No Future: Recessionary Time
This paper is concerned with forms of critique that have no time, or better said, forms of critique that have run out of time or are dispossessed of time and therefore make demands for time itself. Such demands have been heard across austerity hit Europe, and have been encapsulated in the cry of ‘No Future’. From a sociological point of view, what is of significance regarding these demands is that they seek not different kinds of time but the right to time itself and especially the right to a future. This is of particular importance when we consider that sociologists typically understand critique as thoroughly entangled in the logic of the former, that is, in demands and hopes for different kinds of time. Thus in Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism the time of critique, change and the new is the time of the singular, the authentic and of difference. The context of demands for access to time or the right to time itself, therefore, demand that sociologists rethink the dynamics of critique, change and the new and in particular directly confront the issue of time in the making. This includes the issue of how futures can – or cannot – be actualized in the contemporary moment. In this paper I aim to contribute to this rethinking and do so by recommending the development of a pragmatic sociology of the future.

Lisa Adkins holds the BHP Billiton Chair of Sociology in the School of Humanities and Social Science. Before coming to the University of Newcastle in 2010 she was Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has also held posts at the University of Manchester, the Australian National University, and the University of Kent.

Lisa Adkins' research interests and contributions to sociology fall into three main areas: economic sociology (especially the sociology of post-industrial economies and the new political economy), social and cultural theory, and the sociology of gender. Her contributions to economic sociology have included both empirical and theoretical interventions. A current project considers changing temporalities of labour and value. In the area of social and cultural theory her work includes a wide-ranging critical exploration of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, in the area of the sociology of gender her interventions have included a broad scale exploration of shifting formations of gender in late modernity.

The BHP Billiton Research framework brings together and extends Professor Adkins’ extensive research and publication record in the areas of economic sociology, social and cultural theory and social science methodology. Details of the BHP Billiton Research Framework “Labouring Futures” can be found @ www.labouringfutures.com

'Decision Time: Neoliberalism Personhood, Popular Aesthetics, and the Inexorability of Agency'

In this talk, I examine the challenges that the hegemony of neoliberal forms of governance presents to our understanding of the relations among time, power and agency. While many such theorizations seek means through which agency might be located or enhanced—Judith Butler’s performativity would be one classic example—the work of many contemporary thinkers has made clear that neoliberal governance works through rather than against individual agency; it constantly requires that people make meaningful choices whose outcomes differ significantly, and it assigns sole responsibility for these choices and outcomes to the individual in question. I consider the effects of this transformation by turning to a series of texts that focus on what I term suffering agency, or the experience of agency as a form of anguished entrapment rather than self-enhancing empowerment. These works, which include texts from Dave Eggers’ novel What is the What to the torture-porn Saw franchise, offer visions of neoliberal personhood in which to be an individual making agential choice appears either akin to or literally a form of torture. I offer an account of how these works map suffering agency and the role that time plays in both generating this experience and in imagining potential alternatives.

Receptive Affections
I am developing new ideas for a post-globization ethics – an eco/alter ethics. Using ideas rooted in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, I am developing theory for “receptive affection” in which the world creates possibility to make time and space for what is ‘other’ than the desires satisfied by the social and political economy of market liberalism. The pace of economic productivity and development moves at a speed that has little time or space for the rhythms of the natural body and the time it needs to regenerate. The ‘time out’ to care, heal and repair, when it does not exclude, exploit or marginalize, can then take on a diversity of socio-political expression. Patience is the resistance that can pause and wait (a ‘making of time’) despite the imperatives for speed and efficiency. Generosity is the extension of self to alter-positions – others – in which one ‘makes room’ for what remains in marginalized and excluded spaces, in which receptive affections manifest as the ‘welcome’ and the ‘gift.’ A language that seeks world habitability and respect for what is already ‘rooted’ is what I hope emerges out of these efforts, thinking of this also as a post-Holocaust ethics.

Today, power over time is primarily conceptualised as an individual task. Rather than being submitted to collective or institutional disciplinary forces, which impose time regimes that maximally exploit the human body, contemporary individuals aim to discipline themselves, thus imposing self-chosen time regimes on their working and life styles. However, the more free the institutional time orderings are, the more difficult it is to discipline oneself. Today self-discipline seems to become a burden, which ultimately deprives the individual of his/her power over time.

Time and Agency: A Critical Reflection on Marxist Temporalities
Marxists have an ironically contradictory approach to time and the scope of agency in time. Time is the essence of value and the primary expression of what is exploited in the commodified system of production - “As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour-time.” (Marx 1998 Capital p60). It follows that the re-appropriation of time, the re-evaluation of how time relates to value and the transformation from the quantitative measure of exchange value to measures of value in quality and are central to Marxist critique. Yet critical attempts to subvert chronormativity within post-structural influenced critical temporalities appear to query this radical project in two senses. First it engages time outside of some measure and concept of time outside of subjective experience – as a material condition and variable. Second, it queries the relationship between categories of time, labour, quality, utility, quantity and exchange, and so diminishes the Marxist diagnoses of exploitation and alienation in contemporary capitalism. This double bind in relation to theorising time – in diagnosis and emancipation project, sets an agenda for Marxist engagements with the idea of critical temporalities, and there are fruitful sources from which to engage. Drawing from Marx and critics such as Lukacs, Thompson, Marcuse, Meszaros, Jameson and more recently Negri and Postone, this paper will emphasise the dialectical tensions between chromonormativity and critical temporalities, and argues for a critical temporality that recognised the constitution of time as conjunctural, contextual and phenomenological, yet allows for a materialist basis for time from which a Marxist radical critique can critique both subjective and objectivist notions of time.

A Likely Story: HIV and the Definition of Disability in UK Employment Equality Law, 1996-2005
Cancer is first of all a disease of the body’s geography, in contrast to syphilis and AIDS, whose definition depends on constructing a temporal sequence of stages. (Sontag, 1988: 110) This paper engages the question of how to understand legal temporalities. In particular, it asks what fresh methodological approaches we can use to animate socio-legal studies on time. Drawing on approaches from material culture, legal anthropology, and actor network theory, my current work analyzes what ‘things’ do within equality law networks; how objects create legal time. One example of this is how anti-retroviral drugs, biological phenomena, and medical reports, contributed to the legal construction of ‘HIV futures’ in disability discrimination law in the 1990s. Many HIV positive workers in the UK during the 1990s faced employment harassment and dismissal. HIV/AIDs was widely represented, in racialised and homophobic terms, through tropes of moral decline and impeding apocalypse (Sontag, 1988), a socio-temporal phenomenon that we would now analyze for its ‘chrono-normative’ (Freeman) or ‘chrono-biological (Luciano) effects. Despite many of their problems being to do with stigma, the only legal route for positive people was to claim disability discrimination. This required proving, on a case-by-case basis, that HIV was a disability under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 through ‘likelihood of future impairment’. Legal status was thereby intimately linked to a person’s future through medical prognosis and discussions about their T-cell count and viral load. Importantly, even though developments in anti-retroviral therapies had led to a rapid shift in how positive people viewed their own futures (from ‘near death’ in the 1980s to ‘chronic and treatable condition’ by the late 1990s), claimants had to eschew these brighter futures to gain legal rights. Drawing on interviews, case reports, and interdisciplinary research, this paper attempts to analyze the role of objects such as anti-retrovirals, medical reports, and T-cell counts on the construction of legal futures for HIV positive claimants at this key juncture in recent legal history, asking what objects add (and do not add) to our understanding of law and time.

Exploring Interspecies Temporality (with Tarsh Bates)
In the context of the global honeybee crisis, there is perception that we are running out of time. The race is on to save the bees and ourselves. Albert Einstein is rumoured to have claimed that “if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man [sic] would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more man [sic].” This presentation describes an artistic research project by Tarsh Bates and Sue Hauri-Downing that explores ideas of multispecies agency in the space/time entanglements between humans and the European honey bee Apis mellifera. This ongoing project traverses the globe, investigating historical and material bee/human naturecultures in Australia and Switzerland, combining sculpture, performance, evolutionary biology and ethnography to understand interspecies agency, ecology and place. The 'busy bee' has long been considered by humans to be a metaphor of industry and efficiency. Strangely however humans in contemporary technologically rich societies seem to be increasingly time poor. Industrialization does not seem to have made us more efficient. In fact this project has shown that having to engage, research and perform at the pace of the 'busy bee' forces us to slow down; to shift into bee time. This paper explores the challenges and complications of our attempts to shift into bee time, to understand (and fail to understand) the material affects of interspecies space/time.

Borders and Change: The Temporalities of an Emerging Critical Rhetorical Theory
Claiming powerful conceptions of time is often used to legitimize the growth of an academic discipline. This study analyzes the temporal argumentation put forth in academic journals concerning the growth of critical rhetorical theory in the USA from the 1970s through the 1980s. What time did the scholarly agents presume or argue in favor of when they tried to legitimize rhetoric’s values in relation to other knowledge regimes in academia? The study shows that the various agents assumed a conception of rhetoric that was not only limited with regards to gender, class, race, and to Western liberal democracies, but that it also excluded non-progressive temporalities. The scholars at the time argued that the role of rhetoric was to study how people became good citizens, active in creating a morally sound community in search of either the ideal future or the eternal present that would enable social change. This study shows how the first, the teleological and normative temporality of rhetoric, along with the second, the eternal present temporality, both became tied to values of unity and knowledge borders in the name of change. The study shows that any temporality can become the function or underpinning logic of exclusion of alternative knowledge production when used to gain power. It invites further studies of knowledge producers’ conceptualization of time in order to find less exclusive alternatives.

Progress’ Time: The Individualization of the Future in Southeast Angola
Until recently, southeast Angola was known as “the lands at the end of the world.” In the last four years, however, the region started to be under the government’s spotlight, and now bears the slogan “the lands of progress.” The implementation of new public infrastructures is essential in the shifting of representations. Accordingly, since the end of the civil war, in 2002, infrastructures of communication and transportation have become the visible side of the national effort to (re)construct and unify the nation around a common ideal: “One People, One Nation.” Drawing on anthropological fieldwork done in the last two years, I intend to approach the effects of the agency generated by the interaction between the new asphalt road EN140 and the residents of a village in southeast Angola. Against the political imagination promoted since the country’s independence, such an interaction agency reconfigured and introduced a new language of time in the region; from a socially repressed past, a present of crisis, to privatized versions of liberated futures found on restless quest for self-fulfilment. As I intend to demonstrate, the perpetual deferrals of social progress promised by the government have led to the emancipatory privatization of the future. This new emancipatory individual politics of time contradicts not only the demagogic propaganda by the government around the ideal of national commonness but also the scientific sustainability discourse that started populating the country, and which relies on a homogeneous conception of time to legitimize itself: “Our Common Future.” Southeast Angola shows how the individuation of the future has become one of the most conspicuous unintended causalities of our increasing networked world.

Time-Horizon and Agency
I argue that our subjective sense of remaining time is vital to our agency. The argument, in outline, is this:
(1) A diminishing time-horizon diminishes one’s capacity to self-reauthor.
(2) The capacity to self-reauthor is constitutive of agency par excellence.
(C) Therefore, a diminishing time-horizon attenuates agency.
(1) says that the sense that we are running out of time saps our ability to deliberately change our characters. (2) says that this ability is essential for being creatures maximally in control of what we do. (2) is intuitively obvious: since your actions are partly determined by your character, the more control you have over your character, the more control you have over your actions. The argument for (1) has two stages. First, I argue on conceptual grounds that self-reauthoring requires, at a minimum, the capacities (a) for negative self-evaluation and (b) for long-term planning. Second, I adduce empirical evidence (from Socioemotional Selectivity Theory) that these are precisely the capacities that get eroded with time. If these arguments work, (C) follows deductively: our agency wanes with the waning time-horizon. Thus, if we ignore the integrity of the time-horizon to agency, we will miss both a vital feature of agency and the central tragedy of running out of time.