The 1AC’s narrative of a ‘climate crisis’, and subsequently of progress mobilizes temporality as a neoliberal means of organizing social relations and obscuring capitalism as the root cause.

Liberalism: always too late, or capitalism’s colonial and enslaving proactivity?

In the IPCC reports, time as a linear human orientation is placed in the context of timescales of forces requiring human intervention but out of human control: climate change. The recent SRl.5 (IPCC, 2018), ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C’, representing the ‘newer instalment of the scientisation of climate change’, situates ‘the issue beyond democratic debate by declaring it a matter for the scientific expertise of the IPCC’, and inscribes it as an emergency (Garrard, 2020, p. 1). The report suggests ‘climate change is moving faster than we are’ (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2018, p. v), and its urgency demands our intervention. However, the moral and ethical articulation of the climate as a linear temporal ‘urgency’ does not allow us to understand ecological shifts or even climate change in a larger trajectory, including human conquest, property relations, and competition. Rather, the report’s ‘foreshortened timeframe’ speaks to the urgent need of global concerted efforts to mitigate climate change and signals how temporary responses and procrastination are not going to do the trick (Garrard, 2020, p. 2).

John Mecklin, Editor of Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, similarly reminds us that time is running out:

Faced with this daunting threat landscape and a new willingness of political leaders to reject the negotiations and institutions that can protect civilization over the long term, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today moves the Doomsday Clock 20 s closer to midnight - closer to apocalypse than ever. (Mecklin, 2020)

The moving of the clock makes the ‘climate emergency’ public, especially for those proponents of liberalism whose ‘macroscopic exclusion clauses’ have been written to ‘displace ... unfreedom’ onto all marginalized, enslaved, and colonized peoples and those ‘primitive’ and ‘undeveloped’ sites ‘from a white male bourgeois European who was the historical agent in the narrative’ (Mann, 2019). Yet this moving of the clock does not address the root of the problem. It allows the positing of a secular/humanist eschatological story (Rothe, 2020, p. 162) whose temporal structure is one of immanent destruction, informed by an analysis of existence as being-towards-death (i.e. of the human and the planet) or catastrophe.

Of course, this schematic presumes death and ecological catastrophe (collapsed into one). It represents a never-reached horizon of experience, where authentic and moral decisions must be made through a theory or ‘concept of crisis or emergency’ (Mann, 2019). Liberal leaders of the inter- national political system ‘inch toward’ an implementation of a regulatory system, what Mann and Wainwright call climate Leviathan, instead of addressing the root causes of global warming. These leaders are not creative but ‘fumble ... for solutions’, continuing to argue that ‘climate change’ is a ‘market failure, without considering the limiting structures of the ‘market’ itself (Osaka, 2019, p. 2; citing Mann & Wainwright, 2018). When the moment for organized challenge emerges, white hegemony rushes to squander the creative energy and reorients social relations toward its consolidation. It does so by rushing to innovate through the co-production of narratives and an emerging ecological order.

The present as a fracture of notions of history and ‘historical natures’

Apocalypse is ‘the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal’ (Buell, 1995, p. 285). As such, it deranges capital and its entanglements with ecological problems, ranging from the climate change, to the extinction of species, the loss of pollinating insects, and other ecological disasters. These challenges or this ecology of environmental concerns cannot be considered in a partitioned manner.

The focus on temporality has been picked up by historians and others grappling with what the authors of the Anthropocene name a crisis and emergency. One text that speaks to the global climate change as apocalyptic temporality is Oreskes and Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization. In theorizing the present and the temporal possibilities for the future otherwise, these authors open the door for us to experiment with what Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun call sociotechnical imaginaries (2013). The book’s narrator is a Chinese historian in the year 2393. The historian says Western civilization possessed robust information about climate change and the ‘damaging events to unfold’ but was ‘unable to stop’ them (Oreskes & Conway, 2014, p. x, pp. 1-2), thus ‘condemning their successors to the inundation and desertification of the late twenty-first and twenty- second centuries’ (Oreskes & Conway, 2014, pp. 59–60). A second Dark Age descended, and the Period of Penumbra began. The present ignorance, the historian says, is a result of an ‘ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets; another compartmentalization and the practice among the scientific community of demanding an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind, even those involving imminent threats’ (Oreskes & Conway, 2014, pp. ix-x). In a sense, this future scenario tells nothing about the future and more about the ‘present’ – our moment.

However, the narrator’s historical account is problematic and, as Garrard argues ‘unequivocably dangerous’, as the scenario focuses on ‘catastrophic outcomes’ (Garrard, 2020, p. 3). Gallard’s critique is important to our discussion of temporality. Narrating the present as a given history evades uncertainty and possibilities for the world as a project beyond global capital. In a sense, this dystopian temporality posits itself as the ‘truth’ of our reality as if punctuating a certain kind of imaginary temporal orientation – the only one about the future. This depicted history anticipates the failure of the future by drawing on assembled empirics and technologies of problem-solving as if failure and the future are not up for debate (Jasanoff, 2019), as if the historical codes and genre choices that assemble these dystopia future scenarios are not ‘originary’ to the familiar narratives of history which they ground.

In highlighting that the Anthropocene is actually a ‘liberal managerial term’, Mann (2019) suggests the ideology of liberalism distorts the multiple social reproductions of violence and strategies of failure by sublimating them through temporal means, deploying concepts such as crises, emergencies, and exceptions, and substituting adaptation for progress. We see this in scientific reports, for example, the SRl.5 and others; while they address the metabolic rifts and shifts, they still use the Anthropocene as the social contract (Mann, 2019). In Climate Leviathan, Joel Wain- wright and Geoff Mann argue crisis, risk, and uncertainty are asymmetrical, the result of the actions of a minority of humanity, i.e. the white male bourgeois European who claims the agency and writing of the historical narrative of liberalism and imperial capitalism. The Anthropocene is a technology co-productive of temporal regimes of modernity and the planetary order:

[The Anthropocene is] an explicitly future facing instrument of temporal power. Like all contracts, it restarts time on its terms. The distribution of responsibilities it represents is always also the closure of supersession of past arrangements. So, a contract that has no expiration, like a constitution or the Anthropocene, is supposed to mark the end of the past and the beginning of a new time. (Mann & Wainwright, 2018, p. 8)

The Anthropocene is itself a technology of temporal power which orders and organizes social life. In questioning this contract, Mann and Wainwright problematize how time is used to organize global power. They question whether the idea that the Anthropocene marks the end of the past as many claim and the beginning of a new time is accurate. For them, this fetishization of the Anthropocene evades the intensifying challenges to the world. The structure of ‘transition’ of the contemporary global order and the production of history of liberalism as progress (Mann & Wainwright, 2018, p. 9) are problematic and do not acknowledge how such kinds of politics are co-produced with a structure of transcendental time as their major procedural technology of governance. The transformation of the world’s political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted thus need to be engaged on the register of the language of temporal power and the global order.

Tsing argues the Anthropocene is entangled with the history of capitalism: ‘the most convincing Anthropocene timeline begins not with our species but rather with the advent of modern capitalism, which has directed long-distance destruction of landscapes and ecologies’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 19). For Tsing, this is the time to reimagine beyond Cartesian structures: ‘without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back to life, and men and women can express themselves without the strictures of a parochially imagined rationality’ (Tsing, 2015, p. vi). Her vision asks the reader to focus on the contemporary political reality and its contingent forms of violence, including how the material effects and the ‘time of climate change’ are themselves an extension of capitalism. Capitalism and its contingent forms of temporal power should be the focus of critique in our contemporary moment (Moore, 2015; Tsing, 2015).