Can the planet be saved in Time ? On the temporalities of socionature,the clock and the limits debate

Socionature as temporality

Socionatures are always in perpetual flux, as interactions between humans and non-humans continuously fuse sociocultural meaning to an ever-abundant possibility of biotic and abiotic configurations, emerging concepts, emotions, sensations and matterings of all kinds (Barad, 2011; Chernaik, 1999; Descola, 1996; Escobar, 1999; Haraway, 2016; Latour, 1993). Put differently, the dynamism of socionature is the source of ‘difference, otherness, and novelty’ that offers meaning and possibility through lived experience ⁴ (Castree, 2009). The key lies in the ‘possibility’ imminent in the relation. This means that, try as one might, socionatures can never be presupposed or classified into additive or binary categories of ‘human’ plus ‘nature’ (Aldeia and Alves, 2019). Instead, the ‘possibility’ suggests that socionatures are the outcomes of the dynamic and contingent acts of entangled existence (Aldeia and Alves, 2019). However, the exact outcomes of these possibilities can never be fully knowable or controlled.

In Deleuzian terms, within this field in formation, of constantly transforming socionatures, the challenge of defining a world exists precisely because the world never quite arrives as such, but is forever immanent, ripe with the possibility of transformation or dissolution (Mignolo, 2011). Part of the difficulty comes from, as Massey (1999) argues, the observation that socionatures immanently unfold according to a multiplicity of historically contingent place-based relationships and unique temporalities. It is therefore futile to attempt to separate the dimension of spatiality from temporality, both are unified as non-dualistic in the emergence of socionature (Massey, 1999). As Castree (2009: 33) claims in reference to Massey’s work: ‘ … time needs space while space would indeed be ‘dead, fixed, undialectical, immobile’ if it were not for time’ (emphasis in original). While our aim is not to study the continual emergence of socionatures by exploring their spatial and temporal dimensions in isolation (e.g. Castree, 2009), the need to consider temporality, understood as the perception of change, is crucial in foregrounding how socionatures are dialectically co-constituted rather than dualistically determined (Kolinjivadi, 2019). We distinguish living in time (lower ‘t’) as the dynamic cadences or rhythms which shape how socionature relationships emerge and are cultivated, nurtured and sustained, and informing the particular way a phenomenon is experienced. Inspired by the writings of Bergson (1960), we understand coordination in time as a qualitatively experienced connectivity to the world in all its plurality. Its duration is unpredictable, incalculable and not fully controllable. It is rooted in affinity, affection and solidarity, even though the ethical and political foundations of such connectivity can vary. Coordination in time cannot be made to perfectly align, whether forcibly imposed or not, to fixed representations of any temporal device, such as the rigid Time (capital ‘T’) units of the clock (Adam, 1998). ⁵

To understand why capitalist and colonialist epistemologies are incapable of discerning between Time and time, we must first understand how human–nature relationships emerge and subsequently how they become interpreted and enrolled into socionature regimes. From Escobar (1999), a socionature regime ⁶ encompasses a constellation of relational networks between humans and nature. The use of the word ‘regime’ does not mean to imply a totalizing force, be it of capital, modernity or Time. It rather refers to all manner of multi-scalar relational networks that both influence and are equally affected by a tendency towards ontological uniformity of socionature relations. As Castree (2002) claims, this ‘tendency’ reflects the fact that some agents have more capacity to redirect the course of socionature relations than others, reflecting power asymmetries and the capacity to close off political contestation or dissensus. As such, a socionature regime ‘exists’ by placing itself outside of scrutiny from the contestations it stimulates. It does so by consolidating an appearance of general agreement with ideological assumptions of a particular worldview, often by appropriating and (re)presenting contesting articulations (Büscher et al., 2012). As Escobar (1999) notes, a ‘modern socionature regime’ emerged from Western Europe, preceding capitalism and expanding across the world. We believe conceptualizing this historical moment as the ‘modern socionature regime’ is preferable to simply capitalism or even modernity, ⁷ as it reflects a seemingly cohesive set of historical patterns in human–nature relations shaping social, cultural, behavioural, cognitive, economic and territorial development emerging from Western Europe and expanding across the world. It encompasses the ideational, material and symbolic praxis (e.g. Moore, 2017b) associated with broader consolidation of power by the state, especially the administrative and intellectual isolation of human life from the biophysical world, the rationalization of phenomena into expert knowledge and human exceptionalism to control, manage and manipulate the world (Dallmayr, 1993; Escobar, 1999; Latour, 1993).

Modern regime building is grotesquely apparent in the colonization and violent oppression of indigenous and non-Western worldviews, with the justification that such worldviews do not successfully separate their cultural development from dependence on non-humans and therefore are/were perceived as not fully human. For instance, Nanni (2013) documents how Bushmen in parts of Africa were viewed by British colonial observers as following temporal rhythms that separated their humanity from the savageness of the fauna they pursued by a ‘tenuous margin’. Modern science has been subsequently instrumental in enabling and deeply embedding an ontology of standardizing reality, namely, through a commitment to calculative rationality in the mapping of formalized abstractions of space and time (Moore, 2017a). As Escobar (1999) claims, the tendency towards reification of the world for ‘man’ within the ‘modern socionature regime’ extends to relations of territory as property (Raffestin and Butler, 2012; Thomas and Hodder, 2001), the transformation and reproduction of non-human biotic and abiotic natures as objectified raw materials and energy inputs for profit (Foster and Burkett, 2016; Saito, 2017), racialization as socially striating labour in the production of capital (Darder and Torres, 1999; Padovan and Alietti, 2018) and the usurpation of female bodies for the reproduction of labour (Federici, 2004; Merchant, 1980). We would also add the fixity of Time as the metronome coordinating these various facets of modern regime building and always equating the future with extending the projects of settler and neo-colonialism into new frontiers, perpetually reinforcing the white supremacy and patriarchy of Euro/American human exceptionalism (Adam, 1998; Bastian, 2012, 2017; Dabashi, 2015; Rosa, 2013; von Werlhof, 2013).

Inserting a politics of time to unsettle the ‘modern socionature regime’ requires closer engagement with how the rhythms of always-unfolding biotic and abiotic interactions become temporally fixed and regularized by the regime’s regimented pattern of making and shaping the world through capital relations. To this end, we find the contributions of physicist Nicholas Georgesçu-Roegen particularly illuminating. He viewed the biophysical and cultural transformations of economic production as dialectically co-constitutive (Georgesçu-Roegen, 1988). Put differently, society both discursively and materially (re)shapes non-human natures, even as it is itself shaped by those natures. Following this position, Georgesçu-Roegen made a distinction between logical time as explained by Newtonian mechanics and historical time as dialectical and informed by thermodynamics (Bobulesçu, 2017). Time, for Georgesçu-Roegen, derives from the qualitative perception of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ independent of discrete and deterministic units of measurement through a clock or other device. This time of consciousness is where the formation of any and all experience takes place and as such encompasses all possible conceptions of change (Bobulesçu, 2017; Page, 1994). Georgesçu-Roegen’s position of continuous entropic irreversibility contrasts with a mechanistic reading of time that portrays history as merely a series of separate phenomena independent of those that precede and follow it (Bookchin, 1995). Hence, dialectic time underscores qualitative changes which do not apply to the mechanical regularity of ‘cause’ preceding an ‘effect’ such as the tick of a clock, the swing of a pendulum or the fall of an apple from a tree, all of which occur precisely the same way regardless of the change that takes place (Bookchin, 1995).

The fetishization of Time and the synchronization of socionature temporalities

From the perspective of neoclassical economics, temporality is viewed as a mechanical parameter within the production function, whereby any manner of change (e.g. social, cultural, institutional, technological, biophysical, human learning) chiefly serves to influence production (e.g. Arrow, 1962; Solow, 1964). Within this view, Time inserts any and all change as an arithmetical variable within a mechanical understanding of production (Bobulesçu, 2017). Standardized Time thus attempts to represent not only economic production but also global time relations, social time experience, culture and everyday life (Bastian, 2012; Hassan, 2003; Martineau, 2017; Ogle, 2015; Postone, 1993; Tomba, 2012). In his treatise on clock-centred industrial work discipline, Thompson (1967) noted the profound cultural changes that accompanied the synchronization of temporality as Time in the establishment of factory work and industrial capitalism. In doing so, he emphasized how the internalization of Time became a disciplinary force of social control by aligning social behaviour to the centrality of production and productivity. The increasingly more precise alignment of Time to labour, while alienating the rest of human experience, is evident in the history of technological advancement within the ‘modern socionature regime’ (Glennie and Thrift, 1996; Hornborg, 2014; Martineau, 2015). Indeed, as Wood (2008) argues, such a universal conception of Time, calibrated to ensure predictability and control, serves as both precursor to and a product of the imposition of ‘science and technology on the tempos of the biological, physical and social worlds’ (p. 265).

This mechanistic reading of time has deeply cultural consequences for our collective ability to overcome the challenges of economic growth. The incapacity to respond to catastrophic change, or to grasp it as qualitatively different from any other type of change, reflects deeply internalized patterns of world-making in the ‘modern socionature regime’, premised on distinguishing humanity from the rest of nature and universalizing humanity’s destiny as one that must harness time and space to suit its own purposes (Mumford, 1964; Thompson, 1967). While modern societies were capable of mobilizing for the great wars of the previous century, the enemy of the present crisis is Western modernity itself, requiring an existential form of reflection that the ‘modern socionature regime’ is unwilling to accept, let alone mobilize in response to (von Werlhof, 2013). The result has been societal paralysis held captive to deeply normalized fixations of time as clock, and space as political borders, restricting possibilities to respond to external signals of change.

In particular, Time has created a disconnect between the perception of catastrophic change and the representation of that change as comparable to any other experience of change measured through seconds, weeks, months, centuries or any other metric of standardized duration (Scott, 2006). While climate change, species extinctions and soil infertility are brought on by capitalist production relations that peg economic growth forecasts to the clock and the calendar, their resulting consequences cannot be entirely known or controlled through these same disciplinary tempos. For instance, a recent study by Burke et al. (2018) indicates that by the year 2030, the Earth’s climate will resemble that of the mid-Pliocene of three million years ago, an accelerated rate of change faster than anything that life on Earth has ever witnessed. The increasing non-linearity of climate tipping points and positive feedbacks stands testament to a temporality that does not align and cannot be made to tick to the Time of capital. Put differently, climate change does not adhere to the disciplinary predictability of Time, even if the continuous enrolment of socionatures into the production of capital appears to do so. The significance here is that attempts to confine and classify the catastrophic impacts of climate change have very little meaning when framed in Time. We therefore question the plausibility of the regimented linearity of election cycles and global development goals ever being made to align themselves with the extreme non-linearity and irreversibility of climate change.

Temporal markers to forecast and respond to catastrophic change (e.g. 2030 sustainable development goals (SDGs)) thus do not lend themselves to action since their framings of time and space only make sense and are made interpretable through the logic of capital production. The ‘modern socionature regime’ tends to synchronize socionature relations into measurable and quantified metrics of economic production in Time to more efficiently orchestrate the dispossession of vast tracts of the planet of its interconnected natural and cultural wealth, resulting in uneven development, asymmetrical power relations and unequal ecological exchange (Swyngedouw, 2006). For instance, when speculative financial markets and economic discount rates hedge bets on future profits of economic goods, whole generations of people become already enrolled into a calibrated, quantified, bet on future profits. This plays out when, to take another example, the labouring capacity to extract the rare earth mineral inputs to meet the ever-growing production demands of smart phones also locks-in the (often racialized) bodies of humans and non-human natures into temporalities coordinated in Time (e.g. Padovan and Alietti, 2018). In this way, Time performs as a powerful metric to connect socionatures by predetermining, disciplining and locking-in future potentialities in destructive and violent ways (Massumi, 2015).

The concern here does not lie in the myriad timekeeping practices by which the passing of time is conceived (e.g. as modern clocks, sundials, calendars) but rather in the fetishization of temporality from actual lived experience (Scott, 2006). Time confuses the significance of the relation (i.e. as an experienced duration) with the abstracted representation of the relation itself. A life-changing experience posted to a social media app could be said to have occurred on a certain day and hour, invisibilizing the contingent assemblage of factors across time that led to the experience in the first place. Consequently, human–nature relations are forever articulated via the fetishized abstract, such as units of Time or money. We are left with deadened representations of ‘society’ and ‘nature’ rather than lively co-producing socionatures capable of recombining into disruptive, life-restoring resistance. We thus give away the enormous responsibility to understand, reflect and redirect human–nature relations to fetishized abstractions (Hornborg, 2014). Obedience to such abstractions ultimately imposes restrictions on the potentiality of human relatability.

It is also worth noting that the durations and regularized intervals that the clock depicts can hardly be claimed to be intrinsic and universal phenomena of the passing of time. These were consciously (i.e. politically) selected ⁸ as the intervals of change associated with the electrons within a caesium-133 atom shifting electron levels and calibrated to regularity with the inconsistent rotation of the Earth to ensure maximal continuity and precision from one measurable unit of Time to the next (Birth, 2014). But as Barad (2011) states in relation to the ‘between time’ or quantum discontinuity of electrons shifting from higher to lower energy levels: ‘the point is not merely that something is here-now and then there-then without ever having been anywhere in between … ’ (p. 139). The erasure of ‘between time’ thus portrays Time as discrete objectified ‘seconds’ in continuous succession. This ‘worlding’ of human–nature relations in terms of fetishized objects extends far beyond the quest for surplus value. In turn, this perspective can help bring into focus the historical workings of extra-market actors and cultural processes of Western modernity that attempt to organize time and space in brutally efficient and powerful ways to make socionature legible for economic production (Blomley, 2008; Robertson, 2012).

Desynchronizations and re-synchronizations in Time

While Time has a powerful effect on human–nature relations in the ‘modern socionature regime’, it would be both unfair and untrue to claim that socionatures smoothly obey it. The fetishization of Time leads us to exaggerate modernity’s inescapability, furthering its normalization, pervasiveness and ultimate submission to it (Fletcher, 2013; Harvey, 1996). From this view, capitalism and its synchronization in Time are ascribed undue agency, meaning that the capacity to contest, re-coordinate or reassert control is relinquished to the pervasive power of global regime building (Latour, 1993). As was noted above in relation to the political determination of Time as quantum shifts, this universal framing of temporality does not exist prior to the entangled and variegated networks of political and cultural relations that have historically constituted it and give it a sense of coherence (Harvey, 1996).

Rather, attempts to synchronize socionatures into the uniformity of Time invariably result in desynchronizations. For instance, desynchronizations of unruly socionatures are evident in pest outbreaks in monoculture agriculture, labour uprisings and strikes and increasing climate-related displacement of people as migrant refugees (Berchin et al., 2017; de Angeles, 2007). These desynchronized temporalities can take form by actors involuntarily or unconsciously exercising their agency to adapt or reshape hegemonic socionatures in new ways (e.g. Barad, 2011; Escobar, 1999; Hall et al., 2014; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) or as consciously contested alternatives through active resistance (Adger et al., 2001). Desynchronizations of socionatures to Time may also serve to double down to further the oppressive control of the regime, including by closing borders and re-establishing place-based traditions through recourse to right-wing populism and xenophobia (Latour, 2018). Desynchronizations are thus heterogeneous and may lead in many oppositional directions as compared to the otherwise homogenizing tendencies of regime building (Robertson, 2012). In other cases, desynchronizations would better be referred to as alter-temporalities. Indeed, the term ‘desynchronized’ is perhaps a misnomer since not all tempos of socionature entanglement reflect passive or active resistance to a universal Time.

Moreover, the agency of socionatures to materially bring about the world, and the plural temporalities these imply, is not limited to humans. As Barad (2011) highlights, numerous non-human species unfold through entangled relationality across space and time, defying the logic of predictable causality. The multi-species character of Pfiesteria piscicida, a killer dinoflagellate toxic to fish, is for example neither plant nor animal but can act as both according to environmental conditions. As Barad (2011) claims, ‘Pfiesteria’s species beings are not simply multiple or fluid, reducible to variations along some preconceived flow of time, but inherently indeterminate’ (p. 134).

In recognizing such desynchronizations, we stress that the politicization of time is crucial to revealing how socionature emergence reflects as much a form of resistance to the disciplinary homogeneity of capital logics as it does in being enrolled as new raw material for capital expansion (Law and Urry, 2004). As Castree (2009: 43) rightly describes temporality’s dialectic relation to capital, ‘capitalism makes time in two registers at once. It does not simply operate in or through time; more profoundly, in highly specific ways, it constitutes time as a means of constituting itself’ (emphasis in original). In other words, while socionature emergence is coordinated to temporalities that are qualitatively heterogeneous, the legibility of socionature relations in Time directly influences the process by which enrolment back into capital takes place. This process of enrolling desynchronizations back into raw material for capital can be illustrated by examining the ways in which global responses to social and ecological crises have been framed in Time. The SDGs offer a case in point.

The SDGs are argued to be an ‘inclusive participatory process’ led by countries voluntarily making revenue commitments to address social and ecological issues through their own economic development (Edwards and Romero, 2014). The assumption here is that continued economic growth is not only compatible with the planet’s ecological relationships but indeed must take place in order for social and ecological issues to be addressed. In addition to the fact that absolute decoupling of resource use from economic growth on a global scale lacks any empirical evidence, the tight time period required to decarbonize society in order to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5°C or even 2°C is highly unlikely to be reached by continued confidence in decoupling (Hickel and Kallis, 2020). Confusing time with Time, the SDGs can easily combine any expanded set of goals desired, with any number of targets and indicators, and align them to any arbitrary deadline set by the clock (e.g. from now until 2030) but will perpetually remain fundamentally detached from the tempos of biophysical change for which they set to respond to. However, this is not a problem for the SDGs as, again, the assumption resides in (voluntarily) investing a part of gross domestic product to not simply compensate for the life-destroying contradictions that such growth stimulates, but as Büscher et al. (2012) allude to, further profit from energy-efficient innovations, carbon and biodiversity offset trades, and other lucrative ‘green’ values that such destruction offers in the ‘clean-up’ phase. From this lens, the voluntary and collective will of the parties to achieve the SDGs then resembles something more of a trade fair in which parties attempt to convince each other to build partnerships and reap profits from ‘green’ growth (Brand, 2012). Returning to Castree (2009), the SDGs therefore offer a means by which capital not only operates in Time but also crucially depends on socionature relations in Time to further reproduce itself. In this way, the SDGs discursively re-synchronize the ‘externalities’ back into the ‘modern socionature regime’ as potential new sources of capital growth.

Desynchronized articulations may equally coalesce (or re-synchronize) into empty signifiers like ‘sustainability’ or re-commodified as ‘heirloom’, ‘vegan’, or ‘organic’ which do little to undo the ‘modern socionature regime’. Indeed, as we describe later, once re-synchronized, these articulations previously rooted in resistance evolve into new inputs to further regime building. Capital-centric logics have devised increasingly devious and seemingly decentralized tactics to prey upon such messy temporalities to re-synchronize them into Time. We need only think of how tech companies like Google flexibly restructure work ‘time’ according to the creative schedules of the labouring body. The expectation to respond to emails at all times of the day or the on-call 24/7 schedules of Uber drivers and Amazon workers, the codification of lived experiences in Time through social media outlets like Instagram and the devolution of the work space to extend from an office to an isolated beach connected by Wi-Fi have made great strides to tame these messy temporalities (Wajcman, 2016).

Still, with every attempt to synchronize temporalities into the oppressive ticking of the clock, a perhaps unconscious desire to reclaim lived experience not (yet) fully incorporated into the capital-centred structures of Time remains ever-pregnant with possibility (Tsing, 2015). It is then crucial to explore the factors that allow such possibility to materialize. Indeed, since qualitative experiences of change are effectively erased when articulated in the sameness of Time, other appreciations of temporality would better coordinate meaningful response. In the following section, we analyse how the cultivation of rice varieties offers an example into how socionature temporalities emerge, how such temporalities become abstracted through globalized food production systems coordinated in Time and the implications of this understanding for informing the limits debate.

Embodied agriculture in time and its synchronization in Time

Temporality is deeply implicated in agriculture, as food production engenders and is itself brought into being by historically distinct and diverse forms of environment making (Grasseni, 2005; Moore, 2017a). The spectacular diversity of rice varieties for example is not only a feature of rice’s fluid capacity to adapt to many environments but also of its deep association with the sociocultural lives of farmers across generations (Hanks, 1972). Rice production has emerged from generations of farmers selectively breeding crops, resulting in manifold varieties. Each of these has unfolded according to the rhythms of very specific cultural practices and knowledge systems embedded in waves of historical migration of people and dynamic climatic, biological and abiotic factors such as light, temperature and moisture (Hanks, 1972; Zimmerer and Douches, 1991). These condensations of human–nature entanglements in time have produced the materiality of rice landraces in their continuously forming array of textures, colours, aromas, tastes and sociocultural attributions (Hanks, 1972). As Adam (1998) reminds us in relation to food production, ‘To acknowledge the here and now in its rhythmic and seasonal particularity is to know the future as patterned creativity’ (p. 160). This requires a perceptiveness to continuously unfolding biotic and abiotic conditions, a sense of openness in embracing seasonal and climatic patterns and subsequent responsiveness to act or improvise in line with political and biophysical conditions (Adam, 1998). This intensive form of adaptability does not revolve around what is expected or unexpected, nor along blueprints and success formulas, but instead allows farmers to ‘respond to the flux of the world with care, judgement and sensitivity’ (Ingold, 2006: 19). Indeed, as Soemarwoto (2007) illustrates through farming communities in parts of Java, Indonesia, the deep entanglement of humans and non-humans in rice farming results in the discovery of new varieties at every harvest; these increasing varieties can allow farmers to adapt to climatic variations and the emergence of pests.

While technological improvements to maximize yields per hectare were key to fuelling the Industrial Revolution and associated synchronization of Time to labour productivity, it was only in the last 100 years that the pace of this synchronization has accelerated to an unprecedented global scale (von Werlhof, 2013). This was extended further with the ‘Green Revolution’, including the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, high-yielding cultivars, mechanized irrigation infrastructure and futures commodity markets. As a result, rice production now contributes upwards of 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions, principally from methane release (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014). At the same time, price fluctuations in optimizing commercial rice production for enhanced efficiency, when efficiency gains for many crops have begun to level off, have meant increased vulnerability and precarity for farmers (Dawe, 2002). This effect is exacerbated by climate-related drought and pest outbreaks, setting in motion a vicious cycle further disrupting the unique temporal rhythms which intimately tie the lifeways of rice farmers and their non-human partners (Dawe, 2002).

Desynchronized temporalities of tinawon rice as ‘escape agriculture’

Rice cultivation provides an interesting example of divergent temporalities in its production: whether as a commodity in the global market or as an embodied way of being in relation with the non-human world, both culturally and spiritually (Hanks, 1972). Often these temporalities occur simultaneously. For instance, colonial-era rice farming on Sumatra, Indonesia involved the simultaneous production of lowland rice for export markets and upland rice for indigenous self-subsistence, whereby the latter involved producing rice at a different temporal pace and farmer-landscape relationality than for commodity production (Glover and Stone, 2018). Ifugao rice varieties in the Philippines offer an example of how alter-temporalities are in dialectic co-production with circuits of commodification in Time. A dialectic relation with capital suggests that alter-temporalities do not by themselves undermine the Time of capitalism and indeed may support and reinforce it. Yet, socionature entanglements, continuously ‘becoming’ in time to the rhythm of alter-temporalities, may persist to engender material and cultural outcomes that enhance the conditions for life. The factors that lead to such persistence or ‘escape’ are therefore worth exploring.

Ifugao rice varieties are grown through distinctive land-use terrace farming, intimately adapted to higher elevations in the Cordillera mountains of northern Luzon. These landraces are low yielding, aromatic and morphologically diverse; they are called tinawon in the Ifugao language, literally meaning that they are produced only ‘once-a-year’ (Glover and Stone, 2018). The uniquely adapted temporalities of social and biological conditions influencing the quality of tinawon were intimately tied to people’s desire for cultural autonomy and food sovereignty and to escape the ontologically uniform temporality of the modern colonial state (Glover and Stone, 2018). Scott (2009) calls this form of food production ‘escape agriculture’, in which flexible and mobile food production strategies are rendered ‘illegible’ by the state (Glover and Stone, 2018). These might include crops that thrive in marginal soils, are easy to cultivate, are quick to mature and can be easily stored (Glover and Stone, 2018).

In the case of tinawon, indigenous Ifugao farmers initially fled into the mountains to escape slave traders and later as refuges from Spanish subjugation (Glover and Stone, 2018). It was here in this rugged terrain where tinawon emerged, following its own temporality of production as embedded within the biophysical and sociocultural landscape. The embodied knowledge of irrigation and earthwork in the carefully constructed rice terraces and the labour-intensive care involved in tending to crops was co-produced over generations through a rice-centred culture, providing structure and meaning to the Ifugao existence beyond merely sustenance for survival (Glover and Stone, 2018). For the Ifugao people, this means a culture of being in time with the land, in which spiritual rites are tightly twinned to rice farming, including celebratory feasts and the outlawing of farming during the obligatory day of rest following harvest (Dulawan, 1985).

In sum, the temporalities of crops produced in resistance, and specifically, the materiality characteristic of tinawon’s unique aroma, texture, and quality, reflect an alternate form of food production, desynchronized from economic calculus of regimented Time. This illustrates what Adam (1998) calls for in re-appropriating ‘the ownership of time  …  as a central precondition to sustainable agriculture’ (p. 160). The ensemble of human–nature relationships that brought tinawon into being is thus a centuries-old rupture in the temporal fabric of Time. The historicity and contingency of these temporalities are described by Anna Tsing as ‘the inside details of things that happen’ (Tsing, 2015, cited in Gan, 2011). These temporal rhythms would necessarily follow a messier, serendipitous and non-linear trajectory of humans and non-humans in continuous relation, and continuously responding to each other, in bringing about tinawon. There is much to be learned from the temporal conditions that brought about this life-enhancing materiality, giving sustenance and meaning to the Ifugao people.

Re-synchronizing tinawon rice temporalities in Time

To reiterate, tinawon, as an escape crop, is the material manifestation of historical claims for cultural and food sovereignty that led to its emergence. In other words, tinawon came from social, cultural and spiritual purposes rather than for sale or trade (Glover and Stone, 2018). However, the temporalities of tinawon are becoming increasingly synchronized in Time. This is occurring through the commodification of tinawon’s anti-commodity characteristics by so-called ‘heirloom’ varieties which sell not only the uniqueness of the rice but also the history, culture and terraced landscape features that go along with it ((Glover and Stone, 2018) ibid). Through commodification, tinawon becomes fetishized as an end-it-itself, invisibilizing the process of congealed tempos carefully coordinating human and non-human handiwork as well as other biotic and abiotic factors that produced it (Hornborg, 2014). As Glover and Stone (2018) describe, the heirloom concept reifies the ‘complex, contextual, sometimes ambiguous’ (p. 789) and continuously changing abiotic conditions that bring tinawon into existence. It does so by flattening difference into ‘a neat, legible, standardized category of tinawon heirloom rice’ (p. 792) that represent and sell idealized or pure landraces for faraway consumers who are content to demand that a myriad set of temporal relations can be reduced to instantaneity to satisfy their desires. In ensuring racial purity of landrace categories to meet quality and uniformity standards for recognizable consumer brands, a novel temporality is performed which enrols a fetishized end product into quality-controlled production targets, synchronized with transport and retail sectors of the broader supply chain. This is a market temporality synchronized to Time in the generation of profit. The transformation and homogenization of tinawon temporalities into Time are visible in the standardized ways rice seeds are obtained, cultivated, harvested, threshed, stored and transported into niche markets (Glover and Stone, 2018). The ultimate objective is to distinguish and classify landraces as precisely as possible as well as refine and replicate seed selection to maximize marketing potential ‘and to meet consumer expectations for identity, purity, quality, and uniformity’ (p. 793).

Thus, in an attempt to recreate the unique temporalities that produce tinawon as a means to save them, the commodification of tinawon into ‘heirloom’ brands irreversibly alters these temporalities. Consequently, the qualitative significance and life-enhancing meaning of living in time and the material effects on the landscape that this engenders become transformed into a vapid performative act for purposes of consumption. As the rapidly expanding tourism industry illustrates, upkeep of maintaining the ‘spectacle’ is itself a source of profit to be optimized in Time (Mananghaya, 2011).

‘Escape’ temporalities

Of particular interest in this example is the way in which communities have enacted alternative ‘escape’ temporalities as expressions of autonomy, much as alternative food sovereignty movements have done elsewhere. This highlights how the politics of place and time in enacting alternative strategies are themselves political and potentially emancipatory acts. In this way, temporal relations become re-signified to invalidate the imposition of a single coordination metric (Madra and Özselçuk, 2015).

In the case of climate change, the emergence of these alternatives illustrates that it is possible to respond in time, rather than on Time. For instance, the millions of migrants fleeing from a combination of natural and man-made disasters illustrate a temporal dissonance between experienced responses to climate change and the timed regularity of global climate policy conferences and formal protocols. For many migrants, acting in time to their lived experiences, the search for less de-humanizing work in producing commodities for ‘developed’ countries, and to escape inhospitable climates will not align their actions to official responses to the crisis in Time (e.g. the SDGs). For them, the ‘here and now’ immediacy of climate consequences are one and the same as violent bodily assaults associated with the lived experiences and ongoing struggles of patriarchy, neo-colonial dispossession of territory and racialized ‘othering’ within the ‘modern socionature regime’ (Gunster, 2017; Jampel, 2018). In other words, climate response temporalities reflect urgent, historically grounded visceral struggles of structural violence in the degradation and simplification of socionatures within the modern regime.

Responding in time to the consequences of modern socionature relations: Beyond the Limits debate

Returning to the question of limits raised at the start of this article, we now ask: what do alter-temporalities like those found in the socionature entanglements of tinawon tell us about dominant responses to social and ecological crises? A key lesson is how Ifugao farmers reassert self-determination in following their own lifeworlds. This responsiveness in exerting agency for autonomy is ‘escape temporalities’ critical not just for survival but also in infusing symbolic meaning and purpose to life. This responsiveness does not end with the creation of unique socionatures such as tinawon but is always becoming, constantly morphing to seek refuge from attempts to hollow out and homogenize lived experience both spatially and temporally. In this way, escape temporalities offer an ontological basis of resilience guiding the transformation of socionatures in not always predictable ways. They offer important windows of possibility for (more) abundant and life-sustaining socionatures. Indeed, the conditions that flatten the world-making of the Ifugao, forcing them to flee, invite parallels to those of fleeing climate refugees escaping inhospitable environments as a result of climate change and related socio-political conflict. These forms of ‘escape’ do not necessarily imply a voluntary decision but rather embody a sort of refusal to normalize the combined effect of socio-political and climatic alterations, for which they were hardly responsible for. The ‘escape temporalities’ of tinawon tell us that the conscious aim of crafting futuring potentials for the common good must proceed in ways rendered illegible by the state and the market. Caffentzis and Federici (2014) describe this as actively reproducing the commons against and beyond capitalism.

The limits debate frames development challenges as largely biophysical processes with consequences for the continuation of the modern human project. This effectively frames the problem as one of managing global environmental change within the ontology of Western modernity (Serres, 1998). Put differently, the concern is framed as one of scrambling to preserve the project of Western capitalist modernity from existential threats, rather than as an opportunity for alternative, more life-affirming cultural worldviews. For instance, LtG supporters largely advocate ‘fitting’ a singular humanity into biophysical planetary boundaries, such as methane limits from rice production (Rockström et al., 2009). The ecological is seen as a fixed constant, while the co-production of socionatures remains obscured. Far from a universalized ‘humanity’ confronting biophysical limits, we can more accurately describe ‘modern socionatures’ as a class-based, racialized and gender-stratified social world shaping the biophysical conditions that produce those limits in the first place. The conceit of the ‘modern socionature regime’ is that the ensemble of all human and non-human bodies is stripped of its qualitative character and perceived as the abstracted labour force for regime building.

Both the framing of problems and their possible solutions can only take place then by performatively advancing the ‘modern socionature regime’ as the foundation directing all potential action. Through accelerating speculation of labouring bodies and resource extraction, Time locks-in the future to equate human progress with capital. Under this logic, imaginaries that, in any way, might actually avert social and ecological crises are also repressed or disavowed (Berardi, 2017). As Latour (2017) claims, the future of modernity is that there is no future; instead, we must turn to the prospects that arise out of the lived experience of people responding to the realization that they have no future. Fry (2015), cited in Escobar (2018), elaborates on the notion of de-futuring in alluding that the ‘modern socionature regime’ “did not just take the future away from the peoples it damaged and exploited, but set a process in motion that negated the future, and de-futured both the born and the unborn” (p. 23). Meanwhile, both sides of the limits debate are paralysed, focussed on addressing the pace ⁹ of the ‘modern socionature regime’ rather than the need for altogether different socionature relations where new kinds of doing, being and thinking become possible (Escobar, 2018). In particular, the raison d’être of the ecomodernist position is precisely the support for the expansion and acceleration of the ‘modern socionature regime’.

The more hegemonic a socionature regime, the faster it must perform or reproduce itself in order to maintain its power to visibly or conceptually ‘exist’ (Ferguson, 2011). Aptly described as a frenetic standstill, regime building involves continuously enrolling new and emergent socionatures at an ever-increasing pace to maintain political hegemony (Rosa, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2006). For instance, technological developments emerge as an attempt to save Time within the modern regime, which we are led to believe we do not have enough of. Yet, freeing up Time is thoroughly insufficient for alternative forms of human–nature relations to emerge, since the basis of temporal relationality remains centred on increasing profit through commodity production (Thompson, 1967). Instead, Time-saving devices serve to merely extend potential working hours for even more accelerated productivity in the transformation of socionatures, as supported by ecomodernists. The immediacy of acting to halt impending extinction becomes impossible to distinguish in practice from everyday work schedules to discover or produce new consumables (e.g. new technologies, new landscapes for industrial tourism, new journal articles). The reason for this failure to distinguish work and leisure schedules from impending extinction is that the temporal coordination of modern socionature locks-in the future as potential productivity. Ultimately, and in obvious contrast to the LtG position, ecomodernism suggests the liberation from all limits besides those imparted by humans alone in which production is increasingly maximized and optimized to the mechanistic fixity of Time. The ecomodernist conception of Time resonates then to what philosopher Walter Benjamin (2003) described as ‘homogenous, empty time’, one which circumscribes the present, not as the possibility of acting in the ‘now’, but always in servitude to a pre-determined future made only for mankind [sic].

Regardless of which side of the debate we examine, we are left dualistically fitting an abstracted human into an external ‘ecological’ much like assembling the parts of a machine. While the ecomodernist conception of temporality further advances the transformation of socionatures into new commodities, the planetary boundaries position implies the temporality of an ideally resilient society submitting itself to ecological principles seen as somehow outside of Western modernity’s own influence. In both cases, the temporal particularities shaping socionatures are assumed to be capturable at will within the ‘modern socionature regime’. The assumption that goes unproblematized is that humans have complete temporal control in choreographing non-human natures for economic production, such that natures have no agency whatsoever in the ways socionatures emerge. As the example of tinawon illustrates, this is clearly not the case, since the periodicity of high-altitude mountain soils to regenerate played a critical role in the emergence of tinawon prior to its ‘discovery’ as ‘heirloom’ rice for export. These temporalities also involve non-humans, desynchronized from the production logic of Time, and can guide both our ethical responsibilities and political responsiveness to the life-destructing tendencies of the ‘modern socionature regime’.

As Singh (2013) argues, emotions and affective relations bring regenerative socionature temporalities into collective consciousness. Such relations bring forth an idea of the passing of time that does not essentialize but rather reflects the immanence of socionature. Rather than holding faith in the rather hegemonic notion of one story ‘truer’ than any other as Time has come to represent, we might instead perceive the possibility of many temporalities with their own histories and futuring potentials. Our collective aim would be then to explore ways to actualize such potential as a form of active resistance to the tendencies of modern regime building (Veland et al., 2018).