traveling through corporate time: inevitability and (anti-) corporate narrative form

I argue that the trope of time travel is an essential component of the corporation’s narrative machinery. To be clear, I am not suggesting time travel as a metaphor or figure for how the corporation operates, but rather as a vital part of its narrative interface, of its “durable assemblage of human persons and nonhuman things; of technologies, economic practices, and information-gathering procedures” (Turner 127). To grapple with the cultural specter of the corporation at the nexus of fictional imagining and real-world operation, with the way it has permeated future-thinking in general and the dystopian imaginary in particular, is to think through the corporation’s narrative dependence on a kind of time travel between the futures it capitalizes and the present in which it operates. The television show Continuum is the central example to demonstrate ways corporate inevitability can contested.