An other time

As both Jane Bennett and William Connolly have argued, time is an ever-present reference point for climate action and for the Anthropocene. The era is characterized by temporal thresholds and tipping points as well as historic junctures that indicate a radical shift in geo-, bio-, and atmospheric processes. In the context of prevailing narratives of late planetary capitalism and the Anthropocene, ‘we’ – the Western anti-heroes of planetary destruction – have a problem with time. Namely, we are ‘running out of it’ or have already arrived at our ‘last best chance’ or we have already passed the threshold and it has become ‘too late’. In the face of this crisis of time, Bennett writes, there is a presumption that the necessary response is one of immediate action. The kind of action that, perhaps, ‘follows the science’ to institute transformative political change, in which a ‘uniquely human’ and sovereign power ‘“ takes action” in a field or spatial locale that is not itself considered to have a comparable kind of efficacy’ (Bennett, this special issue). In this reflection on Bennett and Connolly’s work, I consider the temporal dimensions of political subjectivity and action in the Anthropocene. In conversation with my own work in the science of jellyfish research, I consider what it might mean to take seriously the ‘heterogeneous temporalities ’ (Connolly, this special issue) that constitute the earth as an abstract machine. I follow Bennett’s line of questioning to ask after the kinds of action appropriate to a plurality of geographies and temporalities. Ultimately, I argue that taking heterogeneous temporalities seriously will require new forms and methods of inquiry, scientific and otherwise.