This Monday I am honored to be giving a talk at Perspectiva as part of a series of discussions for “Temporics Month.”
Joining me will be my two co-hosts, Ivo Mensch and Bonnitta Roy. We’ll each take turns giving a talk before convening for a concluding panel towards the end of October for the final session.
My talk, “The Age of Irruption,” is this Monday, October 9 at 8 am PT / 11 am ET
You can register for the (free) call on Zoom here:
“The Age of Irruption” will introduce some of the broad philosophical narratives for the series, drawing from my writings and readings on the Swiss philosopher, poet and phenomenologist of consciousness Jean Gebser (1905-1973).
We kick off with the Integral Gebser scholar Jeremy Johnson. Gebser, who coined the term Temporics describes the difference in humanity’s experience of time in various structures of consciousness that have emerged throughout history.
Gebser argued that our current structure of consciousness and view of time does not fully allow time’s essential nature. As an alive force, time is ‘breaking forth’ out of the narrow confines of our current temporal frameworks, causing time’s ‘irruption’. What are the faces of irruption, and where are we possibly headed as a collective?
Jeremy, building on his essays “Meta, Modern” and “Three Theses on Liminality,” helps Gebser’s philosophy to land in the thick of our mutational present.
The two essays mentioned above are available to read for free from The Side View and Emerge, respectively, and I’m planning on making a third essay, “Becoming the Planetary,” featured in Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds, available for paid subscribers here next week.
Ivo has an excellent essay entitled, “The Solipsitic Society: From Stuckness to Unfolding,” and if you haven’t seen it already, I greatly appreciated Bonnitta’s philosophical-poetic wordsmithing in this recent video, “The Wicked Mush of the In-Between” (see also Katie Teague’s excellent video project, In the Making: Becoming Human in the Time Between Worlds).
Bruno Latour, in his 2018 book Down to Earth, states the problem dramatically, if also poetically:
“So, what has actually happened? We have to suppose that something has come to twist the arrow of time.”
This is not merely a philosophical problem, a question of reframing our thinking, but a lived, often chaotic, and felt sense. It is an unnamed but increasingly universal structure of feeling that our way of being in the world, our worlding, is in a mess, and this mess, this “wicked mush” as Bonnitta puts it, is in an agonizing process of reshaping us. What is at work in our social imaginaries?
I write about this in my forthcoming Mutations journal essay, “Mutations, Imagination, Futurability”:
"With new temporal sensibilities come new senses of world, self, and being, and so there are the great lists of proclaimed epochs attempting to name the when and the where of our arrival: Anthropocene, Chthulucene, Capitolocene, really “a (hi)story with a thousand names,” and “The Infinity of the Anthropocene.”
The present array of epoch-naming speaks to a certain recognition, a new structure of feeling showing up in public conversations like the gloomy ambience of an Anthropocene track. We no longer ask, “how is the weather?” without that track pervading the space between words. Time makes an appearance in those interstices, too: a subtle recognition, a certain anxiousness, perhaps even a sense of guilt that although we are already living in a new time, demanding a new worldview, we do not know how to address this remarkable new realism."
It’s this notion: that we already live in a remarkable “new” realism. Modernity’s solidity has suddenly become phantasmic, a hungry ghost, while the ethereal visions of hippy interconnectedness and symbioses are quite material, with profoundly material consequences if we continue to ignore them.
The world has flipped upside-down. The rocket-trajectories of progress, those that hold fast to the “out-of-this-world” dreams of Musk and Bezos, remain in the perjorative sense a “religious fantasy,” as the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson recently described. They are dreams with no solidity, no “futurability” without the mush and mesh of a Gaian realism.
So how do we begin living world which is already living us, and threatening to outlive us if we’re not careful?
“Our Herculiean task today,” writes Srecko Horvat in After the Apocalypse, “is not only to understand the Apocalypse, but to imagine a future after the Apocalypse, to embark onto a relentless fight for the very possibility of a future in the ruins of our present.”1 Central to Gebser’s philosophy was the insight that only a new mutation, a new consciousness of time, would be sufficient to salvage the ruins of the present. Horvat seems to echo this insight when he writes, “this [task] can only start once we understand time as a crucial component of any struggle that wants to be successful… unlike the dominant notion of time based on the ideology of ‘progress,’ we need to invent a different temporality.”2
To “invent” is a strong word, it clicks and rattles with the mechanistic ingenuity of clockmakers and machines — not one I would chose, per se — but insofar as invention can be an act of creative imagination, an activity of learning to welcome in, (in + venire, “in/on” + “to come”), I can consent to its usage.
A necessary frame for the meta-crisis that, I believe, we cannot do without is that it is a time crisis. Conversely, the only sufficient response to the meta-crisis is for us to meet it with a new temporality.
There is already a new consciousness of time that is breaking into our imploding worldview. It is “intruding” on us as the philosopher Isabelle Stengers writes about, and in Gebser’s terminology, “irrupting” (to break into, as if from the outside) into our daily lives. It is time we turn to meet what is already meeting us in our troubled present, and do the sort of creative work of worlding needed to realize a new worldview that is, frankly, already working on us.
PS: Paid subscribers, see below for this week’s annotated “What I’m Reading” list.
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