Nobody signs a delay.

This project’s premise is that waiting is not an experience of time but a relation of power distributed as time: one party’s capacity to act is suspended pending another’s decision, and the suspension is felt as duration only by the one who does not decide.

Three claims organise the enquiry. That delay is a technique of government rather than a failure of administration. That waiting is the form power takes when it wishes to be unattributable — which is why it is so difficult to litigate. And, centrally, that there are two waitings, formally identical and politically opposite: waiting imposed and waiting chosen. The applicant in the queue and the poet who waits for words to arrive occupy the same posture and not the same position. Telling them apart is the critical task, because the rhetoric of patience works by making the first resemble the second.

Waiting offers a third term through which incommensurable situations may be related without asserting equivalence: apartheid influx control and the Chinese household registration system cannot be equated, but the temporal arrangements they impose can be read together — as can the queue and the delivery algorithm, two faces of one operation.