Abstract
This thesis enquires into the nature of the temporal formations that structure our lives and, notably, the realms of work and production. Drawing on literature from various disciplines to articulate its own theoretical framework, it characterises what I term neoliberal capitalist temporalities. These are socially constituted, power-laden constructs that regulate lives across space-time. Building on the works of Rosa, Crary and Martineau, it argues that the historical development of capitalism has always been tied to the enforcement of particular temporal cartographies or ‘distributions’ (Rancière). In this sense, neoliberal capitalist temporalities are an intrinsic element of contemporary neoliberal capitalism.I identify the practices of increasing acceleration, continuous functioning, and logistical rationality as three central features of neoliberal capitalist temporalities. I also investigate how productivism, the normative ethos at the core of these temporalities, validates and enables neoliberal capitalism’s relentless extraction of value from both animate and inanimate resources to the point of burning them out.
The thesis refines a critique of neoliberal capitalist time regimes on the basis of the fact they produce what I define as unlivability, expanding on Butler’s work. Arguing that unlivability is differentially distributed across demographic categories, and that it most clearly manifests in the sphere of labour, I discuss present-day examples of ongoing acceleration of work that yield unprecedented types of labour precarity. I both critique and denormalise the phenomena of chronic stress, overwork and burnout experienced by millions of people today.
Further developing Rosa’s argument concerning the three main crises of late modernity (2013), I analyse in concrete terms how neoliberal capitalist time distributions have a destructive impact on human health, politics, and the natural environment. Two keys to this are cheapening strategies and the homogenisation or subordination of nature’s various temporalities to neoliberalism’s uniform global temporality. I examine the manner in which contemporary time regimes dismantle the conditions of possibility for politics on three levels: they erode the material and bodily capacities for individuals’ involvement in politics, they deny our ontological constitution as relational subjects, and they foreclose the temporal-structural requirements for institutional democracy and for protest politics to take place.
This thesis is therefore a multifaceted critique of neoliberal capitalist temporalities that first makes them visible to then challenge their hegemonic, self-evident status. Finally, I discuss alternative ways of navigating time and resisting the productivist push to participate in exploitative and self-exploitative dynamics. I propose a relational, post-growth politics requires that we inaugurate and recuperate other ways of relating to time, to work and to our world.
| Date of Award | Feb 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Mark Devenney (Supervisor) & Clare Woodford (Supervisor) |