Weirding the Progress Narrative
On Modernity, Weird Machines and Reclaiming the Present for the Sake of the Possible
Dear friends, there is still some time to sign up for my summer course: ‘THE FUTURE ARRIVES THROUGH STRANGE REVERSALS.’
This will be a fun, four-week class - together we will weave a different story about what it means to be so-called ‘modern.’
To speak rather candidly: I think we need to reclaim this story, not for our sakes, but for the sake of planetary futures. The smoke stacks and steam engines. The dreams of utopia and progress. What if modernity’s own story of ascent belonged to another people, a people-to-come?
Those who advocate for ecological futures know this already. Our story is not just our own. It is always entangled in that strange, elastic time we call ‘history.’ We are bodied histories and latent futures, and the two are enmeshed and unfold in strange movements of becoming.
What if we took a leap of ‘speculative fabulation’ (as the great Haraway describes) and told the story of modernization from the voice of the future? What would we see differently? How would we make sense of this difficult present? What would we discover about ourselves that already belongs to this future--and can these voices take root in us, through us, in our present?
The year is 1782, and James Watt has just patented his new and wondrous invention of automation: the steam engine.
Let us imagine this date as if it were a magical point, a kaironic knot charged with meaning and significance. This time carries the seeds of great consequence, and so one must imagine it as an event that even now remains unfinished, and in the making.
Still an unassuming pile of draft paper on his desk, the invention will soon be of the greatest consequence. In the dark silence of his study, Watt’s engine already bellows with the fires of deep time, fires that will drive the machines of capital into an unprecedented era of industrialization and anthropogenic climate change. William Blake’s prophetic vision of a “red round globe hot burning” remains unwritten, and yet here, in this room, it is latent.
…Suspended in the passageway between [crisis and collapse, catastrophe and worldview shift]… in that great danger that is also the saving, the future is present and borne through.
“Here,” these future onlookers whisper to each other, as if there was some chance that we might hear them, “this moment, this is where we have our start.” (Johnson, excerpt from Fragments of an Integral Future)
Perhaps time is not so linear, and our collective futures are not so pre-determined.
So let us assume new shapes, and make imperceptible moves--back leaps from ever-present ecological futures.
The past is always capable of transformation, and so even our origin stories might do not belong to us in an exclusive sense. Our history belongs to the future, and the future will remember us differently. This means that the time of the present is ancestral. It has the quality of past as well as future. We are entangled in events which we do not see, but which will nonetheless be meaningfully perceived by a people and a world to come. It means we denizens of the present, like the folds of the flower, inhabit an irreducible betweenness. We are ancestral dreams made flesh, but we are also stories to be told by the voices of the future. (Johnson, Fragments)
Let us re-tell our story so that it is not merely our story, but one which belongs to the future too. The story of planetization.
I look forward to our introductory class on Wednesday, July 29.
July 29 Week 1: Weird Machines
August 5 Week 2: Integral Futuring
August 12 Week 3: The Wisdom of Strange Reversals
August 19 Week 4: Morphologies of the Future, or Planet as Festival
Lesson I is entitled “WEIRD MACHINES.” And yes, we will indeed begin with exploring James Watt’s patented invention—albeit from a wholly different angle.
See some of you then.
Thank you, dear Mutants. Your support makes this project possible.
Consider becoming a paid Mutations subscriber (via the button below), taking my July 2026 summer course on ecological futuring (THE FUTURE ARRIVES THROUGH STRANGE REVERSALS), or booking a one-on-one consulting session with me about your own project.