CTU213 | Time, Utopias, and the Work of Change

Futures are a source of great hope and conviction across civilizations. Western civilizations, we find today, have generated for the world a common template of linear progress. We, in postcolonial India, now access our habitation of the present time through such a linear horizon of progress – a timeline in which we emerge as playing catchup. Time becomes a category through which we measure our current distance or lag from some indeterminate point in the future where we will attain Progress – this being, modernity’s definition of Utopia. If Utopias cannot be attained ever fully, why are we so invested in perfect (utopian) futures? Time, especially the notion of futures, is inextricably linked to political work of engineering change for oneself, one’s own community, nation, and in some cases, imposition of those logics onto the rest of the world.

This course takes up a set of distinct but related questions: Can futures be shared across cultures and societies? How is Time experienced in diverse socio-historical formations? What are the different valences of temporality? How do we conceptualize Time beyond modernity? How can we study our conviction about change in society, nation and world in relation to the category of time? Time and its regimentation emerge as a key instrument of governance of bodies in the time of capitalism. The consideration of our time will be at the centre of our discussion, even as we will intermittently zoom out to consider long scales of time that allow us to look at the present differently.