its differentiation from other words) and through linear time as the articulation of the sentence

unfolds.

In contrast, Lacan argues against this theory of meaning-making. Rather than meaning

being produced strictly linearly (in temporal terms) and additively (in spatial/differential terms) in

this manner, Lacan instead notes that there are certain key moments in which meaning is

constructed by either anticipation or retroaction. As Fink (2004: 113) explains, phrases such as “on

the one hand . . . ” lead a receiver to anticipate more signifiers to come (such as “on the other hand

. . . ”), beyond the signifiers already articulated. In the example above, when Clause C is “to

harmful radiation” the previous two clauses A and B (“Dick and Jane were exposed, when they

were young children and in a repeated manner”) retroactively take on a particular meaning. This

becomes much more apparent when another phrase is substituted as Clause C, such as “to classical

music.” Here, clauses A and B, even while containing the same grouping and ordering of

signifiers, would take on a drastically different meaning. The “meaning of ‘exposed to’ is tied

down when Clause C is provided; its meaning is narrowed down from its other possible meanings

(such as ‘experienced’ or ‘flashed at’). Signifier and signified are, as it were, tied together at that

moment” (Fink 2004: 113). In this sense, the temporal construction of meaning here is not strictly

linear, but is projected backwards once the final signifier is offered. As Lacan (2006: 682)

contends, a “sentence closes its signification only with its last term, each term being anticipated in

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the construction constituted by the other terms and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its

retroactive effect.”

This “tying together” occurs through particular signifiers Lacan (2006: 681) likens to

“button ties.” The tying of a button to fabric as analogous to a prominent signifier “tying” together

the meaning of a sentence works because, as Fink (2004: 113) observes, a “button tie holds things

in place while not exactly anchoring them to anything – they are simply tied to each other.” There

is no extra-discursive referent to which they are tied, but rather to each other through the

signification process. This, in turn, addresses the problem of determining when the “sliding” of

signifieds under signifiers presumably stops, at least temporarily. Laclau and Mouffe point to this

problem when they note that even in an anti-essentialist world without foundations, where meaning

is never fully fixed, meaningful socio-political relations still entail some degree of fixity. The

“impossibility of an ultimate fixity of meaning implies that there have to be partial fixations –

otherwise, the very flow of differences [of significations] would be impossible. Even in order to

differ, to subvert meaning, there has to be a meaning” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112). Such

“button ties” are the means “by which the signifier stops the otherwise indefinite sliding of

signification” (Lacan 2006: 681).

For Lacan, the retroactive production of meaning is the same continual retroactive temporal

movement that constructs the subject itself. In this sense, it is through the process of (retroactive)

interpretation and construction of a discourse that one becomes temporally positioned as a subject

of a discourse. Just as a “button tie” retroactively pins down the meaning of a sentence, this is also

the point at which the subject becomes “sewn” to the signifier (Žižek 1989: 101). So, for example,

in a social field of unfixed political signifiers – such as “welfare” and “freedom” – different

“button ties” (or master signifiers) retroactively project different meanings and subjectivities upon

this field, depending upon the particular discourse within which they are articulated by a subject.

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In a discourse of American-style “conservatism,” “welfare” would have negative connotations

(“government dependency”), and “freedom” may have an economic (“free market”) meaning. In

contrast, in a discourse of American-style “liberalism,” “welfare” might represent worthwhile

public efforts towards social justice, while “freedom” may be constructed as expanding minority

rights. The point here is that only after the articulation of an anchoring master signifier

(“conservative,” “liberal”) do the other signifiers and subjects become a meaningful discourse.

The political illusion here, as Žižek (1989: 102) points out, is that “the meaning” of the chain

appears to have “been there” all along. It is the false impression that the meaning of any of the

elements of the discourse (“welfare,” “freedom”) is intrinsic to the elements themselves, rather

than having been retroactively projected backwards by the intervention of a master signifier

“tying” them together. Moreover, the contingency and temporal instability of both meaning and

subjectivity are simultaneously erased through the retroactive movement. This stitching together is

“successful only in so far as it effaces its own traces” (Žižek 1989: 102).

It is largely for these reasons that the subject’s discursive decentering is intimately bound to

temporal decentering. The subject is never fully “present” not only in a differential/linguistic

sense, insofar as its “identity” is never truly located “in itself,” but in broader socio-symbolic

structures. The subject is also never fully “present” in a temporal sense. As Lacan (2006: 247)

argues, what “is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more,

nor even the [present] perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will

have been, given what I am in the process of becoming.” In other words, the instability of

subjectivity is part and parcel of the subject “not having fully been” in the past and “not quite yet

being” in the future. The subject only ever “will have been” (the “future anterior” tense) since it

never fully arrives at the future image of wholeness and centeredness that it strives towards in its

identification practices. The subject is caught among these “backward” and “forward”

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temporalities as its identification practices are simultaneously constituted through both.3 As Bowie

(1991: 184) explains, the subject “comes into being at the point of intersection between an

irrecoverable past and an unattainable future; its structure is that of a ceaseless cross-stitching, in

language, between what-is-no-longer-the-case and what-is-not-yet-the-case.” Through its

identifications with collective symbolic structures (including master signifiers such as “man,”

“woman,” “strong,” “freedom,” “nation,” etc.) subjects anticipate the sense of “wholeness” or

“completeness” that these identifications will hopefully entail. Yet, subjects tend to re-imagine

their past selves to fit with what they believe their present selves to be. This is, in a sense,

subjects’ attempt to constantly re-ground themselves in a seemingly “original” self.4 For example,

in identifying with traits associated with being “strong,” I anticipate that my lack and

incompleteness (my insecurities, anxieties, etc.) will be alleviated. I look to the future to a security

that I have not yet become. Simultaneously, this is matched by constant practices aimed at

pinpointing a “true” self, a self that “I have always been.” As Žižek (1989: 104) argues, the

“subject becomes at every stage ‘what it always already was’: a retroactive effect is experienced as

something which was already there from the beginning.”

It is through this nexus of retroactive and anticipatory temporalities that the key notion of

desire arises. Desire emerges through the subject’s “lack” of never fully being temporally or

discursively present. Since the subject’s signifiers can never “fully” represent the subject, there is

always a leftover, a sense that part of “me” is not quite captured in my discursive identifications.

There is a continual sense on the part of the subject that s/he is never “fully” what s/he desires or

wants to be. Subjectivity is always marked by a lack. This lack of – and desire for – a “full

3 Throughout this discussion I follow Hoy (2009: xiii) in using “temporality” to refer to “time as it manifests itself in human existence,” as opposed to “time” in the sense of “universal time, clock time, or objective time.” 4 This is close to what some IR scholars have called “ontological security,” or security of the self. See Mitzen (2006), Steele (2008). The notion of desire, as elaborated below, provides an affective spark for why ontological security-seekers continue to search for such security in the face of constant frustrations. In this sense, desire works in conjunction with the emotional factors of shame and honor that Steele (2008) in particular highlights.

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identity” is what sparks the subject’s continual identification practices, even in the face of constant

frustration in never quite achieving the sought-after sense of self-unity. In other words, it is the

subject’s lack of “full” being that sparks desire for its attainment (although it is ultimately illusory).

Desire itself, though, cannot be ultimately satisfied because no object is able to alleviate it – lack

and incompleteness are necessary for desire for subjectivity. This leads to a paradoxical situation:

desire for a signifier that the subject can assume as its own sparks the search for identity, yet none

is able to fully represent the subject. Desire, then, remains unmet, a fully stable identity always

remains out of reach, and the search for identity security continues.

The subject’s desire plays out through what Lacan terms fantasy. The psychoanalytic

notion of fantasy differs from common understandings of the term as such as daydreaming.

Fantasy here is understood as the narrative frame through which the subject pursues the promise of

capturing the “lacking” sense of “wholeness.” In this respect, fantasy is a much more fundamental

part of socio-political reality than is usually presumed. The subject constructs a fantasy narrative

that allows it to continue desiring, and thus offers a kind of “promise” that s/he might still reach a

whole “sense of self” through continued identification practices. In other words, rather than being

a purely individual phenomenon, desire is always channeled through the social, through discourse.

Žižek (2002: 197) emphasizes the temporal aspects of the subject’s fantasies of attaining

“fullness:” “the basic paradox of the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy consists in a kind of time

loop – the ‘original’ fantasy’ is always the fantasy of the origins.” In other words, one of the most

common fantasies is the fantasy of origin, that the subject “has always been there,” that there was

no contingency contaminating the subject’s origins. Politically, this is often seen in nationalist

myths of origins. The various political forces within a country continually re-narrate the nation’s

“origins” in order to discursively claim that they represent “the true meaning” of the nation, and

that this meaning is to be recovered by reaching back to a nation’s “pure” founding. However,

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such “origins” are never self-evident or grounded in a readily apparent reality. Rather, national

origins “are never simple given facts: we can never refer to them as a found condition, context, or

presupposition of our activity. Precisely as presuppositions, such narratives are always-already

‘posited’ by us. Tradition is tradition insofar as we constitute it as such” (Žižek 1993: 127). The

desire for ontological stability – for a “unified” collective subject – leads to the positing of a

“fullness” which never in fact existed at the supposed point of origin.

Time and Social Construction in IR Theory

This discussion in many ways complements recent IR work on time and social construction.

Take, for example, Berenskoetter’s (2011) outlining of a temporal ontology for constructivism. He

argues that constructivism’s lack of attention to the role of visions and utopias is usefully addressed

through Heidegger’s work on the temporal aspects of being. Specifically, a constructivist focus on

reflexivity needs to take into account the future-directedness of being. Since being is perpetually

finite, this “lends the self an evolutionary character in which a sense of Self cannot ever be

solidified; instead, it highlights that becoming is a forward movement and that the formation of a

sense of Self is to a significant degree future oriented” (Berenskoetter 2011: 653). Since beings

face uncertainty about the future (because they can never know the future), anxiety is the primary

condition of the modern subject, rather than the Hobbesian emphasis on fear (Berenskoetter 2011:

653-4; see also Odysseos 2007). The future is the primary existential focus of beings. While the

past does play a part in being, the future “is a ‘pull factor’ providing the Self with an opportunity to

move on, or ahead, on a certain course” (Berenskoetter 2011: 653). Thus, what a Heideggerian

emphasis on futurity brings to constructivism is a reflexive approach to the possibilities the future

holds for imagining possible new worlds.

Johnston (2008: 260) contends that the Lacanian view of the subject “is, in a certain

fashion, a transformative psychoanalytic appropriation of the Heideggerian analytic of Dasein.

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Heidegger conceives of Dasein as a simultaneous dwelling within a plurality of registers of

temporality,” albeit with an emphasis (as Berenskoetter nicely illustrates) on “stretching beyond its

here and now” (Johnston 2008: 260-1). Yet, a psychoanalytic framework weaves in a key insight:

The crucial psychoanalytic twist to be added here amounts to the introduction of the motif of conflict, a motif central to [Lacanian] thought, into this picture: the multiple temporal modes constitutive of subjectivity can and do come into conflict with each other; they don’t blend together to compose an organic unity . . . Drives and desires aren’t simply quotas of energetic force welling up from the brute corporality of a primitive id. Rather, they are the aftershocks generated by the repeated collisions of incompatible temporal dynamics.

Rather than futurity being the sole or dominant temporality in the social construction of the subject,

then, the framework here contends that “future” and “past” are continually interwoven with one

another. The retroactivity of meaning-making through signification is also the movement that

gives rise to the subject’s retroactively positing of its own “origins” through fantasy. Moreover,

antagonistic temporalities spark desire for “wholeness,” a mythical “complete subject.” Key here

is that desire itself works both retroactively in the continual presupposing of origins or foundations

(the desire to “rediscover” one’s presumed essence), and in the anticipation of identifying with

collective symbolic structures (such as master signifiers) that seem to promise a whole “sense of

self.” Subjectivity, in this sense, is a knot of pushing and pulling of desire sparked by the subject’s

stitching across differing temporalities. Identification “pushes precipitously from insufficiency to

anticipation” without ever producing a “full” subject (Lacan 2006: 78). It is this interweaving of

retroactive temporality and desire which can provide a more comprehensive picture of the social

construction of subjects in the war on terror.

Discourse, Desire, and Temporality in the “War on Terror”

Many discourse-based analyses of the US-led war on terror have emphasized longstanding

poststructuralist themes, such as the productive power of terrorism discourses, and the role of

difference. Rather than describing pre-existing actors called terrorists, and their pre-existing tactics

of terrorism, the “war on terror” has been conceptualized as a social construct that is historically

17

contingent and thus contestable (AUTHOR; Croft 2006; Holland 2009; Hulsse and Spencer 2008;

Jackson 2005; Krebs and Lobasz 2008). Hülsse and Spencer (2008: 575) contend that terrorism is

“a social construction, a discursive fact rather than a material fact.” Indeed, the language of “war”

itself was not self-evident, and helps to legitimize state violence in the name of “security” and

“freedom” (Owens 2003). Specifically, analyzing how terms like “evil” and “barbarian” construct

a “terrorist” subject while analyzing how their opposites such as “good” or “Western civilization”

differentially produce an American or Western subject has been a common theme (Jackson 2005;

Croft 2006).5 In this sense, many in this literature extensively draw upon the understanding of

meaning as relationally constructed through difference: self/other, inside/outside, good/evil, and so

on. These relations of meaning through difference have been key to understanding the war on

terror’s political effects (in contrast to strictly “objective” material factors) (Widmaier 2007).

Yet, as discussed above, meaning is generated through both differential and temporal

movements that simultaneously attempt to stop the proliferation of differences so that a meaning

may be assessed. At the same time, the combined temporal and differential instability is also the

source of the ultimate instability of meaning. Examining the roles of temporality, desire, and

subjectivity, therefore, suggests a more comprehensive understanding (and ultimately, critique) of

the war on terror discourse. Several recent studies have pursued similar questions. For example,

Debrix (2008), Jarvis (2009), Lumborg (2012), and Steele (2010) have aptly demonstrated how

terrorism was able to disclose the ontological instability of the US collective subject after 9/11. In

this sense, they help to illustrate why the post-9/11 US subject is an appropriate case to examine

and how US ontological insecurity is revealed in the relationships between temporality, desire,

subject formation.

5 Other related research on post-9/11 politics has drawn upon Foucault’s concept of governmentality (see Dillon and Reid 2009) and upon Schmitt’s and Agamben’s notions of “exceptional” politics to analyze tensions between liberty and security since 9/11 (Huysmans 2006; Jabri 2006).

18

Debrix (2008) and Steele (2010), for example, have both persuasively analyzed how some

often-overlooked aspects of subjectivity are necessary for more fully understanding US war on

terror policies during the 2000s. Debrix (2008:72) employs the concept of “abjection” to move

beyond the longstanding “us-them” disposition in analyses of post-9/11 US identity politics. For

Debrix, the abject is that which does not fit into conventional binaries of “us-them.” “Being

abjected, being the abject means that one fixates on a threat, a risk, a horror, a source of disgust, or

a terror” that is to be rejected, yet is also a source of fascination; yet, “at the same time, through

this very repulsive motion, there is a strong attraction and libidinal attachment to that which is

supposed to be so foreign to us, to that which disgusts us” (Debrix 2008: 72, 73). Abjection is

similar to the account of desire detailed above, and as Debrix (2008: 75) argues, inasmuch as post-

9/11 US discourses constructed a repulsion of “terror,” such discourses also insisted that

Americans, “as much as they seek to reject terror and push it away, they must desire it too, they

must go through it,” for it is through embracing “terror” that Americans could have seemingly

clear-cut meanings of identity. Similarly, Steele (2010) contends that the construction of the

collective post-9/11 US self was a distinctly aesthetic process. For Steele, the “contours” of the

(national) self “can never be ascertained. Our own being eludes us, although we perceive its

‘essence’ to be ascertainable, hence the move toward self-creation” through aesthetic practices

(Steele 2010: 45). This fashioning reveals the vulnerability of the collective self and thus points to

how the state’s crafted facades are often challenged through what Steele (2010: 47) calls

counterpower, which challenges a state’s aesthetic image of itself at specific moments, including in

the war on terror. For example, Steele (2010: 148-64) analyzes how the military campaign for

Fallujah during the during the Iraq war facilitated US efforts at demonstrating “resolve” even in the

absence of any major strategic rationale, and how media reporting of Abu Ghraib detainee abuse

challenged the aesthetically produced US self-image as a morally upstanding state.

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Both Debrix and Steele astutely point our attention to the multitude of ways in which the

war on terror facilitated the insecurity of the collective US subject. Yet, a Lacanian framework

more explicitly synthesizes the mutually constitutive interweaving of temporality, desire, and

subjectivity, which in turn helps to more fully draw out some of the implications of their analyses.

For example, Debrix’s notion of abjection closely relates to desire. As he (2008: 74) details,

“abjection often presents itself as a desperate search for meaning,” yet is a search that cannot be

consummated since there is no fixed meaning to subjectivity. Subjectivity as theorized here works

in a similar fashion, since desire is in part a search for meaning and “wholeness,” yet desire is also

bound to retroactive and anticipatory temporalities such that the subject is never quite temporally

pinned down. Lack is coextensive with desire (Fink 2004: 22), and thus abjection in the war on

terror is often produced alongside desire through the nexus of these multiple temporalities.

Likewise, the concept of desire helps to more fully draw out the temporal dimensions of Steele’s

emphasis on the self’s aesthetics. Where Steele helpfully emphasizes the (often momentary)

flashes of vulnerability in post-9/11 US self-images and the challenges thereto, a focus on

retroactive temporality brings into view how desire emerges in these very processes. As he (2010:

45) notes, aesthetics of the self “are constantly sharpened through time” since there is no “natural”

self that is ultimately revealed. A Lacanian lens illustrates how the subject’s continual construction

not only “through time” but across conflicting temporalities offers some more comprehensive

theoretical reasoning for the ontological instability of the US self – the “self” which is never fully

present in a temporal sense. The US subject must continually work to fashion the aesthetics of its

identity precisely because lack “pushes [the subject] precipitously from insufficiency to

anticipation” without ever producing a “full” subject (Lacan 2006: 78).

Moreover, while there has been important work noting how 9/11 was widely seen as (or

rather, was constructed as) a temporal “break” from previous eras of US security (Campbell 2002;

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Jackson 2005: 29-38), recent studies by Jarvis (2009) and Lumborg (2012) have more explicitly

focused on the importance of time in the war on terror. Lumborg (2012: 3), for example, explores

the role of time in analyzing the concept of the “event,” and argues that “pure events” such as 9/11

largely escape attempts to explain their immediacy. “Rather than a clear and present ‘being,’ the

pure event expresses an ambiguous process of becoming. It is ambiguous in the sense that it moves

in different directions simultaneously, into the past and into the future, displacing and disrupting

the full presence of bodies and individual moments in time” (Lumborg 2012: 3, emphasis in

original). Here, 9/11 is viewed as an event that has not only been constructed as a border in time,

but whose temporal ambiguity is key to the legitimation of state violence. “9/11, in this sense, does

not refer to one and the same ‘thing.’ The production of 9/11 as a historical event can rather be

said to constitute an ongoing process of becoming, whereby 9/11 continues to emerge – in different

contexts and for different purposes – without reaching a final point of completion” (Lumborg 2012:

10). This is partly achieved through what Lumborg (2012: 84) calls “folding,” which regards the

processes by which the disruptive aspects of 9/11 as a “pure event” were political attempts to

capture these aspects and re-integrate them into normal interpretive frameworks. This process of

folding “inside” and “outside” also points to the structure of the modern subject, even as it is an

ongoing process that never reaches “a final point of completion” (Lumborg 2012: 68). The

Lacanian approach above shares much with Lumborg’s insights, yet suggests that desire is the

binding element which helps to account for why – even in the face of continual incompleteness –

“folding” processes perpetuate, and why the subject never quite succumbs to the “dispersion” and

fragmentation that a “plurality of temporalities” (Lumborg 2012: 92) implies. Along similar lines,

Jarvis (2009) traces how representations of time played a key role in the war on terror. He argues

that “specific writings of time – specific writings of pasts, presents, and futures – were absolutely

central to the perceived coherence, necessity, and legitimacy of the Bush administraton’s new War

21

on Terror” (Jarvis 2009: 2). Drawing upon the notion of narrative time, Jarvis (2009: 34) contends

that the ability to construct 9/11 as a rupture, as a conflict between modernity and barbarism, and

as a battle for “timeless” values (“goodness,” “justice,” etc.) illustrates the power of temporal

representations to aid in legitimizing the discourse. My arguments in many ways follow this

important work, not in the least of which in agreeing with Jarvis’s (2009: 5) contention that

appreciating the war on terror in all of its complexity is necessary for critique. Yet insofar as Jarvis

rightly emphasizes the representations of temporality in the war on terror, my analysis focuses on

the function of temporality in its social construction. Moreover, regarding both Jarvis and

Lumborg, my focus on the mutually constitutive relations of temporality and desire stresses their

dual role in the construction of a subject – the “grounding” that political discourses often strive for.

Retroactive Temporality in the War on Terror

We can first turn to what is widely viewed as a founding moment of the war on terror.

Although George W. Bush first publicly uttered the phrase “war against terrorism” on the evening

of September 11, 2001, a much more complete vision was offered in his address to a joint session

of the US Congress nine days later on September 20, 2001. As veteran journalist Bob Woodward

(2002: 102) notes, the speech was seen by the president and his advisors as the “rhetorical vehicle

to describe . . . the scope of a total war on terrorism,” and the speech contained many of the key

themes that would come to define the war on terror (Croft 2006: 69-70, 72-3). This is not to

suggest that Bush was the only articulator of the discourse, since many other administration

officials also expressed these themes in the months after 9/11 (Jackson 2005: 154). Many have

also explored how these official themes resonated across American society and popular culture

(Croft 2006). Consequently, I analyze this speech as a close proxy for the war on terror discourse

that circulated widely in the US after 9/11.

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Analyzing the war on terror through the lens of retroactivity, desire, and lack we can

pinpoint how retroactive temporality functions in the construction of the subject (the collective

“we”) of the discourse. Recall that the Lacanian subject is, first and foremost, a subject of lack.

The lack of “full being” sparks desire to engage in identification practices to reclaim the

indefinable “thing” that the subject believes it is missing that would make it “whole.” Yet since the

subject is always incomplete, this “missing thing” does not exist, and in fact never existed. It is

this lack – the “place” in the discourse pointing to something missing, in a sense – which sparks the

effects of temporality and desire in the production of the collective subject of the war on terror.

What exactly is the lack – this “missing” or lacking “sense of self” – in the discourse?

Bush’s signifiers point to its contours. In the September 20 speech, the collective subject of the

“nation” (“our country,” “America,” and so on) suffered a “wound.” The loss of nearly 3,000 lives

is recognized as a horrific tragedy, yet throughout the discourse there seems to be a certain

something else that was lost on 9/11. Bush alludes to it several times and in several different ways,

something beyond the loss of lives: “Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered a great

loss;” “night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack;” “a threat to

our way of life.” “These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of

life.” “Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity. They did not touch its source.

America is successful because of the hard work, and creativity, and enterprise of our people.”

“This is a fight for all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom” (Bush 2001).

Many have commented that what was lost was Americans’ robust sense of exceptionalism and

security (Gaddis 2004). However, these attempts to discursively pinpoint or articulate precisely

what was lost fit well with what Žižek (1993: 201) calls the “Nation-Thing.”

All we can ultimately say about the Thing is ‘itself,’ ‘the real Thing,’ ‘what it really is about,’ etc. If we are asked how we can recognize the presence of this Thing, the only consistent answer is that the Thing is present in that elusive entity called ‘our way of life.’ All we can do is enumerate disconnected fragments of the way our

23

community organizes its feasts, its rituals of mating, its initiation ceremonies, in short, all the details by which is made visible the unique way a community organizes its enjoyment.

“Enjoyment” is the analytic term given to the (ultimately illusory) sense of “fullness” which

the subject continually seeks in its identifications. The various attempts to describe the loss

experienced do not locate a precise “thing out there” that objectively corresponds to the supposed

essence of the “nation.” Rather, these descriptions can be conceptualized as discursive attempts to

articulate, or symbolize, that which is not able to be fully articulated. “Our way of life” is

discursively as close as one can get to the perceived “essence” of the nation. Yet, these are ways of

covering over the incompleteness – the lack – of a “whole” nation. Bush’s numerous attempts to

discursively “button down” what exactly “we” are points to the very indefinability of that which

must be defended from the terrorist enemy. A “threat to our way of life,” “a great loss,” “freedom

itself is under attack,” “disrupt and end a way of life,” the “source” of American prosperity, “hard

work, and creativity, and enterprise,” “progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom” (Bush 2001)

– all are discursive “button ties” which attempt to attach a name (a signifier) to that which was lost,

the fantasy of the American “Nation-Thing” constructed retroactively after September 11, 2001.

The numerous attempts to discursively “tie down” and locate that which has been lost points to

both the presumed-to-be-missing “object” and the lack of a “whole” collective subject in the

discourse.

Bush’s address (re)constructs the fantasy of a “whole” “America” (the subject of the

discourse) as that entity which is partially represented in signifiers deployed in the speech, yet is

also “missing” something that is posited as central to its “sense of self.” This “missing” part of the

American “we” is that which Bush attempts to name throughout the speech. This element

(partially represented as “our way of life” and so on) is presented as a core aspect of the national

subject, but is absent, is not quite there. Yet, the subject is also presented through a set of

24

signifying “button ties” that are said to represent what it currently is. While the subject is

articulated as having “lost” something, other signifiers throughout the speech are said to express

the subject as it is now – crucially, in the wake of a trauma that has given form to its present search

for meaning. The trauma, in this sense, disrupts the perceived linearity of the subject’s own being.

As Edkins (2003: 13, emphasis in original) explains, “subjects only retrospectively become what

they already are – they only ever will have been.” The subject of the discourse – “America” – is in

a continual process of (re)construction and is both represented as embodied in and lacking through

prominent signifiers. For example, Bush’s (2001) pronouncements about “enemies of freedom,”

the conflict between “freedom and fear,” and the differences between “justice and cruelty” function

to produce a set of differential binaries against which American identity is defined (see also

Jackson 2005: 66-70, 76-88). They help to define who “we” are in contrast to “them” by

articulating boundaries around the collective “us” and external “others.” Temporally, however,

they function as the signifiers of a national subject that are viewed as fully present, as fully

describing who “we” are, but which in fact construct a fantasy which covers over the subject’s lack

full presence. These well-worn signifiers are deployed to express something fundamental about the

collective subject, but the presumed-to-be-missing part of the nation is also just as central to its

social construction within the speech. The “Nation-Thing” is produced as the subject that has been

wounded, but the discursive attempts to construct “it” inevitably circle around the Thing, rather

than capturing its “essence” directly. This is not a result of Bush’s well-known limited oratory

skills, but is instead ontological. The Nation-Thing cannot, by definition, be made to fully exist

within discursive reality. The multitude of prominent signifiers presented in the speech attempt to

cover over the constitutive lack of the subject “America.” “Freedom,” “justice,” “progress and

pluralism, tolerance and freedom,” “security,” “values,” “principles” and so on (Bush 2001)

attempt to construct a unified subject over the wounds that September 11, 2001 is perceived to

25

have wrought. These valued terms, in other words, attempt to “button down” the inherent

ambiguity of the subject, yet without ever being able to fully do so. In the war on terror, the

subject is split between its representation in discourse (in terms of “freedom,” “justice,” “values,”

and so on) and that which escapes discursive representation (the inexpressible sense that “we” have

“lost” something as a nation).

Here we can see the function of retroactive temporality and desire in the discourse. In the

war on terror, the ideal of a complete and unified nation free of threats and antagonisms is an

image that covers over the constitutive ambiguities and divisions of such an entity. A unified

“America” is posited as lost, yet, such an “America” did not, in fact, exist before 9/11. One need

go no further to see this than Bush’s contested election to the presidency in 2000. The un-

wounded, pure Nation without ambiguity or division is the “missing part,” the fantasy, of the war

on terror. This projected ideal of the Nation is posited as having been lost at the moment of

trauma, yet, such an ideal had never been fully constructed before then. It must be assumed to have

existed, though, in order for the war on terror discourse to be meaningful. This illustrates well the

role of desire and the subject’s perceived “missing object.” As Žižek (1992: 12, emphases in

original) explains, the “paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., the

[missing object] is an object that can only be perceived by a gaze ‘distorted’ by desire . . .” There

is, of course, no “objective” definition of what the nation-state “is.” As social constructs, states’

meanings are subject to the contingent twists and turns of history, and thus, in one sense, do not

exist outside of the discursive performances that constitute them, as many constructivists and

poststructuralists have aptly shown (Anderson 1983; Campbell 1998). However, what is often left

out of such accounts is precisely what is at stake here, in this perpetual “incompleteness” in the

social construction process. The subject “America” in the war on terror is indeed one more

performance (in a long line of performances) in its ongoing social construction. Yet, it is through a

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Lacanian lens where we see the impossibility of fully constructing the Nation. It is this temporally-

bound incompleteness and consequent sparking of desire – where most accounts of the nation as a

social construct often stop – that this approach picks up. The social construction of the “nation” is

always “distorted by desire” channeled through the various discourses in which it is named. The

Nation as the fantasy of the war on terror exists not only discursively, but also eccentric to the

social. In this sense, it lives “in the interstices of the socio-symbolic order” (Glynos 2001: 207). It

is partly present in the discourse through the various signifiers that attempt to capture what it “is.”

Yet, it is also partly missing insofar as some “essential” aspect of the collective “sense of self” is

presumed to be lost. The war on terror is founded upon the promise that it is possible to reclaim

the “essence” or Thing that was lost on 9/11 through the (re)articulation of signifiers like

“freedom,” “justice,” etc. However, it is the discourse itself that retroactively constructs what it

says was lost, an illusory wholeness that never was. It is that which is retroactively posited as

missing from the discourse that is the driving desire behind its very construction. As Stavrakakis

(1999: 29) explains, being a “full” subject is impossible, yet “it remains desirable exactly because

it is essentially impossible.” National discourses positing a pure and unblemished past are often

key to their appeal and legitimacy. Political discourses are often “supported by reference to a lost

state of harmony, unity and fullness, a reference to a pre-symbolic [origin] which most political

projects aspire to bring back . . . [yet] it is a retroactive projection conditioned by the intervention

of symbolic lack” (Stavrakakis 1999: 52).

In many ways, this account of temporality and desire extends longstanding arguments in IR

about states as performative social constructs. Take, for instance, the work of Campbell (1998) and

Zehfuss (2001). Campbell (1998: 12) argues that “states are never finished as entities; the tension

between the demands of identity and the practices that constitute it can never be fully resolved,

because the performative nature of identities can never be revealed.” Similarly, for Zehfuss (2001:

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338), “identities as they are defined in discourse fail to be logically bounded entities. Identities are

continuously articulated, rearticulated and contested, which makes them hard to pin down as

explanatory categories”. Yet, this raises a key question regarding this perpetual incompleteness of

identity. If “lack and failure is the destiny of every identification act then what is the driving force

behind” subjects’ continuous attempts to do so (Stavrakakis 1999: 45)? Since states are “never

finished as entities,” something must account for the push to keep pursuing a project that is

ultimately impossible. The analysis here argues that the retroactive staging of a “whole” subject

propels the desire to keep searching for it. Desire is the element binding the subject’s perceived

stability in spite of its discursive-temporal de-centering. The same retroactive movement that pins

down the meaning of words is the same movement through which the subject deals with its own

contingency. Through discourses producing an imagined “origin” or an imagined constancy, the

subject continually attempts to re-ground its “sense of self.” This retroactive projection of being

into the past appears to the subject as a “true ground” precisely because it seems to erase the

contingency of subjectivity produced in the slippery medium of discourse. As Žižek (2002: 190)

argues, the “moment when the subject ‘posits his presuppositions’ is the very moment of his

effacement as a subject . . . the moment of closure when the subject’s act of decision changes into

its opposite; establishes a new symbolic network by means of which History again acquires the

self-evidence of a linear evolution.”

Conclusion

This article has argued that while the recent attention to time in IR is promising, there has

yet to be an account of how analyzing temporality opens new doors in thinking about one of the

field’s core concepts: subjectivity. The article argues that Lacanian theory offers some insights

into the workings of temporality in the social construction of the subject. The article builds upon

the large literature in IR which contends that the subject is discursively decentered off of its

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traditional Cartesian foundations. However, this discursive decentering is simultaneously a

temporal decentering, and stems from the retroactive temporality of meaning-making itself. Many

have detailed how meaning is generated through difference, yet it is often downplayed how

meaning is simultaneously temporally produced whereby prominent signifiers retroactively “tie

together” a meaningful discourse. Consequently, meaningful subjects constructed through

discourse are also produced through this same retroactivity. Moreover, this emphasis on

temporality points to the key role of desire in subject formation. The multiple temporalities of

subjectivity spark desire for the stability and centeredness that these temporalities themselves

prevent. The paper empirically illustrated this argument in an analysis of the temporal dynamics in

the war on terror. While there is now a large literature on how collective subjects in war on terror

were produced through differentiation (“good” vs. “evil”), this analysis illustrated how the

retroactive construction of meaningful subjects was generated by incompleteness and lack, which

in turn sparked the desire to reclaim a perceived-to-be-lost “full” collective subject (“us”) which

was ultimately illusory.

This analysis hopes to illustrate that not only should IR scholars begin to take more

seriously the multiplicity of roles that time/temporality play in world politics, but it also suggests a

more complex relationship with the closely related politics of space. A few recent studies have

insightfully interrogated the overlapping politics of time and space, and desire as analyzed here

suggests a synthesizing element drawing together important aspects of these arguments and

directions for future work. Prozorov (2011: 1275), for instance, argues that “othering” processes of

identity formation are both spatial and temporal, “which renders futile any attempt to transcend the

antagonistic potential of othering by its reinscription in an exclusively temporal register,” such as

found in European integration politics. In a similar analysis, Berenskoetter (2012: 3) offers a

reading of the state not merely as a territorially-bound entity, but as a community with a shared

29

“national biography” narrative that is both temporally (insofar as it gives meaning to the past and

future) and spatially (insofar as it gives meaning to particular spaces, places, and experiences)

significant. Instead, the present analysis suggests that the meaning-making process itself is

retroactively produced, and thus that the meanings constructed and attributed to the dimensions of

national identity analyzed by Prozorov and Berenskoetter indicate another “layer” of temporality

that is integral to the social construction of space and place. Future work may consider different

ways in which this continual retroactive meaning-making produces both past and future images of

place-bound “whole” collective subjects. Additionally, this analysis also suggests that the very

“pull” of subject formation – desire – arises from the subject being essentially a knot of conflicting

temporalities and even spaces. In this sense, other work may explore not only how time and space

play a role in subject construction, but may also analyze how multiple and conflicting temporalities

and spaces may contribute to generating some of the more visceral “pull” aspects of subjectivity,

and are themselves aspects of political contestation.

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