Temporalities of Permacrisis: Pasts, Presents and Futures
In an era marked by interlocking emergencies—environmental catastrophe, social collapse, and systemic failure—the concepts of polycrisis and permacrisis have emerged as defining conditions of our time. Recently, Tallinn University hosted the symposium Temporalities of Permacrisis: Pasts, Presents and Futures, the second in a series of symposia jointly organised by the Humanities Institute of the University College Dublin (Prof. Anne Fuchs) and the School of Humanities at Tallinn University (Prof. Marek Tamm). The event brought together artists and scholars of literature, philosophy, environmental humanities and critical theory to grapple with some fundamental questions: How do we think about time when crisis becomes the new normal? Can we imagine futures after collapse? What is the role of culture, narrative, and human agency in navigating these perilous waters? The main ideas discussed at the symposium suggest that our challenge is not merely to survive crisis, but to learn to inhabit its peculiar temporality—to rethink how we remember, imagine, and act when time itself feels unstable.
Artistic Projects, Visual Media and Permacrisis
The symposium opened with art, setting the tone for everything that followed. Peeter Laurits’s brilliant lecture presented his various artworks, including a video installation in progress, Dining with Worms, which invoked the soil as a site of communion and decay, inviting the audience to embrace decomposition rather than fear it. The subsequent roundtable on Crisis, Time, and the More-than-Human (with Mary Cosgrove, Peeter Laurits, Raili Marling and Julia Kuznetski, moderated by Anne Fuchs and Marek Tamm) deepened this idea: to think temporally today, argued the participants, is to think relationally—across species, materials, and scales of perception.
These ideas resonated in individual presentations: Helen Doherty’s Short Encyclopaedia of Contested Words, an art piece composed of the recently MAGA-banned words, transformed censorship itself into material for creative resistance. Ingvild Folkvord (NTNU/Humboldt University of Berlin, HUB) examined how aesthetic experimentation can make crisis perceptible without aestheticising it, while Amitié Lee and Daniele Monticelli (Tallinn University, TLU) turned to science fiction to imagine circular and posthuman temporalities—loops that resist the linear logic of progress and apocalypse alike through depiction of AI. Anne Fuchs’s (University College Dublin, UCD) thought-provoking analysis of Beckett's Happy Days showed how the play enacts the temporal paradox of permacrisis through the protagonist Winnie’s existence in a world of collapsed circadian rhythms, no real distinction between night and day, and time being neither linear nor gradual, but rather “non-time”, despite the play’s performative attempt to reconnect with temporality by a repetition of “now” 54 times. Winnie’s physical effort to keep her head above ground and stay upright is a metaphor for human attempted mental mastery in the wake of disaster. Her clinging to remembered lines and past moments, ritualistically building a matrix to see herself through permacrisis, resembles whipping the dead horse merely to stay alive, using fiction and memory as survival mechanisms.
If permacrisis threatens to collapse our experience of time into a stretched present of mere survival, how do we resist the narrative of inevitable doom? Marek Tamm (Tallinn University, TLU) challenged the “myth of closure” regarding our common future, wondering if the only future available to us is that of collapse, or if there are other options. He marked a distinction between deterministic futures—where risk management and predictive algorithms fill our temporal imagination—and more open, plural possibilities of futures, pointing to activism, Afrofuturism, and grassroots experiments as evidence of emerging alternative temporalities. Following Franco Berardi's “futurability,” Tamm argued that we don’t have one future but many: catastrophic, redemptive, posthuman, chronic futures that intersect, conflict, and interact.
Tamm's closing question resonated throughout the conference: how can different ideas of the future “talk” to each other without collapsing into a single vision? The challenge is not to choose optimism or pessimism, but to recognise the turbulent multiplicity of our temporal condition.
Nostalgia, End of Holocene, and More-Than-Human Time
Fabian Krenz-Dewe (HUB) introduced a disturbing fact: we are leaving behind the stable life conditions of the Holocene and thus habitual definitions of crisis. While the reference to Koselleck’s discussion of crisis as a turning point implies reversibility, climate change has moved us into realms where crisis may no longer be an adequate concept—and where reversal is no longer possible. The radicality of geological time clashing with short-term social and economic temporalities calls for replacement of the anthropocentric conception of time with the planetary one, pressing on our consciousness the concept of hysteresis, or irreversible effects of climate change. We can no longer plan our future the way modernity taught us.
Kadri Tüür and Sylvia Lotman (TLU) described the “nostalgia horizon” as the envisioned optimal state that societies hold dear, and strive to preserve or recreate, connecting it to “solastalgia,” the pain from loss of or inability to find comfort in one’s geographical home. Their focus on rewilding as envisioned crises created questions about whose temporalities and whose futures we care about. The need to inhabit time differently, embracing its more-than-human nature rather than forcing it into narratives of restoration or control resonated in Mary Cosgrove’s (UCD) theorising of “leveret time”, or the unsettling temporality of hares, as a challenge to think about non-human time scales. Introducing the concept of "stuplimity" (stupid + sublime) —the feeling of repetitive tedium that exhausts mind and body—she argued for the resurgence of “the lost art of paying attention” as resistance, opening radical futures, where time is thought in terms of matter.
Literature as a Representation of Alternative Futures
Literature and art became a temporal laboratory, creating space for reimagining the past and the future. Shreyashi Das (UCD) read Salman Rushdie’s Victory City as a feminist reworking of mythic time, where the storyteller herself becomes a vessel of survival across generations. Megan Kuster’s (UCD) study of Wu Ming’s Manituana highlighted how collective authorship rewrites colonial pasts and multiplies possible futures. Rather than speculating forward, Wu Ming returns to historical “bifurcations”, or alternative turns of events. This counterfactual approach resists nostalgia, instead unsettling historical inevitability: if the past held multiple possibilities, so does the future. The collaborative process itself—multiple authors, coequal voices—protests against singular, authoritative narratives. Julia Kuznetski (TLU) discussed water as metaphor and material reality in Elif Shafak's There are Rivers in the Sky, drawing upon blue humanities and theories of transcorporeality to illustrate how water links human and non-human temporalities, being both a vital and destructive force, which evades the rational human-imposed schema, similarly to time itself. Weaving together ancient and modern genocides and epidemics, she demonstrated how crises build upon and resonate with each other across vast scales. Ghost rivers do not disappear when we cover them with concrete, nor do conflicts and injustices when we avert our gaze. Water is a “liquid archive”, accruing both life-affirming potential and our distilled sins—microplastics, pollution, remnants of violence.
The panels addressed art and storytelling as a form of temporal resistance—not escapism, but an ethical and temporal practice, insisting on the plurality of histories and futures when dominant narratives collapse, offering ways to re-sense time when it falters.
The Precarity of Labour and Bodily Strain
Raili Marling (University of Tartu) addressed the disordered, episodic, paratactic nature of gig economy labour as “tipwork picaresque” by analysing Peter Mendelsund’s Delivery and Joanne McNeil's Wrong Way, in which precarious labour yields a disjointed temporal experience, an endless “and then” narrative rather than a causal “hence” structure, with crisis as the norm of everyday life. Gig workers exist in what Marling called “speculative temporality”, accommodating multiple pasts, presents, and futures, always preparing for the unknown. Time becomes precious, conventional linear career paths get distorted, existing only as fantasies of social mobility and generational progress, theorised by Lauren Berlant as “cruel optimism”. This resonated with Jamie Hahn’s (Nottingham Business School) rhetorical question: “Who are we to build a future with such a precarious now?” He addressed paramedic practice in the UK and the intersection of body politic and overlapping crises: polycrisis, permacrisis, and “acute-on-chronic crisis” of respectively the unprecedented COVID-19 and ongoing failure of the NHS and its systemic dysfunction, pointing to the extreme vulnerability of paramedics, who simultaneously confront disaster and death and personal traumas.
Who and how determines “the” crisis when there are intersecting crises? Does naming constitute a crisis, or is it made by the unconscious organisational processes and conscious lived experience?
Apocalyptic Thinking and Theology
Martin Sauter (Lutheran Church in Ireland) traced apocalyptic thinking from the 5th century BCE to its contemporary manifestations, from pop-cultural and literary examples, such as Apocalypse Now and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to the troubling resurgence of imperialism and reactionary religion—Christian nationalism, dominion theology, fascist movements claiming Christian justification while transgressing Christian ethics. Sauter pointed to the crucial distinction between two temporal vectors, which dictates how we experience crisis: the apocalipsis, whereby present forces move towards their logical conclusion, and the eschatological adventus, whereby the future arrives as radical novelty. Do we envision ourselves as bystanders helpless to watch unfolding predestined doom, or as agents of forging genuinely new possibilities? If we can’t escape complicated historical legacies, can we make a deliberate choice on how we engage with them?
Digital Law, the Ethics of Agency and Permacrisis
Jean Lassègue (CNRS/EHESS, Paris) warned about the menace of digitalisation to the foundations of law and democracy. While classical law requires legitimacy in terms of specific places and communities, digital law operates through de-spatialised compliance with computable rules, which makes the concept of the state redundant and runs a “very high risk of undemocratic regression”. This calls to mind Kafka's vision of an inscrutable, unknowable law with no locational foundation, which nevertheless governs our lives. Struggle with the problem of agency—its breakdown, but also its imperative—was continued by Jeanne Riou (UCD), who condemned the “irrational desire for change” without due consideration of what needs to go and what to stay. We are trapped in the same capitalist system while experiencing a fundamental breakdown of economic and political agency. Drawing on Levinas, Riou warned against paralysis, proposing to build political agency by finding responsibility rather than ignoring it. To be in history is to have agency—not unlimited capacity for solutions, but conscious recognition of our positionality and responses.
This rehearses the conference's general argument: permacrisis is not something simply befalling us, but a condition we inhabit, shape, and are shaped by. The futures remain open, multiple, contested, but only if we actively engage with them.
Synchronising Temporalities
Several themes recurred throughout the symposium.
First, the insistence on multiplicity: permacrisis is not one continuous event but a set of overlapping and uneven disruptions—social, ecological, technological, emotional—which cannot be reduced to a single story. Thinking through crisis today means grasping many temporalities at once: fast and slow, human and nonhuman, visible and invisible.
Secondly, the inadequacy of modern time, with the familiar notion of history as linear progress no longer fitting the world we inhabit. Alternative ways of thinking about temporality, e.g., climate time, water time, hare time and algorithmic time, each follow a different rhythm and resist control. Living in permacrisis means accepting that time does not flow in one direction, nor can our inherited frameworks for measuring it contain its complexity.
Thirdly, a concern with memory and the archive. What do we choose to remember, and how? From Lotman and Tüür’s idea of the “nostalgy horizon” to Kuznetski’s reading of water as a liquid archive, memory appeared as both a tool of survival and a potential burden. Bodies, stories and landscapes carry traces of what came before, but remembering must remain active, not nostalgic, preserving continuity without freezing it.
Despite the heavy themes, the symposium did not end in despair. What emerged instead was a persistence of hope, understood not as denial but as recognition of possibility. From Tamm’s idea of futurability to Kuster’s reflections on collective writing, multiple futures glimmer, if we learn to see them. Literature and storytelling—from Beckett’s repetitions to Shafak’s rivers —offer powerful ways to test out different relations to time and imagine more open, inclusive worlds.
Many questions duly remained open-ended. How to bring different temporalities into dialogue without forcing them into one? How to stay upright, attentive and responsible, while learning to think with water, machines, and other species? How to acknowledge crisis without apocalypse as the only outcome? These questions are not abstract; they are about how we live now, in a present that stretches uncertainly between what has ended and what has not yet begun. To live in permacrisis may mean, apropos Beckett’s Winnie, continuing to say “now” —creating small moments of connection and meaning even when the future feels suspended. The repetition may seem fragile, but it is also an act of persistence, of living in (multiple) time.