If thresholds determine when readiness must become action, then time determines how readiness is lived. Power rarely needs to forbid or command directly; it governs far more effectively by controlling temporal conditions — pace, delay, urgency, and duration.
Temporal domination is the governance of readiness through time.
Time as a Readiness Medium
Readiness is inherently temporal. It stretches forward in anticipation and backward in fatigue. A threshold approached too quickly overwhelms; one delayed too long exhausts. Power exploits this sensitivity by shaping how long readiness must be sustained, and under what temporal pressures.
Deadlines compress readiness. Waiting stretches it. Both are techniques of control.
Importantly, time here is not clock time alone. It is experienced time: the felt pressure of urgency, the drag of delay, the anxiety of indefinite suspension. These are not meanings imposed on time; they are conditions imposed on readiness.
Urgency Without Argument
Urgency is one of the most reliable tools of power precisely because it bypasses deliberation.
When time is scarce, readiness tips into action before interpretation can stabilise. People comply not because they agree, but because there is “no time.” Crisis language, productivity sprints, last-minute requests, and emergency procedures all function by accelerating thresholds beyond reflective capacity.
Urgency does not persuade. It precludes.
Waiting as Control
If urgency compresses readiness, waiting dilates it.
Queues, processing delays, pending reviews, and indefinite deferrals force readiness to remain active without release. Attention cannot disengage; escalation cannot resolve. Waiting consumes energy while appearing passive.
Crucially, waiting is rarely symmetrical. Some wait as a condition of access; others are waited upon. To wait is to have one’s readiness governed by another’s time.
Temporal domination often operates most effectively through delay without explanation.
Temporal Asymmetry
Power reveals itself in who controls pace.
Those with power set deadlines; those without must meet them. Those with power can delay; those without must remain available. This asymmetry produces radically different readiness lives within the same system.
One group inhabits time as flexible; another inhabits it as a sequence of impending thresholds. This is not a difference in attitude or motivation, but a difference in temporal structure.
Exhaustion as a Temporal Outcome
Sustained readiness without adequate release leads to exhaustion. Burnout is not a failure of resilience or meaning; it is a temporal pathology of readiness.
Systems that continuously escalate urgency while deferring release do not merely demand effort — they consume readiness itself. Over time, the capacity to be ready erodes. What collapses is not belief, but potential.
Temporal domination thus produces its own instability. It governs effectively in the short term while undermining readiness in the long term.
Why Time Matters More Than Threat
Threats operate intermittently. Time operates continuously.
A system need not punish often if it controls pace relentlessly. Readiness shaped by time does not require enforcement at every moment; it is self-maintaining, internalised as rhythm, habit, and expectation.
This is why power increasingly appears as scheduling, availability norms, responsiveness metrics, and “flexibility” demands — not as overt coercion.
What Comes Next
Thresholds and time structure readiness, but power does not operate only through pressure and delay. It also engineers escalation itself — sustaining heightened readiness as a permanent condition.
In the next post, we turn to manufactured escalation: how systems keep readiness elevated without resolution, and why anxiety, intensity, and perpetual urgency are so politically and economically useful.
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