Collapse as a Way of Life: Climate Change, Deep Adaptation, and the Future's Dénouement

Engaging debates in social theory on the transformations of the future today, this article argues that planetary upheavals suffuse the present with a sense of malaise, wherein we seem simultaneously unable to envisage liveable futures and unable to envisage life outside ‘the future’ as such. Paradoxically, nowhere is this more evident than in those strands of climate thinking that prescribe ‘deep adaptation’ to inevitable societal collapse. Whereas critics decry ‘collapsologists’ for shutting the future down, this article shows that in their image of collapse, the future takes the form of a dénouement: an epochal unwinding of society's global predicament in the catastrophic arrival of a new time. The challenge for a social theory of the future amidst permanent planetary instability, however, is to envisage the future's own dénouement – or catastrophe as enduring condition, collapse as a way of life, and the unravelling of futurity as the commanding rhythm of social life.