The ideology of sustainability and the globalization of a future

Abstract

Through its moving frontiers, the ideology of sustainability prescribes or challenges orderings in the imaginary of societies. Accordingly, sustainability leads to obvious struggles between different systems of representations worldwide, and temporal orderliness is at the core of these battles. In this article, I focus on the future. Domesticating the future by sustainability is a central element, in particular, of the cultural confrontation between the ‘West and the Rest’. Moreover, the ideology of sustainability proves to be self-contradictory: on one side promotes cultural diversity, but on the other side operates only under a singular and homogeneous construct of the future.