Crisis of temporalities: Global capitalism after the 2007–08 financial collapse

Abstract

As global capitalism took shape, during the 1990s and early 2000s, high-speed, financialized profit making disrupted long-term strategies of capital accumulation centered upon production, employment, commodity exchange and aggregate demand. In addition, state constructions of time and temporality were besieged by the short-termist tendencies of financialized capitalism. This sharpened temporal disjunctures within the nationally constituted economy and the nationally circumscribed state. And, as upper reaches of many nation states conformed to the temporal urgency of supra-national decision-making bodies such as the IMF, national politics could not effectively process the slower rhythms of the representative assembly, the election cycle, public policy formation and mediated public debate. Against this background, the aftermath and repercussions of the 2007-08 financial collapse will be examined. Global capitalism became pervaded by a crisis of temporalities, manifestations of which can be summarized as follows. First, the temporal contradiction between financialized profit making and long-term strategies of capital accumulation remain unresolved; therefore, financial instability and recessionary spirals will be a recurring pattern. Second, in a world of financial turbulence and global recession, spatio-temporal fixities within and across particular national political economies have weakened or disintegrated. Third, the political impossibility of reconstructing Keynesian policy instruments at a national, supra-national and international level has generated a historic malaise. Unregulated financialized capitalism and neo-liberal policy regimes cannot be sustained over time,

Digital prosumption labour on social media in the context of the capitalist regime of time

“…Fictitious capital is an attempt to overcome problems of accumulation by a temporal fix (Castree, 2009;Harvey, 1990). ICT-supported high-speed and high-risk global finance have been embedded into a temporal contradiction between short-term financial gains and long-term profits that erupted in the global capitalist crisis that started in 2007/8 (Hope, 2011).…”

News Satire: Giving the News a Memory

“…It is ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies) that have enabled this acceleration (see Hope 2011;Castells 2000;Fuchs 2015). In turn, a feature of the resulting "liquid reality" is the "media torrent" and "information overload" (Gitlin 2001).…”

Towards a social theory of acceleration: Time, modernity, critique

“…The rhythms of education or democratic polity simply cannot keep pace with the real-time tempo of algorithms-driven inancial capitalism.Rosa calls this temporal phenomenon "the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous" (SA, p.19, see also p.114-115). 8 This theme begins to resonate in social and political-democratic theorizing (Glezos, 2012;Hope, 2011;Laux, 2011;Scheuerman, 2004) and accounts for one of the most viable and promising dimensions of the Rosa's theoretical scheme. Diferent temporalities deine distinct generations, social worlds, ields, systems, and administrative apparatuses, which counteract and mutually exclude one another rather than coexist.…”