The politics of temporal sovereignty and the subaltern MA

Abstract

This paper explains the emergence of an MA in Culture and Creative Enterprise at a Scottish University by locating it within a policy context characterised by the attempt of the Scottish Government to establish ‘temporal sovereignty’ through ‘fast policy’. The argument of the paper is that the MA is an outcome of the Scottish Government’s attempt to establish the sovereignty of a ‘future present’ over political and economic temporalities through the inscription of the figure of the entrepreneur in economic, educational and cultural policy. The paper demonstrates that the MA acts as a subaltern vehicle for that project and uses conceptual and empirical research to critically analyse the politics of the entrepreneur within it. The paper concludes with a discussion of the extent to which that policy assemblage has unravelled.