The Space and Time of Capitalist Crisis and Transition

At Don Mueang Airport

Put yourself in the old Bangkok airport. Handling more than thirty-eight million passengers per year at its peak, Don Mueang was Asia's second busiest airport until its closure in September 2006. This relic of twentieth-century jet travel has emerged as a hub for low-cost and charter operators. As you move through the terminal, connecting to flights bound for regional destinations such as Chennai, Kunming, and Phnom Penh, you encounter an old world map stylized in 1960s design and featuring at its base a row of clocks displaying the time in twelve cities: Dallas, San Francisco, Montreal, Sydney, Moscow, Zurich, Rome, Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Copenhagen. As Max Hirsh notes in Airport Urbanism (2016, 119–24), no flights leave from Don Mueang these days for those destinations. If you wish to fly to those cities from Bangkok, you must pass through Suvarnabhumi International Airport, the massive glass and metal structure to the city's east that replaced Don Mueang as Thailand's major gateway in 2006. Yet despite the shopping amenities, environmental engineering, and modular design that makes Suvarnabhumi feel much like any other world airport, one experiences a more striking sense of global contemporaneity staring at the old world map at Don Mueang. The radical disjuncture marked by the mismatch between the times on the clocks and the cities to which flights depart suggests the impossibility of forcing together in a single historical moment the heterogeneous times and spaces of the present.

The dizziness and disorientation induced by moving through a space such as Don Mueang Airport provides an appropriate prelude for this book. Readers may wonder how a study that begins in the Argentinean pampas ends up taking them to a discount air hub in Bangkok, a shipping port in Athens, a national park in Bolivia, or any of the other sites and installations visited in this book. As in the case of the cities listed on the world map at Don Mueang, the lines of connection are not obvious or given. But this is precisely the point. By seeking to excavate and analytically describe the operational logics that animate and drive the making and unmaking of global arrangements of space and time, we interrogate the workings of contemporary capitalism and delineate their changing relations with political practices, subjectivities, forms, and institutions. Such an investigation requires a wide-ranging analysis that is capable of confronting the continuities and dissonances of these logics as they play out across a vast and variegated panorama. To make our analysis, we draw on an array of sources, including but not confined to academic works produced within the disciplinary limits of anthropology and geography. Occasionally, we supplement these accounts with knowledge drawn from our own research and political experiences. We are committed to the proposition that concept production is most effective when it stems from specific, concrete situations, and we try to stay true to this proposition even when we do not directly discuss the experiences and encounters that have driven our thought. Conversely, we are very much interested in the labor of translation that is always needed when such concepts are applied to concrete situations that may be significantly different from the ones in which they originate. We are convinced that the ensuing frictions and even clashes may generate resonances that are very productive in terms of knowledge production (both regarding the concrete situations at hand and the terrain of conceptual elaboration). We thus present a study that is intentionally broad and, dare we say, purposely disorienting. This choice is only partly a question of writing style. Certainly, we try to convey a sense of the turbulence of contemporary capitalism. But we also suggest that a wide-ranging analysis offers insights and conclusions unavailable to studies that restrict themselves to a single locale or a closed set of sites. While we respect the lures of ethnographic immersion, we are wary of claims that the distinct forms of engagement it offers provide an exclusive or reliable index of analytical depth. Rigorous and probing analysis, we submit, can be generated in other ways.

In moving across sites, experiences, and processes, the giddying surface of our text searches for the multiple edges and frontiers along which contemporary capital expands. We aim to specify how this expansion displays a systemic logic that both exploits discontinuities between existing social differences and produces new forms of spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Our writing seeks not simply to claim solidarity with the many populations and struggles it encounters along the way, but also to ask what form such solidarity might take and how it might be meaningfully expressed in the current conjuncture. To this extent, we are not too invested in drawing parallels between the book's wide analytical remit and the itineraries of passengers who pass through Don Mueang Airport. Many of these travelers are, as Hirsh (2016, 5) points out, "nouveaux globalizes — new members of Asia's flying public, such as migrant workers, students, retirees, pilgrims, tourists, and traders from the Global South." In this case as in many of the others we study in this book, the differences between the lives of these populations and our own circumstances and positionality are manifest. Nonetheless, the problem of getting from A to B remains, and the operational logics governing the making and breaking of air routes apply, regardless of who occupies the seat on the next flight.

The sensory overload experienced standing before the world map at Don Mueang is complicated by the fact that some of the clocks have stopped. Different times are displayed for cities such as Frankfurt and Rome, which are in the same time zone. It is as if time has gone awry, and the neat demarcation of the world into uniform time zones has been consigned to a past moment of history. Although clocks around the world are still set against Greenwich Mean Time, the fractured moment of the present is not easily flattened onto a single cartographic surface. It is not only that the movement of time along scales not representable on the clock face weighs so heavily on our sense of the contemporary — whether it is the millisecond differences that provide arbitrage opportunities for high frequency financial traders or the slow geological time that underscores planetary existence itself. More important, the "disjunctive unity of present times" (Osborne 2013, 17) that underlies the global sense of contemporaneity cannot be separated from the growing heterogeneity and interconnectedness of global space.

Not accidentally do these spatial and temporal complexities come to a head in an airport, a space deliberately made to facilitate transfers and connections. Recent critical thought has struggled to give a name to such spaces of transit and circulation,...