Re-Thinking Time and Myth After Progress with Michael Garfield & Tim Adalin
Reflections on the Voicecraft podcast discussion.
With the Parallax course completed, I’ve already begun to draft up something new, hosted here on the Mutations learning platform. I’m thinking the first session will be open, as in free for everyone, while the rest of the sessions require registration.
The last course was an exploration of time and our present culture’s relationship with time, positing that an important part of what is needed to respond to our ecological crisis is a new consciousness of time. Students looked at a re-visioned history of human origins before leaping to another incipient point: the late 18th century as the dawn of the industrial revolution and the so-called ‘anthropocene.’ I suggested that new histories about where we’ve come from began to paint a radically different picture about who we are as beings, and what kind of possibilities might be seized in the present.
For this new course, I’d like to delve into an exploration of human nature.
I’d like to suggest that a re-visioned history (a history that has thoroughly composted developmental schemas and narratives of progress) implicates a re-visioned image of human nature.
This is an idea I’ve recently described:
Different stories, different histories about human origins shape and reshape our ‘models’ of human nature. Revisioning the past, as I’ve been suggesting (online and in my forthcoming manuscript) holds a radical potential, because how we see the past changes what is perceived as possible in the present. Past and future are entangled horizons, and if our history has been that more rich and polyvalent, that much more full of variation, possibility, and freedom (and not just an inevitable and predetermined march towards that ambiguous thing called ‘progress’), then our present as well as our future cease to be foreclosed by the end of our worldview. On the contrary, the immanent present becomes a new, creative horizon of the virtual and the possible.
So the question I’m holding is: what does this relatively ‘new’ history of human origins—a history that emphasizes variation, protean plasticity, and oscillation rather than universalized schemas of linear ‘development’—begin to suggest to us about human nature?
Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Gloria Anzaldúa will help us develop a philosophical groundwork for this venture. Deleuze offers the image of the “sorcerer,” while Anzaldúa suggests the ecological “shapeshifter.” These images of human nature will be brought into dialogue with other philosophers like Jean Gebser, and media theorists like Marshall McLuhan.
Lastly, I also hope to ‘ecologize’ the Western notion of ‘self-fashioning,’ rescuing it from the compost heap of modern ideas.
The metamorphic image of the human, I suggest, does not make the human being stand apart from nature. On the contrary, it places human beings in the heart of nature when we contemplate that the ‘nature of nature’ is metamorphosis. Gaia is the great shapeshifter.
The class is looking like it will be 3, possibly 4 sessions.
Stay tuned, friends, and thanks as always for your continued enthusiasm for these courses. It is a joy and a pleasure to craft them, and I’m forever grateful for the chances to offer them.
A few other things in the meanwhile.
Thinking Beyond Progress on Voicecraft Podcast
I recently joined Michael Garfield and Tim Adalin for a conversation on Voicecraft podcast.
Together we riffed on the nature of time and becoming, complexity and history, with Michael offering some exquisite ‘mind-jazz’ as he connected evolutionary science with mythic imagination. Tim, meanwhile, was an excellent host, able to lead the conversation with the kind of thoughtful inquiries that really allow a rich exchange.
It’s difficult to sum up where we ‘landed’ at the end. I recently tried to say something about it here and here, but suffice to say: myth is inescapable, as Bill Thompson talked about. When we think big, we think myth. So what is needed are ways to tend to the irreducible presence of myth in our scientific and social narratives, especially the ones that tell us about who we are, and where we’ve come from. Mutations readers know that I hammer this point home again and again (I’d like to think I’m promulgating some important insight here, but hey, I recognize that the topic has been in heavy rotation).
Another insight that one can take from this conversation: human history, let alone the history of life, doesn’t really move in straight lines. More interesting—perhaps one could even say more adequate—stories can be told about our evolutionary history. We owe it to ourselves and our world to cultivate better ways of thinking with the world. Myths concerning human exceptionalism and naive techno-utopianism are hardly appropriate for a “tentacular” era characterized by collapse. What is needed are ecological myths that help us to ‘compost’ ideas that do not serve planetary kin-making.
These myths, which are the kind that one finds quite compatible with systems thinking, Gaia theory, and evolutionary biology, are mutagenic things that reshape our perception of time and render the self as ‘holobiont,’ imbricating us with the more-than-human.
These myths dance between soulmaking and science, and are that much better for it.
They (re)introduce ecological temporalities that help us see that there is a time beyond progress, and that time is now.
So much for keeping it brief! Enjoy our call below. Paid subscribers can expect to receive a solo podcast (likely in your inbox tomorrow) where I attempt to unpack some of the core readings I’ve been integrating lately and will likely be incorporated into the next course.
Mutations Discussion Next Sunday (6/8)
I’m grateful to see how Mutations is springing to life (again) after a season or two of relative digital quiet. I assure you, things have not been quiet here. I’ve just been busy adjusting to the new pace of rural, homesteading life while also finishing up my manuscript and reading and writing essays for my PhD classes (at this point I’m halfway to the dissertation). The office is up and running now, though, and I have a flurry of Integral Imprint book projects in store for later this year (How to Live in the Future is first up).
That’s a long preamble to say hello, dear readers and subscribers. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you next Sunday, June 8 at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET. Our call will be in orbit around a short book by Isabelle Stengers entitled Making Sense in Common, as well as the short essay I had written about the book.
Paid subscribers have received an invite to the session in a previous email. They’ll also get a reminder shortly before the actual call.
Thank you, dear reader, for your attention.
I hope to see you on the Sunday call.