It is not uncommon for utopian narratives to operate on “decadal timescales,” as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts it. Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit for the 1939 World’s Fair placed “the future” in 1960. Many science fiction works of the 1960s and 1970s looked to the year 2000 as a threshold. Similarly, various scenarios of reduction, stabilization, and mitigation of greenhouse gases operate on decadal scales. For example, California’s Air Resource Board has outlined a self-regulated scheme to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020; an 80 percent reduction of current levels is hoped for by 2050. The year 2030 is a key target for many of the scenarios presented in the 2007 IPPC report. In The Future of Life, E. O. Wilson expresses a humanist optimism: “Within several decades, many neuroscientists believe, we will have a much firmer grasp of the biological sources of mind and behavior. That in turn will provide the basis for a more solid social science, and a better capacity to anticipate and step away from political and economic disasters.”1

We tend to think of “the future” as coincident with the big life changes in the personal-economic cycle: graduation from college, buying a home, starting a family, promotion, grandchildren, retirement, and so on—the events featured in television commercials for financial planners and investment companies. Yet “the future” of the climate must be measured in geological terms, and on that scale these life events of ours do not even register. Even the popular idea that climate change starts with the Industrial Revolution fails to synchronize with the temporality of carbon-based life-forms compressing underground. Fossil fuels are produced over millions of years; anthropogenic intervention is a mere blip on the geological timeline. To paraphrase Hamlet: the time of climate change is out of joint.

How are we to think of such a radical disjuncture? Thomas Kuhn’s conception of paradigm shifts offers little help, as these are revolutions in thought that presume a stable universe, a clearly demarcated “outside” of the human. George Kubler, whose book The Shape of Time shook up the discipline of art history by warning of the bias of Western temporality, still frames his thoughts in terms of human activity.2 In fact, the immense discrepancy between geological and human temporalities is rarely confronted—and certainly not by so-called global-warming optimists.

Bernard Stiegler’s dense work Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus dates from 1994—the present, by many estimates, and yet before climate change was in the public sphere. This is how strange the temporality of our present situation really is. Stiegler, influenced by Martin Heidegger and the paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourham, develops the idea that humans and technology are always bound together. What makes us human is technics, and without technics we would have no access to “what came before” the human. Technical objects constitute our very experience of time (Heidegger would say our relation to Being), and this had always been so. Humans have been relatively stable in a biological sense for twenty or thirty thousand years, but technics has continued to evolve, ever faster. Stiegler discusses the alteration of “eventization,” or a breaking of the time barrier. He fears the destruction of ethnic groups and nature by the “marketization” of democracy and expresses anxiety about the technicization of all domains of life, but in the examples he uses—genetic manipulation, real-time information technologies, weapons of mass destruction—he cannot yet anticipate climate change. Perhaps Heidegger, writing earlier, comes closer to that subject. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” he addresses energy directly—but not to say that consumption is proceeding too fast (leading to the depletion of resources), or that fossil fuel consumption is producing warming greenhouse gases (he could not have anticipated this particular outcome, nor would he have been precisely interested in a technohistory), or to suggest alternatives or even propose a Luddite retreat from technology. Rather, Heidegger is interested in drawing a distinction between a form of “disclosive looking” in an earlier era and in his present. In the past, man built a wind-powered mill that was geared into nature. When the wind blew, it turned, producing energy that could be used immediately (unmittelbar). Now a windmill—that much-celebrated form of renewable-energy technology, touted everywhere in the public sphere—takes wind out of nature, stores it, and makes use of it in remote times and spaces. This, for Heidegger, is a form of rape, in essence, not qualitatively different from a hydroelectric plant that steals water and makes the river no longer a river but a system of generation, or even from mining that rapes the land in a manner more visible to all. One of the most important things to take from Heidegger is the problem of time: modern power plants are a form of physical usury, but rather than offending the gods, we offend Being itself.

Focus on the Automobile

Doubtless human-centered temporality accounts for the myopic focus on the automobile in current debates about climate change. At the end of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore reminded viewers of their responsibility as green consumers: “Use compact fluorescent bulbs, and if you can, buy a hybrid.” By the most generous calculation, transportation may account for a quarter of current global greenhouse gas emissions, yet at least in the United States we are obsessed with alternative fuels for cars. Fueled by predictions of growth in China, India, and other emerging markets, we have demonized the automobile even as we accept its inevitability. This is not by chance. The car is the commodity most easily assimilated to human time and common sense. We—again, at least in the United States—assume we need the car to function in the world; without it, we would be living asynchronously.

From the earliest days of the automobile, producers and consumers have expressed anxiety about pollution and about gasoline shortages, and “future fuels” have been a topic in the industry’s boardrooms throughout the very brief (in geological terms) history of the automobile. Yet the internal combustion engine (ICE) and petroleum-based fuels have persistently dominated. It has been too easy for manufacturers to blame the high performance of the ICE itself for their failure to develop alternatives. And the Big Three have lobbied with regrettable success against “excessive” regulation and “artificial” thresholds for fuel efficiency that, they have argued, will kill the industry. But in this case we must question the tendentious view that Technology—reified—cannot keep pace with demand for technology. A memo written by a Ford executive in 1979 succinctly encapsulated the common argument: “We’re not complaining about having standards. We will do our best to meet them. But we do quarrel with the idea that technology can always save our skins if we push hard and fast enough. We are driving virtually to the limits of our know-how and financial resources already.”3

Such statements could be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Literary theory teaches us that technology and language are intimately bound up, so we must take the expressions of temporal and spatial deferral here as crucial, not incidental or peculiar to corporate cynicism. If we are in a fine mess in the present, it is not simply because we were not smart enough to know better; it is not because the price of gas has largely been perceived by consumers (until very recently) as just or because neoliberalist policies have kept inflation in check; it is not because geopolitical crises of supply have been averted through OPEC or other bodies; it is not even because of behaviors and choices of individual “stakeholders,” to use the language of the IPCC. Rather, what is to blame is human temporality itself, tragically out of synch with the time of earth.

We must question the idea of the automobile as a product invented to satisfy a need for increased personal mobility, as if technology always takes time to catch up to an idea. The car should not be thought of as a “technology” that came to be and was then capitalized with various degrees of success in production. The “technology” does not exist prior to modes of production—not only to the assembly line, but to the entire manufacturing apparatus: special tools, fast-drying paints, glassmaking, metal stamping, and so on, along with necessary social practices (high wages, regulation, corporate intervention into everyday life, etc.). Moreover, the early history of the car—electric, steam, and finally ICE-powered—suggests that success depended on understanding the necessity of financial capitalization.4 From its very origin, the car is about debt, speculation, the future.

“Futurity” is deployed, in part, to mask the intrinsicness of debt to the automobile. Production vehicles have been marketed since the earliest days as ahead of their time. Certainly, the automobile represented a vast leap in technology and radically transformed civil society. While consumers were mobilized around the auto as a durable good, it was always a commodity with built-in obsolescence, a hybrid of past (horsepower endured as mode of measurement and a standard for comparison), present (ownership), and future (debt, financing, model replacements). In this regard, the auto represented an obliteration of time itself.

A 1912 Detroit Electric advertisement exemplified the formal projection of the automobile into the future: “[W]hen you buy a Detroit Electric you anticipate the future, because of this car’s many new, exclusive and patented features.”5 The product itself was, of course, actually available on the market—and, ironically, in reality the electric car did not have a very bright future, at least up until the present. As early as 1911, Henry Ford was marketing his products with the idea of “the-future-as-now.” The automobile, Ford fervently maintained, would be the instrument of all labor in the future, which was precisely why one must consume it in the present. The same philosophy could be carried over to improvements in technology: “The eight-cylinder engine, said the engineers, is a luxury that one can do without. Yes, it’s quicker, more subtle, easier to drive . . . but . . . it’s to this but that FORD replies: The V8 engine as I have just developed it is the real progress of tomorrow.”6 This was no science-fiction scenario, but the future-as-present of capitalism in the Fordist paradigm. General Motors’s well-known focus on marketing ever-new designs—the company invented the idea of the “model year” and set in motion a product cycle that has become so naturalized as to appear like the seasons themselves—offers only a slight contrast.

In any case, it is important to note that future fuels have been a consistent feature of the auto over the years, whether allied with a traditional or a futuristic design or simply suggested in promotional literature. Concept vehicles have been put forward as future solutions to diverse problems that include the high price of gasoline, environmental concerns, and dependence on foreign oil. Whether or not automakers ever had the slightest intention of producing such vehicles, they could capitalize on the language of futurity to boost their corporate brands. The attraction of concept vehicles has to do not only with their exterior design, but also with the positive social and environmental forces they signal. But we should recall that a discourse of futurity has been part of the marketing of the automobile from its very inception. The “future” did not emerge as a favored trope of the auto industry in response to the challenges of wartime, or with the space-age optimism of midcentury, or following the oil crisis of the 1970s. It has been ubiquitous.

The future, then, is not so much a time as an ideological space for storing all that cannot be achieved in the real space inhabited by common sense. In the city of the future—the city of world’s fairs, auto shows, utopian design projects, and quasi–science fiction cultural forms—transportation is lifted from the terrestrial sphere; gone are the heavy, earth-bound Sierras, Land Rovers, Explorers, Grand Cherokees, Wranglers, Yukons, and Suburbans. Passenger cars may continue to move along urban thoroughfares, and pedestrians may slog their way to work, but another class of movement takes place above—airborne, or rapidly cruising along elevated tracks.7 In the city of the future, there is no need for regulation, since Technology has resolved problems such as safety, traffic, and fuels—areas of intense state intervention in the real world of the present. The space of the future is a smooth and neoliberal space, where passengers move as freely as goods and capital. It is still a space, though, where individuals or small groups enjoy the freedom of their own vehicles; think of the Jetsons.8

Time and the Market

Approaches to debt and financing vary among automobile manufacturers. While Ford has a long history of focusing attention on the links between forward-looking methods of production and affordability, General Motors considered debt financing integral to car sales. A 1939 Buick informational brochure explains the mechanisms behind GM’s proprietary financing:

Organized for the use of GM Dealers only and their customers, The GM Acceptance Corporation has taken the lead in reducing the cost of financing car purchases. Its financing cost including adequate insurance is as low as that of any well-established financing organization and in many cases lower. Terms can be arranged to suit your convenience and courteous treatment is assured at all times. A comparison of costs will show the advantages of purchasing a Buick on the convenient General Motors Installment Plan operated by GMAC.9

In 1992, General Motors introduced a “GM reward” credit card as part of an effort to boost the brand after the company suffered a dramatic loss in market share. Every purchase made using the card added “earnings” toward the purchase of a GM car or truck. Since its inception, it has helped GM sell or lease approximately 5 million vehicles. The card was significant in its formal linking of general debt and the purchase of an automobile. Something else of note recently took place: in 2006, for the first time in its history, the Ford Motor Company began mortgaging its assets. The total mortgage exceeded the value of its outstanding stock; Ford’s credit has always been good enough that it never had to borrow. Then, in 2008, facing possible bankruptcy, GM fired workers, sold assets, borrowed cash, and suspended its dividend. It seems certain that the financial institutions will bail out their investors before making any significant investment in alternative fuels.

The links between neoliberalist economic policies since the early 1980s and energy are too well known to be reiterated here in detail. Suffice it to say, the current political climate supports the dream that market forces will keep inflation in check while leading to developments in efficiency and alternative fuels. Carbon trading is but a manifestation of that dream. Dematerialized speculation on pollution has come to represent the financialization of futurity in the environment itself.10 Consider, then, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s testimony before the House budget committee on 28 February 2007, one day after a major downturn in the markets (blamed, significantly, on a shift in Chinese accounting practices). Bernanke focused on issues of intergenerational fairness, while also assuring the markets (performatively) that there was no need for panic. Indeed, stocks climbed steadily afterward, reaching all-time highs several months later (they have, of course, lost considerable ground since that time). But it is interesting to note that in this particular speech, titled “Long-term Fiscal Challenges and the Economy,” Bernanke did not once mention the environment as an intergenerational issue—not in the context of fairness or even of economics. In short, the typical move of divorcing economics from other spheres of life, such as civil society, continues apace. But if climate change, while structured like debt, is fundamentally different from debt, then we cannot accept this separation.

The public sphere remains concerned with the individual consumer. Conservation is presented as a (possibly pleasurable) ethical choice, even when the consumer may be skeptical or may suspect greenwashing. Yet the focus on the individual diverts attention from the larger issues of manufacturing, agriculture, and local or national policies that contribute significantly to environmental devastation. The consumer-based model of responsibility strengthens the foundations of neoliberalist market practices and simultaneously helps to defer discussion of the broader and deeper changes that will be needed on a global scale to achieve reductions in greenhouse gases, to slow the destruction of biodiversity, and so on. It is easy to see, then, why the individual consumer and that exemplary object of consumption—the automobile—continue to maintain such prestige in the public sphere. The strategy of Representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, to introduce a steep carbon tax in order to test the will of the consumer is merely an actualization of the faulty logics of a “politics” of climate change.11 Any consumer-based model of the politics of petroleum, while useful, can only go so far.

I have focused on the automobile because of its centrality in the public sphere and its intimate links to the way humans now experience time, but it is crucial that we also step back and seek a broader perspective. To succumb to the spectacle of the “green” car is not so qualitatively different from succumbing to the optimism of tail fins, streamlined design, or chrome. Yet if technics is not simply an external means, and the automobile is not simply a shell that could quickly and easily be filled with a greener technics, then it is not enough to have a debate, even in a democratic context, about how best to use it. If the future is always already linked to the automobile, then it is not enough to bank on “future fuels” to save us from the present crisis.

We must begin by addressing the human actor as something other than a consumer. Then thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and Giorgio Agamben can help undo the certainty with which we approach decadal timescales. They can unravel E. O. Wilson’s faith in the redemptive power of neuroscience. The earth existed before humans, but literary theory, which holds that there is no “before language,” could help us deconstruct the myth of untarnished, prehuman nature. What I am suggesting goes beyond common sense to something that is not knowable in the terms of energy policy, no matter how enlightened. Thinking about time and technics leads us to acknowledge the disjuncture between human and geological temporalities—not to reconcile them, but to see them in their very differential relation, as irreconcilable. In this regard, Heidegger is a crucial thinker for our times, for his suggestion that neither conservation nor Ludditism allow us to truly grasp technology in its essence in order to supplant the current mode of “calculating” disclosive looking with poesis. His radical thought pushes us not to new technologies, nor even to abandon cars, but to think otherwise.

1. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007 (Geneva, 2007). Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York, 2002), 156.

2. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, Conn., 1962), 1.

3. Stuart M. Frey, “There’s an Auto in the Future,” in Super Service Station (May 1979), 54, pamphlet, Duke University Special Collections, JWT Marketing vertical file, box 13, “Marketing—retail service stations, 2000-0182.”

4. Rudi Volti, “A Century of Automobility,” Technology and Culture 37 (October 1996): 663–85.

5. Cited in Gijs Mom, The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age (Baltimore, 2004), 119. The ad shows a well-to-do woman in winter gear near the car. It is made by Anderson Electric, and it includes Edison’s “greatest invention”—the Edison nickel-and-steel battery.

6. “Au service du public,” La Revue Ford 14 (1932): 3.

7. See Nick Barley and Ally Ireson, City Levels (London, 2000).

8. The Jetsons was an animated television show produced in 1962–63 and then revived during the 1980s. The Jetsons flew their vehicles to their apartment in the “Skypad” apartment building. Many of the businesses were also elevated (resembling the Marina Towers of Chicago, the Seattle Space Needle, and the Los Angeles International Airport theme building). The freeway had a speed limit of 500 mph. For all of the futuristic gadgets, the family was very traditional (the show was conceived as a futuristic version of Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones).

9. 1939 Buick brochure, 6. Wolfsonian Library, Miami Beach, TRA2 83.2.2291.

10. David Wolman,“How to Get Wall Street to Hug a Tree” (New York Times, 11 February 2007), reports on various forms of green financing: “In fits and starts, trading and payment schemes are taking shape. In 2000, a $25-million company specializing in bioreserves was listed on the Australian stock exchange—history’s first publicly traded conservation company. Although Earth Sanctuaries Ltd. later struggled and was bought out by a nonprofit, it generated considerable buzz. Meanwhile, the government of Costa Rica has been experimenting with programs to compensate landowners for leaving some of their acreage undeveloped; in Quito, Ecuador, an alliance of local water companies, an electric company, and a brewery pay to protect and manage the 5.4-million-acre Condor Bioreserve, which is the source of much of the city’s water.”

11. Dingell has admitted that his proposal is bound to fail, but his goal is not to achieve “success” so much as to expose the very lack of individual will; see Edmund L. Andrews, “Counting on Failure, Energy Chairman Floats Carbon Tax,” New York Times, 7 July 2007.

Karen Pinkus is professor of Italian, French, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. Her current work explores how the humanities—and literary theory in particular—can contribute to discussions of climate change.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 49 No. 4 (October 2008)