ABSTRACT

This essay examines longstanding, widely circulated arguments regarding blocked futurity in relation to emerging forms of temporal experience associated with financialization. From ambivalent conservative accounts of the ‘end of history’ to the grim repetition diagnosed on the Left as ‘capitalist realism’, divergent accounts of post-1960s culture have focused on what I call ‘static time’, or an experience of time in which human agency is no longer operative because meaningful change cannot be created. Although versions of static time continue to proliferate in academic discourse, liquidity and financialization produce forms of individual temporality that operate very differently. When we make the conceptual parameters of static time explicit, I suggest, it becomes more possible to read for the forms of temporalized human action that these parameters may prevent us from noticing. These forms include what I call suffering agency, or the experience of individually chosen, consequential human action as horrific and unwelcome, and life-interest, or the production of individual binary decisions made in relation to survival. Rather than being inaccessible or unshaped by human efficacy, the future here bears down in the form of negative results directly caused and deliberately chosen by the individual in question. In this form of ‘punitive futurity’, individuals experience temporalized forms of distress keyed to the willed unfolding of their own choices over time. By reading punitive futurity in relation to what Lisa Adkins calls ‘speculation as a rationality’, I argue that this temporal form serves as an increasingly crucial means by which individuals experience their subjection within contemporary capital.

摘要

本文探讨了长期以来广泛流传的关于未来受阻与金融化相关的新兴形式的时间经验的论点。从对“历史终结”的矛盾保守描述到被左派诊断为“资本主义现实主义”的冷酷重复，对 1960 年代后文化的不同描述都集中在我所说的“静态时间”，或一种时间体验人类能动性不再起作用，因为无法创造有意义的变化。尽管静态时间的版本在学术话语中继续激增，但流动性和金融化产生了运作方式截然不同的个体时间形式。当我们明确静态时间的概念参数时，我建议，阅读这些参数可能会阻止我们注意到的时间化人类行为的形式变得更有可能。这些形式包括我所说的受苦机构，或个人选择的、随之而来的可怕和不受欢迎的人类行为的体验，以及生活利益，或与生存相关的个人二元决策的产生。在这里，未来不是无法接近或无法被人类效能所塑造，而是以相关个人直接造成和故意选择的负面结果的形式受到影响。在这种“惩罚性的未来”形式中，个人会经历时间化的痛苦形式，这与他们随时间自愿展开的选择有关。通过阅读与丽莎·阿德金斯所说的“作为理性的投机”相关的惩罚性未来，