(De)Facing Time and Power: Towards a 'Temporal Turn' in Political Science?

While social and political science have witnessed a “spatial turn” towards the end of the 20th century, currently issues of time and temporality again seem to move into the focus of attention. Central insights emerging from an interdisciplinary field of social time studies have finally inspired scholars of international relations, public policy and political theory to develop a temporal lens adequate for re-approaching central questions of political science. In this paper I will deal with these developments along two questions or arguments. 1) I will ask if we are currently witnessing such a “temporal turn” and what this re-orientation could imply for dealing with issues of ontology, epistemology and methodology in political analysis in general. 2) I will focus in particular on questions of conceptualizing relations of time and power, which until now have remained an enigma to social and political science. Bringing together current discourses on time and temporality in social time studies with political science theories on power, I will reflect on different ways and means temporal power is actualized not only in processes of political decision making but also as a technology of directing the conduct of conduct of individuals and groups in their everyday behavior. Far from giving expression to a necessary logic of historical development, contingent articulations of time and power work differently with regard to historical-specific circumstances and to different social groups affected from specific time structures, norms and values. While earlier approaches towards time and power thought of the process of becoming hegemonic of social time relations of modernity according to a logic of unification and rationalization that subsumed every temporal atom under a singular logic, new approaches emphasize the heterogeneous, fragmented and real-time aspects of temporal steering. Therefore, the paper tries to sketch an overview of implicit and explicit ways relations of time and power are conceived in social and political science more broadly, and to rethink these issues with regard to current insights coming from interdisciplinary time studies.