Ukraine and Historical Irruptions
Notes on Current World Events and Having Hope for Integral Futures
Dear readers,
In the last newsletter, I had written “three theses on liminality,” which Emerge subsequently re-published (with my thanks to Anna Schaffner), just as Russian forces had begun their invasion of Ukraine.
Speaking of interregnums and thresholds.
This week, the world was reminded that the threat of nuclear war did not vanish with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In this interview, for instance, Beatrice Fihn discusses present nuclear realities with journalist Owen Jones.
Bayo Akomolafe, also on Emerge this week, writes that “the war didn’t end in 1945 with Japan’s surrender and the victory of the Allies.”1
In short, the peace of the Geneva Conventions and the justice of the Nuremberg trials were war-inflected. And now, an insurgency of the molecular sort infiltrates the cold stoic interiors of modern superpowers – reminding us that we never really stopped hurting each other.
Geopolitical histories have transmuted themselves into devastating post-war legacies, which, in turn, have found new “war-inflected” pathways into the twenty-first century; these ghosts of the past-in-the-present are another face of what Gebser understood to be the temporal characteristic of transparency.
The present contains the past, as well as the future, in nearly every thinkable (and unthinkable) way: geopolitical, material, historical, psycho-spiritual-shadow dimensions to name only a few.
In the intensifying process of planetization—our interim, “Janus-faced” world of “nepantla”—much has come to the surface that must be integrated, and as Akomolafe affirms, we need “new allies, new projects of mutation, new shadows,” as we seek out habitable planetary futures.
To inhabit such wild futures would involve no less than a mutation of our social and political imagination; an integral mutation that would no longer be haplessly subjected to the ghostly, tentacular limbs of hegemonic and anthropogenic legacies.
We need to look to the trouble for indications of where this new mutation is present.
Time Irruption
“We can never be in the heat of the moment, only in the heat of this ongoing past,” Andreas Malm wrote.2 Those words came to mind during a community call I recently helped to facilitate. A participant had described that what was happening in Ukraine was so uncanny because it didn’t feel like the present, it felt like the past.
It would come as a shock to anyone, especially to a world that sometimes feels like it hovers a few inches above space and time in the hyper-reality of digital culture. Looking ahead towards the future, we are surprised to find the other face of Janus, asking us to look back.
We are, in some sense, experiencing a collective re-worlding as the ghostly trends of globalization meet the fecund realities of planetization.
By that I mean that the processes of de-worlding and up-rooting that have characterized so much of modernity for the last few centuries are experiencing a profound enantiodromia.
This reversal involves a turning towards the realities which appear alien to alienation; they disrupt the processes of globalization. These emissaries from our integral futures are the planetary realities of time, biology, and climate. They continue to appear as ruptures in our capitalist world system, disowned geopolitical histories in the wake of hegemonic power grabs, uprooted relations with our more-than-human-kin.
“Irruption” means something like breaking in from the outside.
As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote about, we can look to the ruptures and disruptions of our worldview as, simultaneously, passageways to new realities. Hedgerow lines of flight that lead, however haphazardly and dangerously, into habitable futures.
Months ago, back in the fall of 2021, I wrote that “lately, time has felt more like a broken rhythm.”
“Clock-time was already wavering, a thin trance waiting to be liberated from the speed of capital. In its place, time has become a strange pluralism. It rushes forward and stands still. Time is the heaviness we feel about uncertain climate futures, and the weightless flurry of all our transient nows. Time shows up as the rote pulse of calendar app notifications, now robbed of any sense of urgency during the blurry weeks of COVID lockdown, but we all feel that a different order of time has come alive in its place—a torrent dramatic and full, roaring with the import of historical, political and planetary events.”
The irruption of time, as Gebser understood, was an all-encompassing theme, hinting at an integral world, an era of complex-dynamical realities where the past and future would need to be held simultaneously in order to navigate an intensified present.
As Nathan J. Robinson has just written about, there is an obligation to study our geopolitical histories—recognizing how we are still very much entangled in these pasts, which now reveal themselves to be uncomfortably ever-present—because we can no longer afford to unconsciously repeat them. These material histories are in danger of preventing the realization of new material futures (Gramsci’s “interregnum” and my second thesis). There can no longer be a “lulling about in the lap of the unconscious” (McLuhan) of our collective actions. Like William Irwin Thompson wrote about, humanity has created an “up or out” scenario of cultural bifurcation.3
On the one hand, we might lean into the trouble, transitioning these hegemonic legacies towards an international, post-capitalist and, yes, eventually post-national planetary community. Far easier said than done, yes, but at least we can lean in where it counts.
This move would involve a radical mutation in our consciousness of time, and therefore of our self and world, our being and knowing.
The other fork in the road? A doubling down of the rule of “might” and “power,” a succumbing to the shadows of intergenerational violence and ghostly colonial worldviews which are, in the end, mirage-like vectors of retreat from the greater work of becoming planetary. They are insubstantial in that they are de-worlded. The only moves left at this transitional moment are the orthogonal ones towards a habitable present.
Srećko Horvat, who draws from the writing of philosopher and essayist Günther Anders (1902-1992) to help illustrate our Anthropocene entanglement in his 2021 book After the Apocalypse, recently quipped that,
“Zaporizhzhia is everywhere.”
It’s interesting to note that philosophers like Timothy Morton point to the Atomic age as the beginning of the era of “hyperobjects.” As we leap from the Cartesian split to the carving up of space through colonial histories to, finally, the splitting of the atom itself, the continuity of one worldview reaches a kind of zenith point as it creates the conditions for its release and reversal. Anthropocene conditions, nuclear or otherwise, threaten to burst space apart, but even in their catastrophic and existential expression they point to the reality of our interbeing. If “Zaporizhzhia is everywhere” illustrates anything, it is that near and far are no longer obstacles to our mutual planetary interdependence, and that we are not living in the spatial world of modernity with its industrial nation-states but the Gaian world of “critical zones,” past-future relations, and planetary kin.
The interregnum re-emerges. The face of Janus looks to us once again. How will we turn towards these mutational realities, these Anthropocene conditions?
If we recognize that we are not wholly outside of these ghostly legacies, but that they are in us as much as new, orthogonal and regenerative futures are also in us, then we begin to land on the fecund ground of the habitable present.
The present is the where and when any of this work actually begins. It is where any of us actually dwell. Turning towards the present, place, and time is this enantiodromia, this (regenerative) reversal, that allows us to that much more fully inhabit the otherwise overwhelming complexities of living in planetary relationship.
Akomolafe, Bayo. “Putin, Ukraine, and 1945: The War Never Ended.” Emerge.
Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm.
Thompson, William Irwin. Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness.