It has been more than a decade since the publication of Jane Guyer's (2007) influential essay ‘Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time’. The prime thesis of this text is that there is a tendential shift in the current public culture of temporality. Guyer describes this shift in terms of a demise of the near future, that is, a retreat of the sequential temporal space beyond the immediate present and before the distant future. As she puts it:

For me, a sense of foreignness in the current present has come to revolve around a strange evacuation of the temporal frame of the ‘near future’: the reach of thought and imagination, of planning and hoping, of tracing out mutual influences, of engaging in struggles for specific goals, in short, of the process of implicating oneself in the ongoing life of the social and material world that used to be encompassed under an expansively inclusive concept of ‘reasoning’. (Guyer 2007: 410)

This demise of the near future, Guyer argues, happens in consonance with two other temporal adjustments: on the one hand, our sense of the present has become ever more punctuated and ‘event-driven’; on the other, it has become ever more informed by utopian and apocalyptic thinking. In an article I wrote back in 2013 titled ‘Technological Indeterminacy: Threat, Medium, Temporality’, I engaged with Guyer's model while also benefitting from the excellent forum around her article by authors who have contributed a great deal to the anthropology of temporality. My own intervention was to reel the relation between governance and temporality into the specific field of media theory by reasoning against the paradigm of technological determinism if only to reinstate it in regard to the idea of indeterminacy, a technological indeterminacy.

Nearly a decade later, I am allowed the opportunity to rethink some of the premises on which that whole discussion ensued in light of the articles that integrate this special issue under the title ‘Held in Suspense: Promise, Threat and Revocability as Modes of Governance’. One thematic thread connecting both editorial forays concerns governance in relation to regiment life and the state. Both interventions highlight the mobilisation of operative temporal modes and associated affects: anticipation, deferral, tarrying, shifting, undecidability and indeterminacy. What is peculiar about such temporal-affective modes is how they are designed to puncture and cleave the present, creating a sense of disjointedness, which has the effect of destabilising the foreseeability of futures.

Such a cleaved present becomes potently animated, ‘teeming with activity’, as Caitlin Zaloom (2007:444) put it in her response to Guyer. As the editors of the present issue also note in their introduction: ‘Continually deferred promises of inclusion, recognition, autonomy/sovereignty and access to entitlements increasingly appear across multiple types of political regimes as a means to displace the responsibilities, costs and risks of governance towards specific subjects and geographies, as well as a way to distribute resources unevenly amongst distinct constituencies’. Thanks to this cleaved indeterminate present, promise and threat occasion an indexical regime of effectiveness which consists of releasing any referent from being committed to a specific temporal horizon. The present both structures and reflects the general disengagement of referential meaning from any privileged normative contents. And it is this disengagement of normative referential contents that precisely sharpens the edges of the present, as it were, endowing it with cutting force.

I noted in my earlier article that the ‘evacuation of the near future’ that Guyer suggests is altering how we experience the present and how this alteration ties to a shift in the temporal orientation of causality (De Abreu 2013). Rather than placing causes in terms of consequential logics, as anterior to particular outcomes, I analysed the process by which contemporary governance, through the forms of media corporations, religious groups and political groups, happens by placing causation not in the past but in the future: as future causes. To put causes in the future is the method by which the reasoning behind decisions happens retroactively from the future back into the present (Massumi 2007). It is the approach to futures by which authors, like Catherine Lutz (2001) on military preparedness, Judith Butler (2004) of indefinite detention, Joseph Masco (2006) on pre-emptive nuclear futures, Carlo Caduff (2015) on the powers of the speculative ‘perhaps’ and Hirokazu Miyazaki (2004) on hope-based governance as method, have been documenting as typical epistemological construction befitting the medium of suspicion, alarm and threat. What is so affective about affective terms, such as ‘promise’, ‘suspicion’ and ‘threat’, is precisely the boundary of vagueness that surrounds each, blurring their temporal and spatial edges, so that one dwells indefinitely in the nebula of potentiation. This nebula of potentiation is the odd void of the almost-not-yet that Ernst Bloch wrote extensively about in The Principle of Hope (1995) and that, as Guyer (2007) and Miyazaki (2004) note, recalls the ‘gap’ period in evangelical prophetic time.

Guyer's point is that such a gapped presentism in Christian rhythms is temporally coherent with calendric time in macro-economic terms. In that respect, an epistemological counterpart to threat and alarm is the temporal surprise, as when, for instance, a ‘spontaneous’ hyperbolic sale in times of severe food crisis is relayed across technologically mediated publics (De Abreu 2018). In this case, the tactics put to use to punctuate time was through the sharp axe of a sale surprise, a puncture so sounding in times of austerity measures and drastic reduction in the levels of consumption of primary needs, it stunned the reasoning involved in decision-making, satisfaction and demand stumbling on each other, slinging out cause into the camp of the future according to a logic of ‘buy first, think later’. What is significant is how this harnessing of the anterior into a posterior, this speeding of the signifier past the signified, has the power to transform the quality of the present into potentiality. Despite the financial crisis – or because of it – many citizens set to buy food not based on calculated need but on the drive to respond to the call to seize a moment, an opportunity, not unlike a portal in time that is about to close.

Such a present that fires up its futures and only ‘afterwards’ looks back to justify a decision carries an important consequence: it potentiates the present. Instead of conceiving the present as a tense moving towards its calculative horizon, we now conceive the present as endowed with qualitative value, intensified at the edge of its being. In William Stanley Jevons’ example of a three-pound loaf of bread: cut slice by slice, one gets a number of slices; once we get to the last slice of the loaf, however, one is no longer in the domain of the quantifiable but in the realm of possibility, the ambit of counting as such. Number has yielded to infinity. As Robert Thornton (2007: 438) puts it, this ‘slice of loaf that remains’, then, marks for Jevons the end of economic history towards more speculative orientations about the future, that is, those that are built around potentiality. In our current era, that passage is incarnated in the withering of economics for global finance, one that finds its most emblematic expression in the highly volatile entity of the financial derivative. Its potentiating and indeterminate powers correlate to the wide spectrum of fractal ‘otherwises’ that increasingly volatize the life narratives, trajectories, horizons of so many people – young and old – worldwide.

These spectral realities that enter the domain of life and governance are ruled by a peculiar indexing regime. Leaving behind the metaphysics of causal anteriority, such a regime rebounds its semiotic apparatus towards more ghost-like categories of time such as latency, expectancy, imminence, incipience, prospect and the unconscious (see Maurer 2002) – that is to say, precisely those kinds of temporal dispositions that are cordial to performatives like ‘promise’, ‘threat’, ‘speculative locution’, ‘revocation’ and the like. In short, what is held in suspense congeals into what Elizabeth Povinelli (2014) names ‘quasi-events’. This status of indeterminacy is, then, distinctive on two levels: first, causation is no longer being cast under the logical principle of anteriority in terms of cause and effect; second, instead of an obstacle, indeterminacy is a pragmatic component of governance. Indeterminacy is no longer that which must be avoided or mitigated, as per more modern and progressive logics. Rather, it is what must be structured, regulated and normalised as proper to present's regime of effectiveness.

As the contributors to this special issue all show in their variety of ethnographic contexts, this reconfiguration of the present around orders of regimented indeterminacy alters the experience of being ‘held in suspense’, and how it is accounted for by individuals and communities worldwide. Temporal indeterminacy, or the sense that one is held in suspension, is not understood as the interruption of an action that was under way. For such an idea would imply understanding the event of suspension as the passive counterpart to an active course of action. It would entail relating to interruption as that which puts a hold on the progress of things that ought to be running their linear course but are not. Such reading, in sum, would imply seeing interruption as what happens in progressive sequential time.

The authors in this issue engage in a different kind of conceptual labour. They are less interested in how suspension happens in time – though the historian in the ethnographer is never absent – than they are in the question of what a theory of time suspension would entail. It is less suspension in time and more about suspension as time. Instead of relegating suspension to a passive status, they explore the active potentials that nest in suspension as such, and in suspension as a kind of dynamic: a governance through suspension. Thus conceived, suspension is not an intervallic ‘betwixt and between’. It is a suspension that alters the very nature of what an interval is. Accordingly, such an interval is not a pause but more like Joseph Vogl calls a tarrying in indeterminacy that holds the strictures of decision-making in suspension. As he puts it, ‘Tarrying addresses both the complexity of the situation and the contingency of its solution and keeps both, situation and solution, in suspension’ (2011:54).

Distinctive about the eventful interval of worlds in suspense is the temporal gerund, how it unbrackets time to a marching that is indefinite and ongoing. At stake is an analytical difference that Lauren Berlant (2011) perceptively reverts by naming such dynamic interims as ‘animated suspensions’ [rather than ‘suspended animations’].

Second, and moreover, the authors all set out in this special issue to examine, both ethnographically and conceptually, how such activated and indefinite unbracketings turn into a particularly hospitable nook for the mobilisation of modal types from speech-act performativity. Held suspension, it turns out, is good for governance.

Adding to the concerns of this editorial project, in the remaining I highlight two key aspects in the discussion of governance through indeterminacy and suspension. The first aspect is how geographically widespread the rhetoric of ‘indeterminacy’ (as the fuel of the temporal medium of suspension) has become beyond Guyer's initial suggestion. As one learns from the enclosed articles, such ‘widespreadness’ also solicits analytics of differentiation across cultures and time. The second aspect is concerned with what Guyer (2007) calls ‘punctuated time’ as an idea that ties with my own current interest in rethinking the concept of the [sovereign] decision towards that of incision.

One could argue, as some have effectively done, that in many non-Western societies short-term temporalities are the rule rather than the exception. Such a point has been made by anthropologists of the so-called ‘Global South’ whose work complicate a prolific, but West-bounded, scholarship on precarity in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In his ethnography on the Congo, Filip de Boeck offers ethnographic evidence of how the vocabularies used to describe post–financial-crisis precarity have long animated Congolese society. As he writes: ‘The small-scale modes of action that punctuate living, often reformulated yet continuing in the urban context, provide Kinshasa's inhabitants with an urban politics of the possible’ (2011: 269).

Similarly, AbdouMaliq Simone writes in his account of a South African city: ‘As I illustrate through a range of ethnographic materials on inner-city Johannesburg, an experience of regularity capable of anchoring the livelihoods of residents and their transactions with one another is consolidated precisely because the outcomes of residents’ reciprocal efforts are radically open, flexible, and provisional’ (2004: 408), which, as Simone emphasises, is not to say illegible. On the contrary, the non-provisional nature of the city poises its inhabitants for vernacular rejoinders. Meanwhile, to the geographical specificities of these accounts that complicate the situatedness of precarity as a specific Western problem in the firmament of the recent financial crisis, a temporal complication has been added. Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter (2008) show how in the West precarity has long been the rule rather than the exception, particularly amongst certain groups like the working classes, women, migrants, and the rural and the urban poor.

At the centre of these discussions is the role of the welfare state (or lack thereof), an entity that enforces geographical divides between not just the Global North and the Global South but also between the European North and the European South. Thus, while in Northern Europe the precarity taxonomy may be articulated with the relegation of the welfare state to the rules of the market as both condition and symptom of neoliberalism, in the European South, so the argument goes, such a welfare state was consistently absent throughout much of its modern history. As Melinda Cooper (2017) well shows, this schematic reading enunciates a problem that hides another. Drawing on Wendy Brown's (2006; see also 2017) thesis, according to which neoliberalism and neo-conservativism (in the American context of Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and the AIDS epidemic) are mutually constitutive, Cooper goes about contesting the notion that the philosophy of neoliberalism discourages familial dependencies for atomised individualism. On the contrary, she contends, neoliberal logics of entrepreneurial freedom are deeply entrenched in old traditional policies (such as the Elizabethan Poor Laws in 1601 England) and the ethos of family social responsibility in ways that are beneficial to contemporary market logics.

A similar pattern of questionable partnerships is found happening in Southern Europe with particular vehemence during and after the financial crisis. Take, for example, Italy where, as Andrea Muellebach (2012) documents, the idea of a welfare state has been further transferred to kinship bonds, charity or institutional care in a move that ends up benefitting a common, if oddly paradoxical, referent: communists and conservative neoliberals alike. Similarly, in Portugal, a context I am familiar with, the authoritarianism of austerity during the Salazar years that neoliberalism was meant to overcome (through the rhetoric of autonomy and free initiative) ended up reappearing as neoliberalism's most determinant expression (De Abreu 2022). This why during the financial crisis the rhetoric of state austerity could so easily swing with and reactivate traditional values regarding the moral role of the family, of friends and of philanthropic solidarities in Portugal, as in other Southern European countries. In a sense, the novelty of neoliberalism was that it was not ‘neo’ at all: the novelty was the taking awareness of that fact precisely, a proof that neoliberalism not only happens in time but is also itself animated by a theory of time.

Amongst others, the 2008 financial crisis made apparent two key aspects. The first is neoliberalism's pretension to oppose the traditions which it, in effect, restores. The second is that precarity is not a consequence of neoliberalism but its distinctive modus operandi. That explains the paternalistic verbal dispatching by Northern European politicians towards ‘those’ Southern European nations during the sovereign debt crisis, which (echoing Montesquieu's benevolent stereotyping of the ‘sunny south’) pave the way for the acronymic insult PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) created in the heat of negotiations with the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund).

In truth, though, the PIGSonymic grudge was how the European South had failed to make precarity an asset of neoliberalism. The fact that countries like Portugal, Spain or Greece lived under authoritarian dictatorships in the post-war period instilled in the new generations the idea that short-term temporalities were better than lasting allegiances; this is how critiques of linear teleological time could suddenly be articulated with the rhythms of short-term contracts. This is also why across the European South large segments of contemporary youth still find it hard to identify with traditional unions – their logics of political representation and ideas of the future – even though unions were long engaged in criticising the neoliberal policies that would lead to the financial crisis, and even though, from the other end, the unions have attempted to adapt their political discourses to cater to the temporal sensibilities of these same youth.

Neoliberal entrepreneurship has offered the youth a vocabulary (of freedom, autonomy, flexibility and meritocracy) by which to distance themselves from the past – from the context of their parents (authoritarianism, heteronomy, durability and heritage) – and especially from how this past conceived of the future. Increasingly, however, neoliberalism reveals levels of operational solidarity with authoritarianism. The rhetoric of freedom, autonomy and creativity of the former act in syncopation with the rhythms of the market and those underpinning the constant state of exception.

At once central and peripheral, the European South – much like the Global South – made it clearer during the financial crisis how precarious the notion of precarity itself was (Knight and Stewart 2015; Mitroupolus 2005). This at once alignment and dis-alignment between European South and the Global South was evident in the massive wave of migration of Portuguese labour to its former colony, Angola, during the oil boom at the peak of the financial crisis, a time when discourses of precarity went side by side with tales of excess. At stake is the flexible mobius-like regime of indexation where precarity comes to mean two opposite realities at once. It means that like in Fernando Pessoa “The Anarchist Banker” there is no other side, only continuous non-orientable surface, (and a lot of cigar smoke).

On the one hand, “precarity” has become a temporal infrastructure which certain groups – high professionals and artistic communities from the high-tech and the cultural industries – embrace as a lifestyle. On the other, it has become an infirm labour dynamic that led very many – often in the name of choice and opportunity – to destitution, despair and depression. A striking differential eventually appeared from the cracks, notably between those who benefitted from the perpetuation of precarisation and those who found themselves in the traditional past of austerity and familial dependence they wanted to leave behind. It is a complex dance to figure out, one that requires moonwalking skills: an oscillatory ‘come-and-go’, a forward-backward motion that reflects the cleaved grounds of the market in Southern Europe, and globally, across regimes.

‘Held in Suspense’ offers a variety of ethnographic sites where such forward-backward oscillations are staged ethnographically as well as conceptually. Each contribution to the issue is a treatise in withheld suspense as a tool of governance in contexts that range from would-be migrants waiting indefinitely in northern Morocco (Bajalia), to waiting for the delivery of the promise of social housing amongst dwellers in urban India (Jonnalagadda), the promises and limits in state's reckoning with the past with the past in the aftermath of China's Cultural Revolution (Chang), passing through populist tactics that blur promise and threat in Nicaragua (Chamorro), and the weaponised deferrals in the toxic proximities to a garbage dump in a Mumbai Muslim working-class neighbourhood (Chatterjee). Throughout, it places us readers in the nowing, a temporal that owes its gerundian quality to the rhythmic incisions that cleave – yet extend – the present. But also to hybrid regimes of indexicality which, as Montero (forthcoming) shows in his ethnography on the militarized Afro-indigenous region of Moskitia in Central America benefit contradictory operational tactics that anticipate revocation in face of ambivalent alliances. It relates to what Piero Leirner calls “the cryptography of form” in military movements. (Leirner 2020)

Guyer did not pay much attention to the political aspect of decision-making in relation to temporality. Yet, when she proposes a theory of punctuated time, a shift is implied concerning the binary nature in classic decisionism. This shift is about rhythmic incision rather than exceptional decision. Punctured time affects the ‘either/or’ framework of decision-making towards pendular oscillation. Contemporary governance asks: what is the alternative to the principle of alternatives or opposites? And the answer is: the possibility or ability to oscillate as such – to proclaim and revoke. Such temporal choreography is the new normal. The present animates suspense, “helding” it. Compressed against the abyss caused by the fallout of the grounds of the near future, the present tense is traversed by unstable laterals. It highlights in subjects the realisation of ‘the roads not taken’. Punctured potentiated grounds are, thus, particularly hospitable to performatives like ‘threat’ and ‘promise’, or to the swing of revocation.

Coupled, as these performatives are, to flexibilisation in regimes of indexation, governance tends to foster the co-existing of opposites; and it does so without the slightest sense of incongruence, such that whatever might be pointing one direction in this moment might point to the extreme reverse in the next. What is more, it does not try to hide that this oscillating dynamic either. In fact, as Barbara Johnson has it “targets are most effectively hit when most indirectly aimed at” (1986: 29), an idea that allows her to connect CIA manual on psychological operations in guerrilla warfare in Nicaragua with literary oratorical and rhetorical techniques. “Shoot softly and carry a big stick”, she puts it, to suggest how deviousness in language and violence combine in warfare.

As all articles hereby have shown, held suspension is by no means the exception but the rule of a flexible and compliable thumbing. And while this normalisation of exception has received some attention in recent scholarship, namely, as the withdrawal of [sovereign] decision from an outside transcendental plane into an internal one via dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, ‘Held in Suspense’ excels in highlighting the temporal as beyond, yet complementary to, the spatial dimensions implied in that other endeavour as modes of governance. Focus on the temporal – on punctuation – as a modality of governance is all the more urgent as researchers set out to examine the logics that are being adopted by emergent authoritarian populisms in various parts of the world today. It is possible to trace a lineage between the kinds of evacuated near futures that Guyer identifies as affecting macroeconomics and evangelical time alike, and the rise of right-wing politics, which we can see happening today in the United States, Brazil and Italy. An odd combination between authoritarianism and neoliberalism announces itself via evangelical channels, both institutional and techno-mediatic, and corresponding theological doctrines. It should be noted that to say that it is evangelical should not mean saying it is strictly out of Protestant lines, as it is often understood. Rather, it requires examining how evangelicalism as such is rearticulating the very traditional relation between Pentecostalism and Catholicism into new alliances and antagonisms in turn, inspiring political counter-reactions.

A topology of power tends nowadays to happen through punctuation. Adoptive punctured time and/in/as governance is operative, in that it both draws on the political extreme – and bodily extremities – and undoes the extreme in the same moment. It is a pendular motion that in as much as it is performed in extremis is always on the edge of becoming something wholly other, ‘a politics on the edge’, so to say, that makes any scene of arrival into a lasting departure.

The disorienting puncturing in politics and governance that we are witnessing today relates to what Paul Virilio aptly called the ‘loss of dimension’ in power (1984). Where once there were points and lines within dimension determining the direction of a field, increasingly we see a tendency for cuts, caesuras, and … ‘hiccups’ which design, cleave and riddle political discourse. Politics increasingly happens, in Virilio's words, as ‘punctures without dimension, instants without duration’ (1984: 104). I have recently addressed this idea in depth through the example of Jair Bolsonaro, his punctured by hiccups (attributed to the abdominal injuries caused by the stabbing he suffered in 2018) speech in his presidential addressing. What – if any – was his point-or dimension-if not the sovereign proof of its inexistence? A point degenerating into semi-colon on the stage of puncturing politics. By now a system of scars by virtue of serial surgeries to his colon since he became president, Bolsonaro's belly incarnates at once threat, promise and revocability. (de Abreu 2023). He will be remembered for his punctured flesh. For little else could be more structurally in tune with memetic (and mimetic) powers of social media than a stitched belly of the sovereign. The serial operations, the technics of incision, in fracturing speech (evacuating or suspending its near future), also make it available for pixilation, algorithmic transmission and circulation. The rhythmic alternations of opening and closure, not unlike the operations of breathing, of systole and diastole, may render governance and understanding uncertain, and for some such uncertainty can even be easily rendered in the positive terms of “liveliness”, “process” or “improvisation”: as non-teleological. Yet, it is increasingly the case that in the bucketing of such affirmative terms, also runs the conditions for a new paralysis and death. One is eventually led to ask how to bring animated suspension to a breaking point.