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Friday, January 10, 2025
1:30 p.m. EST

Dr. Wayne Hope

The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Epochal Crises of Time

Humankind inhabits the epochal formations of fossil-based global capitalism and an Anthropocene earth system debilitated by carbon emissions, global warming and associated tipping points. Convergence of these epochs has generated crises of time at three interrelated levels. 

Firstly, from an intra-global capitalist perspective, the realisation of capital over measurable chronological time is disrupted by the real time imperatives of financial profit making. Digital technologies enable traders and speculators to compress sequential economic time in ways that cannot recognise the historicity, futurity and totality of global warming-climate change. Secondly, global capitalism destabilises every aspect of the earth system; consequently, the deadweight of capitalism’s past carbon emissions and the associated ecological damage weighs increasingly upon the present. As this situation worsens for each incoming generation, the advancing repercussions of global warming deepen uncertainties about what the future might bring for disparate populations. A general crisis of temporal progressivity results whereby the past-present-future trajectory of economic growth becomes unviable and survivalist business models prevail. Palpable earth system deterioration threatens the assumption that that continued growth and technological advancement are guarantors of a better future. Global capitalism’s earth system deterioration also generates a crisis in the denial of coevalness; globally mediated now-ness and presentism cannot occlude the ever-growing multitudinous others of global warming displacement. Thirdly, earth system deterioration triggers a crisis of ecological and social temporalities. Across major ecosystems the cyclicities, rhythmicities and synchronicities of biotic, animal, bird and marine life are unravelling. And, amidst declining biodiversity, humankind faces a crisis of temporal autonomy; a sustainable future cannot be reliably secured. 

Although the enveloping, polycentric nature of these time crises are not fully apparent their symptoms circulate unpredictably within communication flows and media spectacles. Fundamentally, the convergent epochs of the Anthropocene earth system and global capitalism have limited duration. What will then follow? In these fraught times, I set out the counter- constructions of time necessary to energise the climate justice movement and advance eco-socialist principles.

Watch some of our previous talks on YouTube

Past Speakers:

Dr. Adam Rosenthal
Life as Lineage, or: Literary Apocalypse and the Text of Evolution
October 25, 2024

Dr. David Roden
Nietzschean Hyperagents
September 18, 2024

Dr. Alenka Zupančič
The Logic of Fantasy
May 3, 2024

Dr. Mariana Ortega
Carnal Light and Border Crossing, Sensing a Photographic Archive of Feeling Brown
November 6, 2023

Gabriel Rockhill
Ideology, Art & Class Struggle
October 5, 2023

Rocío Zambrana
Metamorphosis of Value: Epistemic Protocols in the Long 17th Century
April 3, 2023

Alia Al-Saji
Making the Colonial Past Hesitate: Fanon, amputation, and a politics of refusal
March 13, 2023