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Paper short abstract:

How do we speak about chronicity without ignoring individual and collective attempts to escape terminality and stagnation? This presentation considers social acts in and after 'chronic' time. How do they relate to time and how do we account for their very own temporality?

Paper long abstract:

In many places, infrastructures stopped working or turned against the populations that they were meant to support and serve. In Indonesia, where I conducted long-term fieldwork, poor residents live in the aftermath of infrastructural failure. They regularly suffer from floods--riverbanks crumble or canals designed to prevent flooding clog. Faced with this situation, people are constantly forced to fix and retrofit infrastructures, inserting themselves actively into larger sociotechnical assemblages. As Jackson (2013) argued, as a mode of existence repair itself constitutes an aftermath that grows at the margins of sociotechnical systems. Repair extends the lifespan of infrastructures, bridging from old worlds to new worlds--buying time. But what if the possibility of deterioration lingers on? What if repair and prevention trap people in such a present, preventing them from developing viable long-term plans? Cazdyn (2012) has diagnosed contemporary society with having entered a chronic mode, "a mode of time that cares little for terminality or acuteness." The 'chronic' comes with a cultural configuration that suppresses agony and manages pain while repressing the possibility of future change (cf. Masco 2019). In ethnographic research, however, we often encounter hopeful and innovative arts of dealing with crisis and dead-ends that have more or less self-destructive effects (Bourgois 2003). In my presentation, I ask what it means to consider chronic time and its material manifestations as an ethnographic object. How do we speak about chronicity without ignoring attempts to escape terminality and stagnation? How do social acts relate to this kind of future?