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This article examines the temporal rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future to discuss how the new generation of climate movement organizations offers ideas of an open future that can be acted upon. Research has shown how climate organizations create economic and social disruptions. However, as the article shows, they also create temporal disruptions. Taking theoretical inspiration from critical utopian studies, the article states that the climate activists should be understood as utilizing a disruptive utopian method that aims to disrupt the present and thereby open the future. The method relies on utopias that are relational and open, not static or absolute. Hence, the utopianism employed by these groups is not about closure and perfection, but rather about openness and offering alternatives.
During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged throughout Europe. Not only did the war affect the great powers; smaller nations that were not directly involved also experienced a resurgence of constitutional disputes. While these controversies have been analyzed as conceptual struggles, this article – inspired by Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of historical times – suggests that they can also be understood as ideological struggles over temporalities. The article examines the Swedish parliamentary debates on further democratization after the introduction of universal suffrage. In this context, there were ideological struggles over how the historical development should be interpreted and differing visions of how the future should be shaped, resulting in varying understandings of what was required of the present. In the conclusion, the article addresses the Koselleckian categorization of temporal experience and argues that there is a need for another category, one that lies beyond calculable prognoses and predictions: the category of the utopian.
During the last decades of the twentieth century, sustainable development emerged as one of the most important political concepts. However, the concept carried a temporal discrepancy as sustainability concerned continuity and persistence while development focused on change. In this article, the temporalities of the concept are put into focus to understand how the temporal tension influenced the environmental debate in the Swedish parliament, from the late 1980s to the first decade of the new millennium. During this time, the climate emerged as the most important environ-mental issue, and sustainable development became a key concept. The analysis shows how sustainable development should be considered as a composite concept, situated at the intersection of the semantic fields and temporalities of sustainability and development. The two parts have exercised various influence over the whole. For long, development constituted the dominant part while being intimately connected to ideas of progress. Sustainability was primarily given a moderating function, to control the expected progress, and to give shine to goals formulated in terms of eco-nomic growth.
This article examines how the discourse of the new generation of environmental youth movements highlights time and temporality in order to explain the possibilities of change that the movements offer. This is done by analyzing three influential and transnational youth climate movements-Earth Uprising, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays For Future-in relation to three influential diagnoses of the current political condition: postpolitics, populism, and postapocalypse. The article argues that the movements should be understood as mobilizing through negative utopian energies. Using theoretical inspiration from Ernst Bloch, the article states that the discourse should be read as containing acts of hope and utopian impulses that reach forward toward a new beginning of a future possible. The article shows how the movements challenge the diagnoses of populism and postpolitics by their constant critique of capitalism, by reinstalling the people as heterogenous political subjects, and by representing a new temporality. Moreover, the article shows how the mainstream climate discourse contains two temporal narratives that run parallel to each other: one that can be thought of as a vernacular eschatology and one that is seemingly postapocalyptic. However, the article argues that both narratives provide visions of a better future to come, and by using the notion of anticipation, the article states that even the postapocalyptic narrative can be mobilizing. Thus, the environmental youth movements offer a new kind of discourse, one that is non-postpolitical, nonpopulist, and non-postapocalyptic.
It has been argued that the issue of global warming has become incorporated into a postpolitical condition that has deprived it of a proper political subject. In this article, the depoliticizing process is examined through a historical analysis of Swedish election campaigns, 1988 to 2014, a domain that traditionally features political language and politicizations. The analysis shows how the rhetoric of political parties was characterized by an increasingly universalizing language which made it problematic to name a political subject, and how the enemy of global warming was constructed as an outsider that threatened the current order. The article argues for the need to re-politicize the climate issue by understanding climate crises as social crises; that is, crises that can be properly politicized.
For a long time, the reception of German historian and theorist Reinhart Kosellecks work focused on disciplinary and methodological aspects of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte). However, in recent years, there has been an increased interest in Kosellecks more theoretical discussions on historical time and temporality, highlighting his oeuvre of a theory of the conditions for possible histories (Historik). Taking its cue from the current trend, this article revisits the Koselleckian category of horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont) in light of Ernst Blochs work on the principle of hope (Das Prinzip Hoffnung) and the concept of utopia as the forward dreaming of the Not-Yet (Noch-Nicht). By exploring and developing the utopian as a formal category - used as a supplement to Kosellecks conceptualization of the relationship between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation - the article argues that Kosellecks theory can be reframed into one that can fully account for the utopian imaginaries of political thinking.
The relationship between time and politics is complex and multilayered, especially in issues such as global warming. This facilitates political playing with and about time; political actors use and frame time in various ways. Drawing upon the work of Reinhart Koselleck, this article examines temporal statements about the environment and the climate in Swedish election campaigns 1988 to 2018 and shows how political rhetoric has been constituted by several competing modalities of time. However, these modalities can become problematic for political thinking about the future. To resolve the climate crisis, we need a politics that acknowledges both historical and political contingency. Engaging with the past, without seeking to extrapolate a unified narrative of historical progress, explores the past from various perspectives and shows how the present is contingent. This could enable a renegotiation of possible futures and a politics for the future that facilitates both understanding and action.