Faculty Writing: On Neoliberalism’s Resilience; and Political-Time in the Anthropocene
In a recent interview, originally recorded at the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy and published in Jacobin, BISR Faculty Rafael Khachaturian talks with political economist Martijn Konings about a rise in speculative soundings of the death knell for neoliberalism—even as the evidence keeps stacking up that no such end is imminent. They discuss the nature of neoliberalism’s ongoing appeal, on both the left and the right, for both elite and mass culture.
And, writing in BISR’s Late Light journal, BISR Faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary explores the ways that ecological realities are fundamentally reshaping our experience of time. In the political divide that characterizes the Anthropocene—a “zero-sum” divide between “those who stand to gain… from fundamental system preservation… and those whose current exhaustion is part of the fuel for that system”—are embedded different ways of conceiving of time. Against the future, he urges an engagement in and with the present, in all its strangeness—what he calls “The Long Now”—as a time of radical potential.