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Five Theses for Political Theory in the Anthropocene:
Reflections on Wolin’s “What Time Is It?”
Lars Tønder, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen
Pre-published draft!*
“To theorize the inside one must theorize the outside.”
-- Wolin, “What Time Is It?” (1997)
In his “brief commentary” on Jeffrey Isaac’s essay, “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,”
Sheldon Wolin sets out to change the terms of the debate concerning contemporary political
theory.1 Rather than the normative “What is wrong with political theory today?” (which is
Isaac’s question), Wolin encourages us to focus on the diagnostic “Why is political theory so
difficult today?” His answer hinges on a “language of temporality” that emphasizes the
existence of different “time zones.” Whereas “political time”—which also is the time of
political theory—moves at a slow pace, allowing for time to reconcile differences and
preserve existing ways of life, the outside world, in particular the economy and popular
culture, develops according to a logic of innovation and speed. Wolin characterizes this
situation as a temporal disjunction in which “political time is out of synch with the
* NOTE TO THE READER: The following essay is a short reflection on Sheldon Wolin’s 1997 essay ”What Time Is It?” The essay has been commissioned as part of a forthcoming special issue of Theory & Event celebrating the journal’s twentieth anniversary. Each contribution to this special issue includes a short reflection on an article published during the journal’s first five years of existence. Wolin’s article was part of a symposium included in the very first issue of the journal. A copy has been inserted at the end of the present essay.
1
temporalities, rhythms, and pace governing economy and culture.” If political theory has
become difficult, Wolin concludes, it is because theoretical work no longer has the time
needed to compete with the world it hopes to theorize.
The aim of this essay is not to contest Wolin’s general claim—that political theory is
difficult—but rather to suggest that a new configuration of temporal experience has come to
the fore, which in turn should change our understanding of the challenges facing
contemporary political theory.2 The Anthropocene is the name commonly used to describe the
kind of changes that I have in mind. As a descriptor shared by most disciplines, the
Anthropocene invokes the advent of a new epoch in which Nature and human agency have
meshed to such an extent that it is no longer possible to consider one without the other. 3 The
significance of this confluence is surely contested, and it is therefore unsurprising that
scholars should disagree about the implications of living in the Anthropocene. Whereas some
point to geoengineering and other human-centered techniques as the most feasible solution to
urgent problems such as climate change and rising social inequality, others link the looming
extinction of human and nonhuman life to the beginning of a dystopian future driven by
melancholia or post-humanism (or both).4 Which of these two approaches has the most
promise is difficult to determine, in part because neither seems to recognize that the
Anthropocene itself requires a new model of political inquiry. The issue is not simply how
society should respond to the Anthropocene; moreover, it is about how to conceptualize
politics in a world that no longer adheres to the age-old distinction between the human and
the nonhuman. Can political time be simultaneously human and nonhuman? What follows
from this with regard to politics itself?
Like Wolin, the starting point for my consideration of these questions is the dictum
that “to theorize the inside one must theorize the outside.” The virtue of this dictum is that it
2
places the work of political theory in its proper context—in the liminal space between the flux
of worldly events and the sedimentation of abstract thought. However, unlike Wolin, I want to
suggest that the reason political theory is such a “difficult” enterprise no longer is that it lacks
the time needed to complete its mission, but rather that it has become limited in its outlook
and concern for the outside world. More specifically, I want to argue that the conditions set
forth by the Anthropocene make it imperative that political theory attends to the
entanglements of the human and the nonhuman, and that this in turn necessitates a shift in
the theorization of politics, replacing Wolin’s language of “disjunction” and “dispersion” with
terms such as “integration,” “intertwinement,” “mediation,” and “resonance.” The shift in
terminology that I am proposing may well amount to what Wolin describes as a new “vision”
of political theory.5 If this is the case, I suggest we call it a political theory for and in the
Anthropocene. The following five theses outline the counters of what this might mean,
especially with regard to the relationship between time and politics.
1. The consideration of political time must be vertical as well as horizontal . Let us begin
by returning to the idea of “time zones,” which Wolin uses to suggest that culture, economy,
and politics represent separate spheres of society defined by their own homogenous mode of
temporal experience (fast, slow, etc.). No doubt that such a division of time can be helpful if
we want to analyze the horizontal differences that occur across the same human-centered
level of temporality. But the division has limited value in the Anthropocene where the natural
environment has become a social artifact, and where humans interact with—but never fully
control—the structure and composition of nonhuman entities that subsist across all levels of
time, including those pertinent to fields of inquiry as different as geology and microbiology. If
political theory wants to be relevant to discussions about not only climate change but also
ecology more generally, it needs to acknowledge this new situation by expanding the language
3
of temporality. More specially, like so many other fields of inquiry, political theory must
become open to the possibility that while a specific sphere of society often can proceed slowly
at one of level of temporality, it may also change rapidly at another level (and vice-versa). A
good model for such an expansive approach to temporality is the so-called butterfly effect,
which holds that small changes in a small state can cause large differences in a later state. 6 But
the more important insight here is that the very idea of privileging one level of temporality
(and exclude the rest) no longer is appropriate for the theorization of politics. Time, including
political time, works vertically as well as horizontally.
2. Intertwinements and resonances are primary. The fact that so much of
contemporary political theory remains reluctant to embrace such an expansive approach to
temporality may well be the symptom of deep anxiety about the discipline’s status in the
broader field of scientific inquiry. One could even formulate the problem as a question of self-
confidence, which has come to haunt recent interventions in contemporary political theory7:
what is left for political theory to claim as its own subject matter if the temporal scales have
become so complex that the theorization of politics must open itself to everything from
changes in geological time to the ebbs and flows of bacteria and other microbiological
structures? Wolin’s own concerns about this question surface most explicitly when he laments
the take-over of “synoptic theory” by “customized theory,” by which he means a mode of
theorization that has given up the goal of “cumulative knowledge” and instead embraced the
ever-changing demands of “contemporary culture and economy.” Wolin laments this
development because it creates a bind between the “global structures of power” and the “local
and restricted” outlook of the claims made by some of the, at the time of his own essay, most
prominent discourses in contemporary political theory, including those inspired by cultural
studies and French critical theory.
4
The reason I want to caution against this reading is not that its conclusions are wrong
per se, but rather that it creates another, more problematic impasse. Indeed, what Wolin
identifies as a bind is more likely a double bind: to secure the specificity of political theory by
insisting on a separation of society into different spheres is also to blind oneself to the
intertwinements and resonances that connect these very same spheres vertically as well as
horizontally. Each sphere may fight for supremacy over the others, but since none of them is
ever fully self-sufficient, the real struggle lies in the temporal overlaps between them. An
especially promising way to better grasp this struggle is to reverse our terminology and to
make the language of intertwinements and resonances primary rather than secondary. Note
that the emphasis on primary does not imply that the intertwinements and resonances are
temporally prior to everything else, or otherwise more fundamental. Rather, the language of
primacy is meant to suggest that they represent the most poignant starting point for theory
itself. The reason for this kind of primacy is twofold, both of which are directly linked to an
expansive approach to temporal experience in the Anthropocene. First, the turn to
intertwinements and resonances highlights how changes in one sphere or at one level of time
can affect the internal composition of all the other ones. Second, the intertwinements and
resonances place political theory in the midst of its own subject matter—what we, with a nod
to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, could call the flesh of political time.8
3. The political is integrative and mediating. What, then, is “the political”? The two
previous theses provide us with some guidance to this all too often anxiety-inducing question.
The political is the integration of—and mediation between—different layers of temporal
experience relevant to human and nonhuman life in the Anthropocene. Politics (understood
as the practices surrounding the political) is what happens when connections are created
across levels of temporality, and when new constellations of human and nonhuman forces
5
come into being, creating the opportunity for more or less sedimented structures of discourse
and embodiment, including culture, economy, and religion. The political is aesthetic in the
sense that it gives form to all modes of lived experience, and it is productive in the sense that
it endows agents—both human and nonhuman—with the power to act in this or that manner.
So much of contemporary political theory, including Wolin’s version, insists on the political as
a distinctive activity of irruption (Rancière) and/or division (Schmitt). What these accounts
overlook, however, is that every irruption is premediated by a prior mode of being, which not
only frames the orientation of social-political forces in the present, but also precludes a strict
separation of what-has-been and what-is-to-come. The best way to characterize this
confluence of forces, especially considering the conditions given by the Anthropocene, is to
say that the political is the historically specific linking of horizontal and vertical levels of
temporal experience. None of these levels is ever fully self-sufficient, but always-already
intertwined with each other. “Superpower” (another of Wolin’s important contributions to
political theory9) names one such set of intertwinements and resonances. But so do “Black
Lives Matter,” “Blockadia,” “Occupy Wall Street,” “Pussy Riots,” and the “Aboriginal Tent
Embassy.” Each of these constellations traverses the human-nonhuman divide, and each of
them embodies a set of entanglements from which a particular temporal experience emerges.
The upshot is a specific conception of political action, which in turn sets forth a possible
response to human and nonhuman life in the Anthropocene.
4. Mood matters for the work of political theory. Before we dismiss some of the latter
constellations as somehow peripheral for the analysis of contemporary politics, it is important
to note that while each of them, including Superpower, invokes a unique conception of what
needs to be done in the Anthropocene, they all share one thing: the ability to notice their
significance for the theorization of politics depends on the embodied dispositions of those
6
doing the work of political theory. Here we might learn from a long tradition of philosophical-
theological inquiry, which reaches its apex with Spinoza’s account of prophecy as an
embodied practice inspired by the prophet’s affective situation. According to Spinoza, “…if the
prophet was of a cheerful disposition, then victories, peace, and other joyful events were
revealed to him […] If he was of a gloomy disposition, then wars, massacres, and all kinds of
calamities were revealed to him.”10
Spinoza’s account of the prophet’s situation is not unlike the one of the political
theorist. Wolin seems to acknowledge this when he stresses the visionary aspect of political
theory, and then goes on to suggest that the practice of theorization is shaped by its historical
context, in particular in times of crisis.11 However, whereas Wolin limits the scope of historical
context to a human-centered mode of temporality, Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence is
better suited for theoretical reflection in the Anthropocene because it expands the relevant
forces to include the nonhuman as well.12 Following this expansion are two insights that are
particularly relevant for the link between mood, the Anthropocene, and the work of political
theory. First, even though it implies abstraction and second-order reflection, political theory
is an embodied experience, which is subject to the same kind of contingencies and
externalities as all other modes of embodied experience (nonhuman included). Second, given
this dependency, the development of political theory, both as a practice and as a field of
inquiry, is dependent on how its practitioners engage the moods and dispositions
underpinning their work. To make political theory worthy of its name—to make it critical of
contemporary power as well as relevant for participants working toward a better and more
just world—political theorists can not only scrutinize the embodied lives of other people; in
addition, they must also interrogate and alter the affects and desires driving their own
inquiry.
7
5. Political time is emergent. One way to bring these considerations together in one
thesis is to say that political time is emergent. At one level, this is surely all too trivial: given
our historical knowledge about politics, it should come as no surprise that conceptions of the
political emerge over time in a manner that is bound by—but never fully restricted to—past
occurrences. At another level, however, the issue is far more complex. Indeed, to say that
political time is emergent is not only to recognize the significance of history, but also to
highlight the way in which politics itself emerges from within divergently located
entanglements of human and nonhuman forces spread out across different points in time.
Another way of saying this is that political time is both dynamic and plural because it can be
experienced differently depending on the situation from which the experience itself arises.
While may have been true before the advent of the Anthropocene, it has certainly become
more significant than ever, reinforcing our first thesis—that contemporary political theory
must consider political time vertically as well as horizontally. Moreover, the emphasis on the
dynamic and plural character of political time allows us to further specify the challenges
facing contemporary political theory, in particular given the challenges associated with the
Anthropocene. To capture and scrutinize the many, often divergent, experiences of political
time, contemporary political theory must develop a paraliptic language of temporality, which
recognizes the prevalence of some temporal experiences, in particular the one suggested by
Wolin’s Superpower, while at the same time avoiding the tendency to reduce political time to
just one level of inquiry. Contemporary political theory does not possess a God-like ability to
capture all experiences of time simultaneously. Instead, it must aim for something more
modest but also more difficult: the ability to ventriloquate multiple experiences of time, and in
so doing to create an internal dialogue that allows the hegemonic and the non-hegemonic, the
sedimented and the non-sedimented, to rub up against each other. Such a dialogue does not
8
guarantee an affirmative outcome. But it does create the insight and friction needed to ignite
and to move the thought-processes underpinning political theory itself.
I conclude by returning to the starting point of this essay: that the main difficulties facing
contemporary political theory relate to how we conceptualize and deploy terms such as
integration, intertwinement, mediation, and resonance—and not, as Wolin suggested in his
1997 essay, disjunction and dispersion. Given the preceding discussion, it should be clear that
the intention behind this claim is not to argue for a return to political theory as a totalizing
construct pretending to have captured and synthesized all aspects of the world into one single
principle. Rather, by recommending a shift in terminology I wish to propose a new vision of
political theory that operates from within its own emergent becoming, that is, from within the
sites where the entanglements of the human and the nonhuman are most intense, and where
multiple levels of time come together in a manner that delimits the range of possible
embodied experiences. In this context, the interest in integration and other related terms
signifies a desire to acknowledge the plurality of the Anthropocene, and to scrutinize how this
plurality distributes political theory’s attention to divergent structures of meaning and power.
Thus, drawing on Wolin’s own account of political theory, turning this account against the
very mode of theorization that he favors, we might say that the vision proposed in this essay
is an attempt to reorient our approach to the issues raised by the advent of the Anthropocene,
including the ones associated with the debate between geoengineering and dystopianism that
I mentioned at the outset of the present essay. In line with what we already have seen, the
approach to debates like this one should be one that neither restricts political theory to one
level of temporal experience, nor finds hope in emphasizing the extraordinary nature of
politics itself. Instead, we should aim for an approach that attends to the emergent character
9
of political time while recognizing the importance of intertwinements, integration, moods, and
resonances. Without proper attention to these terms, contemporary political theory may
never raise to the occasion that we now call the Anthropocene.
10
Endnotes
11
1 Unless otherwise noted, all Wolin references are to his essay ”What Time Is It?” published in
Theory & Event, vol. 1, no. 1 (1997).
2 For previous engagements with Wolin’s diagnosis and argument, see especially Mario Feit,
“Wolin, Time, and Democratic Temperament,” Theory & Event, vol. 15, no. 4 (2012); and Smita
A. Rahman, Time, Memory, and the Politics of Contingency (New York: Routledge, 2015).
3 On August 29, 2016, a working group under the International Union of Geological Sciences
(IUGS) published a report that confirms the Anthropocene as a new geological age, dating its
beginning to the middle of the twentieth century. The report was the subject of numerous
news reports, including The Guardian, “The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of
Human-Influenced Age,” September 29, 2016.
4 For a discussion of the geoengineering strategy, see John Shepherd, Geoengineering the
Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty (Royal Society 2009). For recent discussions of
melancholia and posthumanism, see respectively Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic
of Future Existence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); and Rosi Braidotti, The
Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
5 On Wolin’s idea of “vision”, see Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western
Political Thought, Expanded Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. pp.
17–20.
6 Debates about the butterfly-effect stem from the atmospheric sciences where the ideas
behind it were introduced by Edward Lorenz in “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Journal of
Atmospheric Sciences, vol. 20., no. 2 (1963), pp. 130–141. The term has latter been taken up in
discussions about chaos theory.
7 A good starting point for grabbling with this anxiety is John Gunnell, “Are we Losing Our
Minds? Cognitive Science and the Study of Politics,” Political Theory, vol. 35, no. 6 (2007), pp.
704–731. For a more recent version, see also Linda Zerilli, “The Turn to Affect and the
Problem of Judgment,” New Literary History, vol. 46, no. 2 (2015), pp. 261–286.
8 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), chapter 4.
9 Wolin, Politics and Vision, p. 591.
10 Baruch de Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise, 2nd edition, trans. Samuel Shirley
(Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 2001), Chapter 2, p. 23.
11 Wolin, Politics and Vision, p. 9.
12 Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence anticipates the Anthropocene in the sense that it, too,
rejects a categorical distinction between the human and the nonhuman. However, whereas
Spinoza takes this to mean that the human is a product of the nonhuman, and in that sense
subject to the laws of Nature, the Anthropocene encourages us to consider a more complex
line of causation: the human is just as much the cause of the nonhuman as the other way
around.
What Time Is It?
Sheldon Wolin
From Theory & Event, vol. 1, no. 1 (1997).
The impetus for this brief commentary came from Jeffrey Isaac’s essay, “The Strange Silence of
Political Theory.” (Political Theory, Nov., 1995) Professor Isaac’s principal claim was that the
failure of American political theorists to theorize about the significance of the overthrow of
Soviet-style regimes and of the Central European dissident movement that had helped to
bring it about was symptomatic of a more general failing to respond to “the possibility of new
forms of democratic citizenship and new forms of authoritarian reaction.” (p.649) Although I
might disagree with Isaac’s understanding of the significance of the events of 1989 and agree
in principle that it is important for political theorists to engage the ideas spawned by
Solidarity and Charter 77, I am not persuaded that he has explained the reasons for “the
strange silence.” He points to the professionalization of theory, the overemphasis on canonical
texts, and an aesthetic aversion to “practical political problems located in space and time, in
particular places, with particular histories” (p. 643). Again, there may be something to be said
for each of these considerations, but taken as a whole they do not seem to account for the
virtually blanket-indictment levelled against political theorists.
Let me attempt to reformulate Isaac’s indictment and reframe the question: let us call the
problem a failure of political sensibility. By that I mean an inability or refusal to articulate a
conception of the political in the midst of wildly differing claims about it, some of them issuing
from nontraditional claimants. What can account for that dissociation of sensibility? By that
question I mean to shift discussion from the question, “What is wrong with political theory
today?” to the question, “Why is political theory so difficult today?”
Let me begin to attempt an answer by quoting a phrase which Isaac uses with reference to
Central Europe, “the dramatic experience of our time.” The word “dramatic” is, I would
suggest, a way of conceding that political theory is a difficult undertaking these days, and
precisely in reaction to that uncertainty 1989 acquires an unambiguousness that then relieves
our difficulties. But a different sensibility, while acknowledging the “dramatic” character of
1989, might object to the formulation “our time,” with its implication of a homogeneous,
shared time. The objection is in part that there is no single shared “political time,” only
culturally constituted different times. Their self-conscious character produces the equivalent
of a different time zone that contributes to a disruption and undermines the possibility of a
common narrative structure and, along with it, a common identity — formerly a staple
element in conceptions of the political. These diverse time zones help to promote (what can
be called) “the instability of political time” and to expose a broader political problem, one
which I can best approach through the language of temporality. I am referring to a pervasive
temporal disjunction that has contributed to serious political difficulties and helped to make
the task of the theorist daunting.
Starkly put, political time is out of synch with the temporalities, rhythms, and pace governing
economy and culture. Political time, especially in societies with pretensions to democracy,
requires an element of leisure, not in the sense of a leisure class (which is the form in which
the ancient writers conceived it), but in the sense, say, of a leisurely pace. This is owing to the
needs of political action to be preceded by deliberation and deliberation, as its “deliberate”
part suggests, takes time because, typically, it occurs in a setting of competing or conflicting
but legitimate considerations. Political time is conditioned by the presence of differences and
the attempt to negotiate them. The results of negotiations, whether successful or not, preserve
time: consider the times preserved in the various failed attempts to deal with the secession
crises prior to the Civil War. Thus time is “taken” in deliberation yet “saved.” That political
time has a preservative function. is not surprising. Since time immemorial political authorities
have been charged with preserving bodies, goods, souls, practices, and circumscribed ways of
life.
Political theory might also be said to be governed by political time. It has its preservative
function which is partly reflected in the amount of labor, perhaps even affection, that
accompanies its perpetuation of a canon.but partly, too, in the deliberations about political life
that figure in each and every theory and make their construction such a slow and drawn out
process.
In contrast to political time, the temporalities of economy and popular culture are dictated by
innovation, change, and replacement through obsolescence. Accordingly time is not governed
by the needs of deliberation but by those of rapid turnover. This has not always been the case.
At one time the meaning of “culture” was reflective of an agricultural understanding:
cultivating, taking care of, nurturing. And when one referred to someone as “a person of
culture” or “a cultivated person,” the implied reference was to the care and attention which a
person, or his or her teachers and parents, had given to selecting certain knowledge and
encouraging certain tastes so as eventually to create a sensibility. In these usages temporality
had the attributes both of longueur and duré. Today, however, culture is less a developed
sensibility than a weapon: one speaks of “culture wars” and can use that sort of metaphorical
language knowing that, as a description, it is false. Culture can seem like war because culture
is increasingly attuned to the tempos of fashion. Fashion shares with war a certain power: it
forces disappearance. Fashions are evanescent, wars are obliterative. Each is in the business
of replacement. Fashion produces new music, dress forms, new language or slogans. Wars
produce new economies (“the German miracle”), new cities, new weapons, and new wars.
It is clear that today that culture and economy have both so thoroughly transformed politics
that it becomes difficult to recall when they did not The economy has come to so dominate
political discourse—and of course economics to dominate political science and threaten to
make it a certain kind of theoretical science—that the president has given himself a reminder
that not to think of it as central is to be “stupid.”
There are two additional developments that have complicated the theoretical life. One is the
dispersion of politics so that it is hard to think of an action, much less a relationship, that
someone has not declared to be “political” or to involve “politics” or, its shorthand, “power.” It
is not at all clear today what would not count as politics.
Accompanying this development, even complementing it, is the ubiquitous character of
theory. Everyone is a theorist and only Stanley Fish is against it. One could enumerate at
length the countless ways of being a theorist today but it pretty much boils down to
“customized theory”— “custom” not as in “tradition” but as in “customer.” Customized theory
is the achievement of theory able to sniff out domination at the slightest stirring of the breeze.
Its sense of smell is nearly as acute as Nietzsche’s. The imagery of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
dims before the long running daily dramas of power, abuse, and violence.Theory has thus
exchanged the tempos of deliberation and contemplation for the temporal rhythms of
contemporary culture and economy. A different way of saying this is, that the proliferation of
theory has been accompanied by the decline of science as a theoretical model for the social
sciences (excepting the significant exceptions of economics and possibly political science and
certainly Habermas) and for the humanities. It is not simply that science has ceased to be
exemplary or even that it no longer serves as the negative exemplar (as in Horkheimer) but
that much of the supporting culture of science—the centrality of empiricism, the norm of
objectivity and the anti-norm of bias, and verification principles—all of this commands very
little loyalty outside the fields previously noted. The last thing theorists need is the goal of
cumulative knowledge. The second last thing that customized theory needs is the ideal of a
synoptic theory.
Theory, then, is in a bind: it wants to be local and restricted but the structures of power—
political, economic, and cultural—are national and global. To theorize the inside one must
theorize the outside.