We're Already Living in a New Time

Meeting the Meta-Crisis with a New Temporality

The following is an ongoing series of reflections for Temporics Month at Perspectiva. Session I was recorded (see above), and Bonnitta Roy’s talk for Session II was just posted. Join us next Monday for Session III with Ivo Mensch.

I began to make this argument during my

Perspectiva

talk:

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.

Another way of phrasing this argument is that there is already a new background experience, a “structure of feeling,” that’s rising to meet contemporary global cultures—it rises like the oceans, like the warming climate. In order to truly meet it, we need to understand it involves the invention of a new temporics. Call it the temporal imaginary. It seems to involve an admixture of solastalgia (grieving for the future), complexity and systems thinking, and a weirding, or entanglement of our relationship with more-than-human forces and agencies. It seems to involve, in other words, the construction of a new worldview. The idea is that this new worldview is already quite underway. It’s more like a kind of unconscious activity that seems to be happening to us. It’s what Swiss philosopher and phenomenologist of consciousness Jean Gebser meant by “irruption,” meaning an experience of something breaking into our consensus reality, as if it were coming from the outside. Philosopher Isabelle Stengers, for instance, has popularized a similar concept: the “intrusion” of Gaia. It’s a bottom-up framing. Anthropologist Bruno Latour was often referring to it as a new ground beneath our feet, which, as a metaphor, is also helpful here, because it implicates a kind of fundamental rupture of our foundational operating presumptions concerning space, time, history, metaphysics, progress. It is a “quake,” a major re-organization and restructuring of our social imaginaries.

All of this is to say, turning our attention towards it, actually “facing Gaia” as Latour would phrase it, seems to be a reasonable next step: let’s turn towards the new ground that’s already rising to meet us. Let’s try to understand what’s happening. Let’s name it, constructively respond to it through the conscious re-organization of our cultural imagination, with a worldview that can actually meet what this new ground is demanding of us.

There is an understandable preoccupation right now with what we might call naming the chaos.

Mapping the complexity of our civilizational crisis, identifying through systems thinking the cascading dilemma of interrelated and runaway economic, ecological, social and technological trends. Fair enough start. Polycrisis was perhaps necessary to generate public consciousness but insufficient. Meta-crisis, as Jonathan Rowson has argued, gets us much closer to a more enactive and constructive prefixing.

What we’re really needing more of is work that actually identifies some of the underlying themes of the emergent worldview, and experimenting with how we can start enacting them. There has been a lot of handwaiving and gesturing vaguely towards mystified emergent processes, all the while dwelling on rather top-heavy, satellite-view analyses and relying far too much on the game-theorization of our problematized present. One wonders if there is a kind of reticence, a compulsive obsfucation which serves to help us avoid really looking at this new ground. Looking for escape hatches rather than acknowledging our terrestrial-bound reorientation. This is incompatible with actually going meta, as per Rowson’s definition and my own (see Douglas Rushkoff’s brilliant, if scathing critique “What’s a ‘Meta’ for?” Parts 1 and 2).

Epistemic humility is, as Bruce Clarke points out, one of the key characteristics of our emergent ‘planetary imaginary,’ but this doesn’t mean mystification. It means staying with Haraway’s troubled and thick present. Torres and Read’s recent critique of William MacAskill’s instrumentalist longtermism in favor of long-term thinking and Homo-curans is a good example of how this can be done. Since so much of what has been catastrophic about our civilizational momentum involves our cultural narratives concerning progress, and so much of what we need, and what all the disruptions, irruptions, and Gaian intrusions involve is a new paradigm of complex time and long-term thinking, I argue like Gebser did that integral to the emergent worldview is a new consciousness of time.

We can’t talk about the meta-crisis without inventing a new time.

Our task, as Srecko Horvat puts it in After the Apocalypse, is inventing a time beyond progress: we need to imagine a worldview compatible with the Gaian realism that we are already reckoning with.

This worldview doesn’t exist yet, but it’s necessary for us to start imagining it concretely.

The good news is, we can start identifying its trends, characteristics, modes of thinking, and social imaginaries through all the ways our world is being disrupted and interrupted: a kind of negative image of the future is happening in the present. In my writings I have been calling this negative image of the future a “dark planetary imaginary.”

If techno-pundits and systems thinkers have, to some understandable degree, been preoccupied with naming the chaos, then our next move seems to be a more constructive one. Let’s call it constructing a new temporal imaginary.

I know. More jargon. Is any of this necessary? I’d argue that we should proliferate our naming, not of the crisis, but of the world we are already worlding with; the future is present, as my colleague Michael Garfield points out (see his excellent series How to Live in the Future), in problematic and unthinkable ways. We need to hold our prefixing compulsions lightly, perhaps as a sort of play, but we need to hold them.

Nothing I’m saying here is especially new: in 1964 Marshall McLuhan described the artist as the “early warning system” of cultural transformation in that they help to identify what deep-structured reorganizations are taking place, but the artist also helps to proliferate new forms of subjectivity—new forms of social imaginary (in our case, planetary or temporal). Our cultural project must be something like the artist’s. I am also partial, of course, to Sean Kelly’s claim that Gaia is a kind of “concrete universal,” and it may be useful to frame our age as the Gaianthropocene, a second axial age.

Enough vague gesturing towards new attractors looming in the distant future horizon. The future is present. “We need Long Reflection to re-enter our world,” as Torres and Read put it. We should be skeptical of false epistemic modesty when it is used to bypass discussions of time and capital, the material conditions of our troubled present. The necessity to invent a new time beyond progress means the abandonment of our “deadly hyper-activity,” it means a radical emancipation of labor and time (see Byung-Chul Han’s short but excellent book The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering), and it means the reclaimation of our relationship with time and place. As Latour dramatically, and powerfully put it: there is no world compatible with the dreams of globalization. That future has ended. So we need a new futurability, as my colleague Ivo Mensch wrote about, a reclaimation of tomorrow beyond the dreamtime of techno-modernity. We need a new temporal imaginary to talk about how to live after that dream has ended—and it already has.

Our task now involves learning to imagine and live another kind of future in the present—so let’s talk about that.

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In Part II of this series, I’ll be revisiting some of the Q&A for my talk. Stay tuned next week! Meanwhile, consider supporting this project here or on Patreon.