Beyond the Present

Abstract

It is widely recognized that globalization, contemporary technologies and environmental hazards pose problems for the political ideal of democracy. An explicit focus on time gives us a new point of access to these debates. No longer understood in the singular as the implicit context within political processes take place, time in its complex, multiple expressions can serve as a tool for reconceptualization. In its single and conglomerate forms it is lived and negotiated in conflict. This is nowhere more apparent than in globalized socio-political processes with their varied ties to contemporary technology, most specifically when these are concerned with environmental hazards. In such situations the conflict is not merely between different scarcities of and needs for time, but between temporalities that operate to different principles: the variable. rhythmic temporality of nature and the cosmos, on the one hand, and the industrial times of the machine, the laboratory and economic considerations, on the other hand. It is between new configurations of actors past, present and future where concerns, rights and duties extend beyond the present to peoples long dead and those whose future present is constructed by our contemporary political and scientific actions. Together, these temporal features and complexities present crucial conceptual and political challenges for the next century.