| When: | Thursday, January 16th, 2025 |
| Time: | 2:30 pm |
| Location: | Richcraft Hall, Reader's Digest Resource Centre (RB 4400) |
| Audience: | Current Students, Faculty, Staff |
| Contact: | Dwayne Winseck, dwayne.winseck@carleton.ca |
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.
About the Speaker
Professor Wayne Hope’s primary research focus concerns time, globality and capitalism. He has authored Time, Communication and Global Capitalism (Palgrave 2016) and The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures: Times out of joint (Palgrave 2024). Related research has appeared in The International Journal of Communication, Time and Society and Triple C: Capitalism, Communication and Critique. Professor Hope is joint editor of an online IAMCR journal entitled Political Economy of Communication. He is co-director of the Journalism, Media and Democracy (JMAD) research centre at the Auckland University of Technology and comments regularly on media-politics in blogs, podcasts and the news media.