We are Already Living in a New Time - Part II

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” (Rilke)

Parts I (myself), II (Bonnie), and III (Ivo) of Temporics month have happened. Join Perspectiva next Monday for our fourth and final discussion on time and spiritual transmission.

Picking up where we left off last week, I suggested that we are already living in a new time — “the air is heavy with time”¹ — and that our task seems to involve “learning to imagine and live another kind of future in the present.”

I concluded by reiterating the deeper inquiry here at Mutations - and the general thrust of my projects - which has been: what does it actually mean to live another kind of future in the present? Katie Teague’s recent artful video with Jonathan Rowson (as part of the In the Making video series) is, I think, a deeply cogent overview and analysis of exactly what this could mean.

Another way of summarizing what we’ve attempting to articulate is that this new time is, at the very least, pre-ontological, meaning it is a kind of background experience that suffuses our everyday lives (for example: the greater context of the climate crisis is present in every ‘small talk’ conversation we have with a neighbor about the local weather).

We are already affected by a present—but largely unconscious—shifting cultural imagination, a cultural imaginary, which many different artists, activists, writers, and now, especially, academics in the humanities (going by the name ‘posthumanism’, which really means a non-anthropocentric turn in our knowledge making) are attempting to give language to. Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe are a few of these so-called ‘posthuman’ thinkers. They each have very different, yet interrelated approaches. I think it’s important to note here that this new consciousness of time and planetary thinking isn’t the exclusive privilege of academics or systems thinkers, nor European or Western thought.²

The emergent worldview, if we can call it that, is one which moves all of us and is owned by none of us. We can look to fiction, too, for inklings of this new cultural imaginary: in the works of Frank Herbert’s Dune or A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys, or, generally, the subgenre of ‘weird ecology.’

There are songs like OPN³ and Rosalía’s “Nothing’s Special,” which arguably taps into the palpable mood of climate melancholia.

I’m not upset
by the wind and the rain
making their way to the shore

To reiterate the work of what complexity and systems thinkers, integral ecologists, and bioregionalists, are doing are functioning like artists:

if we’re already being moved by this new-and-ancient Gaian realism, then our task seems to be to turn this into a more conscious, creative relationship; a conscious relationship means developing the capacity to constructively, rather than merely destructively, work with our Gaian reality, producing works of art and imagination that foster new futures (Bifo Berardi’s term “futurabilities”), that are epistemic and pedagogical (they are instructive and work to instill both new subjectivities and new collective regenerative cultural practices).

Like the artist, we must learn to live in the future, to articulate and give voice and form to the tectonic transformations of culture and consciousness.

What’s coming up from these depths needs new images, new stories, and cultural expressions to help us imagine ourselves differently and, therefore, live differently.

“I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information oh how to rearrange one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.” - Marshall McLuhan

We are living in a time of extensive and intensive civilizational drama—we need an equally dramatic mutation of culture and consciousness if we want this transformation to be a post-tragic and not merely a tragic one.

Questions

For the rest of this installment, I thought I would respond to a few excellent unanswered questions from the “Age of Irruption” talk.

If we are comprised of relations (radical relationality as in Deleuze) how much of the felt sense of time can be explained through the tending of relations? What are our relations to the future? I love the idea of indebtedness to the future

This is such a wonderfully phrased question. I think we need to acknowledge, as Gebser did, that ‘time freedom’ or a ‘mutation’ of consciousness is, first and foremost, a felt sense; from time irruption to time concretion, we have what I would understand to be a senseful accomplishment. It’s the work of the contemplative, the poet, or the artist as much as it is the philosopher to realize what this could mean in our lives.

Speaking of poets, I know of no better exemplar than Rilke.

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

Metamorphosis is always in us. We are already in relationship with the future. Ecological thinking, complexity thinking, teaches us that we are always-already in relation, and this relation is always coalescing in ways seen and unseen. This relation extends beyond the convenient boundaries of clock-time’s ‘now,’ spilling out and over into past and future alike; the converse is also true in that the past and future are always spilling into the present.

Reciprocity and relation are at the core of an integrative consciousness of the planet and time: the ancestral beings who continue to actively shape us, the unborn who are nonetheless present. “Here comes everybody” is a temporal annunciation of this radical relationality, a ‘rhizome time’ as I call it in my recent writing (with great inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari).

Artwork by Richard Giblett.

When we imagine time having a kind of relational, plastistic morphology, where the future has already entered in us, or as Gebser said, where we acknowledge that we are ‘shaped by tomorrow’ as well as the past—this is the dazzling multiplexed morphology of the living present.

Fortunately, we don’t always have to hold all this conceptually—though I applaud the poets and philosophers who seriously practice thinking with time—for each breath, for each ‘I’ to be — the unthinkable wholeness of an integral time is present.

This is the only place where we can ‘stay with the trouble.’

But what would would happen if we actively worked to develop our perception of this present, and lived accordingly?

At the very least, I think, what all this means is perhaps closer to the activity of faith (and here is where I touch on some points for the fourth temporics session):

My understanding of a contemporary spirituality is that it has to do with a fidelity towards the originary present (‘praeligio’).

Secondly, you can suspend your disbelief and simply treat all this as an imaginative exercise: an invitation to act as if all of this is true: as if we could dialogue with tomorrow and are already in relation with the future, as if time is like a rhizome we are always being shaped by and co-shaping. This continual activity of faith is a being and a doing that can, in moments of grace, catalyze a perceptual shift.

When we consider how the fires of our industrial ancestors, those who ignited the first fossil fuels of early modernity, continue to burn in the skies of our present, or when we consider how our own activities shapes the weather of future skies, the above proposed imaginative exercise suddenly becomes less ethereal and far-fetched. It has already become our dizzying new realism.

But therein lies the rub: our radical relationality with past and future is both the key to understanding the archeology of our catastrophic present and the way we might just enact different sorts of futures.

What is your opinion of psychedelics as a tool for explicitly, and maybe collectively, peeling back the paradigm of structured/“clock” time and other paradigms of integral consciousness?

Another excellent question! There are no givens here. Psychedelics can certainly be potent catalysts for disrupting and interrupting deep — perhaps irrupting — internalized, paradigmatic structures of the mind.

I’m very partial to the late Mark Fisher’s notion of “psychedelic reason,”⁴ which if I understand him correctly has to do with following through with the revolutionary implications of psychedelic experience. Psychedelic insight can help us dismantle the paradigmatic forms of ‘clock-time’ and spiritual alienation that we, as moderns, have interiorized (and exteriorized as our social and material world), but what Fisher called psychedelic reason also meant the application of thinking in the service of cultural transformation.

Rilke again: “You must change your life.”

The revolutionary potential of psychedelic reason is exactly this: the challenging of what Fisher called our ‘frenzied stasis,’ and the invitation to live — and by this I mean in the material sense — in accordance with a new time.

“To have one’s consciousness raised,” Fisher wrote,

“is not merely to become aware of facts of which one was previously ignorant: it is instead to have one’s whole relationship to the world shifted… consciousness-raising is productive. It creates a new subject… at the same time [it] intervenes in the ‘object,’ the world itself… as something that can be transformed.”

This attitude takes us back to the original meaning of psyche (mind or soul) delic (manifesting). Whether we are talking about psychedelics, or temporal practices aimed at engaging a different mode of time beyond the time of capital, we are talking about activities that help to produce—manifest—new subjectivities of self and time, new worlds.

Stable diffusion generated art. Read prompt here.

Psychedelic reason helps construct continuity between these kinds of catalytic insights on the nature of time and the remaking of our world.

Meaning, to be fulfilled in our lives, to move from the virtual to the actual, must find ways to be mattered into new social and material realities.

Gebser has a rather remarkable clarion call towards the end of EPO (Ever-Present Origin) where he discusses the broader implications of a new consciousness of time: the realization of time freedom would mean the transformation of our world. Does our hyper-productive way of life — he lists three aspects, 1) automation, 2) technologization and 3) labor — stand in the way of us realizing this new time, Gebser asks?

“On the contrary, all the more clearly will the false form of time’s irruption be evident as expressed in… the scramble for worthless ‘goods’… Our environment, the factories and offices, is our own creation, and we have allowed the formlessness of this void to be imposed on us by the empty mechanisms. Such an environment will change to the extent that we are able to realize our task.”⁵

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote about our culture’s “deadly hyper-activity” which, he asserts, must be disrupted because “the human being suffocates among its own doings.”⁶ Time must be emancipated from this frenzy. “Perhaps the mind itself owes its emergence to an excess of time,” Han suggests, and argues that the democratization of labor must also be a democratization of time.⁷ Hyper-activity destroys relationships — in order to be in relation, to catch the ‘scent’ of time, we must learn the art of lingering, we must realize a wider, wilder present where such relationships have time to be born in us.

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Join me next week for the third—and possibly final—installment of “We Are Already Living in a New Time.”

1. Andreas Malm in The Progress of This Storm.

2. In addition to ‘integral ecology’ and ‘posthumanism,’ ‘critical posthumanism’ importantly incorporates postcolonial thought; although this is still very much within academia, I can’t imagine genuine planetary cultures emerging that aren’t postcolonial. See Banerji and Paranjape, Criticial Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (2016).

3. "There’s no denying we’re in some kind of paradigm shift.” - OPN (Daniel Lopatin) in an interview with The Line of Best Fit.

4. See Mark Fisher, Post-Capitalist Desire: The Final Lectures.

5. Jean Gebser, Ever-Present Origin.

6. See Byung-Chul Han: The scent of time: a philosophical essay on the art of lingering.

7. My only caveat here is identifying the democratization of time as one expression of Gebser’s time-freedom.