Collective Disorientation and Catastrophic Precarity in the Hypermodern Era

Abstract:Who can imagine a future today? Any sense of progress, or belief in the future, appears as merely another exclusive privilege of the ultrarich. Time seems to be accelerating faster than catastrophic trajectories can be metabolized. Meanwhile, hypermodern capitalism is eroding its own conditions of possibility, intensifying historical injuries and societal fractures, and destabilizing modern assumptions regarding space, time, and security. The supposed end of history that characterized the neoliberal era has morphed into a reckoning with the end of a world — perhaps not the world as such, but the world as it is being made and unmade by the spatial, temporal, racial, linguistic, technological, and imperial drives of hypermodern capitalism, particularly its global, financialized, and algorithmic forms. Scholars of political economy have drawn attention to the fracturing of the neoliberal phase of late capitalism and its hegemonic constellation, and how this fracture has led to a moment of historical uncertainty and transition in the dynamics of power and contestation across societies. Similarly, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have highlighted the existential and political challenges presented by the Anthropocene’s apocalyptic implications. This article argues that the dialectical crises of capitalism and ecology are converging in a cultural condition of collective disorientation: a return of history bereft of futurity. Through an analysis of catastrophic precarity in the hypermodern era, the article tracks collective disorientation and catastrophic precarity across four registers — accumulation, time, space, and agency — before ending with a discussion of implications of the analysis for alternative orientations.