Time, Tempor(e)alities

Wolfgang Ernst

Related terms: acceleration, Anthropocene, Artificial Intelligence, chronotechniques, cosmic clock, computation, deep time, delay, katechontic, Moore's law, nuclear waste, singularity, time-criticality, technology

Related authors: Siegfried Zielinski, Jussi Parikka

Environmental vs. computational “time”

In this glossary entry, “time” is juxtaposed with the idiosyncratic typography of “tempor(e)alities” to express the author’s determination not to get lost in the lofty semantics of a transcendental unifying referent. “Time” is rejected in favour of concrete operations: actual process qualities that replace, in their actual multitude, the metaphysics of “time” and reveal this noun as a collective singular oscillating between temporal layers and stochastic Markov chains. There is no more universal (Newtonean or philosophically transcendental) time, but rather a plurality of tempor(e)alities: “time may dissolve into a flash of strings and bursts” (Winthrop-Young 2015, 146). The apparent continuous temporality of climate change is increasingly being translated into discrete computational timing indeed. The Turing galaxy treats time “as a succession of instants instead of a continuous flow” (Turing 1986, 111). This is no “deep” time anymore. In computational infrastructures, “hardwired temporalities” are at work instead (Volmar and Stine 2021).

Nonlinear temporality: Climate catastrophe and/or disruptive technologies

Environmental humanities deal with human (historical) as well as nonhuman (physical, geological, planetary) tempor(e)alities that decentre the epoch of cultural history. In between, cultural technologies are at work. While narrative eco-historical imagination tends to extrapolate an accelerating evolutionary process into the future, the expectation of technological leap innovations introduces a nonlinear momentum (Bower and Christensen 1995). From an epistemological (rather than activist) point of view, such processes are recursive rather than linear. Symbolically organized historical time gets replaced by disruptive event horizons. Nonlinear temporality may not even be termed “history” at all (De Landa 1997).

The environmental crisis is globally experienced, even in everyday life, e.g., by weather disasters. The scientific answer to this phenomenal experience is time-critical signal-sensing devices. A grid of sensors all over the planet turns physical evidence into a discrete time series of measuring data. Environmental time gets thereby stochastically calculable. Mathematized tempor(e)ality is the basis of climate change models that define current prognostics. This includes the time-critical momentum of a “tipping point” of global warming as a nonlinear time figure of climate research. Computational projections such as the 1.5-degree target as global warming benchmark generate tempor(e)alities as futurum exactum. This hypothetical, anticipative future point in time was originally been developed for anti-aircraft prediction in WWII; it has now become the dominant time figure of the Anthropocene. The notion of a drastic climate change, like all concepts of catastrophe before, is time-critical indeed.

An anti-technological return to natural temporality is not possible anymore. Such an attitude would already be trapped within technological thinking. The concern with the Anthropocene is dominated by temporal tropes that are themselves chronotechniques. The activist ethics of slowing down the imminent climate crisis is no return to so-called natural environmental care but more technological than ever since it is dominated by the cybernetic time-figure of feedback where deviations of a system are corrected by feeding the output negatively back to the input. Deceleration itself is achieved by technological means – be it administrative or technical engineering.

When current climate change is constructively counteracted by technological resilience, technológos set free even more technological imagination, in a knowledge-creative way, mastering the imminent threat by its outdoing. Against techno-scepticism, so-called accelerationism as an intellectual time figure of the Anthropocene is supporting the intensification of global technologization. Instead of limiting or slowing down technology confronting ecological dilemmas caused by cultural industrialization, the “fatal strategies” perspective (Baudrillard 1980) resolves this crisis with even more technological innovation. 

From “deep time” to “time-criticality” (in its double sense)

The texture of environmental humanities is interwoven by patterns that relate to temporality. In the French Annales school of historical inquiry, Fernand Braudel differentiated between the longue durée of an (almost) immobile transhistorical ecological time, material cultural cycles in the middle, and man-made events. A dominant time figure in current debates concerning the Anthropocene is the so-called “deep time”. Conceptually, the Anthropocene names the significant human impact on ecosystems as the most recent epoch of geological time. But its qualification as “deep time” itself is a metaphysical seduction already, granting the physical parameter a hermeneutic dimension. A more archaeo(geo)logical view confronts several layers of time as topological convolution. Probes are taken from deep ice layers  to identify, by material substitution of direct evidence, archaeoclimatic states. Ice core proxies, as indirect evidence, reveal the layered environmental times of the earth itself from its arctic archive. Such an archaeology questions the transcendental signifier “time” as such.

A lot of environmental humanities research took off from the geologists’ work that deals with long periods. But “deep” time is not historical: it is neither man-made on the objective event horizon, nor can its folded layers be approached by linear narratives. Historiography fails when it comes to describing the tempor(e)alities of the Anthropocene. Historization (the extension of “history” to such transhuman  temporal fields) results in a narrativization of real events in literary (“humanistic”) emplotments – be they tragic or comic (White 1973). Towards a less anthropocentric turn of environmental humanities, a more finely differentiated approach towards tempor(e)alities is appropriate, instead focusing on their technical mediations.

Tempor(e)alities of katechontic delay: archival (end-)times and nuclear waste

The time figure of climate crisis activism is katechontic. In ancient Greek, tó katéchon signifies “that which withholds”. Christian eschatology knows this as a time-figure of delay: the deferral of the apocalypse. The hazard of climate catastrophes nourishes the archival impulse in contemporary culture. The primary mission of the Arctic World Archive on the island of Spitsbergen, Norway, for instance, is to maintain the integrity of digital records by storing them photographically on film reels.

Environmental humanities claim to bridge the traditional divides between nature, with its scientific tempor(e)alities, and culture, with its humanistic concerns regarding “time”. But shouldn’t this divide rather be even more accentuated, looking at “time” from a non-anthropocentric technological point of view (Irrgang 2020)?  This perspective is liberated from the transcendent signifier since technologies act processually while having no sense of (cultural) “time” semantics themselves.

A concrete scene in this epistemic drama is such places where human is literally excluded: nuclear waste depositories. The temporality of nuclear waste decay is sublime. It escapes the human phenomenological “inner sense of time” (Husserl 1991) by its sheer vast dimension. In nuclear waste deposits, an almost infinite radiant storage interlaces with the “deep” geo-tempor(e)ality of its protective environment.

The chronopolitics of long-lasting radioactive waste storage oscillates between the time figures of teleology and apocalypse: between techno-optimism and aporetic fatalism. Salt, clay and granite are currently considered the most suitable natural matter for more permanent underground storage of nuclear waste. Such physical time capsules, adding a second-order “deep time” to the geological timescale, are not dealing with historical, mad-made event time anymore. But with no available long-term solution for safe nuclear waste deposits so far, improvised temporality replaces the familiar cultural concept of infinite time. Just like volatile random-access memory (RAM) replaced materially fixed read-only memory in electronic computing, intermediate storage of nuclear waste becomes temporary.

With nuclear storage, “different temporalities collide, overlap, and interweave” (nGbK 2024, 4). While the architectural source of nuclear waste production is already disappearing with the dismantling of nuclear power plants, and with the probability that its archival witnessing will shrink after multiple generations, nuclear waste deposits will endure hundreds of thousands of years in radioactivity. This raises the challenge of communication with the future: How to mark such monuments of the Anthropocene, across vast temporal gaps, against premature intrusion? Such an address must include nonhuman receivers as well. With nuclear waste deposits, the archival transmission model of cultural memory (monitored “tradition”) is replaced by long-term self-active storage. Atomic semiotics require a trans-linguistic warning system into the future (at least one hundred thousand years) to prevent humans or nonhuman beings from prematurely interacting with radioactive deposits. This requires rather physical signalling (literal “radio”-activity) as beyond-human  communication instead of cultural symbols (Sebeok 1985), such as detectors “for transmitting messages about radiation's hazards” (nGbK 2024, 18). Media-active time signals replace cultural semiotics.

The cosmic clock

According to Marshall McLuhan, commenting on the Soviet Sputnik satellite launch and its extra-terrestrial perspective, “for the first time the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container” (McLuhan 1972). This concerns global “time” itself. The temporal environment for culture has for the longest time been dominated by astronomical orientation towards natural cycles. The tipping point in the economy of time occurred with the quartz clock built at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1927. Continued by the atomic caesium clock, such electro-physical mechanisms generate a time reference more exact than the astronomical one itself. Time axis manipulation is the Anthropocenic impact on astronomical time, just like temporal “smearing” smuggles leap seconds into Internet time (Genosko and Hegarty 2018). Nature-oriented cultural techniques of time-keeping have been replaced by self-referential chronotechnologies, down to Coordinated Universal Time which is used to regulate time based on a weighted average of hundreds of atomic clocks worldwide (Wikipedia 2025). A quartz piezo-electric oscillator operates the function of the clocking unit within microcomputers that provides a rhythm to process algorithms. In reverse, it required time-critical computational synchronisation to smooth the time delay of cosmic radio signals received by the Event Horizon Telescope in its achievement of the first direct imaging of the supermassive M87 black hole (published in April 2019).

Technochronization of the earth: negentropy in the Anthropocene

The concept of the Anthropocene as a global geochronological epoch is dominated by a uni-temporal view of cultural progress towards an ecological point that can be deferred but not reversed. The current strategies to at least delay the climate catastrophe are already manifestations of a chronotechnical (cybernetic) relation of humans  to earth: correction by negative feedback. Culture as such is “negentropic” (Flusser 1998), that is: reversing the arrow of time. In this reading, human culture is “unnatural” already in the sense of improbable interventions into the physical environment. But local and temporary islands of order negentropically allow for different shapes of time to take place.

A technological concretization of Anthropocenic time: Moore's law

“Standing reserves” (Heidegger 1977) become materially concrete with rechargeable batteries as energy storage devices. They are a technical equivalent to accumulated “time”. Since such knowledge of battery technology is a key to limiting carbon dioxide emissions, it is a media-archaeological irony that the human concern to slow down climate change depends on technology itself. Computational data centres and their related infrastructures increasingly absorb energy to a decisive degree. Its technical lógos are materially embodied indeed. This becomes most concrete in a “climate crisis” within digital data processing itself: So-called Moore’s law, as it has been proposed in 1965 by the co-founder of Intel, states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years – a self-fulfilling prophecy that has turned into a stable temporality itself (Volmar and Stine 2021, 17).

The time operator of the techno scene is no longer history but entropy. There is entropy in the physical sense (thermodynamics) vs. Shannon’s entropy in the informational, communication engineering sense. Both converge with the hardware limits of Moore’s law. The accelerating clock speed of CPU models over time already faces the thermodynamic challenge of overheating. The thermal interference of micro-processing electronic elements with their neighbours results in a kind of micro-climate catastrophe (Lison 2020). Moore’s law has its in-built temporal end. The improvements in silicon components hit a material and energetic wall. Drastically “new ideas will be required” (Calude 2017). Unconventional computing, that is: computation with(in) matter and energy itself, is an answer.

Towards a technological “singularity”: Artificial Intelligence

Environmental studies are predominantly concerned with physical damage like climate change caused by human industrial interference. But in more epistemic, post-industrial terms, it is rather digitization that has been the core event of the Anthropocene. The pace of climate change and its imminent tipping point of irreversible global warming, in its impact  on the human condition, may even be surpassed by an “environmental” acceleration of a different, technological kind: the breathtaking impact of advanced Artificial Intelligence. The investment of risk capital into advanced AI and other technological sectors already has a much more immediate decisive effect than measures intended to slow down the climate crisis. Faster than physical catastrophes, a technological “singularity” (Kurzweil 2005) may soon occur as an irreversible cultural tempor(e)ality indeed. In order not to miss this point, environmental humanities may apply a more dialectic analysis. Classical cybernetics once claimed: “Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.” (Wiener 1962, 132) But resource-heavy (from rare earths to electric energy) information processing in times of advanced AI demands an even more determined materialism. With its much more energy-efficient and therefore significantly reduced environmental impact the open-source Chinese AI model DeepSeek as an alternative to ChatGPT has, in January 2025, been shocking the markets. Ecology and technological intelligence intersect in the challenge of energy-efficient, “green” big data processing for machine learning. In its double sense, environmentally advanced AI will become a new kind of post-Heideggerian “standing reserve”.

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