Stable destabilising? Rethinking images of temporality

Abstract

This article explores our sense of stability and instability. For example, is contemporary life governed by uncertainty, fluidity and sociotechnical acceleration, or do relative stability or inertia still represent the predominant experience in many domains? In particular, can stabilities and instabilities represent symbiotic processes, the one interwoven with the other? Furthermore, are theories conventionally treated as antagonistic more intimately related than we tend to consider, such as those favouring historical sedimentation over performativity and the assembly of the ‘new’? In comparing stabilisation and destabilisation, the article considers divergent theses of temporality, such as acceleration and refeudalisation, and the way that social theory appears peppered with images of stability and instability. To explore the symbiosis between stabilising and destabilising processes, it considers the social science disciplines of economics and accounting. In so doing, it addresses debate surrounding critical realism, historical sedimentation, governmentality and performativity, with attention to the argument of Abbott, Bourdieu, Callon, Elias, Neckel and Rosa. It also examines micro–macro relations, and the implicit theories of the self that inform the macroanalytical portrayal of stabilisation and destabilisation. Rather than seeing stability and instability as ‘opposites’, it argues that we should be open to the possibility that they may often be closely interrelated.