The intensified global or rather planetary interconnection and entanglement that characterises the condition of contemporaneity appears even more clearly with the growing awareness of anthropogenic climate change and the advent of the – disputed! – notion of “the anthropocene”. The notion of “the anthropocene” suggests that we have entered a new geological epoch as crucial geological and eco-systemical conditions and processes – including the biodiversity and climate of the Earth – have been profoundly altered by human modernisation activities; and thus, that the human has proved itself to be a geological force (for the moment I leave aside the problematic use of “the human” or human kind in general as the responsible agent – according to, for instance, Françoise Vergès we should rather be talking about the “racist capitalocene”). Entering the anthropocene epoch influences our very perception of time. Hence, we are not only dealing with a new epoch replacing an old one, the Holocene, in a process of linear progressive development – which in the case of the Earth spans more than 4,5 billion years, a time scale that is highly abstract to our human perception. The new epoch is also accompanied by an increasing need for us to relate to a planetary scale, according to which we, as inhabitants of the same Earth, globally and across our cultural differences and national histories, share the same historical now, the same present. More negatively phrased, the geological and bio-systemical changes herald the potential extinction of the human species, thus obliging us to share a possible common absence as well, transcending all cultural and historical disparities. In this way, the idea of the time of the Anthropocene implies a coupling of human historical times with deep geological time, of world history, and the five hundred years that can be said to constitute the history of capitalism, with Earth history.^[1]1See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Anthropocene Time,” History and Theory 57, no. 1 (March 2018): 5-32, 6. It implies that our world historical political and “cultural” temporalities are more explicitly linked to and made part of non-human temporalities (see historicity). Or, as Achille Mbembe states in an interview on “How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness”: “I would go so far as to insist that more than any other time in our brief history on Earth, we are experiencing a clash of temporalities: geological time, the deep time of those processes that fashioned our terrestrial home; historical time; and experiential time. All these times now fold in on one another. We are not used to thinking of time as simultaneous. We think of time as linear: past, present, future. So how do we begin to think about time in a way that takes these concatenations seriously?”^[2]2Achille Mbembe, “How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness,” Interview with Nils Gilman and Jonathan Blake, NOEMA(January 11, 2022), accessed January 15, 2022, https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-develop-a-planetary-consciousness/. (To be consistent with the terminology I am developing here, I would substitute contemporaneous for “simultaneous”, to stress their interconnectedness.)

Contemporary conditions mean that our human lives are critically entangled with the geo-bio-chemical processes of the Earth, and that our earthly imaginations must strive to include temporalities that exceed our sense-perceptual capacities.^[3]3Chakrabarty, “Anthropocene Time,” 30. The Earth and its environments can no longer be viewed, imagined, as mere frames deprived of any capacity to react and as relatively unchanging backdrops of the time and history of the human world, Cf. Hartog, Chronos, 226. Our bodies and our times are inescapably implicated in environmental changes, cf. Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker, “'Weathering': Climate Change and the 'Thich Time' of Transcorporeality,” Hypatia vol. 29, no. 3 (summer 2014): 558-575, 559. Living in the age of planetarity means to contemporaneously inhabit the interconnected presents of world history and of Earth history where what seems slow on the scale of the former may be instantaneous on the scale of the latter. Under contemporary conditions we are forced to let go of the idea of a one-dimensional time from where it would be possible to imagine and project a different future – futurity is no longer something that lays ahead on a one-dimensional, progressive continuum. The coming into being of contemporaneity, the coexistence and interconnection of different histories and temporalities, worldly and planetary, implies a spatialization of time, or what Latour calls “the time of cohabitation”, and we now have to begin to imagine futurity and global politics liberated from the modern Western obsession with the time of succession – and the imagination it allows for, including persistent colonization, social, racial, and regional inequality (see historicity).^[4]4Bruno Latour, "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public," in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM exhibition catalogue (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 4-31: 29-30. We are in need of imagining a future temporal horizon that includes the natural environment as an agent rather than a mere object or context – of a regime of historicity that is radically different from the modern one, which is still ordering large parts of our current time.