Fatally Confused

Focusing particularly on the role of the clock in s ocial life, this article explores the conventions we use to ‘tell the time’. I argue that although cl ock time generally appears to be an all encompassing tool for social coordination, it is ac tually failing to coordinate us with some of the most pressing ecological changes currently taking p lace. Utilizing philosophical approaches to performativity to explore what might be going wrong, I then draw on Derrida and Haraway’s understandings of social change in order to suggest a fairly unconventional, but perhaps more accurate, mode of reckoning time in the context of climate change, resource depletion and mass extinctions.