The future is yet to be created: temporality and imagination in the Anthropocene

The notion of Anthropocene, introduced by Crutzen, has posed new concepts of temporality and new ways to understand the relationship between the natural and the manmade. Chakrabarty, for example, in his article “The climate of history: four thesis” explains that we find ourselves at a point where we must cast doubt upon the distinction between human and natural history, and begin to consider mankind as an agent of geological change. In this way, Chakrabarty questions the linearity of historical time and the possibility of progress, while maintaining a critical stance on philosophical concepts of historicity.

In this article, we will critically explore different concepts of historicity, temporality, and shift towards a simondonian notion of individuation, which will enable us to imagine other types of relationship between the manmade and the natural. Our aim is to present new ways of understanding temporality outside of a linear view of history, where change is a mere static addition of a specific difference to a set of generic characteristics. Faced with critics of the Anthropocene notion, we can see that this enables us to problematize the relationship between an individual and their surroundings and allows us to imagine a new framework for tackling the ecological crisis of the new millennium. Understanding the specific ecologies by restoring their temporality in a deep sense is necessary in order to understand this new “end of the world” perspective, that is, as a radical change in the material conditions of the existence of the human species.