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“The potentials of the past,” Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat recently wrote in Poetry From the Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement is Our Civilisation’s Last Chance, “can only be reactivated by changing the present… it is in this newly shaped present that the future can be created.”52 One key to reading history, then, is to reject the habitual modernist tendency to imagine past events as wholly finished, like markings etched upon a stone. What if history was better understood as the unfinished work of an artist? Like a sculpture, it remains incomplete, yet forever efficacious. Chisel and hammer sit adjacent to the maker’s stool, waiting for the right moment to be picked up again.
Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish philosopher and associate of the Frankfurt school, understood this notion of history’s entanglement with the present and future alike. In certain moments the past can be and sometimes is taken up again. These moments are no doubt unique, translucent even. Unfolding events in the present reveal their entangled simultaneity with the past, just as new opportunities to co-shape the future begin to disclose themselves. Essayist and creator of The Marginalian Maria Popova poetically invokes this new temporal attitude in her recent literary book Figuring: “we slice through simultaneity by being everything at once.”53
Benjamin called it Jetzteit (now time), the radical present, the moment when we are able to look again and “leap into the open air of history.”54 Horvat adds that this form of time is kaironic, where “the potentials of the past re-emerge, not as something gewesene (what has been), but as kairos, an open and unfinished project.”55
How we might make a mutational leap into the open air of history is not readily apparent, but there is at least one certainty. It invites us to imagine that time has a more malleable, elastic quality. “It means breaking once and for all with the historicist notion of history as Kronos,” Horvat notes, “the purely linear and chronological vision of events usually perceived as a succession of dates in the columns of a calendar.”56 This is a perceptual shift appropriate to and in accord with the emergent integrative worldview: where history becomes “divested of its mere temporality and sequential nature,” as Gebser noted. McLuhan would also come to describe this as a transformation: “from [perceiving] lineal connections to configurations.”57
History is not just a matter of directing our attention to the chronological past (historia, meaning to inquire after something). Rather, a more integrative approach to history employs a new attitude with respect to time. It works with what I have been describing as rhizome time, which recognizes the continuity of past, present, and future as an ongoing creative (schopferisch) relationship. Rhizome time encourages us to draw up (schopfen) latent pasts in our radical present in order to shape new and still more radical futures.
If this is a necessarily poetic reading of material history, then by no means does it reject the reality of that history. Rather it is an integral complement and approach to history, one which does not discount but affirms the complex interlinkages between meaning and matter. It envisions participation with history as a non-linear and unfinished process, ripe with manifold integrative possibilities. This history, then, “is the account of events… effected by creativity,”58 or a history of consciousness.59 Such a history is understood, as Feuerstein writes, “in terms of structures and interdependencies rather than strict causally determined historical events.” Like Benjamin’s open air of history, this essay recognizes that history is never merely a “temporal stream and course of events, but a manifestation of interrelated and combined events whose effective interrelationships form history… It is world-open.”60 From the integrative perception of Jetzteit, now time, history is world-open.
This mode of relating to history — interactive, pliable, unfinished — helps us to recognize the linkings and meta-linkings between events and to perceive constellations of sympathy and resonance drawn up from the wellspring of their networked relation.
– Excerpted from the upcoming book, FRAGMENTS
“Written in the fashion of classic countercultural texts, FRAGMENTS is a sweeping tour of the evolution of consciousness from Paleolithic past to Anthropocene present. Now, in the fiery alembic of the climate crisis, civilization once again finds itself on the verge of another worldview shift. The signs are everywhere, but if humanity is to glean them, what is needed is a new consciousness of time beyond the clock. In the spirit of Terence McKenna’s ‘archaic revival’ or Jean Gebser’s ‘integral’ consciousness structure, Jeremy argues that our present cultural transformation can be characterized as a paradoxical leap—a ‘forward reversal’—which scrambles modern notions of linear progress. What becomes decisive now are precisely the kind of stories that help us gather past and present into ‘temporal medicine bundles’ that open the future.”
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