Anti-catastrophic time

One of the dominant features of post-apocalyptic or Anthropocene culture is a ‘this changes everything’ sentiment regarding time. Whatever cultural differences the world may have been able to harbour up until the present, the current feeling of end-times focuses attention on the future. The overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic climate change seems to demand either that we think about humans as a historical agent at the level of the species or that we devalue the human to recognise a temporality beyond that of human concern. This essay questions that exclusive disjunction: it is possible to recognise both the thoroughly ‘human’ nature of the sense ‘we’ make of the world, while also striving to think beyond what has (up until now) counted as human temporality.