Deep time opens into the future as well as the past

Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) p. 15 

The book of events

Every beginning
is only a sequel after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Love at First Sight' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 198

Progress is a matter of political struggle, following no pre-plotted trajectory or natural tendency

Various modernities are possible, and new visions of the future are essential for the left. Such images are a necessary supplement to any transformative political project. They give a direction to political struggles and generate a set of criteria to adjudicate which struggles to support, which movements to resist, what to invent, and so on. In the absence of images of progress, there can only be reactivity, defensive battles, local resisitance and a bunker mentality – what we have characterised as folk politics. Visions of the future are therefore indispensable for elaborating a movement against capitalism. Contra the earlier thinkers of modernity, there is no necesssity to progress, nor a single pathway from which to adjudicate the extent of development. Instead, progress must be understood as hyperstitional: as a kind of fiction, but one that aims to transform itself into a truth. Hyperstitions operate by catalysing dispersed sentiment into a historical force that brings the future into existence. They have the temporal form of 'will have been'. Such hyperstitions of progress form orienting narratives with which to navigate forward, rather than being an established or necessary property of the world. Progress is a matter of political struggle, following no pre-plotted trajectory or natural tendency, and with no guarantee of success. If the supplanting of capitalism is impossible from the standpoint of one or even many defensive stances, it is because any form of prospective politics must set out to construct the new. Pathways of progress must be cut and paved, not merely travelled along in some pre-ordained fashion; they are a matter of political achievement rather than divine or earthly providence.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 74-75

Choice is lost in the maze of generations

Love makes men foolish. I speak as a victim myself. We are taken out of our own care and it then remains to be seen only if fate will show to us some share of mercy. Or little. Or none.

Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast and endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life. [...] Our plans are predicated upon a future unknown to us. The world takes its form hourly by a weighing of things at hand, and while we may seek to puzzle out that form we have no way to do so.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 2011) pp. 196-197

Perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all

We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole nature of any one, not the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a man's character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance; and a little reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing that must arise, and the only thing that can by any possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.

For the future depends upon the present, and the present (whose existence is only one of those minor compromises of which human life is full – for it lives only on sufferance of the past and the future) depends upon the past, and the past is unalterable. The only reason why we cannot see the future as plainly as the past, is because we know too little of the actual past and the actual present; these things are too great for us, otherwise the future, in its minutest details would lie spread out before our eyes, and we should lose our sense of time present by reason of the clearness with which we should see the past and the future; perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all; but that is foreign.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 216

Horizons of expectations

We will not reclaim a future qualitatively different form the present by reinvesting in the idea of horizon. At its best, contemporary art models experimental practices of negation that puncture horizons of expectations.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 211

History is inherently utopian

History is about the future in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is only from the standpoint of a particular future that the ultimate object of history – the unity of the human – can be thought. In this respect, history (like art) is inherently utopian. This is something that ties art to history. It is beyond the scope of all actually existing social subjects.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 194

Deterrence of the future as well as of the past

In the nineteenth century, Progress meant the Great Commotion of the railways. In the twentieth century, still meant more the Great Speed of the bullet train and the supersonic jet. In the twenty-first century, it means the Instantaneity of the intereactive telecommunications of cybernetics. So the anachronistic acceleration of present reality certainly does not spell the end of historicity. More importantly, it does spell the emergence of lying, not by omission any more, but by deterrence of the future as well as of the past.

This involves a sudden loss of memory, every bit as much as of imagination, about the future of a too-cramped telluric planet, cluttered – and rendered insalubrious – not so much by rubbish these days as by the illusion it entertains, its great progressive illusions.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 70-71

The futurism of the instant

And so, after the twentieth century's Futurism of long-term History, denounced by Daniel Lévy and celebrated by Marinetti, the time will then have come for this futurism of the instant, which Octavio Paz spoke to us about, observing bitterly: 'The moment is uninhabitable, just like the future.'

It is this form of insalubrious uninhabiting that today speaks to us through the exoduses, through the distant exiles, through all this dislocation of expatriation that is only ever deportation in disguise – not, as in days gone by, propelling people towards the extermination of the camps, towards genocide, any more, but driving them towards externalization, the outsourcing, of the ultracity to come, the genocide of the twilight of places, the exhaustion of the resources produced by the geodiversity of the terrestrial globe.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 23-24

The Metacity will be outsourced to the middle of nowhere

For if the Axis of the World ran through the heart of the city of antiquity long ago, tomorrow's ultracity, the Metacity, will be outsourced to the middle of nowhere!

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) p. 15

Architecture seems to restore the meaning of time to us

What is true of the past is perhaps also true of the future. To perceive pure time is to grasp in the present a lack that structures the present moment by orienting it towards the past or the future. It arises equally well from the sight of the Acropolis or of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Both structures have an allusive existence. So it can happen that architecture, against the grain of the current dominant ideology of which it is part, seems to restore the meaning of time to us and speak to us of the future.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) p. xvii

The future lies ahead like a glittering city

The future lies ahead like a glittering city, but like the cities of the desert disappears when approached. In certain lights it is easy to see the towers and the domes, even the people going to and fro. We speak of it with longing and with love. The future. But the city is a fake. The future and the present and the past exist only in our minds, and from a distance the borders of each shrink and fade like the borders of hostile countries seen from a floating city in the sky. The river runs from one country to another without stopping. And even the most solid of things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand-shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (Vintage, 1990) p. 144

The past becomes the future

As surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forego the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 76

The future is over

Exhaustion is a cursed word in the frame of modern culture, which is based on the cult of energy and the cult of male aggressivity. But energy is fading in the postmodern world, for many reasons that are easy to detect.

Energy is fading because of the demographic trend: mankind is growing old, as a whole, because of the prolongation of life expectancy, and because of the decreasing birth rate. A sense of exhaustion results from this process of general aging, and what has been considered a blessing – the prolonged life expectancy – may prove to be a misfortune, if the myth of energy is not restrained and replaced with a myth of solidarity and great compassion. Energy is also fading because basic physical resources like oil are doomed to extinction or dramatic reduction. Finally, energy is fading because competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on juvenile impetus and male aggressivity – on fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on cooperation and sharing.

This is why the future is over, and we are living in a space that is beyond the future. If we are able to come to terms with this postfuturistic condition, we'll renounce accumulation and growth, and will be happy in sharing the wealth from our past of industrial labor and from our present of collective intelligence.

If we are not able to do this, we will be doomed to a century of violence, misery, and war.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) pp. 81-82

The extension of expectation and memory

It is in the soul, hence as an impression, that expectation and memory possess extension. But the impression is in the soul only inasmuch as the mind acts, that is, expects, attends, and remembers.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 19

A succession of instants does not consitute time

A succession of instants does not consitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present that time is deployed. To it belong both the past and the future: the past in so far as the preceding instants are retained in the contraction; the future because its expectation is anticipated in this same contraction.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 91

Blueprints

'Anna, it occurs to me – surely I can't be so bad – if I can imagine how one ought to be, if I can imagine really loving someone, really coming through for someone... then it's a kind of blueprint for the future, isn't it?'
Well these words moved me, because it seems to me half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p.434

Posterity's antiquities

The queer inverted craft of devising posterity's antiquities.

Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles (Picador, 1977) p. 160

Termitaries of the future

My rôle is not to belong to the future but, like Eliot's poet, "to live in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past". I believe that a conscious affinity with Nature forms the shield of Perseus through which man can affront the Gorgon of his fate and that, in the termitaries of the future where humanity cements itself up from the light of the sun, this dragon-slaying mirror will rust and tarnish.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 76

Cowardice in living

Cowardice in living: without health and courage we cannot face the present or the germ of the future in the present, and we take refuge in evasion. Evasion through comfort, through society, through acquisitiveness, through the book-bed-bath defence system, above all through the past, the flight to the romantic womb of history, into primitive myth-making.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 75