Mutations in 2021
An end-of-year missive on time, book writing, and highlights from 2021. "I go back, look forward."
“What you need to know is that time is not simple or laminar, but a manifold of different potentialities that interpenetrate and influence each other. A common image is to think of it as a broad gravel riverbed with many braided channels, with the water running both upstream and downstream at once. The channels are temporal isotopes, and they cross each other, shift and flow, become oxbowed or even dry up, or become deeper and straighter, and so on. This is just an image to help us understand. Others speak of a kelp forest in the ocean, floating this way and that. Any image is inadequate to the reality, which involves all ten dimensions, and is impossible for us to conceptualize.”
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream
Seasons greetings, dear reader. With 2022 right around the corner, I’ve been thinking about the Cree porcupine story mentioned back in June.
“I go back, look forward.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, in what is arguably one of her best non-fiction pieces, uses Porcupine’s story to help us imagine a different kind of relationship with the future. This future would be “Non-Euclidean.” Free from the stuck-in-forward-gear machinations of progress and utopia, and free for reversals and sidereal movements.
As I continue to work on the manuscript for Fragments of an Integral Future (late 2022), my mind has been preoccupied with how the past and future interrelate with the present, like the marvelous rhizome.
Rhizome Time
This old plum tree is boundless. All at once its blossoms open and of itself the fruit is born. It forms spring; it forms winter. It arouses wind and wild rain…. Its whirling, miraculous transformation has no limit. Furthermore, the treeness of the great earth, high sky, bright sun, and clear moon derives from the treeness of the old plum tree.
– Eihei Dōgen, “Plum Blossoms”
The conditions of our present are already re-working our cultural mythologies of time into something far weirder (etymologically, “weird” means to twist, to turn) and certainly wilder.
“Side trips and reversals are what minds stuck in forward gear need most,” Le Guin wrote, “I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways.”
This echoes an enigmatic passage Gebser would write on the time-free nature of consciousness transformation: “[mutations] are latent in origin; they are always back-leaps, so to speak, into the already (ever-)present future.”
In 2017, David Graeber and David Wengrow were still developing their magisterial The Dawn of Everything (2021), but a philosophical seed of that work can still be found in their co-authored Eurozine publication, “How to change the course of history.”
What made revolutionary movements, like the Zapatistas or Kurds, so exceptional stemmed from their ability to “simultaneously root themselves in a deep traditional past.”
“Radical,” after all, also means “root.”
Graeber and Wengrow conclude: “there seems to be a growing recognition, in revolutionary circles, that freedom, tradition, and the imagination have always and will always be entangled, in ways we do not completely understand.”
This thought experiment, on “blowing up walls” that have distanced us from the past, has been present in Graeber’s writing early on (see Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004).
And so what happens when we do knock down those walls? When, “history is divested of its mere temporality and sequential nature,” as Gebser wrote, when it’s not so distant, what kind of “Non-Euclidean” future becomes possible to shape?
We go back to look forward. Back-leap into (ever-) present futures. Entangled rhizomes of tradition-revolution, past-future reciprocity; all things in relation, all things in simultaneity.
Dialogues on Becoming Planetary
With discussions on the Stoa this year like “Doomer Optimism” with Jason Snyder and Chris Smaje on Small Farm Future, exploring how we might retrieve localized, pre-industrial models of agriculture for imminent Anthropocene futures, or the publication of the Cosmo-Local Reader, Gebser and Le Guin’s statements begin to sound more like accurate descriptions of the “meta-crisis” that we’re all simply living through.
If one thing has cohered during 2021, it’s that there is a kind of growing coherence around “what is emerging.”
In my essay for Dispatches From a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity (Perspectiva, 2020), I suggest we call it “becoming the planetary.”
Sean Kelly has likewise described this in Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation (which, I am honored to say, was Integral Imprint’s very first publication in early 2021).
The “intrusion” of Gaia, as Isabelle Stenger has described, or the “facing” of Gaia, as Latour details, has initiated us into a time of Kairos. Epochal transformation. Kelly has proposed that we call it the Gaianthropocene.
What seems to be involved in this cultural transformation is a certain movement: call it the decentering of modernity.
By no means is this a wholesale rejection of modernism, but it is a kind of loosening of its center, a weirding of its vantage point. Making the human into the fecund humus of (post)humanism.
There is, of course, need for a science of bioregional regeneration, a knowledge of critical zones and complex Gaian systems.
So we can also call it the de-centering of the human, as the entanglement with the more-than-human world becomes an ever-intensifying reality.
I was delighted to talk about these themes for the Integrales Forum panel last summer, also entitled “Becoming the Planetary,” with Cordula Frei, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Michael Glück, Daniel Christian Wahl, Sophie Strand, and Jeremy Lent.
So, finally, we might call all of this the regenerative turn, as we move away from the primacy of modernism (really, as it continues its process of dissolution), moving back into relationship with indigenous complexity (see the Mutations x Animist Arts book club we hosted this summer for Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk).
Of course, in order to make any of these “turns” real and effectual, let alone ethical, we need to be in actual relationship. Concrete, not abstract. That means, as The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth wrote about earlier this year, a material commitment to restorative justice.
In 2020, Andreas Weber wrote about the need for an “ecopolitics of reciprocity,” where the mostly spontaneous and unconscious cultural phenomena (what I’ve been calling the “de-centering of modernity”) could become a more conscious form of engagement. A meta-modern (as in in, around, through, beyond, between-) agency might be realized in asking for guidance from animistic cultures. Weber calls this “western self-decolonization.”
I’ve had an inkling to say that if we are working towards the realization of some integral mutation, to achieve this in ourselves, we would do well to explore how we can relax that overused “muscle” of mental consciousness. Call it western self-decolonization, or de-fixating perspectival thinking. However we name this, it involves not only a renewed transparency of history, but the history of consciousness. In the end, this is about coming back into relationship: with our non-human kin; with time and place; with the past, our ancestors; with the future, the unborn.
The unbearable awkwardness of transparency. Becoming planetary.
So what does this all come to—these starry constellations of past-futures? Archaic-integral futurism?
How do we work with the irruption of rhizome time?
“I have no idea who we will be or what it may be like on the other side,” Le Guin wrote, “though I believe there are people there.”
I hope that you will join me, and the Mutations community, to explore these questions in 2022.
A Few Highlights
Looking back on 2021, I’m realizing that it really was a year for conversations. I’m grateful for the growing “liminal web” (hat tip to Joe Lightfoot for proposing that name, and mapping Mutations on there) of connections that seems to have sprung up all around me. Frankly, it has been a little hard to keep up.
To name a few highlights from this year:
Dare Sohei and I had a conversation exploring all this through Gebser’s integral poetics.
The 2021 Gebser Conference was appropriately entitled, “Origins: A Cosmo-Local Gathering,” where I was honored to host a keynote panel with Dr. Rudolf Hammerli and Dr. Aaron Cheak. See all the conference proceedings here.
Author Jeremy Lent reconvened with me on Mutations podcast to talk about Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe.
I hosted a panel with Nora Bateson, Maimunah Mosli, and Jon Freeman on the ethical problems with stage-centric meta theories (like Integral Theory).
Henry Andrews (one of the presenters for the Gebser 2021 conference + future Mutations guest) wrote an excellent article documenting “The Great Stage Theory Debate” that erupted in our online circles. Check out Henry’s important work with Clare Graves in “Decolonizing Gravesian Theory: A Call to Action.”
Zak Stein joined me for the first time on Mutations to talk about how The Dawn of Everything challenges our political imagination, and what a more complex-dynamical history means for the future of meta theory.
Joe Lightfoot had me on his podcast to talk about a whole lot of things. Definitely listen to this one for a poetic fragment Joe made from Seeing Through the World.
Another highlight from this year was my chat with Nicholas on Electric Spacewalk (check out their excellent Substack newsletter). We covered many of the themes written about here, and just so happen to draw from similar inspirations (Latour, Gaian Theory, etc.).
It was fun going on Bernard Graham Dempsey’s Metamodern Spirituality podcast to talk about “a sense of the whole.”
The 2021 Gebser course was—as I have come to anticipate—enriching and deepening. J.F. Martel’s “Art and Contemplation” and “Weird Religion” courses were also some of the best ways to spend evenings in the company of brilliant lectures and equally brilliant students. I can say the same about the brilliance of Becca Tarnas and the return of the “Journey to the Imaginal Realm” course, which also just wrapped up this December.
A little something lighter than theory discourse: it was really fun to be a part of the Movie Night Extravaganza podcast, and the Bad Takes podcast, both of which really took off this year.
Ryan Nakade’s Meta-Ideological Podcast has been a fun evolution of meta theory and political discussions, and I hope to return for more appearances in 2022.
The Brooks Books club on The Michael Brooks Legacy Project (Patreon) has been an integral part of my year. Gratitude goes out to Lisha Brooks for co-facilitating deep dives with the likes of Meagan Day, Joshua Kahn Russell, Ben Burgis, Richard Wolff, Harvey Kaye, and many others.
Finally, you’re going to be hearing a lot more about Integral Leadership Review in the new year. Our weekly Clubhouse calls have been another stimulating and community growing hub, so please look forward to them and more in 2022.
What’s Next and Staying Connected
Before this missive goes on much further, I’d like to wrap up by extending my gratitude to everyone that supported my work this year. Especially the Mutations community. Our weekly Patreon calls have been an enlivening and nourishing aspect of an otherwise challenging time of lockdowns and social restrictions, but they have also been an invaluable help to my thinking and writing.
If you’re thinking of supporting my writing (and podcast), Patreon is a great way to do that.
In early 2022, look forward to the first volume of an Integral Imprint anthology, Mutations: Art, Consciousness and the Anthropocene, and my second book Fragments of an Integral Future, in Fall 2022.
I’ve shared my introductory essay, “Mutations, Imagination, Futurability” with Patrons and presented it at the Gebser Conference.
I’m excited to tell you more about Integral Imprint’s 2022 lineup, and my own additional publishing ventures, but that will have to wait. For now it’s back to winter festivities and manuscript writing.
Well, one more thing before we wrap. This one has been a long time coming: I’m excited and honored to announce that I have been accepted into the online PCC (Philosophy, Cosmology, Consciousness) doctoral program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. I will be pursuing a Doctorate in the Philosophy of Religion, starting January 2022.
Now that’s a wrap. Thanks everyone. See you in 2022.
Jeremy
Congratulations on your doctoral studies my dear Jeremy! I’m still following you here and there. Gonna listen to the Lightfoot podcast soon.
Lots of love!
Nancy
Now that’s a wrap? Not sure there is “a wrap” on these braids weaving themselves in the “in, around, through, between, and beyond “ of your missive.
Does treeness arrive at “a wrap” once it’s offered up it fruits?
Deep smile of thankfulness, Jeremy.