Abstract
Who can imagine a future today? Any sense of progress, or belief in the future, appears as merely another exclusive privilege of the ultrarich. Time seems to be accelerating faster than catastrophic trajectories can be metabolized. Meanwhile, hypermodern capitalism is eroding its own conditions of possibility, intensifying historical injuries and societal fractures, and destabilizing modern assumptions regarding space, time, and security. The supposed end of history that characterized the neoliberal era has morphed into a reckoning with the end of a world—perhaps not the world as such, but the world as it is being made and unmade by the spatial, temporal, racial, linguistic, technological, and imperial drives of hypermodern capitalism, particularly its global, financialized, and algorithmic forms. Scholars of political economy have drawn attention to the fracturing of the neoliberal phase of late capitalism and its hegemonic constellation, and how this fracture has led to a moment of historical uncertainty and transition in the dynamics of power and contestation across societies. Similarly, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have highlighted the existential and political challenges presented by the Anthropocene's apocalyptic implications. This article argues that the dialectical crises of capitalism and ecology are converging in a cultural condition of collective disorientation: a return of history bereft of futurity. Through an analysis of catastrophic precarity in the hypermodern era, the article tracks collective disorientation and catastrophic precarity across four registers—accumulation, time, space, and agency—before ending with a discussion of implications of the analysis for alternative orientations.
Fredric Jameson is famous for suggesting that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. His aphorism requires some meditation. Capitalism has been ending worlds for centuries through slavery, colonialism, and imperialism (Coulthard 2014; Federici 2004). It has sought to divide nature and humanity through strategies of racial hierarchy, violence, and externalization of ecological harm (Moore 2015; Whyte 2017). It is now increasingly apparent that hypermodern capitalism is eroding its own social and ecological conditions of possibility, and in the process, intensifying historical injuries and societal fractures, while simultaneously destabilizing modern, largely Western assumptions regarding space, time, agency, and security (Fraser 2021; Mbembe 2019). These are highly uneven processes. The catastrophic excess of hypermodern capitalism privatizes risk and produces vastly different trajectories of vulnerability. The emerging (post-)neoliberal configuration of power has no answer for any of this, trudging along in pathogenic denial (Means and Slater 2019). Yet things are clearly out of control. Those in power offer no answers. What they posit as solutions are, in fact, our problems. Simultaneously, collective ambitions have collapsed into a void of atomized and fractured hyperrealities. Moreover, expansive conditions of precarity and dispossession create new lines of conflict and present barriers to generating the solidarity needed to enact alternatives.
This gap between a catastrophic reality and the absence of a pathway out creates a historical and existential condition that we refer to in this article as “hypermodern disorientation.” Following John Armitage (2002), we reject the binary opposition between modernity and postmodernity, preferring instead the prefix “hyper” to describe the fundamentally excessive mutations of capitalism, power, culture, and subjectivity within the present. Thus, in our view, the term hypermodern does not signal a break, but rather an evolving phenomenological and existential condition. Phenomenologically, disorientation is typically characterized by the loss of one's place in space or time. It is to be rendered bereft of stable coordinates: spatial or temporal referents that provide a sense of location and direction. Etymologically, disorientation is derived from the Latin words orientem (the east) and oriri (to rise). To be oriented in this sense is to locate the direction from which each new day will dawn. Our argument in this article is that hypermodernity represents a historical opening of the spatiotemporal horizon. However, this is a return of history that remains bereft of futurity: a slow confrontation with a catastrophic trajectory. Put differently, the so-called end of history that characterized the neoliberal era has morphed into a coming to terms with the end of a world—not the world as such, but the world as it is being made and unmade by the spatial, temporal, racial, linguistic, technological, and imperial drives of hypermodern capitalism, particularly in its global, financialized, and algorithmic forms. A feeling of a world unraveling represents a source of collective disorientation—denial, cynicism, paranoia, resentment, and fear—in Western (post-neoliberal) societies like the United States and beyond.
Jameson (1991, 2015) offers foundational insights for grasping the material and cultural foundations of these conditions. However, his project now requires revision. Jameson describes an ontology of the present as ideological analysis and phenomenological description aimed at illuminating the cultural logic of a mode of production. An ontology of the present is thus historical and material, linking thought and experience to the political, economic, aesthetic, and ideological entanglements of a social totality, which is always too complex to grasp through any singular representation. Today, such a strategy of cognitive mapping is both indispensable and incomplete. Tools of cognitive mapping, attempts to capture elements of the historical totality, must be expanded to index the catastrophic convergence of capitalism, power, subjectivity, and ecology in the present, and how these socioecological entanglements produce unevenly distributed forms of violence and precarity that inhibit alternative collective orientations to the future from emerging.
Scholars of political economy have drawn attention to the fracturing of the neoliberal sociohegemonic constellation and how this development has led to a moment of historical uncertainty and transition in the dynamics of power and contestation across societies (Brenner 2017; Fraser 2017). In a parallel register, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have drawn attention to the ontological, existential, and political challenges presented by the Anthropocene, including its apocalyptic implications (e.g., Grove 2019; Horvat 2021). We suggest that the dialectical crises of capitalism and ecology are converging within the systemic pathologies of hypermodernity to produce a distinctive mode of collective disorientation within post-neoliberal societies like the United States. Confronting hypermodern disorientation, we argue, is a vital step in grasping an ontology of the present and in coming to terms with our catastrophic condition. Despite its many negative valences in the hypermodern context, disorientation is not necessarily something to be feared. The waning of the normative orientations that prevailed under late capitalism and neoliberal society should not be mourned. In a sense, hypermodern disorientation presents an opening for new ways of apprehending humanity/nature, time, care, and collectivity that might break from the destructive legacies of capitalist modernity (Tsing 2015). In other words, it could operate as a catalyst for letting go and working through our predicament and therein reorienting the imaginative horizon toward an alternative modernity (Means et al. 2020; Stein et al. 2021). However, this also requires developing capacities to translate pervasive forms of alienation and suffering, immanent to the pathological economy of fear, exploitation, and enmity that pervades neoliberal societies, into the basis for new solidarities and collective responses. This article outlines hypermodern disorientation as a theoretical, material, existential, cultural, and political problem. First, we define the hypermodern condition as one characterized by catastrophic excess before discussing evolving mutations in the ideological ordering of space and time within the prior neoliberal sociohegemonic phase of late capitalism. We describe how the fracturing of this order is giving way to a distinctive condition of hypermodern disorientation. Second, we outline the disorienting intersection of capitalism and ecology through an analysis of what we refer to as “catastrophic precarity” within the hypermodern era, tracking the valences of hypermodern disorientation and catastrophic precarity across four registers: accumulation, time, space, and agency. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis for alternative orientations.
Hypermodernity: A First Cut
Catastrophe is often understood in terms of events that deviate from a set of established patterns, with severe and destructive consequences. Catastrophes occur when things unexpectedly go wrong. A pandemic erupts. A chemical spill poisons a town's water supply. A financial system melts down. Hypermodernity inverts this understanding. The catastrophic developments of the twenty-first century are not random deviations from an otherwise smooth trajectory of modern progress and linear scientific, technological, and civilizational development. Rather they represent the unfolding of historical processes and rationalities immanent to capitalism and neoliberal governmentality that are approaching a terminal limit, producing nonlinear and compounding eruptions of socioecological trauma and disaster. Hypermodernity is thus not principally a condition of systems going haywire—when financial markets seize up or a natural disaster strikes—but when they function as designed (Szeman and Cazdyn 2010). In pursuit of unlimited growth and accumulation without end, hypermodern capitalism feeds on and profits from the catastrophes it unleashes in the short or medium term, while that pursuit ultimately begins to exhaust the socioecological basis on which the system depends (Fraser 2021; Moore 2015).
Ulrich Beck glimpsed the emergence of the hypermodern. He wrote that the “world can no longer control the dangers produced by modernity; to be more precise, the belief that modern society can control the dangers that it produces is collapsing” (Beck 2009: 8). Capitalist modernization involves a reflexive process, whereby state power, science, geopolitics, modes of rationality, and technological developments generate catastrophic risks, such as nuclear weapons, pandemics, and climate change, that exceed stable or localized spatial and temporal boundaries. The distribution of insecurity and violence is felt at the level of everyday life. However, the systems of accumulation, power, and rationality that produce them are global. There is no longer an outside, no space or territory beyond capitalist modernization. Its manufactured fragilities and instabilities are inescapably planetary in scale, interconnection, and impact. In 2010 a tiny glitch in algorithmic trading software in New York annihilated a trillion dollars in value in a matter of minutes and sent global markets into a brief hallucinatory tailspin, impacting everything from pension funds to world food prices. The risk of pandemics like COVID-19 is compounded by the rapacious destruction of natural habits and ecosystems that feed the profits of extractive industries and corporate agribusiness—dramatizing how a tiny microbe, once passed to a single human being, can quickly escape its locality and dramatically shift the parameters of global history (Davis 2006).
Yet the underlying logics that drive financial speculation and resource extraction index such risks as external contingencies detached from the systems of production, accumulation, and power that generate them. The Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan, for instance, gambles on the collapse of ocean life, building giant freezers to store endangered bluefin tuna, waiting for the profitable moment when the species goes extinct to sell them at auction for a grotesque premium—a higher priority for hypermodern capital than preserving delicate ocean food chains and the ecological balance on which all life depends. We use the concept of the hypermodern to describe the condition of catastrophic excess that undergirds the material and existential precarity that is foundational to hypermodern capitalism, which is experienced at vastly different levels of relative vulnerability across societies (Stengers 2015). For instance, in the United States and many other societies, the devastating economic and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have fallen most heavily on the working class, communities of color, people with disabilities, and Indigenous people. Climate change likewise disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable, intensifying ongoing historical injustices, while elites shield themselves, at least for now, with their money and mobility (Nixon 2011).
Departing from Beck, who was focused on the reflexive characteristics of modern risk, we use the term hypermodernity to describe the material, cultural, and ideological implications associated with the evolution and the unmaking of a set of sociohistorical coordinates immanent to late capitalism and neoliberalism. The hypermodern, we argue, reflects a historical conjuncture of collective disorientation. This represents both a historical opening and a set of barriers to imagining and enacting futures outside of a catastrophic telos that privatizes risk and produces differentiated trajectories of precarity and vulnerability. Hypermodern disorientation constitutes a historical mode of spatiotemporal abstraction, reification, and dislocation, in which manufactured anxieties, converging catastrophes, and material insecurities are detached from the conditions of their production. The complexity of the world is increasingly reduced to a chaotic array of detached images, memes, and stochastic events without consistency or underlying connectivity. The mediated churn of information, fear, and events works against the individual and collective ability to sustain critical thought or preserve historical memory. Even attention is transformed into a commodity, with every waking moment reduced to a reservoir of value to be mined and exploited by corporate algorithms (Citton 2017). The spatial and temporal characteristics of hypermodern life often make it seem easier to imagine we live in a computer simulation, where every movement, thought, feeling, sensation, and action becomes an optimized data point, than it is to imagine we can make even the most basic modifications to the present configuration of production and power.
Fractured Horizons
The theme of disorientation has long been present in modern philosophy, literature, and art, fields that have often linked processes of social and psychological dislocation to the restless evolution of capitalist modernity. For instance, Marx and Engels (2012) observed that the self-revolutionizing and imperial drives of capitalism tend to unleash waves of creative destruction that sweep away traditional modes of life and ways of being. From a different vantage point, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (2002) observed that capitalist modernity was an alienating force that operated through instrumental rationalities that reified the historical grounding of consciousness and the domination of humanity and nature. Similarly, though with notable differences, Hannah Arendt (1948) identified disorientation as an inherent tendency in modernity that found its most banal but violent expression in the mass perversion of thought integral to twentieth-century fascism. Disorientation, as a loss of stable spatiotemporal bearings that ground shared conceptions of the past, present, and future, has, therefore, always been an effect of capitalist modernity over the longue durée and its ongoing and uneven processes of development, state formation, colonialism, and imperialism (Arrighi 1994; Perelman 2000). However, to grasp what is distinct about hypermodern disorientation as a sociohistorical problem, we must first attend to the fracturing and mutation of the neoliberal constellation and spatiotemporal imaginary.
An Endless Present
Western societies underwent significant transformations in the latter half of the twentieth century that can be linked to the reconstitution of capitalism following the collapse of Bretton Woods and the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s. For David Harvey (1989), the global expansion of capitalism that followed the stagnation of Keynesian economic regimes in the West, along with the development of ever more totalizing and networked forms of finance, debt, and logistics, sparked a disorienting compression of space and time. The expansionary drive and innovative technological dynamics of capitalism annihilated space-time barriers: just-in-time production linked global supply chains with seamless efficiency; information technology communications made the circulation of information abundant and instantaneous; free trade arrangements allowed capital and production to move anywhere globally in search of exploitable labor and natural resources; cheap manufactured goods, produced increasingly in Asia and Latin America, transformed Western consumer cultures, coinciding with the penetration of markets into all facets of existence. According to Harvey, space-time compression generated a fragmentation of consciousness and atomization of everyday life.
These dynamics of space-time compression were also mirrored at the level of theoretical production and political articulation. Prominent here was an increasing skepticism, identified by Jean-Francois Lyotard (1989) and others, toward metanarratives and universalizing projects. When carried forth by feminist and postcolonial critics, such skepticism offered crucial sensitivity to difference and incisive analysis of Western conceptualizations of reason and history, such as in liberalism and some strands of Marxism, that have typically failed to index their own assumptions and exclusions (Mohanty 2003). However, at precisely the moment when global capitalism was becoming more ephemeral, abstract, fragmented, ideational, and recursive in its global articulation, depth, and penetration into every aspect of life, many affirmed and celebrated these postmodern qualities as liberating. Such sensibilities coincided with the rise of neoliberal and purportedly postpolitical “Third Way” formations in the 1980s and 1990s, such as New Labour in the United Kingdom and Clintonism in the United States, that proceeded to embrace neoliberal governmentalities and dismantle the collective infrastructures and forms of identification required to challenge the new formation of power and distribution of wealth (Bauman 2001; Mouffe 1992).
Picking up on these themes of fragmentation, abstraction, and ephemerality, Jameson (2015) observed that the neoliberal period, which he associates with postmodernity, produced a disorienting collapse of historicity, or an ability to locate seemingly disparate aspects of experience and representation within a social totality. Culture and everyday life were reduced to a form of presentism, an endless swirl of memes, clichés, and recycled aesthetic forms shorn of referents to their production. One can see this in the overreliance on nostalgia and pastiche in popular film and music, which find corollary articulation in a waning of historical memory and political alternatives. For Jameson (2015: 120), postmodernity was defined by the conquering of space over time, which he refers to as “the historically strange and unique phenomenon of a volatilization of temporality, a dissolution of past and future alike.” This produced a disorienting condition as time was reduced to an eternal feedback loop of present systems within the conquering of space by globalization, representing “a kind of contemporary imprisonment in the present . . . an existential but also collective loss of historicity in such a way that the future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like” (120). For Jameson, this is a political as well as an existential diagnosis, suggestive of a disorienting socioimaginative stasis, “since it is intended to indict our current political paralysis and inability to imagine, let alone organize, the future and future change” (120).
The compression and volatilization of space and time captured by Harvey and Jameson was given a positive valence in the end of history thesis formulated by Francis Fukuyama (1989) in the late 1980s. Fukuyama declared that with the triumph of Western capitalism and liberal democracy over twentieth-century fascism and communism, all the major social and political questions had been resolved, and all that was left was to tinker at the margins, to embrace corporate enterprise and financialization, and to extend market administration to the entire earth. In effect, Fukuyama's conception of the end of history represented the reification of the entire world as globalization and neoliberal technocracy came to stand in for and thus obscure capitalism as a historical, cultural, and political referent (Szeman and Cazdyn 2010). The notion of the end of history has haunted intellectuals and social movements for decades, spawning countless analyses of the intransigence of late capitalism and neoliberalism at the level of space, time, culture, affect, and imagination. For Mark Fisher (2009), the term capitalist realism perspicuously captured the disorienting cultural and affective dimensions of the end of history. In Fisher's view, capitalist realism signaled a profound disorienting malaise. “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration,” he wrote, “and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics” (4). Fisher argued that capitalist realism is sustained by cynical repetition of neoliberal logics in practice, rather than firm belief in its ideological precepts (see also Dean 2009; Žižek 2009). Thus, those whose lives are enmeshed within the culture of market Stalinism are not typically unaware of the alienating conditions it produces, but nonetheless their consent is ensured through modes of affective cooptation that preclude any sense of alternatives.
History without Futurity
The disorienting collapse of past and future into an endless present persists under hypermodernity. Yet there is simultaneously a sense that capitalist realism no longer commands the hold it once did over the spatiotemporal imagination (Heron 2020). The 2008 economic crisis, from which many individuals and communities never recovered, was, of course, a watershed event in the fracturing of popular support and legitimacy for neoliberalism. The accelerating crises of the recent past have shattered solidarity, devastated livelihoods, accelerated climate impacts such as superstorms and massive wildfires, and generated widespread insecurity. It has also fed cultures of xenophobia, nativism, racism, and misogyny. Without viable avenues for translating private forms of suffering into collective responses, many have chosen to retreat into a disorienting realm of culture-war resentments, therapeutic escapes, and digital pseudorealities as an effort to establish some sense of certainty or security. The present historical moment appears to be an interregnum, characterized by the dramatic return of history, the outcome of which remains uncertain (Brenner 2017; Fraser 2017). And while neoliberalism has not yet been relegated to the dustbin of history, the narrative fictions sustaining it have begun to collapse (Kotsko 2020). This gap is signified clearly by the rise of reactionary populisms, the election in recent years of far right-wing governments in Brazil, the United States, India, Hungry, and Italy, to name but a few, and the rightward lurch of the political spectrum in purportedly democratic states (Mouffe 2018). The wave of neofascism has been fueled in part by demagogic manipulation of collective disorientation, creating new and exacerbating long-standing social contradictions in political economy and cultural politics. On one hand, anger is directed rather abstractly at global elites and anonymous technocrats, while on the other, migrant workers, refugees and immigrants, women and people of color, and Indigenous people are subjected to real violence at every level of social order. The coronavirus pandemic and its associated health and economic impacts has only intensified these dynamics leading to further isolation, alienation, and precarity (Means and Slater 2021). However, the return of history is also signaled by a wave of new social movements for equality, global justice, and decolonization, indicating that the immediate future will be characterized by intense social conflict, struggle, and uncertainty.
Yet even amid a sense that history has returned, new disorienting spatiotemporal identifications have arisen that present barriers to apprehending the past and present in ways that open space for alternative trajectories. For reactionary white populations in Western societies like the United States, there has been an increasing attraction to denialism, irrationality, and conspiracy theory, fueling right-wing affiliations and fantasies of ethnonational restoration of mythical pasts (Brown 2019; Saltman 2020). The absence of stable and shared perceptions of space, time, and the future manifests in nostalgia for lost worlds believed to be stolen by malign others, such as people of color, feminists, communists, and immigrants. However, nostalgia also grips the professional managerial classes who face increasing challenges to their own positionality, wrought by steroidal competition for jobs and status in an emergent neofeudal AI economy combined with unmistakable signs of destructive climatic and ecological transformation. However, rather than pursue changes in the distribution of wealth and power as a response to disorienting societal and ecological deterioration, they embrace a delusional politics of reestablishing neoliberalism and its posthistorical consensus joining brutal financial capitalism to symbolic multicultural inclusion (Fraser 2017; Melamed 2011). For the new oligarchs who are fully aware of humanity's catastrophic trajectory, particularly those in the advanced technology sector such as Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, a different form of disorientation operates through their techno-fantasy of an escape from a planet ravaged by capitalist environmental destruction of which they are now the principal drivers. Rather than countenance even minor adjustments to political economy—production, exchange, growth at all costs—the new oligarchs dream of colonizing space, bringing hypermodern capitalism to the entire galaxy. For others, we see growing desire for egalitarian alternatives that challenge the disorienting irrationality of capitalism and violence of neofascism.
Catastrophic Precarity
We have drawn attention to hypermodern disorientation as a sociohistorical problem that emerges within a moment of transition between a fractured neoliberal order associated with globalization and postmodernity and the restless unfolding of a hypermodern present that appears devoid of alternative trajectories. Here we suggest that this historical transition is also defined by new convergences between the systemic pathologies of capitalism and ecological realities associated with the Anthropocene that are imposing themselves on the material, cultural, psychological, and political landscape in new ways, generating what we refer to as catastrophic precarity. The Anthropocene is, of course, a widely contested term (Malm and Hornborg 2014). Due to perceived conceptual weaknesses, absences, and blind spots some scholars across the social sciences and humanities prefer different terms to describe our age such as the Capitalocene, Eurocene, Plantationocene, or Technocene (Grove, 2019; Haraway and Tsing 2019; López-Corona and Magallanes-Guijón 2020; Moore 2015; Yusoff 2018). While these distinctions matter for questions of periodization and causation, drawing them out is beyond the scope of this article. We refer to the Anthropocene simply to signal a set of entanglements captured astutely by Andreas Malm (2018: 11), who notes, “We are only in the very early stages, but already in our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural responses, even our politics show signs of being sucked back by planetary forces into the hole of time, the present dissolving into past and future alike.” Our contention is that hypermodern disorientation emerges out of a socioecological dialectic, which, on one hand, entails an evolving and self-undermining intensification of accumulation and power that is generating asymmetric crises and vulnerabilities, and on the other, the destabilization of modern spatiotemporal assumptions and coordinates. What follows are sketches, hints, and fragments that capture what we believe are important aspects of this convergence, roughly corresponding to categories of accumulation, time, space, and agency. As we will explore in the final section of the article, it is precisely through such necessarily incomplete attempts to come to terms with the totalizing flux of the hypermodern that we might learn to work through our predicament by producing different trajectories, senses of futurity, and orientations.
Accumulation without Frontiers
Hypermodern power attempts to construct a reified conceptualization of the world in its own image. Manufactured risks and disasters are reduced to surface effects, or isolated variables detached from the material basis of their production and intensification. Progress is reduced to the endless dilation of markets and evolution of technology, perhaps culminating in the mythical AI singularity, or a vast global neuro-network of perfect Hayekian exchange and efficiency. Planetary ecology is viewed as an engineering problem, a limitless external frontier to develop and master, subordinating human and nonhuman futures to the exigencies of endless growth. The catastrophic precarity of the hypermodern era, which disorients and fractures the spatiotemporal horizon, is grounded in the expansionary drives of capitalist modernity and its distinctive patterns of power, accumulation, and organization of nature that have shaped its historical foundations in conquest, colonization, and empire (Patel and Moore 2017). However, today there are no more frontiers. There are no new sources of land, energy, food, and labor that have not been accounted for, conquered, or incorporated, save perhaps for the opening of the Arctic as the ice recedes, or in the remaining pockets of threatened Indigenous sovereignty. Yet precisely at the moment when capitalism can no longer be said to have an outside—no space, time, or horizon external to it—and as the risks it unleashes defy locality and threaten mass extinction, many now argue that capitalism itself is either doomed or already dead, mutating under the weight of its own contradictions, ecological limits, and technological transformations (Wallerstein et al. 2012; Wark 2019). Capitalist modernization, as it organizes the world in its own image, exhausts the very world it attempts to create. It disrupts the rhythms and stability of its environs. It divides humanity and nature. Ultimately, as critics of political economy from Marx (1981) to Karl Polanyi (2001) have demonstrated, in its pursuit of endless accumulation, capitalist modernization threatens to exhaust the land and labor that are the basis of its own conditions of possibility. We will not speculate on how long capitalism will endure, or what new modes of crisis displacement it may enact, and at what cost. What interests us are the disorienting spatiotemporal conditions it intensifies.
Hypermodern capitalism, as it is emerging out of the collapse of neoliberal governmentalities, is a stagnant, oligarchic, and ultrawasteful mode of organizing socioecological relations that appears to be facing new ecological limits and barriers to expansion (Foster 2020; Moore 2015). On one hand, it relies heavily on the upward redistribution of wealth through financialization, rent seeking, speculation, and tax avoidance, rather than productive investment in the “real” economy (Brenner 2017). On the other hand, it mobilizes new forms of oligarchic expropriation and exploitation that accelerate the spread of ecological and social harm. We are drifting well beyond the applicability of popular Gilded Age comparisons. A neofeudal model of power appears to be a more accurate representation of the emerging political economy (Dean 2020). The eight richest men in the world have now accumulated as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity in total, or approximately 3.8 billion people. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated this stupefying concentration of wealth. During the first twelve months of the pandemic, billionaires in the United States alone increased their wealth by $1.6 trillion, even as 76 million people lost their jobs and one hundred thousand businesses closed. These statistics underscore immense asymmetries of power, responsibility, and vulnerability. For instance, the richest 1 percent of the global population now produce double the carbon emissions of the poorest 50 percent of humanity, almost single-handedly destabilizing the earth's biosphere through their consumption. In turn, this consumption, on which the global economy is based, fuels compounding forms of socioecological precarity and dispossession. It is estimated that by 2050 as many as 1.2 billion people, primarily those least responsible for climate change, may be displaced due to intensified ecological threats such as searing heat, sea-level rise and flooding, and lack of access to food and fresh water.
While the technical capacities now exist to end global poverty and transition to sustainable and humane modes of production, hypermodern capitalism continues its devastating life as a zombified anachronism, feeding on and accelerating catastrophic excesses through new “predatory formations” of billionaires, transnational corporations, financial institutions, and nation-states operating through complex contractual and legal arrangements, types of knowledge, digital algorithms, and high-level logistics (Sassen 2014). Such predatory formations take many forms today: large-scale industrial agriculture and mining operations that extract value by destroying old-growth forests and dispossessing peasants of ancestral lands; financial arrangements that extract value by reducing the world's teeming diversity and natural wealth to speculative semiotic abstractions; systems of compulsory debt that extract value from future labor and productivity; and modes of surveillance capitalism that extract value from the world's information on platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Predatory formations represent a source of collective disorientation, not only because of the difficulty they present in locating a center to power within reified abstraction and complexity, but due to the catastrophic forms of precarity that they unleash across the world that extract from, obfuscate, and dislocate collective spatiotemporal foundations.
Toxic Temporalities
Hypermodernity enacts a disorienting sense of speed, acceleration, velocity, and intensive time-pressure. Modernity asserted that time was linear, ordered, quantifiable, and predictable. Taking cues from the natural sciences, classical social theory posited that societies obeyed their own quasi-natural laws separate from nature, but were nonetheless thought to evolve, like ecosystems, in stages toward heightened degrees of complexity and perfection over time. Hypermodernity implodes these temporal referents in a proliferation of nonlinear socioecological feedback loops. Nick Land (2017) has observed that acceleration reflects “an absolute horizon—and one that is closing in.” Hypermodern capitalism is a self-amplification machine: an algorithmic circuit that is autoproductive and self-referential. It is an amoral operating system with a static and solipsistic time-horizon. As Land notes, “it grows only to grow . . . it appeals to nothing beyond itself.” It evolves. It exhausts. It mutates. We reject Land's mad descent into libertarian nihilism and his cold embrace of capitalism's auto-destructive feedback loops. However, he is correct in his observation that hypermodern capitalism's acceleration compresses time required for thought and action.
Who indeed can imagine a future today? A sense of progress, or belief in the future, appears to be just another form of privilege relegated to the ultrarich. Time appears to be accelerating faster than events can be metabolized. We watch the era's disasters unfold in real time on social media platforms. Yet time for urgently needed deliberation and social action that might address the pathologies of power and the urgent reality of climate change appears as a void in time. Within hypermodern societies like the United States, time is increasingly experienced as a source of deprivation. Time has been reduced to a form of property. Time is owned. But it is not the property of the individual. Rather time is increasingly owned by future employers, landlords, banks, and credit card companies. Yet the fears of losing a home, of losing a job, of losing security are carried solely by individuals and families (Cooper 2017). Futures are privatized and protected by gates. Temporality under hypermodern capitalism is disorienting—destabilizing past, present, and future—as existence is rendered as a perpetual deferral. One is always borrowing from the future as debt to stave off insecurity in the present. The future, which becomes more uncertain and terrifying by the day, is reduced to the frantic labor of the present: a theft of time, reflection, collectivity, and possibility.
This sense of time-pressure is amplified by unfolding ecological devastation in the Anthropocene—droughts, dying species, toxic air—that are exposing subjects to an unsettling reality: a world of planetary forces that are indifferent to their survival (Chandler and Grove 2017). As hypermodern capitalism accelerates within the Anthropocene, triggering alarming feedback loops within planetary ecology, it exposes populations to forms of catastrophic precarity operating through varied temporal registers, generating uneven forms of vulnerability. Rob Nixon (2011: 6) draws attention to what he calls “slow violence,” or “calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans.” The offloading of toxic waste onto the postcolonial world, which began in the postwar era, is a toxic legacy that spans decades. The mountains of plastics, discarded electronics, and spent industrial chemicals will release their biocidal violence for decades to come, poisoning rivers and aquifers, causing human and animal birth defects, respiratory diseases, and cancers. However, this tragedy will occur out of view of the world's affluent populations because, as Nixon explains, slow violence unfolds through forms of displacement—geographic, temporal, representational, technological, moral, rhetorical—that reify and obscure social and ecological precarity, producing historical amnesia out of distracted indifference. These displacements also obscure the racial asymmetries of slow violence in the Anthropocene as affluent white populations in the West are only now forced to reckon with the toxic legacies they have historically off-loaded onto Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, as ecological crises contribute to larger planetary transformations that impose themselves on their own material and existential security. As Kathryn Yusoff (2018: xiii) notes, “If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization, and capitalism.” Thus, hypermodernity and the catastrophic precarity it intensifies within the Anthropocene is indeed an end of time—a linear temporal logic constructed in a Western frame—which is only now “noticing the extinction it has chosen to continually overlook in the making of its modernity and freedom” (xiii).
Spatial Dislocations; or, Enough Is Never Enough
With the enclosure of the global space, hypermodern capitalism accumulates without frontiers. In turn, it accelerates feedback loops that trigger asymmetric risks and time-pressure, exposing individuals and communities to patterns of power and slow violence seemingly beyond their control. This is dramatized in new spatial dislocations of land and labor, as bodies and landscapes are modified and consolidated into new symbolic and material divisions. For instance, in the United States, workers in Amazon warehouses, many of them seasonally employed, often live nomadic existences out of cars and recreational vehicles. Many have been dispossessed of former industrial and retail jobs by Walmart or Amazon. Many lost their homes in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In a landscape of abandoned communities, scarce employment, and decimated unions, Amazon is able to subject workers to grueling and dehumanizing conditions reminiscent of a prior era of industrial exploitation. They are denied bathroom breaks, sometimes subjected to the indignity of urinating or even defecating in plastic bags during shifts, and regularly pushed to medical exhaustion. Such archaic exploitation is exacerbated by the advancement and normalization of digital surveillance. Electronic wristbands that emit ultrasonic pulses monitor the workers’ hand movements, providing haptic feedback used to “nudge” the workers to work faster, harder, and more efficiently. These conditions intersect with a new global geography of labor surpluses, disposable populations, agricultural and industrial sacrifice zones, and new types of forced labor, debt bondage, and outright slavery (Bauman 2004). These spatial patterns of exploitation are not new, of course. Yet currently, the reality of climate change and the perilous totality of planetary conditions, is beginning to impose itself, altering these processes in novel ways. For instance, theocratic monarchies in the Persian Gulf, such as the United Arab Emirates, eager to cash in on Western tourism as the oil runs out, import a mass workforce from the poorest sectors of Bangladesh and Pakistan, many of whom are fleeing sea-level rise and the flooding that now inundates low-lying coastal regions. Upon arrival, their passports are taken, and they are subjected to brutal servitude as menial, domestic, or care laborers, and sex workers. They escape one form of spatialized dislocation from rising seas only to confront another in the form of slavery.
Hypermodernity has intensified disorienting spatial divisions of power, which began centuries ago through capitalist modernization and its processes of imperialism and colonization. However, divisions of the global space take on new characteristics within the catastrophic convergences of hypermodern power and ecology. This is to say that all politics today now revolve around land (Coulthard 2014; Jameson 2015). The question of where one can live, and under what conditions, strikes at the core of the hypermodern era's disorienting and asymmetric vulnerabilities. Globally this is reflected in conflicts over land in places like Kashmir; occupations in places like Palestine; disputes over the construction of oil and gas pipelines on Indigenous lands; the construction of sprawling settlements and camps to house refugees displaced from their homelands; and in the toxification of land from industrial waste and pollution, such as in the oil patches of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, or in nuclear radiation zones such as the Marshall Islands (Horvat 2021). In the United States, hedge funds, private equity groups, and rich private investors are buying massive pools of housing stock, including entire neighborhoods, as a place to stash their surpluses of money, fueling a speculative bubble, rising rents, and mass homelessness. The third richest man on earth, Bill Gates, is now the largest owner of farmland in the United States. He owns over $700 million in arable land encompassing an area larger than Hong Kong. Nick Estes (2021) writes that “land is power, land is wealth, and, more importantly, land is about race and class. . . . The relationship to land—who owns it, who works it and who cares for it—reflects obscene levels of inequality and legacies of colonialism and white supremacy in the United States and the world.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg exemplifies these ongoing settler legacies. Having purchased large tracts of land on Kauai in Hawai‘i, Zuckerberg has aggressively sought to evict Native Hawaiians who have lived there sustainably for generations, long before private property and the advent of Facebook. For the new oligarchs, enough is never enough—they insist on hoarding all the land, wealth, and power. It is difficult to say how much of this is driven by greed, ego, or a desire to own land that provides multiple sites at which to escape societal deterioration and climate crises. There is a recognition, captured well by Bruno Latour (2018: 1), that at some point it appears a significant segment of the new ruling classes have “concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else” and “it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a common horizon, toward a world in which all humans could prosper equally.”
Agency: Human and Nonhuman Refrains
Hypermodernity accelerates spatial and temporal dislocations that are at odds with efforts to formulate new common orientations toward the future. It is a world where history has returned. Yet hypermodernity is devoid of historicity. It obscures the conditions for thought and action that are necessary for futurity. The hypermodern word appears as a disorienting vortex of detached signs, images, and events without consistency or underlying connectivity, stitching representational schemas into reified cosmologies, stable yet distorted forms of libidinal attachment that are alienated from a sense of historical totality and solidarity with others. According to Félix Guattari (1989: 46), capitalist modernization integrates three ecologies (social, mental, and natural) through “existential refrains” that call out to us in familiar patterns. Refrains in this formulation are the existential soundtrack of capitalist modernity: the lyrics and music of stories, myths, sensations, and affects that create the world in its image, while at the same time obscuring the underlying historical, social, and ecological relations that animate it. Such refrains work against what Guattari (1989: 33) called “singularization,” the capacity to think differently, to sing melodies distinct from those that saturate our social and mental ecologies.
Indeed, an enduring legacy of neoliberalism is the degree to which it has convinced the majority that they are isolated, powerless, and alone. Though the ideology of individualism proclaims an ever-expanding freedom to remake identities, to express oneself freely, and to create simulated versions of our lives for others to consume, there is a remainder of interpassivity characterized by a spectatorial sense that little can be done to alter the current order of things. Even when historic waves of mass protest erupt, as they did in the summer of 2020 to protest racism and police brutality, eventually the protests end, new logics of cultural appropriation emerge, radical energies are displaced. Car companies sell gas-guzzling SUVs through the refrains of the Black freedom movement. The CIA considers “diversity” to be “an operational advantage” and makes recruitment videos through patronizing refrains of corporate wokeness that mobilize difference to obscure imperial power (Borger 2021). Heroic organizing work continues, yet the scale of dramatic change at all levels needed to avert climate catastrophe—reconfiguring production, energy, culture, psychology, values, design, engineering, and annihilating racism and class hierarchy—does not appear imminent. This “passive nihilism,” as William Connolly (2017: 9) describes it, manifests as the “formal acceptance of the fact of rapid climate change accompanied by a residual, nagging sense that the world ought not to be organized so that capitalism is a destructive geological force.” These intuitions are folded into the practical and psychological challenges of everyday life, afflicting a range of responsibilities and insecurities that constrain action such as the demands of work, paying rent, servicing debt, raising children, and struggling with mental and physical health.
Hypermodern disorientation is thus as much a product of the atomization of social life as it is of stubborn denial or indifference. There is a pervasive sense that things are out of control, that the systems of power and accumulation that govern our societies can no longer contain the risks and uncertainties they unleash. Time-pressure accelerates. This is dramatized not only by the crisis of human agency, but by the agency of nonhuman forces. For many contemporary philosophers and ecological thinkers like William Connolly, Timothy Morton, Claire Colebrook, Anna Tsing, and Bruno Latour, the prevailing incapacity to accept and work through the catastrophic convergences of the Anthropocene stems from a deep Western humanist refrain of anthropocentrism that is in stubborn denial of the agency of planetary forces and nonhuman others—plants, rocks, ocean currents, animals, nitrogen cycles, and more. For instance, Morton (2013) suggests that climate constitutes a hyperobject, a large system or thing that is massively distributed in time and space relative to humanity, rendering it unintelligible in its totality. Hyperobjects are disorienting. They produce “a traumatic loss of coordinates” because “they force something on us, something that affects the core ideas of what it means to exist, what earth is, what society is” (Morton 2013: 15). Surely Morton is right in pointing out that climate change represents a vast set of processes that exceed simple correlation between the human mind and natural world. And surely we cannot effectively work through the catastrophic precarity and convergences of our time without deconstructing Western anthropocentric refrains. However, there are limits to this mode of materialism as it obscures power and a need to not just simply “extend agency” to nonhuman processes. As Malm (2018: 112) notes, it is also imperative that limits are placed on the agency of “those humans who extract, buy, sell, and combust fossil fuels, and to those who uphold this circuit, and to those who have committed these acts over two centuries: causing the climate system to spin out of control, they and they alone instigate the paradox of historicized nature.” New materialism in the social sciences and humanities offers insights for rethinking how to care for the world as it is in its vast contingency and complexity beyond Western anthropocentrism. Such insights are indeed necessary to break the spell of hypermodern capitalism's ideological soundtrack. However, they also tend to render history and ecological processes as para-metaphysical, therein substituting ontology for politics, which feeds into disorienting forms of hypermodern atomization.
Conclusion: Ambivalences of Orientation
Disorientation has long been identified as an effect of capitalist modernization (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). The loss of stable conceptions of the past, present, and future is expressed in a dislocation of thought and existence from their historical and cultural grounding. We have drawn attention to hypermodern disorientation as a problem that emerges in part within a moment of historical transition, an interval, or gap, between a fractured neoliberal order associated with postmodernity and globalization, and the restless unfolding of a present that is accelerating on a catastrophic trajectory. Yet as a sociohistorical problem, hypermodern disorientation cannot be reduced to political economy, or simply to the reified abstractions of a mode of production. It must also be understood in relation to planetary forces associated with the Anthropocene that are undermining and destabilizing a modern ordering of space and time as well as Western expectations of progress, order, and security. Achille Mbembe (2019) argues that catastrophe itself should be understood as a Western theological category, a purification of Being by fire, through which, in Heideggerian terms, the earth will eventually destroy itself. However, in many African and other non-Western traditions the world is not understood as a matter of being, but rather as one of relation and mutual implication. From this orientation, “the world simply does not end; the recapitulation of time corresponds to nothing at all precise” (Mbembe 2019: 28). This does not mean time is necessarily cyclical, but rather that it is always opening, as “time arises only in and through the unexpected and the unforeseen” (29). Mbembe notes that for a large share of humanity the end of the world has already taken place. “Neoliberal capitalism,” he writes, “has left in its wake a multitude of destroyed subjects, many of whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be one of exposure to violence and continuous existential threat” (115). Such conditions, in many instances, produce a longing for certainty and lost origins. Hypermodernity here reflects a double spatiotemporal movement: “on the one hand it involves an enthusiasm for origins and recommencement; on the other, an exit from the world, an end of times, bringing the existing to an end, and the coming of another world” (29). Mbembe's observations reflect important tensions immanent to hypermodernity and a complex politics of knowledge, understanding, and experience. The catastrophic convergences of the era are indeed ending worlds, albeit on different historical timescales and geographies of privilege, power, and vulnerability (Yusoff 2018). The pull of catastrophic thinking is itself a disoriented psychological drive that ignores rich histories and cosmologies outside Western assumptions of an ordered, stable, quantifiable, and predictable universe. Yet cognitive mapping of hypermodernity's onrush of converging catastrophes may also harbor potential to aid in a collective coming to terms with the unmaking of the world produced by capitalist modernization.
Some may be uncomfortable situating an ontology of the present within theoretical traditions that retain fidelity to an analytical sense of totality, a universalizing gesture that has been viewed as obscuring difference and complex politics of knowledge after the death of metanarratives associated with the postmodern (Lyotard 1989). However, maintaining the aspiration to totality does not presume that totality can be grasped fully, or that the world's vast diversity and shocking inequality can be reduced to the product of a single determinant, or captured by a one-dimensional representation. Instead, totality can be understood as built out of complexity and difference in historical articulation, material conditions, and epistemic standpoints that encompass human and nonhuman spheres of existence, precisely what the Western philosophical tradition has often denied, obscured, or sought to negate. Such a process, what Jameson calls cognitive mapping, is always incomplete and riven with tensions. Mapping was, of course, a formative technology of Western modernity that did not simply or innocently represent the world, but classified, quantified, and configured it so as to master and conquer it. Importantly, astute analysts of capitalism, racism, and colonialism such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Frantz Fanon perspicuously linked such processes of representation directly to the material violence and psychological dislocation perpetuated by colonialism. In a parallel register, feminists and postcolonial scholars such as Silvia Federici, Maria Mies, and Chandra Mohanty have drawn attention to the way modern cartography syncs with a persistent fracturing of space and time that stems from deeply embedded epistemological and ontological binary distinctions between the cognitive (rational) and the somatic (embodied), valorized labor (production) and nonvalorized labor (social reproduction), and nature and humanity as discrete spheres external to one another. However, despite the imperial baggage of cartography as a metaphor, we suggest that cognitive mapping is not merely yet another attempt to impose a new set of fixed representations of a fully graspable totality (which is, in fact, what capitalist modernization attempted to do), or to posit a unified theory of ideology and consciousness that ignores difference. Rather, the practice of cognitive mapping is an analytical and aesthetic approach to identifying and deconstructing representations and monochromatic models of subjectivity that assume an undifferentiated Western subject of history (Sandoval 2000).
The collective disorientation that adheres within hypermodern societies like the United States and beyond can indeed be mapped onto the collapse of a modern Western subject of history, itself a layering of arbitrary significations that have always been dependent on the dehumanization of colonized people (Lowe 2015; Wynter 2003). The collapse of this subjective horizon creates dilemmas such as the nostalgia for mythical pasts that informs neofascist white nationalism in the United States and Europe. Simultaneously, hypermodern disorientation presents an opening for new ways of apprehending humanity/nature, time, care, and collectivity to emerge. Yet the problem of hypermodern disorientation is sufficiently complex as to resist tidy resolution. Any effort to overcome hypermodern disorientation would require, at minimum, new egalitarian refrains to break the spell of alienation, atomization, and fragmentation by providing compelling alternatives that point toward a common horizon beyond the devastating reification of the present, a strange loop that, in turn, forecloses the prospect of the future. What we need, perhaps, is a shared sense that futurity is inherently a product of collective agency, historical struggle, and relational ethics. However, Sara Ahmed (2006) complicates arguments for a straightforward notion of reorientation as the sole liberatory political response to disorientation. She warns that orientations can easily take on prescriptive and oppressive characteristics. By turning us toward certain objects, normative forces of orientation fix our subjective points of reference, potentially occluding creativity and experimentation. Queer politics might involve adopting certain modes of disorientation, though disorientation is not always radical. “The point,” according to Ahmed (2006: 158), “is what we do with such moments of disorientation . . . whether they can offer us the hope of new directions, and whether new directions are reason enough for hope.” We agree with Ahmed that to be disoriented from the ideological refrains that enframe the world for hypermodern capitalism presents an opening: it provides a sense of possibility, but at the same time presents new dangers. “The concept of ‘orientations,’ ” she argues, “allows us to expose how life gets directed in some ways rather than others, through the very requirement that we follow what is already given to us” (21). Despite the prevailing force of hypermodern disorientation, struggles for the future should resist certainty and prescription, for new orientations are as likely to be stitched together through hatred and violence as they are through love and cooperation. Cultivating new orientations to the future will thus not occur through blueprints fit for application and assembly. Rather, they will emerge out of historical processes of political struggle, conflict, experimentation, creativity, collaboration, chance, and innovation.