Temporicide: Waiting, punishment, and (social) death

Waiting is an individual and collective social process embedded in everyday life. State-sanctioned waiting is a widespread form of political subordination enacted by the state through bureaucratic processes—criminal legal systems being a prime example. We draw connections between waiting and punishment to explore the systemic power structures that regulate social interactions based on processes of stratification. Here, we explore formal and informal waiting under processes of state detention through our exemplars in Canada, Jamaica, and the United States. We explore a certain kind of indefinite waiting we call “temporicide,” a condition in which the future is circumscribed by a present condition for an unspecified length of time. Temporicide is where living social death and necropolitics meet. We argue that waiting serves as a marker and maker of difference, and with that, certain groups are subject to wait by the state for longer periods and sometimes until death.