OUT OF TIME: The Spectacular Temporalities of Border Crisis

In this essay, we work at the intersections of rhetorical conversations on time and temporality with interdisciplinary debates on spectacle to build an argument at the intersection of time and spectacle. Our theory of spectacular temporalities connects contemporary conversations on time and temporality that locate temporality as always laden with larger ideologies of discipline and power with conversations of spectacle that attend to spectacle as a genre that, like time, is never simply neutral. Together, these two conversations direct us toward the temporalities of spectacle, or what we call spectacular temporalities. We argue that spectacle, as a rhetorical form, garners public attention and rhetorical form through its ability to compel attention to the heightened sensation of the present. We build this argument by turning to a recent spectacular moment of crisis at the US/Mexico border, the controversy around the Border Patrol’s use of horses in their attempt to limit Haitian migrant movement into the US. Our analysis directs us to the immediate and pervasive affective response to spectacle, outrage, and to two spectacular temporalities: dis/location and urgency. We argue that dis/location and urgency foster outrage as an effect of the moment that in its Now-ness quells national sentiment even as it fails to address the material violences and complexities of border regulation.