Re-Visioning Happens Tomorrow
And solstice celebrations this Thursday with J.F. and Pierre-Yves Martel.
Tomorrow, December 19th at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET I’m hosting my class, “Re-Visioning History: Groundwork for New Models of Consciousness Unfoldment.”
Then, on Thursday December 21st, on the evening of the solstice (5 pm PT / 8 pm ET), join the Nura Learning community for Lords of Darkness and Light: A Solstice Celebration in Words and Music, a collaborative event between J.F. Martel and his brother, Pierre-Yves Martel. Pierre-Yves will be providing live music and J.F. will be providing the bardic riffs as they, together, compose auditory meditations on the themes of darkness, light, and spiritual renewal thematically appropriate for the transition into winter season.
They’ve already put together a fantastic trailer for the event. It’s invocative, in my mind, of Terence McKenna’s brilliant, rhapsodically accompanied rave talks.
I’d embed it for you, but Twitter/X has some weird hangups with cross-platform sharing.
I hope to see you there for both events.
Some Notes on My Talk
The essay this talk is based on is a long, sprawling, 15k words or so. It will likely be one of the earlier chapters of Fragments. I’ve considered the possibility that it might need its own publication, but thematically it’s the heart and soul of the book. So it needs to, at the very least, be included, even if it eventually appears elsewhere or standalone.
Paid subscribers: in the new year, look out for excerpts from the chapter, and from Fragments, leading up to its eventual publication through Integral Imprint.
The book chapter is entitled “Re-Visioning the History of Consciousness,” and is largely an attempt to bring Gebser’s mutational model into conversation with contemporary research paradigms in anthropology and paleontology, firstly, which has painted a very different, and far more complex picture of the human story than the one commonly referenced in our modern imaginary.
The Enlightenment-era progress narrative concerning unilateral stages of cultural evolution is now largely untenable.
What we have in our history looks more like an oscillatory spectrum of possibilities, gains and losses, “zig-zags,” as Charles Taylor describes them, or as William Irwin Thompson put it, “bifurcations with consequences.” It doesn’t mean that nothing has transformed over the past 30,000 or so years. Of course, everything has, and continues to transform. It’s just that the way we understand these transformations needs a better model, and ultimately, a better paradigm. We need, as sociologist Edgar Morin describes it, a “paradigm of complexity” in order to be a) more ethical when discussing and theorizing on cultural evolution and b) in order to meet the theoretical challenges this history presents us with.
Telling a different meta-historical narrative has profound implications for just about everything. Imagining who we are, and where we’ve come from shapes what we believe is possible in the present, and where we may still go in the future.
It’s a question of worldview.
Can meta-theory approaches — like Gebser’s but, of course, many others too — stand up to a far more complex and non-linear history of consciousness?
I’d argue that yes, they can. Or, at least, some of them can. Gebser’s model meets us more than halfway. What I hope to do is nudge Gebser’s model a little further and delve into its more radical implications.
This is what I talk about in the essay and, time allowing, what I’ll be delving into for my talk tomorrow.
And speaking of tomorrow’s talk, I’ve described it as a “groundwork for new models of consciousness unfoldment” because it’s not attempting, in itself, to become the new theory. It all feels very prefigurative. The history of consciousness is so dazzlingly complex — and utterly fascinating, to my mind — that we certainly need new frameworks that try to do something else, to “walk another road,” as LeGuin suggests in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness. So tomorrow’s talk, and my chapter by extension, are a kind of theoretical and mythmaking exercise. Deliberately walking away from the progress narrative and its ideological and theoretical underpinnings, and working from a different basis. Taking a different road. I’m not so much interested in opposing Enlightenment-era narratives as I am clearing the ground for something new to occur.
Like many of my peers, I enjoyed my earlier readings of Up From Eden by Ken Wilber, for instance, and (sometimes) enjoy stage-theory debates and conversations with folks generally associated with Integral Theory and metamodernism. But now I’m theoretically passionate about the generation of new concepts with different frameworks and starting premises (for instance, shifting away from a ‘developmental logic’ inherent in stage theory to a ‘logic of continuity,’ as Deleuze writes about in The Fold). They are sorely needed, and, in my opinion, the best kind of theory work: when we move from deconstruction to the more difficult task of re-visioning. Theorycrafting from a new paradigm. Walking a different road.
I’m not content to throw away the big worldview questions and cede them to stage-centric theorybuilding (as much as I admire and respect many individuals and peers in these intellectual communities).
We need to reclaim our history because in doing so, we reclaim the future.
I hope to see you tomorrow for the seminar.
Reach out if you’re looking to access the call, but can’t afford to register. No one will be turned away.
See you then.
Was your talk recorded? I’d love to hear it.
I recently finished reading Seeing Through the World and am very much looking forward to tomorrow's class. Thank you!