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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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Endnotes

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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.