Technical Temporalities of the Transitional Protest Movements

Addressing questions drawn from ethnographic research, this article theorizes the temporalities of protest movements shaped around digital technology. After describing the historicity of transitional protest movements, politics of potentiality is analyzed in the context of new techniques of governance based on the circulation of everyday data through social media. The author argues that the growing governmental research on digital mediation of mass politicization indicates a shift from politics of preemptive action to modulation of propensity. The article then examines the state’s continuous investment in making the population legible through knowledge objects such as tables and networks in relation to historical time. This analysis situates the changing character of the temporal interventions of the state apparatus into the social body in general and networked protest movements in particular. Drawing on media theory and ethnographic material, the author offers a critique of crisis-temporality as it strengthens synchronicity in networks, offering expanded legibility for governance contra grassroot aims of decentralization and pluralization of temporality. The article ends by suggesting the substitution of present-oriented crisis temporality and synchronization with the musicality of political theory and practice.