On the question of time, racial capitalism, and the planetary

ABSTRACT

Modernist capitalist iterations of time of linear and messianic teleologies/eschatologies are co-produced with the nation-state and the global ecological capitalist order. This article contests racial ecological capitalism by focusing on its language of time for two dominant structures: first, the linear, that is, the flow of a determined sequence of separable measurable units in one direction and capitalist ecology and second, retrojection, that is, the conjuring up of the moment of enclosure and capture as the ‘origin’ of racial ecological capitalism which supposedly testifies to its necessity. I draw on the 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and work by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway to register the co-production of the temporal with the ecological. In conversation with Octavia Butler, I argue that grappling with these two time approaches and ecology allows for a structural engagement with the emergence of and generation of the possible conditions for a decolonial planetary relations as acts of invention.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial capitalism
• temporality
• capitalocene
• climate change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 My approach here is informed and shaped by David Marriott's analytics on writing and history. See David Marriott (2018).

2 Another important notion of time is cyclical time. This assumes a cyclical movement, where there is ‘no true Future’ in a transcendent sense that will introduce a rupture or break with the past.

3 Retrojection can also be imagined as a different past, the time to come, the new beginning. Such evidence is found in the syntactical signs of the perverse investment in the epistemologies of the future anterior.

4 Sheila Jasanoff’s idea of co-production is an experimental, generative site that allows us to pay attention to how structures and social relations are not a given. As a process, they may orient us to different temporal trajectories, and even toward the undetermined.

5 This approach to history indicates a historical perspective “that extends further into the past than both human memory and the archaeological record. It attempts to incorporate climatology, demography, geology, and oceanology, and chart the effects of events that occur so slowly as to be imperceptible to those who experience them, such as the changing nature of the planet” (Oxford Reference, 2021).

6 Ur-Akt or the primal act of law is a placing or localization (Lopez, 1997; as cited in Schmitt, 1997, p. 15). See Anthony Farley for an analysis of how the law places the slave in a circular temporal mode to constantly pray for equal rights in a system that is death. In his words, “The slave’s unacknowledgeable death drive is the secret of the commodity and its fetish. Contra Marx, commodities do speak. Commodities speak of equality of right, equality of right only, and that continually” (Farley 2005, p. 225).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna M. Agathangelou

Anna M. Agathangelou is Professor of Politics at York University. She is the co-editor of (with Kyle D. Killian) Time, temporality and violence in international relations: (De)fatalizing the present, forging radical alternatives, co-editor (with Nevzat Soguk) of Arab revolutions and world transformations, co-author with L. H. M. Ling of Transforming world politics: From empire to multiple worlds, and author of the Global political economy of sex: Desire, violence and insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States.