Susan Hogben

Life's on Hold Missing people, private calendars and waiting

Keywords: private calendars, waiting, worry

Intimate relationships are forged on and sustained by the appreciation of mutually significant events. When someone is missing, as a result of a reportedly unmotivated absence, expectations of the continuity of relationships are disrupted. Using data from publicly available texts I examine how people experience such an absence. Harvey Sacks's notion of the 'private calendar' helps explicate how remaining family members experience literal and figurative desynchronization that suggests missing might be more potently understood as waiting. Finally, it seems that the duration of the absence helps family members account for the enduring lack of communication. KEY WORDS • disruptive events • interstitial time • missing people •

Introduction

Time making and time measuring can currently be characterized in industrial, commodified and compressed terms [START_REF] Adam | Reflexive Modernization Temporalized[END_REF]. Temporality also has a role to play in how we generate a more intimate sense of self and in the organization of our relationships [START_REF] Mead | The Philosophy of the Present[END_REF][START_REF] Maines | The Sociological Import of G. H. Mead's Theory of the Past[END_REF][START_REF] Flaherty | Present, Past and Future: Conjugating George Herbert Mead's Perspective on Time[END_REF]. [START_REF] Jenkins | In the Present Tense: Time, Identification and Human Nature[END_REF] proposes that progressive time provides a fundamental unit for conceptualizing who we are. He argues, 'our past is who we have been, and the future is fundamental to imagining who we will become. However, in order to have either past or future we need a stable present, the space of our everyday lives'. Given the emphasis on stability for our and, by extension, a relationship's continuity [START_REF] Sigman | Handling the Discontinuous Aspects of Continuing Social Relationships: Towards Research of the Persistence of Social Forms[END_REF] we can appreciate how, when an intimate family member, lover, friend, colleague or acquaintance is reported missing, the anticipation (and realization) of the future, the consistency of the past and the stable present become disrupted. 1 In this article I discuss the impact of someone being missing 2 by considering the role of time in three interrelated fashions. First, I examine how the routine relevance of relationships can be understood through [START_REF] Sacks | You Want to Find out if Anybody Really Does Care[END_REF] notion of 'private calendars' -the local means of organizing our relevance to others through the appreciation of events of personal significance. I demonstrate how the unexpected and prolonged absence of an intimate removes the availability of private calendars to the extent that the disruption is experienced as a kind of suspension of normal service. I examine how missing might be more aptly understood as interstitial [START_REF] Gasparini | Anticipation and the Surprises of Everyday Life[END_REF]; missing is experienced as a form of waiting where anticipation is populated with both worry and hope. Finally, it seems that the duration of the absence and the associated uncertainty provide family members with a way to account for the missing person's extended lack of communication.

The Data

Many scholars [START_REF] Weitzman | Social Suicide: A Study of Missing Persons[END_REF]Hepworth andFeatherstone, 1973, 1974;[START_REF] Payne | Understanding "Going Missing": Issues for Social Work and Social Services[END_REF][START_REF] Braid | One Husband, Lost and Found[END_REF][START_REF] Cowley | Where Are They Now?[END_REF][START_REF] Boss | Ambiguous Loss: Working with Families of the Missing[END_REF][START_REF] Rayner | Why did they have to go?[END_REF] observe that public talk about missing people tends only to occur when a disclosure about the missing person's absence can act as a declaration of concern and function as a direct or indirect request for the ongoing undesirable state of affairs to change. Alternatively, when missing is resolved (for example, when contact is made or a missing person returns) those involved rarely want to discuss the time of the absence [START_REF] Braid | One Husband, Lost and Found[END_REF][START_REF] Cowley | Where Are They Now?[END_REF][START_REF] Biehal | Lost from View: Missing Persons in the UK[END_REF]. Capturing data about missing is understandably somewhat restricted. For these reasons and others the data are taken from a representative range of public sources; a newspaper report, textual missing person appeals 3 and an episode of public participation television. 4

Time and Relationships: The Role of the Private Calendar

Relationships have been predominantly theorized through metaphors of physical proximity in terms of 'attachment' [START_REF] Bowlby | Attachment and Loss[END_REF] and 'social bonds' [START_REF] Hirschi | Causes of Delinquency[END_REF]. [START_REF] Baumeister | The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation[END_REF] propose an extension by suggest-ing that relationships are better understood as articulations of 'belongingness'. Relationships are recognized and maintained, they suggest, 'by stability, affective concern and continuation into the foreseeable future (p. 500).

For [START_REF] Sacks | You Want to Find out if Anybody Really Does Care[END_REF] this consistency and continuity rely on mutual attention to specific meaningful events. The relative significance of social, intimate, familial, institutional, collegial and sexual relationships is founded on the creation and acknowledgement of special events within relationships. Importantly, these events are treated as marks on a calendar which forge a referential framework through which relationships become remarkable.

The calendar, in addition to organizing time in a linear, progressive fashion (Coveney and Highfield, 1990: 26), acts as a temporal referent for general events and might indicate moon phases, national holidays or culturally specific celebrations that may or may not be treated as personally pertinent to the individual calendar user. Calendars can also be customized or personalized (cf. [START_REF] Symes | Chronicles of Labour: A Discourse Analysis of Diaries[END_REF] by marking dates which are privately apposite and peculiarly relevant to the individual calendar user, for example a father's birthday, a dental appointment, party invitation and the like. According to Sacks (1992a: 36-7), this personalized use ensures that time becomes organized in relation to an individual's 'relationships or biography'. Relationships develop what [START_REF] Sacks | You Want to Find out if Anybody Really Does Care[END_REF] terms 'private calendars' not as clandestine practice but as a means of locating 'events within the relationship' and understanding 'events in the world in general, by reference to the relationship ' (p. 222). The significance of the latter means that people can say things like, 'Kennedy was assassinated two weeks after we got engaged ' (p. 222).

An important feature of the private calendar comes through its contrast with 'everybody's calendar' because 'everybody's calendar' has a 'guaranteed continuity' that runs on into the 'indefinite future without regard to anyone particular being present' (Sacks, 1987: 223). A private calendar is personalized because it relies on particular people being available and active in the making and the marking of (private) events. The need for certain people to be present has important ramifications: a private calendar (and the significance of the events therein) 'ends when "we" end ' (p. 223). That is to say, the termination of an intimate relationship through, say, death or the relationship's aborted continuity, for example through divorce, means there will (most likely) be no more 'events on the private calendar '(p. 223) and so no more mechanisms for marking the private calendar.

Yet these two 'ends' differ. Following a death, Sacks (1987: 223) suggests the survivor may still be able to mark private calendar events previously shared with the deceased by reflecting safely on a normatively ended past; that is, events for a bereaved private calendar user can still 'occur sensibly in their lives' and are to greater and lesser degrees publicly permissible. An individual may recall personal(ized) events, anniversaries and the like without too much fear of sanction. An event in a private calendar ended by death is available, if not for renewal, then, for temporary restoration. This potential can be contrasted with the more restricted use of private calendars in relationships that end by, say divorce. Events in a private calendar which were once treated as mutually significant by those active in marking the relationship are, after separation, considered inappropriate referents to the extent that, as Sacks suggests, 'one cannot even retrospectively use the private calendar one had going ' (p. 223).

It seems that event referents, where a calendar-marking participant is removed but still available, are considered inappropriate to recognize, share or mark in subsequent relationships. These relationships in effect require the creation of new calendars to render them mutually significant. Following separation or estrangement a private calendar, like Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, returns to a kind of 'year zero'.

When we consider the impact of someone being missing it seems that neither of these characterizations is wholly appropriate. The unexpected absence of a family member produces a situation that is saturated with uncertainty. Where is the missing person? Why is he/she absent? Why is he/she not in touch? When and how will the situation be resolved? The multiple uncertainties throw into confusion the status of the relationship and the role of the private calendar.

The newspaper article examined here [START_REF] Goodchild | Milly is probably dead, say police[END_REF]; Figure 1) concerns the, then, ongoing absence of 13-year-old Amanda Dowler who did not return home from school on 21 March 2002. In the article, Amanda Dowler has been missing for three months and, unlike hundreds of thousands of missing people [START_REF] Prasad | The Girl Who Vanished[END_REF], there was widespread sympathetic media coverage. The article illustrates how her absence has consequences for the continuity of mundane practices which are indicative of and significant to the routine maintenance of relationships.

The imminent arrival of Amanda Dowler's birthday [START_REF] Goodchild | Milly is probably dead, say police[END_REF] line 8) introduces one of the challenges that absence makes to the successful maintenance of a relationship through the appreciation of and commitment to a private calendar event. Family (and friends) are reportedly unsure about how to mark events that are pertinent to the missing person and also relevant to the still present family and friends. Amanda Dowler's father reports the collective uncertainty ('no one really knows what to do'; lines 8-9) surrounding, what the reader can infer to be, the previously unremarkable and routine marking of birthdays ('they're asking us if they should send cards': line 9). The declaration of the uncertainty around how to mark his missing daughter's birthday appears to conjoin Sacks's distinct options of when and how private calendars can reasonably end. There appears to be neither the possibility of 'sensible' restoration (following bereavement) nor is the erasure of the event possible, as it is following (mutual) separation.

While people may remember the date of a deceased person's birthday it would be highly unusual for the deceased to be sent birthday cards. Indeed, Pauline [START_REF] Boss | Ambiguous Loss: Working with Families of the Missing[END_REF] appreciates the lack of ritualistic practices involving the missing, pointing out that 'there are no Hallmark cards for families and friends of the partially missing, for those who disappeared, vanished without a trace'. Yet, to not send a birthday card would indicate the erasure of 25 June (Amanda Dowler's birthday) from the Dowlers' private calendar and, thus, the tacit acceptance of a permanent end to that suspended relationship.

FIGURE 1 Extract from newspaper article published following Amanda Dowler's disappearance

The multiple uncertainties that define the missing are also protracted and amplified over time, colonizing both the past and the future with seemingly unanswerable questions: why did she/he leave? What happened? Where is he/she now? When will he/she return? Boss (2002: 553) argues that these uncertainties create a further complication to the situation which defies but also craves resolution by creating 'confused perceptions about who is in or out of a particular family'. Does the missing person still exist when they do not adhere to private calendar relevant events ('Father's Day had been a bad day'; line 10; 'There's normally two cards'; line 14)? Despite her absence should Amanda still be included in family definitions? Amanda Dowler's father reports how they now sign cards using the ambiguously inclusive referent 'the Dowlers' (Goodchild, 2002: line 25) to avoid definite removal of a particular family member for active calendar event marking (cf. [START_REF] Fravel | An In-depth Interview with the Parents of Missing Children[END_REF][START_REF] Hastings | Self Disclosure and Identity Management by Bereaved Parents[END_REF]. 5 The disruption that accompanies the absence of a family member forces a reappraisal of how relationships should continue. Family members are waiting for some sort of resolution (Goodchild, 2002: lines 27-8) but are mindful of the potentially undesirable endings that might accomplish this. The waiting, though, is not a passive or inert reaction but the combination of uncertainties through a prospective lens produces an anticipation [START_REF] Gasparini | Anticipation and the Surprises of Everyday Life[END_REF]) replete with apprehension.

Missing in Action: Waiting, Uncertainty and Apprehension

While the missing person is physically absent she is also psychologically present [START_REF] Boss | Ambiguous Loss[END_REF]. The emotional presence typically takes some form of apprehension. The following indicative extracts are taken from missing person appeals and demonstrate a range of reactions to the uncertainties surrounding the missing person's absence and lack of communication:

The family fears for Francesca as she often feels quite agitated and confused. (20 September 2003) His family are very concerned about him. They say, 'we are desperately worried to hear news'. (10 May 2002) Everyone is worried about his welfare. (10 July 2004) Amrita's mum, older brother and the rest of the family are desperately worried for her. (4 February 2001) Mark's friends and family have become increasingly worried about him. (10 January 2001) . . . has not contacted her family who are desperately worried for her. (7 June 2002) They are very anxious to contact him. (30 February 2002) His mother is deeply concerned about him and asks him to call. (20 September 2004) Worry, as these extracts indicate, is not a complete action; worry in general craves resolution. Worry, here, in particular, longs for some contact from the missing person. In this respect, as [START_REF] Phillips | On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored[END_REF] has it, worry is an 'ironic form of hope' to the extent that 'worrying implies a future, a way of looking forward to things. It is a conscious conviction that a future exists, one in which something terrible might happen' (p. 56). Worry and hope both reveal the future to be uncertain and both tend, though in contrasting modes, to work towards an outcome that can reduce the uncertainty on which each is premised and thrives [START_REF] Bradac | Theory Comparison: Uncertainty Reduction, Problematic Integration, Uncertainty Management, and Other Curious Constructs[END_REF]. Worry, while implying a future, is also stasis inducing because, as Phillips (1993: 41) also argues, it also 'fixes the worrier in the present'. Apprehension anticipates a future that will not be realizable until there are changes to the current uncertainty. The fixing of the family members through the suspension of routine relationship-appreciating events and through worry reconfigures missing and renders it akin to waiting in general and waiting for resolution in particular.

The interstitial action of waiting can be bracketed off from other social activities by being located in specially designated spaces (such as waiting rooms, bus stops and the like) but waiting also creates its own space [START_REF] Gasparini | On Waiting[END_REF] where hope and worry engage the future in an extended or suspended present. As Thomas [START_REF] Mann | The Magic Mountain[END_REF] elegiacally suggests in his characterization of waiting, it 'means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction'. He continues, 'it means making their actual content null and void . . . Waiting, we say, is long. We might just as well -or more accurately -say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such' (p. 279). [START_REF] Fuchs | Melancholia as Desynchronization: Towards a Psychopathology of Interpersonal Time[END_REF] proposes that such stasis, torpor or inability to act can be 'interpreted as the result of a desynchronization', that is, 'an uncoupling in the temporal relation of organism and environment, or of individual and society'. The uncertainty and the worry that fixes family members in the present avoiding undesirable futures, as the data will demonstrate, literally and figuratively, restricts them. Just as, Amanda Dowler's family reported uncertainty of how to mark existing private calendar events it also seems that the potential for making new events significant to their ongoing relationships is also impeded.

The next two extracts from the episode of public participation television reveal the mother of a missing son inviting him directly to contribute to her wedding (see Appendix for a list of transcription conventions):

[Christine's sons David (aged 13) left his family home on 26 December 1996, apparently to stay with his 11-year-old friend, Paddy Warren, but did not arrive there. At the time of the broadcast they have been missing for three years. In the previous turn the host has been discussing what might have prompted her son's absence.] 1. Christine: life's on hold (.) I mean I I'm frightened to go away 2.

I've I've recently married this year (.) I've been 3.

with my partner 14 years and we've recently 4. married this year . . . so we married in May this 5.

year I had it put in the papers asking David to come 6.

back to give me away (.) nothing came of that (.) and 7.

um (.) it's just been it's absolutely (.) torment (.) I 8.

can't go away on honeymoon (.) I couldn't go away on 9.

honeymoon because I was frightened to death (.) just in 10.

case I went away and David got in touch [with me]. 11. Host:

[it was] the day 12.

he turned up. Amid Christine's description of the anxiety and restrictions ('frightened to go away' (line 1); 'it's absolutely torment' (line 7); 'frightened to death' (line 9)) generated by her son's three-year absence and lack of communication she intimates that her marriage to her partner was used as an invitation to her son David to renew their lapsed relationship (lines 5-6). Despite embarking on her own personal calendar-making practices (her marriage), the effects of her son's absence seem to truncate what would be the normative events following marriage (lines 8-9). It seems that attempts to continue life without her missing son, to make events that might operate as new marks on their own private calendar are embarked upon reluctantly, are not wholly successful and strongly related to the desire for the significant presence of her missing son.

The relevance or denial of relevance are also evident in missing person appeals where reports of meaningful events are used as forms of inducements to encourage the reparticipation of the missing person: The reports of significant changes ('two new additions') or events ('important family news'; 'important news') are appended to expressions of concern ('They are very anxious about her well-being') and requests for some action by the missing person ('would love to hear he is safe and well'; 'it would be lovely for Tony to see them') and act as invitations and incentives for the missing person to renew contact.

It seems that without acknowledgement by the missing person the changes to the family members' lives are diminished in some way. The next extract demonstrates how apparent suspension of 'normal' service which was summarized by Christine ('life's on hold'; line 1) also encapsulates the effects a missing person's absence has on private calendar making more generally. Later in the broadcast data Val describes family's reaction to her 16-year-old-son's absence as literal immobility.

[Val's 16-year-old son (Damien) did not return from a party and has been missing three years.] 1. Val: we live on the island Isle of Wight (.) we were due to 2.

move to the mainland obviously we felt at that point 3.

when Damien went missing (.) we couldn't move cos any 4.

time he might come home (.) [and] 5. Host:

[how] old was he?

Val reports how her family have suspended events which would otherwise form part of a private calendar as inevitable immobility ('we couldn't move; line 3). Plans ('we were due to move'; lines 1-2) which were under way prior to the missing person's absence are cancelled, postponed or temporarily unrealizable. 6 This stasis, the worry, the waiting help explain why it is not without poignancy that the typical description of people who miss people is framed as 'people left behind' [START_REF] Weitzman | Social Suicide: A Study of Missing Persons[END_REF][START_REF] Hepworth | Going Missing[END_REF][START_REF] Boss | Ambiguous Loss[END_REF] in (calendar-making) time and space.

It seems that family members struggle with multiple uncertainties regarding why the missing person is absent and where he/she is but perhaps the most distressing consequence is trying to imagine and explain why the missing person is not (able to be) in touch with them. In this final section I identify how the duration of the absence seems to provide a way of accounting for the missing person's enduring lack of communication.

Accounting for the Lack of Communication: The Longer You Leave It the Harder It Is

The ongoing lack of communication that characterizes missing allows for the potential inference that the missing person is not in touch, not because they are somehow incapacitated but because they do not want to be; that family members are not important enough, have some shortcomings or are in any other way undesirable [START_REF] Boss | Ambiguous Loss[END_REF]. This silence, as [START_REF] Poster | The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context[END_REF] 3) appreciates, is perversely amplified because of the 'new level of interconnectivity'. The multiple modes that communication can take, in fact, 'heighten[s] the fragility of social networks'. It also means that some blame can be attributed to the missing person for not getting in touch.

The first of the two following extracts sees the potential blame generated from a lack of communication being resolved by positioning the missing person's inaction in line with some categorical group action (cf. Sacks, 1992aSacks, , 1992b)). Then, in the other extract, the potential culpability is managed through a different device; by exploiting the duration of the absence/silence as an exonerating factor.

[Jo's 16-year-old daughter, Helena, since returned, had been missing for six weeks with her 30-year-old partner. Carol's daughter Kathryn is 16 years old and has been missing for six weeks. Christine's 13 year old son has been missing for three years.] 1. Host: and did you have any contact in that period? 2. Jo: uh you you wrote a a a letter once didn't you? 3. Host: oh so you knew she was safe and she was alright? 4. Jo:

I uh I uh and also that she was safe because the 5.

police were were able to track her through her bank 6. card 7. Host: right, so it's quite a different situation to (.) 8.

[she wrote you a letter] 9. Carol: [if she'd only phone] 10. Host: yeah (.) sorry Carol 11. Carol: I mean if she'd only phone if she'd only phone cos 12.

(.) I can't understand why she doesn't phone but the 13.

thing is most of them don't phone 14.

(1.0) 15. Host: uh Chr-uh Christine Here it is evident that communication (line 2) provides confirmation of the missing person's her security and well-being (line 3). This experience is contrasted with Carol's report of the ongoing lack of communicative contact from her daughter. During this exchange, Carol displays her desire for a similar action ('if she'd only phone; line 9) which would presumably bring about a similar diminution of disquiet. Carol elaborates her incomprehension ('I can't understand why she doesn't phone'; line 12). In order to dispel the potential accusation that the lack of contact is a personal shortcoming peculiar to her daughter, Carol provides a description that downplays the deviance and locates her daughter's inactivity as a practice typically associated with a group ('most of them'; line 13), to which she tacitly ascribes her daughter membership (cf. [START_REF] Watson | Some General Reflections of Category and Sequence[END_REF]. Describing individual behaviour as part of group practice diffuses its potential abnormality and absolves the missing person of individual responsibility.

The next excerpt reveals that making sense of the protracted lack of communication is of great concern for family members. It demonstrates an alternative device for normalizing the missing person's lack of contact by foregrounding the duration of the absence.

[Christine's son, David (aged 13), left his family home on 26 December 1996, apparently to stay with his 11-year-old friend Paddy Warren but did not arrive there. He has been missing for three years. Helena was missing for six weeks but has since returned.] 1. Christine: did you find that the longer you were gone the 2.

harder it was to come home? 3. Helena: yeah (.) much harder 4. Christine: because I've been told by missing persons 5.

that they find it very hard after they've been gone for so 6.

[long] 7. Helena:

[the long]er you leave it [definitely] 8. Christine:

[to (.) come] [back] 9. Carol:

[had] you told any 10.

of your friends that you was [going]? 11. Helena:

[no]

Christine, like Carol in one of the aforementioned extracts, locates the missing person's behaviour with already existing others ('they'; line 5). This pattern of conduct is reportedly supported by experts in the form of the external authority ('been told by missing persons'; line 4) 7 and consolidated by Helena (a returned missing person who in previous turns has been classified as a local expert by the host ('you know you're the expert'; 'Helena she's our expert here')). Helena corroborates Christine's speculation emphatically ('the long]er you leave it [definitely]'; line 7). Both Christine's question, in lines 1-2, and Helena's response, in line 7, suggest that a formulaic structure is available as a blame-diffusing and normalizing device. Indeed, when prompted later in the programme to give advice to other missing people ('hhh what would you say (.) to those who've run away?'), Helena restates the duration of the absence as definitively influential on a missing person's enduring lack of communicative contact ('they do need to get in contact (.) and from experience I know that the longer (.) you leave it the (.) more difficult it gets').

This form 'the . . . er X the . . . Y' is a recognizable idiomatic construction (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992: 44; see also Wray, 2002: 48-50) with slots which can be filled by various adjectives fast, slow and such like. In this data, the comparative structure tends to contain references to duration (longer) and adversity (harder), difficult)]. The X and Y slots are filled by more or less explicit reference to absence and lack of communication (to get in touch, call, come back, phone). The structure 'the . . . er X the . . . er Y' also appears in agnate forms ('they find it very hard after they've been gone for so long'; lines 5-6; 'the longer you leave it'; line 7).

The structure 'the . . . X the . . . er Y' and agnates provide an alternative means of normalizing a missing person's lack of contact within a collective by constructing it formulaically as a routine articulation of an already existing practice. The formula displays an internal equilibrium which operates as an equalizing device. As a result activities are shorn of individual significance and work to downplay any potential individual shortcoming or an assessment of the minimum or maximum length of time of the absence and the ensuing silence which would render contact (im)possible.

It seems that the longer the missing person is not in touch the harder it is for the missing person to get in touch and for the remaining family members to continue marking or being to embark on new relationships.

Conclusion

Relationships are fragile; they require routine maintenance that demonstrates 'affective concern' (Baumeister and Leary, 1995: 500) which in turn demonstrates each individual's commitment to its continuity. [START_REF] Sacks | You Want to Find out if Anybody Really Does Care[END_REF] notion of the private calendar helps explicate the powerful ways that time can become personalized and indicate the relevance of people to that relationship.

However, when someone is missing, denies someone else contact, and withdraws (or is withdrawn) from a social network, life for the remaining family members is thrown into a phase of suspended animation, in literal and figurative stasis, unable to satisfactorily complete normative life events and 'move on'. This stasis occurs because family members are waiting for some action (the return of or some news of the missing person's whereabouts). This kind of resolution would restart or, as [START_REF] Fuchs | Melancholia as Desynchronization: Towards a Psychopathology of Interpersonal Time[END_REF] would have it, 'resynchronize' the family members with his/her (social) environment. Family members become fixed in a present (characteristically as 'people left behind) and it is, it seems, only with reluctance (and some guilt) that family members are able to embark on making new private calendar events.

The guilt that family members may feel during the missing person's enduring lack of communication is partly informed by the inference that a missing person is not in touch with them, not because they are incapacitated in some way, but because he/she does not want to; the family members are no longer relevant. This kind of wilful rejection can lead to the missing person being blamed for his/her social inadequacy. Family members seem to want to protect the missing person from such conclusion and they do so by exploiting a range of time referents to account for the missing person's lack of communication. The emergent formula, glossed here as, the longer you leave it the harder it is, identifies the duration of the absence, rather than the missing person's potentially wilful withdrawal, as the obstacle to renewing contact. This formula is not only used in this order of missing but is apparent in more mundane situations where previously frequent or regular contact diminishes. Beyond this, it seems that missing additionally reveals a resistance to identify one's own personal undesirability as a plausible reason for one's sudden or accumulated irrelevance to a previously intimate or familiar other. So while missing of this order is not a mundane phenomenon its extreme nature seems to provide insight into the complexities and, importantly, the simple ways that we use repetition and time to organize our relationships.

Notes

My immeasurable thanks go to the insights of two anonymous reviewers.

1. For concision the term 'family members' will be used throughout the article. 2. The UK police will treat an adult as missing if they are unexpectedly absent for around 72 hours. The significance of this length of time is to allow for absences that can be culturally treated as 'lost weekends'. This is not to say that people don't privately (and publicly) register the absence of someone, particularly children, after very much shorter periods of time. 3. The original corpus consists of 215 appeals published in The Big Issue (a weekly magazine sold in the UK by the vulnerably housed) from January 1999 to May 2000. More recent examples of appeals have been used for illustration. 4. The episode entitled 'Desperately Trying to Find a Missing Loved One' was taken from Kilroy broadcast on 27 October 1999. The benefits of using public participation television as data lies in the fact that the participants (including the host) are making versions of their experience publicly available because of and despite the constraints of the context and regardless of any researcher's agenda. [START_REF] Hutchby | The Organisation of Talk on Talk Radio[END_REF] suggests that the interface and negotiation of apparently personal and indisputably institutional contexts provides the means for common-sense understandings of the public world to become available. 5. Amanda Dowler was buried on the anniversary of the day she 'vanished'. This was perhaps an attempt to erase the significance of the day she was reported missing by creating a new calendar date with a practice of ritualised closure.

  There are two new additions to the family and it would be lovely for Tony to see them. (20 April 2001) They are very anxious about her well-being and have important family news. (20 May 2002)Rob's sister, Maureen, would love to hear he is safe and well saying the she has some important news to tell him.(30 June 2001)

  6. It transpires that this family have, indeed, reluctantly moved. The ongoing appeal, available on the NMPH website (http://nmph.underwired.com/seen.php?show all=yes#) states: 'He comes from a close family who miss him terribly. Sadly, his family have had to move to USA for work since he disappeared but they are still hoping to hear news of Damien. His grandparents still live on the Isle of Wight. Damien was 21 last June 2001'. 7. In line 4, 'missing persons' refers to The National Missing Person's Helpline; a charity which supports missing people and 'those who are left behind'. SUSAN HOGBEN is a discourse analyst currently working on a project indentifying emerging science and technology issues in UK media. She was previously a research associate with CESAGen, an ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Aspects of Genomics examining genetics, health and identity. Her research interests include innovation, representations of identity, constructions of community, family and belonging and the role of evidence in the production of explanations. ADDRESS: Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3NB, UK. [email: HogbenSH1@cardiff.ac.uk]

Time & Society copyright © 2006 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) VOL. 15 No. 2/3 (2006), pp. 327-342 0961-463X DOI: 10.1177/0961463X06067065 www.sagepublications.com

TIME & SOCIETY15(2/3)

Appendix

Transcription conventions

The transcription conventions are modelled on those of Gail Jefferson (see Atkinson and Heritage, 1984:


Kathrin Braun

Biopolitics and Temporality in Arendt and Foucault

Keywords: biopolitics, Foucault, messianic time, modernity, natality, temporality

The article demonstrates that Hannah Arendt's examination of modern temporality strongly intersects with Michel Foucault's diagnosis of modern biopolitics. Both observe three key features of biopolitical modernity: the political zoefication of life, a technocratic understanding of politics, and processual temporality which link the project of modernity to the project of 20th-century totalitarianism. Arendt, however, also offers an alternative, nonbiopolitical understanding of politics, life, and time captured in the concept of natality. Built into the concept of natality is the 'weakly' messianic temporal structure of the interval as opposed to processual temporality. KEY WORDS • Arendt •

strangely enough, makes little or no use of these thoughts. In this essay, I will not undertake a detailed discussion of Agamben's political theory but rather continue the project of bringing Arendt and Foucault together on the issue of biopolitics. Although the term 'biopolitics' does not appear in Arendt, I will argue that in her work we can find a rich and in-depth analysis of the specific features that constitute modern biopolitics, so that we can read Arendt as a theorist of biopolitics avant la lèttre. So far, this aspect in Arendt's work seems to have been widely overlooked. An exception is André [START_REF] Duarte | Biopolitics and the Dissemination of Violence: The Arendtian Critique of the Present[END_REF] who argues that reading Origins and The Human Condition as analyses of biopolitical violence, even though biopolitics is not an Arendtian category, enables us to find the missing link between these two works and to understand the lingering continuity between capitalist market society and totalitarian violence in our contemporary world. Duarte suggests that we live in a world in which there is a constant danger that the Arendtian animal laborans gets converted into the Agambian homo sacer. My own reading of Arendt widely corresponds to this thesis, but I will discuss in more detail the overlaps and intersections between Foucault's conception of biopolitics and Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism. These intersections, I argue, concern the analysis of certain critical features of the modern project that culminate and converge in totalitarianism: the zoefication of humans, a technocratic understanding of politics, and, not least, processual temporality. The issue of temporality, as I will show, is of particular significance in Arendt's political thought. Furthermore, I will focus on Arendt's specific contribution to a theory of biopolitics and modernity and point out the additional insights she can offer. Those consist, in my view, first in opening up an additional dimension of understanding in regard to biopolitics, one that refers to a debatable but also inspiring existentialist, if not theological, layer in her thought. Second, and linked to this dimension, with her concept of natality, she presents an alternative way of conceiving temporality, politics, and life that has the potential to take us beyond the spell of biopolitics.

Both Arendt and Foucault belong to those thinkers who draw our attention to the dark sides of the modern project. Arguably, what Jeffrey [START_REF] Isaac | A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights[END_REF] said about the work of Arendt is equally true for Foucault: both are puzzled by the irony 'that the modern age, which proclaims the value of life above all else, is also the age of genocidal mass murder' (p. 65). That is, both Arendt and Foucault ask the question of how the atrocities of 20th-century totalitarianism were rooted in the soil of modernity and how to unearth these roots. Whereas Arendt provides an in-depth study on the functioning principles of totalitarian rule and the nexus between shaping, regulating, and enhancing the Volkskörper and classifying and killing people marked as 'life not worth living', Foucault's works, as Milchman and Rosenberg (1998) point out, rather shed light on the formative stages of this nexus. Milchman and Rosenberg argue that the idea of 'life not worth living' can be seen as one possible, though not necessary, outcome of the practices of classifying and categorizing in terms of healthdisease, normal-pathological, fit-unfit, which Foucault traced back to the emergence of modern medicine, psychiatry, biology and the carceral society. In the following, I will highlight some further aspects in the works of Foucault and Arendt that illuminate the threads running from the formation of the modern project to the extermination camps. To avoid misunderstandings, this is not to say that Nazism was the inevitable, necessary outcome of anything. It is only to say that Nazism was able to build on ideational and practical elements that were and still are key to modernity and that it is worthwhile studying these elements in order to be aware of the possibility that they might again grow into a real nightmare.

The first aspect I want to highlight is the observation of what might be termed the political zoefication of humans. 1 Looking at the formative stage of the modern state, [START_REF] Foucault | An Introduction[END_REF] observes that it was accompanied or even characterized by the move through which humans as living beings became the subject and target of political rule: 'Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate domination was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access event to the body ' (pp. 142-3). The life at stake here is clearly not the life people live, not the life story, the biography, but rather the zoe-aspect of their existence. Public policy and the welfare state through the late 18th and 19th centuries, Foucault argues, co-emerged with practices, institutions, and new bodies of knowledge, designed to take care of the physical aspects of human life such as fertility, health, disease, longevity, or morbidity, in order to enhance the productivity of the population as well as its loyalty to the state [START_REF] Foucault | The Political Technology of Individuals[END_REF]. [START_REF] Foucault | Governmentality[END_REF] makes it clear that the shift towards 'the population' was a decisive precondition for the emergence of the economy as a separate sphere which he links to the 'governmentalization of the state' (p. 220), that is, the understanding of politics as government in the sense of management.

This analysis partly overlaps with Arendt's indictment in The Human Condition (1958) that modern society is being based on labour rather than on work or political action. Labour, in her terminology, means the type of activity that serves the necessities of life and the ongoing circle of consumption and reproduction. The purpose of labour is not really to produce lasting works but to maintain the life processes of the individual, society, and the species. The Arendtian categories of labour, work, and action are certainly problematic, as Bronislaw [START_REF] Szerszynski | Nature, Technology and the Sacred[END_REF] argues, particularly when understood as universal, neatly separable features of human existence or as an account of the social evolution. Still, I think, if we do not share Arendt's 'phenomenological essentialism' (Benhabib, 1996: 123-41) but rather understand 'labour', 'work' and 'action' as a typology of action within modern society, these concepts may be useful to understand some of its basic features.

From this perspective, Arendt's delineation of the role of labour as compared with work and action clearly draws from Marx's analysis of capitalist accumulation [START_REF] Braun | K)Eine Denkerin der Vermittlung? Gesellschaftstheorie und Geschlechterverhältnis im Werk von Hannah Arendt[END_REF]; human activity merely serves as a means to feed the ongoing dynamic of a process that Marx has analysed as the process of capitalist accumulation. Any act of work tends to get transformed into an act of labour insofar as it is neither performed for its own sake nor for the sake of creating a lasting product but merely as a means to maintain the dynamic of the economy. [START_REF] Arendt | The Human Condition[END_REF] here speaks of 'repetition and the endlessness of the process itself' and of a 'specifically modern acceleration', which has transformed work into labour (p. 125). It is not least in this sense that life in modern society has become the highest good; however, it is not the life of human individuals but rather the 'life' of society, the ongoing dynamic of the economic process, which ranks as the supreme good.

Thus, while Foucault stresses that life is a resource which gets mobilized, Arendt points out that life is constantly (re)produced. Both, however, state that individual life functions as a force that feeds into the dynamic of a larger process, be it as a resource or as a product, and that the newly emerging sphere of the social is not least characterized by the constant consumption of life in order to maintain the dynamic of this process. They both, I argue, make the diagnosis, which is actually very similar to the Marxian analysis of capitalist society, that the rise of the social implies a certain degradation of individual lives to mere means of sustaining and feeding the economy. Thus, to a certain extent, we can say that the political zoefication of humans is inherent in modern society from the very beginning.

The totalitarian systems of the 20th century, however, have taken the political zoefication of humans to the extreme in reducing certain groups of people to the status of being mere life. They did so through stripping these people of their civil rights, social positions and political status. The concentration camps, [START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF] says, demonstrated 'that human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human animal' (p. 455). She also makes clear, however, that the practice of stripping people of their legal and political status was not invented by the Nazis. It had already occurred in the aftermath of the First World War, when hundreds of thousands of people became refugees, homeless or stateless due to expatriation, flight, or expulsion. These people, Arendt says, belonged 'to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species' (p. 302); they were reduced to a status similar to that of an animal; it did not matter what they thought or did but only what they were [START_REF] Arendt | Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht[END_REF]. While it was the Nazi state that declared whole categories of people to be 'life not worth living' and accordingly destroyed their lives, the Stalinist Soviet Union also, as both Arendt and Foucault remark, classified political adversaries in biological terms, as mentally ill [START_REF] Foucault | Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976[END_REF] or 'dying classes or parasitic races' (Arendt, 1996: 938). 2 The political zoefication of humans is closely linked to another thread which, according to both Arendt and Foucault, runs through modern politics and society up to totalitarianism: the conception of politics as administration, namely the administration of life. [START_REF] Foucault | Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976[END_REF] shows that the emergence of biopolitics comes with a shift from understanding politics basically as the continuation of war to an understanding of politics as administrating, regulating, calculating, and managing the life of the population. Within this new paradigm the population was seen as a resource that can be mobilized in order to strengthen the state. Administrating and managing this resource was dependent on knowledge and gave rise to population statistics, population science, hygiene, public health, or eugenics. These bodies of knowledge were, as Foucault points out, intrinsically based on a logic of classifying, qualifying, categorizing, and ranking. Biopolitics in Foucault, as Larry [START_REF] Reynolds | The Genetic Modification of the Agro-food System and the Transformation of the Biopolitical[END_REF] notes, actually means bio-administration. Foucault thus diagnoses a specifically technocratic understanding of politics in modernity: politics is mainly the set of technologies required to achieve certain ends such as the increase of the welfare and productivity of the population and the relative strength of the state as compared to other states. [START_REF] Arendt | The Human Condition[END_REF], too, views modern politics mainly as administrating or managing the necessities of life. The 19th and 20th centuries, according to her, have developed an understanding of politics that equates politics with government and sees it as a sort of housekeeping. Whereas, however, Foucault takes a nonnormative view, simply stating the substitution of one unappealing understanding of politics for another, Arendt takes a decisively normative perspective, mourning the loss of the public sphere and referring to an emphatic idea of politics as an activity that forms an end in itself.

Again, we find that a general feature of modernity culminates in totalitarianism. Under totalitarian rule, there is no room for politics in the sense of expressing and debating different viewpoints and opinions and for acting in concert as opposed to exercising command and obedience. In short, there is no space for political action as an end in itself. The sites where the utmost destruction of the ability for political action altogether took place were the camps [START_REF] Arendt | Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft: Antisemitismus, Imperialismus, totale Herrschaft[END_REF]. Hence, we find that both Arendt and Foucault see totalitarianism as the extreme case of a system that has turned politics into a knowledge-based administration of life.

In totalitarianism, according to [START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF], this knowledge-based administration of life takes on a new dimension: she depicts the system of the camps in terms of 'experiments' and 'laboratories', that is, in terms of technoscientific knowledge production. Totalitarianism, here, is seen as a gigantic experiment on human subjects, the camps being the laboratories where new technologies of turning humans into mere life are developed and tested: 'The concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified' (p. 437). The last observation about the relation between modernity and totalitarianism in Foucault and Arendt concerns the processual structure of time. It is here that Arendt can offer some crucial insights into the nature of totalitarianism and the modern link between politics and life. Therefore, in the following, I will reconstruct her argumentation in more detail.

Again, Foucault makes us aware of a specifically new modern feature of power and politics which, as Arendt's analysis makes clear, fully and fatally takes shape in totalitarianism. He points out that the new modern form of power which refers to 'man-as-a-living-being' (Foucault, 2003: 242) does not really target individuals as living beings. It does not primarily operate through exercising direct control over the body or through intervening in individual lives. Instead, it targets collective phenomena such as the birth rate, or the average life expectancy. While on the individual level these phenomena seem ungovernable, they are not necessarily so when taken as collective phenomena. This, however, implies another characteristic new feature of biopolitics, namely that it targets processes, temporal phenomena, phenomena which 'occur over a period of time, which have to be studied over a certain period of time: they are serial phenomena. The phenomena addressed by biopolitics are, essentially, aleatory events that occur within a population that exists over a period of time' (p. 246, emphases added).

Biopolitics is essentially about 'taking control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species' (Foucault, 2003: 247, emphasis added); it 'is a technology in which bodies are replaced by general biological processes' (p. 249). In other words, the processes Foucault is talking about do not take place within an individual's life time. On the contrary, they pass through individual life. The individual's birth and death do not delimitate but on the contrary mediate and facilitate the activities of modern governing. Hence, the life that biopolitics targets has a supra-individual dimension, not just in a numeric but also in a temporal sense [START_REF] Gerodetti | Biopolitics, Eugenics and the Use of History[END_REF]. Modern politics, as Foucault depicts it, consists of a set of government technologies which act upon a target, the biological processes in the population, within which individual life is just a transitory moment.

We will rediscover this relation between politics and life and its specific temporal structure in a radicalized form in Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism. To her, it forms a key to understanding the specific nature of totalitarianism. Understanding, here, means to recognize the principle that sets this form of government in motion [START_REF] Arendt | Essays in Understanding 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism[END_REF]. However, it is also more: 'Insofar as totalitarian movements have sprung up in the non-totalitarian world (crystallizing elements found in that world, since totalitarian governments have not been imported from the moon), the process of understanding is clearly, and perhaps primarily, also a process of self-understanding ' (p. 310).

Trying to understand totalitarianism, for her, includes asking the question of how it could have an 'appeal' to people and she examines this question both in her works on totalitarianism and in The Human Condition (1958). However, she does so not on a political sociology plane but on a speculative, if not theological, plane, seeking to understand the rule of processual temporality as an answer to the questions of death, finitude, and loneliness. It is at this point that Arendt and Foucault definitely part; Foucault would not concede that it made sense to deal with questions of that kind. He deliberately restricts himself to the study of when and how certain questions emerged and evolved. However, such self-restriction comes at a cost: within these limits it is neither possible to ask the question of 'appeal', which certainly limits the range of understanding what was going on, nor is it possible to develop better, non-destructive answers or to distinguish between bad, worse, and better answers at all. Therefore I think it is worthwhile to take a closer look at Arendt's analysis of the configuration of politics, life, and temporality that characterizes the nature of totalitarianism and links it to the modern predicament. Against this backdrop we can then reconstruct Arendt's concept of natality as a guidepost to break away from this still dangerous configuration.

At the core of totalitarianism, both as a form of government and as a type of ideology, Arendt argues, lies the idea that all human action is subordinated to laws of nature or laws of history. 3 In retrospect, one such line leads from Darwin to Nazi racism, another from Marx to Stalinism. What both have in common is the idea 'that a superior process of movement has seized both nature and history' (Arendt, 1996: 952). 4 Totalitarianism, according to Arendt, is largely about executing the laws of nature or history. What does this mean? It essentially implies a disastrously distorted, preposterous relation between continuity and change, intransience and transience, timelessness and time. Here, Arendt in fact starts from some basic assumptions about human needs, and about the kind of relation between intransience and transience that would be more appropriate to humans. Her assumption is that, due to their capacity for freedom and spontaneity, human actions and their results unavoidably have a moment of unpredictability, instability, and transience to them. That is, transience is built into the human condition -which is a problem men inevitably have to deal with. Positive law and political institutions, to Arendt, form something like an appropriate compensatory answer to this problem. They are able to provide continuity and stability in order to balance the essential instability and changeability of human action. Positive laws are depicted in terms of 'boundaries' [START_REF] Arendt | Essays in Understanding 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism[END_REF] 341-2) or a 'framework of stability' (p. 341), which confines but also permits and protects the exercise of freedom. As such, positive law hedges what she calls a 'common world, the reality of some transcending continuity' (p. 342).

Two other salient concepts in this context are 'home' and 'homelessness'. [START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF] goes so far as to assume that 'human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency' (p. 352). The transformation of class society into mass society and the related process of atomization, in her view, have eroded such a common world and left the masses in a condition of 'essential homelessness' (p. 352). She even speaks of a 'social and spiritual homelessness' (p. 352, emphasis added), which underlines that she is arguing on a highly speculative plane here.

The totalitarian response to this 'spiritual homelessness' was to twist around the relation between continuity and change so that under totalitarian rule it is human action which is made 'static' (Arendt, 2005: 342), whereas all laws are turned into 'laws of movement'. Terror, the main instrument of totalitarian rule, 'stabilizes' or 'freezes' men (p. 342) through shutting down the spaces where freedom and spontaneity could be exercised, whereas the laws of nature or history undermine and ultimately destroy the conditions of stability and a 'common world'. At first glance, the laws of nature or history, in contrast to positive, man-made law, seem to be characterized by their unchanging, permanent quality, their 'timeless presence', as Arendt puts it. At the same time, however, the idea of laws of nature or history display an inherent dynamic linked to the political zoefication of humans. We can reconstruct Arendt's argument through discerning three ways in which the laws of nature or history form laws of movement: first, they allegedly determine the course and movement of history, much as natural laws determine the course of the planets. Second, totalitarian movements make them their highest ranking source of authority, so they become the laws of these movements. Third, the totalitarian movement as such can only proceed if it avoids the establishment of any stable institutional order. In order to maintain its existence, it has to preserve its form as a political movement even after having taken seizure of the state. [START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF] insists that totalitarianism is far from forming a monolithic or hierarchical state structure but is rather characterized by its 'shapelessness ' (p. 395). Through mechanisms such as the confusing co-existence of party and state offices, real and façade power centres, overlapping and competing jurisdictions, and not least the constant shifting of the centre of power, it avoids the establishment of stability. Keep in mind, Arendt insists, that the goal of a totalitarian movement is not simply to retain power within the territorial boundaries of a state but to conquer the world and to create a new mankind. The latter in particular can be seen as a dynamic goal. Whereas world conquest could theoretically be achieved -the surface of the earth is limited -this is not the case with creating the master race or the 'new man'; these are endless projects requiring an ever ongoing process of purge and elimination. It is here that the different dimensions of the 'laws of movement' converge with one another and with the political zoefication of humans: the project of creating the new human species through the execution of supra-human laws of movement, thereby avoiding stabilization and preserving the political movement as such, according to Arendt, forms the essence of totalitarianism.

Creating the new mankind, or the new human race or species, through executing the laws of nature or history displays and implies the general features that Foucault ascribes to biopolitics: it targets collective and serial, temporal phenomena. Put differently, it operates on the level of the species and employs the sequence of generations, thereby transgressing, utilizing, and mobilizing individual life. Further, when [START_REF] Foucault | Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976[END_REF] highlights evolutionism as a general paradigm that emerged in the 19th century he comes very close to Arendt's analysis of processual thought:

Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broad sense -or in other words, not so much Darwin's theory itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the hierarchy of species that grow from a common evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit) -naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century not simply a way of transcribing a political discourse into biological terms, and not simply a way of dressing up a political discourse in scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness, the history of societies with their different classes, and so on. (p. 257) Evolutionism, according to Foucault, forms an important link between classical biopolitics and what he calls the evolutionary racism developed by Stalinism and Nazism. Thus, Foucault, too, points at the specifically processual structure of modern temporality, which links the biopolitical dimension of the modern project to the totalitarian project. 5 Totalitarianism prolongs and radicalizes the features of biopolitics highlighted in Foucault to the point that it uses the elimination of humans as a means of productively consuming individual life in the production process of the new species life. The only functions individuals can have vis-à-vis the laws of movement are to execute them and/or to become 'walking embodiments of these laws' (Arendt, 2005: 340), which is by no means mutually exclusive. Executing them means actively applying the standards according to which certain individuals or groups do or do not allow for the unfolding dynamic of the laws of movements. Embodying them means being classified according to these standards. Laws or processes which function through transgressing and productively consuming individual lives are not served through compliance but through providing the material in which they realize themselves. This material can be of higher or lower quality and the political zoefication of humans is the outcome of a mechanism that judges the existence of individuals or groups according to the question of whether they present suitable or unsuitable material to realize and promote the project of enhancing the human race. Within this logic, being deemed a 'dying' or a 'decadent class' functions much the same way as being deemed 'unfit to live', whether the classification refers to physical qualities or not.

Compared with 19th-century processual thought, the totalitarianism as depicted in Arendt thus adds, or at least dramatically increases, the element of acceleration. The totalitarian project is not only about scientifically understanding the laws of movement but about actively promoting the process of their unfolding. Here, execution is at the same time acceleration. Its instrument is terror, which makes terror the borderline case of a technocratic, instrumentalist understanding of politics. Hence, Arendt seems to say, processual thought had a certain appeal to the masses in their 'spiritual homelessness' because it enabled them to participate in a permanent, intransient, 'timeless presence'. The alleged intransience or permanence of these laws, however, was a fatal error because in fact their operating principle was mobilization, dynamization, acceleration. What processual temporality really did was destroy the chance of establishing some sort of this-worldly stability, continuity, or common home. In the end, the supra-gigantic forces whose movements race through humanity, dragging every individual willy-nilly with them -either riding atop their triumphant car or crushed under its wheels -may be various and complicated: still, it is surprising to see how, for all practical political purposes, these ideologies always result in the same 'law' of elimination of individuals for the sake of the process or progress of the species. From the elimination of harmful or superfluous individuals, the result of natural or historical movement rises like the phoenix from its own ashes; but unlike the fabulous bird, this mankind which is the end and at the same time the embodiment of the movement of either History or Nature requires permanent sacrifices, the permanent elimination of hostile or parasitic or unhealthy classes or races in order to enter upon its bloody eternity. (Arendt, 2005: 341) The kind of eternity the totalitarian movement has to offer is a deadly eternity, the permanence it produces is the 'tranquility of the cemetery' (Arendt, 2005: 348). Hence, the totalitarian project is based on a specifically processual structure of temporality in which 'endlessness' has taken a deadly double meaning: first, the processes determined by the laws of nature or history and executed through terror cannot come to an end because their goal, the production of a new human species, can never be completed. Second, each individual and each human activity merely counts as a means to promote the process and not as an end in itself. These processes have a direction, but no end(s). To [START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF], this structure is expressed concisely by the maxim of the SS: 'No task exists for its own sake' (p. 409). This attitude, she says, destroys 'all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different ' (p. 409).

Here, however, we also see that processual temporality is not confined to the totalitarian project, although it is within the totalitarian project that it assumes its most deadly power. Rather, the relation cited earlier between actions and ends bears considerable resemblance to Marx's analysis of the relation between exchange value and utility value under capitalist conditions, in which human productivity is essentially transformed into a mere means to advance the process of accumulation. Indeed, Arendt's later work on modern society can, arguably, be read as a study on the functioning of processual temporality before and after totalitarianism. In The Human Condition (1958), as I will point out in the following, Arendt both makes an endeavour to understand the development of processual temporality and to present an alternative model, the temporality of the interval, the former crystallizing in the priority of life, the latter in the concept of natality.

In The Human Condition, [START_REF] Arendt | The Human Condition[END_REF] explores the rise of 'life' to be the supreme good in occidental 6 culture; she shows how the changing notion of 'life' is related to a pertinent transformation of temporality and how these transformations form responses to certain fundamental, traumatic historic experiences. The polis, in her view, had offered its citizens a kind of 'worldly immortality' in that it formed the institutional framework for the possibility of remembrance (p. 314). Life was conceived of as a life story that can be passed down over generations and remembrance constitutes a response to human mortality. This response required a body politic though with a functioning context of narration and remembrance. The decline of the polis therefore meant a traumatic experience and the cultural response to that experience was the 'invention' of a new form of temporality, namely eternity, which came with a revaluation of the vita contemplativa in relation to political action. This shift, however, came at the price of devaluating the only human capacity that is able to create a common world before death.

Similarly, [START_REF] Arendt | The Human Condition[END_REF] understands Christianity and its idea of the immortal soul as a response to the decline of the Roman Empire. However, this shift meant a further devaluation of political action and the political realm insofar as the immortality of the soul did not rely on a functioning body politic. On the contrary, in order to save one's soul and attain immortality, what mattered was to turn away from worldly political life. For this reason, Arendt argues, the price for this new form of immortality was alienation from the interpersonal world.

The beginning of the modern age and the development of modern science mark a further upheaval in that science implied a model of investigation that devalued contemplation as a path to truth so that contemplation lost the status of being the most highly regarded form of life. For a short time, [START_REF] Arendt | The Human Condition[END_REF] says, work took the place of contemplation and homo faber the place of the philosopher. However, to the extent that religion lost its capacity to determine the appropriate ends of work it lost its significance and was superseded by processual thought, be it evolutionism, historical materialism, life philosophy, or the belief in progress, as a new notion of temporality. This notion of tempo-rality in turn, she argues, is modelled on the biological life process, or on a biologistical understanding of life. In terms of bios and zoe, it would be modelled on zoe, referring to the idea of an entity that, in analogy to the species, sustains itself through the coming and going of individuals. The species in that sense is beyond life and death and so is the assumed entity that underlies processual thought, be it termed nature, history, society, or progress.

However, we could also say that Arendt understands processual thought as a response to the 'spiritual homelessness' that has accompanied the inhabitants of the western world from the turn to metaphysics in ancient Greece to post-war capitalism. To model thought on the life processzoe -therefore means a specifically immanentist endeavour of constructing immortality. Note, however, that Arendt does not consider the quest for immortality to be an essential feature of 'human nature'. In her interpretation, the quest for immortality is not a cause but rather an outcome of or a response to another human need, which she does assume to be essential: the need to find a home in the world, to be respected as a member of this worldly community.

Incidentally, according to Arendt, the capitalist economy of the 20th century is in no way based on work but on labour in that every human activity is directed at the maintainance of the economic dynamic. Again, we find, 'no task exists for its own sake'; no activity forms an end in itself, any thing and any activity merely serves to feed the automatically proceeding dynamic. From this perspective, we still live under the rule of processual temporality. It certainly does not take as murderous a shape as it has taken in Nazism and Stalinism insofar as it is not directed at the production of one new single mankind and does not use terror as its main instrument. However, to the extent that human activities are qualified and treated as mere means to feed an automatic, relentlessly proceeding paramount process, whether it is named progress or globalization, we are still under the spell of processual thought. In post-war society, [START_REF] Arendt | On Violence[END_REF] says, one form the rule of supra-human processes takes is the inexorable progress of science and technology 'compelling us to do whatever we can, regardless of consequences' (p. 86), not least in the realm of biotechnology which, in [START_REF] Arendt | The Human Condition[END_REF] view, is apparently driven by the desire to escape the human condition of natality and mortality.

Hence, we note that Arendt and Foucault help us discern certain critical, interrelated elements of the modern project that fatally culminated and converged in the totalitarian projects of the 20th century but did not disappear with them. As such features we have identified the political zoefication of humans, a technocratic understanding of politics, and processual temporality. Biopolitics can be understood as the combination of these elements. As long as these elements are to be found in contemporary thought, science, technology, society, or politics, it is advisable to watch out for their impact and their possible convergence. Arendt, in my view, goes a little further than Foucault in that she decidedly outlines an alternative, non-biopolitical understanding of politics, life and temporality captured by the concept of natality. The idea of natality is meant to present a different and better response to the existential human need to find a home in the world. This response would differ from the various predominant responses we can find in occidental history which all focused on overcoming mortality. Up to now, the history of occidental thought has been preoccupied by mortality [START_REF] Arendt | The Human Condition[END_REF]. Metaphysics, Christianity, and processual thought, in this perspective, do respond to the need of finding a home in the world and to the experience of this need being frustrated. Metaphysics and Christianity responded in developing a specific temporal form: eternity, a sphere of permanence and intransience beyond the interpersonal world and superior to it. In processual thought, however, eternity moves from transcendence into the immanence of nature or history and in this move gets dynamized so that what remains from eternity is just the constancy of the process. Processuality is the new temporal form emerging in the 19th century. Hence, to Arendt, both eternity and processuality form temporal structures that respond to the problem of homelessness in the world, a problem caused by the nature of human action itself, but they respond in a way which rather makes things worse as they devaluate and undermine those human faculties through which humans are able to create a home in this world. To focus on natality instead of mortality would mean to acknowledge that the only remedy to the volatility of human action and its results is human action itself, complemented by the capacity to promise and to forgive [START_REF] Arendt | The Human Condition[END_REF]. While human action produces results that are volatile and unstable, action is also the capacity to begin anew, to create a new political community in concert with others. [START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF] concludes Origins with the warning that totalitarianism will stay with us as an ever-present potentiality but also with the more optimistic outlook that the end of totalitarianism at the same time implies the promise of a new beginning: 'Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man, politically, it is identical with man's freedom ' (p. 479).

Although the concept of beginning, initium, is taken from Augustine, [START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF] gives it a distinctive turn in linking it to the factum of birth: 'This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man' (p. 479). In The Human Condition (1958) she develops this idea further, capturing the relation between beginning, freedom, action and birth with the term 'natality'. Being born, here, is not only a physiological process, the beginning of biological life, although it is that too, but in the case of humans it also means entering the world which is already inhabited by otherszur Welt kommen, in German -and the beginning of a being capable of acting, that is, of beginning herself. Action can be understood as a kind of second birth, in that the acting person once again, and this time on her own account, enters the world, that is, the interactions and common projects of persons (p. 176). Unlike many other metaphors of a second birth this one does not devaluate the 'first birth'. The second birth is not the antithesis of the first but its confirmation; it means accepting the gift of spontaneity and freedom man has received already at and through birth. While birth forms the beginning of physiological life that has to be sustained through labour and work, action is the essence of political life. Physiological life thus provides time for the good life; action fills zoe with bios. It is important to note though that political life, in Arendt, is no idyll, no paradise that had been lost and could be regained; the idea of embracing natality is not meant to lead us back to an alleged state of static timelessness. There is no denying that human action can cause mistakes and that political institutions are volatile, which is why we need promising and forgiving.

With the help of forgiveness one can not undo mistakes caused by human action but one can prevent them from determining the future. By means of making and keeping promises human beings can bring consistency and commitment into their affairs without relinquishing their freedom. Focusing on natality, instead of mortality, means appreciating these human capacities and sustaining the institutional framework that allows them to be exercised. To focus on natality also means to break away from eternity and processuality and to introduce a new temporal form instead: the interval. Thus it is not least a revision of our understanding of time that the concept of natality is aiming at, as Julia [START_REF] Kristeva | Hannah Arendt[END_REF] has remarked. 7 Human life, then, is not understood as a transitory stage to eternity or as a means to feed the dynamic of an ongoing process nor as a timeless idyll but as 'the time interval between birth and death' (Arendt, 1958: 97). As such it has a beginning and an end, it is limited, and it provides time for the good life, which in turn can be remembered as a life story.

To focus on natality would thus mean putting an end to processual temporality and replacing it with the time of the interval. It is here where we can locate what Susannah Young-ah [START_REF] Gottlieb | Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W[END_REF] has called Arendt's 'weak' or 'inconspicuous messianism' (p. 160). [START_REF] Arendt | The Human Condition[END_REF] frequently refers to the figure of Jesus, particularly when she wants to emphasize the significance of action and forgiveness. Jesus, Arendt holds, was far from preaching the superiority of contemplation over action: 'The only activity Jesus of Nazareth recommends in his preachings is action, and the only human capacity he stresses is the capacity "to perform miracles"' (p. 318). Hence, it is not necessarily Jesus who has messianic qualities but rather Jesus demonstrates the messianic, potentially redeeming powers of action and forgiveness. To Arendt, these amount to the human faculty to perform miracles. In many passages of the New Testament, she tells us, 'miracles are clearly not supernatural events but only what all miracles, those performed by men no less than those performed by a divine agent, always must be, namely, interruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected' [START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF](Arendt, /1993: 168): 168). This miraculous power of human action has a messianic quality to it as it ends one time and opens up another; it disrupts the time of the process and opens up the time of the interval. It brings the current time to a close insofar as it stops time's race towards the future and breaks open a time span in the present, a time between limits. 8 The element of messianism and the thought of redemption are alien to Foucault and it is with regard to this messianic perspective that Arendt's and Foucault's conceptions of temporality fundamentally diverge. Foucault's considerations about time (see [START_REF] Michon | Strata, Blocks, Pieces, Spirals, Elastics and Verticals: Six Figures of Time in Michel Foucault[END_REF] do not refer to the messianic idea of an end of time, whereas Arendt's conception of human action as a messianic power that manifests itself in the public sphere bears strong affinities to what Gershom [START_REF] Scholem | The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality[END_REF] identifies as the messianic idea in Judaism: 'Judaism, in all of its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community. It is an occurence which takes place in the visible world and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearance' (p. 1).

Arendt, as well as Foucault, strictly rejects the 'strong' messianic idea that the world could be saved once and for all, which she, as well as Foucault, considers extremely dangerous. Nevertheless, she does convey a messianic message, only that the messianic powers, the human faculties of action and forgiving, are themselves temporal; they operate within time, their results are unstable and all they can do is open up time for a new beginning in this world. Hence, messianic time in Arendt has the structure of the interval, redemption means freedom, the exercise of which in Arendt is synonymous with power, and such power takes place, quite as [START_REF] Scholem | The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality[END_REF] put it, publicly, in the community.

To Foucault, in contrast, freedom means the capacity to think differently and to conceive of ourselves differently, different from the requirements of subjectification, of becoming an 'autonomous' subject through confessing and truth telling and thereby producing knowledge required for the biopolitical management of the living. The liberty [START_REF] Foucault | What Is Enlightenment?[END_REF] finally leaves us with consists of thought practices and self-practices; liberty to Foucault is 'an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life' (p. 319), 'a permanent critique of our historical era' (p. 312), a 'critical ontology of ourselves', it is 'work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves' (p. 316). It is a liberty that remains preoccupied with the self, if not confined within the limits of the vita contemplativa. Foucault's way of interrogating history and exposing allegedly universal, necessary, rational or emancipatory features of modernity as being not only historical but also inherently ambiguous provides us with a tremendously helpful prerequisite to analyse the logic of modern biopolitics. It is hard to see, however, how this self-centred, philosophical conception of liberty could point at an alternative conception of politics, one that enables us not only to analyse but also to overcome biopolitics.

The concept of natality, I have argued, takes us a step further, offering an alternative understanding of politics, life, and temporality. Human life here is understood not as a moment in an endlessly racing process whose laws are to be executed on the individual, nor as a manageable entity but as the time span between birth and death. Time is not the medium for the execution of suprahuman processes but the interval that provides the chance to perform activities for their own sake. Politics, finally, would be understood not as the management of populations or the acceleration of economic or scientific progress but as acting in concert together with others, and the purpose of politics would not be to enhance the quality of some collective entity, to create a better species or to maintain the dynamics of the economy, but to make the world a home.

Notes

This article has benefited greatly from discussions in different contexts, particularly within my long-term seminar on biopolitics at the University of Hannover, the ECPR workshop on 'Mapping Biopolitics', and the Jewish Studies reading group at the University of Washington, Seattle. I would like to thank the participants in these groups for in-depth and inspiring discussions. Particularly, I would like to thank Richard Block, Barbara Duden, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Michael Rosenthal and Karen Litfin for substantial comments and encouragement.

1. [START_REF] Agamben | Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life[END_REF] has pointed out that the Greeks had no single word for 'life' but the two terms 'bios' and 'zoe'. Unlike the contemporary use of the prefix 'bio' in terms such as 'biology' or 'biopolitics', 'bios' denoted the life one was living whereas 'zoe' comprised the physical aspects of being an animal, a living thing. 2. Here, as in many instances, the German version of Origins which has not so much been translated but rather rewritten by Arendt herself, is much sharper and stronger compared to the earlier English version. Whenever I refer to the German version, it is for this reason. 3. A comprehensive study on the historical development of what Arendt calls processual thought, namely the idea of progress and its relation to the notion of one single mankind as the subject of improvement, can be found in André [START_REF] Taguieff | Du progrès: biographie d´une utopie moderne[END_REF].

Taguieff's study basically confirms Arendt's thesis that processual thought forms one of the problematic continuities between the core features of modernity and totalitarianism. 4. Cited and translated from the German version. In the English version, [START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF] simply states that in Marx and Darwin the law has changed its meaning from expressing a 'framework of stability' to expressing 'the motion itself' (p. 464). 5. For a comprehensive overview on the respective notions of temporality in the different stages of the work of Foucault see [START_REF] Michon | Strata, Blocks, Pieces, Spirals, Elastics and Verticals: Six Figures of Time in Michel Foucault[END_REF]. 6. Arendt's account is partly paralleled by Ivan Illich (1992), who also presents a history of 'life', but stresses even more the cultural construction of this notion. According to Illich, in the 1970s and 80s, 'life' became a new fetish. It appears as 'a life', a precious substance which has to be preserved and managed by institutions, experts and professionals. Similar to Arendt, whom he does not explicitly refer to, he holds that the construct of 'life' is filling a void created by modern scientific society. However, he does not deal with what makes Arendt's story on the rise of 'life' so troubling: the connection to totalitarianism. 7. However, I do not share [START_REF] Kristeva | Hannah Arendt[END_REF] view that Arendt pursues a vehement defence of life in The Human Condition. Kristeva does not sort out the different meanings of the term 'life' in this book. 8. Arendt's critique of the idea of progress and processual thought clearly draws from Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on the Concept of History' (1968). The affinities and differences between Arendt's and Benjamin's conception of temporality would, however, require another study.

TIME & SOCIETY16(1)