acknowledgement of humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being that which cannot wait. The continued existence of
places like Yarl’s Wood and similar institutions in the USA nonetheless points to
the challenge of exposing the
urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily hidden from view
, and also reminds us that our
research can help to explain the relationships between normative dimensions and the political and social conditions of
struggle.
¶
In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do seem to evocatively describe otherwise obscured suffering (e.g.
Bennett, 2011), but it is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of urgency. Given the discussion above,
what might be accomplished – and risked – by incorporating urgency more overtly and deliberately into our discussions of
waiting, surplus and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify the implicit but understated ethical consequences and normativity
associated with waiting, and encourage explicit discussion about harmful suffering. Waiting can be productive or unproductive
for radical praxis, but urgency compels and requires response. Geographers could be instrumental in reclaiming the ethical
work of urgency in ways that leave it open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and representations.
There is good reason to be thoughtful in this process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure differentiated
experiences of being human, dividing up ‘those for whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths
simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all’ (Butler, 2009: 50). But
when the urgent body is rendered
as only waiting
, both materially and discursively,
it is just as easily cast as impulsive, disgusting,
animalistic
(see also McKittrick, 2006).
Feminist theory insists that
the urgent body
, whose
encounters of violence are ‘usually
framed as
private, apolitical and
mundane’
(Pain, 2014: 8),
are as deeply
political, public, and exceptional
as other forms of violence
(Phillips, 2008; Pratt,
2005).
Insisting that
a suffering body, now, is that which cannot wait
, has the
ethical effect
of drawing it into consideration alongside the political, public and exceptional scope
of large-scale futures
.
It may help us insist on the body
, both as a single unit and a plurality,
as a
legitimate scale of normative priority and social care
.
¶
In this report, I have explored old and new
reflections on the ethical work of urgency and waiting. Geographic
research suggests a contemporary popular
bias towards the urgency of large-scale futures, institutionalized in ways that
further
obscure
and discredit the urgencies of the body
.
This bias
also
justifies the production of new
waiting places
in our material landscape,
places like the detention center
and the waiting room. In some
cases, waiting is normatively neutral, even providing opportunities for alternative politics. In others, the technologies of
waiting serve to manage potentially problematic bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination (e.g. Wright,
2013). One of my aims has been to suggest that
