The Future Arrives Through Strange Reversals

“The things that are to happen / have already happened.”
- T.S. Eliot

One of the most decisive questions facing our troubled present concerns time.

What does ‘futuring’ mean when the clocks of progress have been scrambled? When our machines have veered from their expected course?

Many already sense that something has happened. They recognize it like an open secret, circulating through the pulses and currents of the more-than-human. It is a truth carried on wing and wind, and felt in the heat of a warming planet.

Before something can be named, it is known, and despite our civilization’s rational pretense, our animate sense insists upon another form of knowing. This knowledge is more stubborn than material facts, for it sinks its roots into the real.

We know that an event—call it ‘the future’—has already happened. This means we are already living in a time beyond the clock, demanding a whole new worldview.

In his science-fiction novel Pattern Recognition, William Gibson muses that the temporality of the machine moves too fast for the human soul. “Souls can’t move that quickly,” he writes, “and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.” It is as if the future has already arrived beneath our feet, reshaping our consciousness of self and world, space and time. We are already mutants.

This four-week course invites participants to enter the gap between machine and soul, speed and slowness, in order to truly arrive in our unthinkable present.

We are already living in a weird, planetary time, characterized by posthuman agency and past-future entanglement. Time itself has become ‘knotty,’ where the heat of the past and the storms of the future shape the here and now.

What would happen if we embraced this weird ecological time?

What if time were something more relational, even malleable? What if past and future were co-agents shaping our living present? What is the medicine of this strange ecological time, and how can it help us take on new and impossible shapes, assume the paradoxical gestures which call in the future?

In a time characterized by meta-crisis and mass extinction, let us dare to take speculative backleaps from ecological futures. Let us engage in practices of radical (as in root-like) futuring, where tomorrow becomes lived in the space between our relations, in the openness of the open present.

THE FUTURE ARRIVES THROUGH STRANGE REVERSALS consists of readings, lectures, and group discussions. For your instructor, Jeremy Johnson, this course is an opportunity to expand on ideas expressed in his forthcoming book, Fragments of an Integral Future: Time, Ecology and a New Worldview.

“We are shaped… not only by today and yesterday, but by tomorrow as well.” — Jean Gebser

Class Outline

There will be four Zoom lectures, with a follow-up group discussion scheduled to accommodate students in different time zones.

• Lectures will take place on Wednesday evenings at 8 PM Eastern Time, starting July 22.

• Group discussions will take place on Fridays at 12:30 PM Eastern Time.

Lecture Dates

July 22           Week 1: Weirding the Machine

July 29          Week 2: Integral Futuring

August 5 Week 3: The Wisdom of Strange Reversals

August 12 Week 4: Morphologies of the Future, or Planet as Festival

Please note that all lectures and discussion groups will be recorded and made available to students on the Mutations site throughout the duration of the course.

The site also includes a course-specific discussion forum and a section for course materials.

Student Learning Outcomes

This is a course made for those who endeavor to live ecological futures in the present: the artists, creatives, mystics, philosophers, and mutants of late capitalism. If you have enjoyed Seeing Through the World (2019) and the Mutations publication, or if you are involved in any effort towards a regenerative worldview shift, you will find much to appreciate in this course.

Students will:

• Explore the aesthetic, metaphysical, and ethical underpinnings of ecological futuring.

• Rethink the story of modernization through posthuman, decolonial and ecological narratives.

• Gain access to a selection of readings in philosophy, art criticism, and cultural history, as well as poems, novel excerpts, and literary essays.

• Have the opportunity to share and exchange ideas with the instructor and fellow students.

• Join a thriving online community on Mutations, concerned with the direction our world is taking and convinced that different ways of being and futuring are possible.

Registration: $175

Alumni and Patreon members receive a $25 discount link. Please send us a brief note if you would like us to resend it.

Student rates:
Send us a note to receive a pay-what-you-can registration link: info (at) nuralearning (dot) com

Thank you, and see you in class!

Featured image: Golem from the Wax Museum in Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic.