The Time That is Left: a 2020s Vision
[The Future Left]
By Jaden Adams
The 2010s are drawing to a close, and as they do, attempts at characterizing the nature of the decade, as well as what should be retained and what should be built upon into the next decade, will of course, proliferate. For the left, the 10s were largely about traversing the distance between what might be thought of as “the Occupy model” and “the Bernie model”, or, more generally, that between embracing and rejecting zero-sum game logics, from the start. Not so much “Change the World Without Taking Power”, as prevailed in the 00s, much less moralist reruns from civics class, but more, opening oneself to one’s deeper agnosticism, as manifest in the face of cultural and political urgency. Starting with street populism and ending, not with electoral populism, but with street populism and electoral populism, for instance. Or, more simply, just thinking and doing more than one thing at once, while still affirming an ethos and a vision.
The whole notion of “the decade”, of course, as a generalized marker of qualitative commonality, is questionable — given not only the schizophrenic, paranoiac, and other tendencies that splinter ten-year periods into many fine pieces, but also the quantitative speed at which events increasingly transpire today, and the coexistent, proliferating multiplicity of them, each of which require digestion and reflection. So, perhaps what was missing most notably for much of the 10s, was not only digestion and reflection upon the present or the past, but also conceptual projection into the future. It would not be difficult of course, to find evidence that a shift from an immediatist “just-so” presentism or historicism to a more considered type of foresight was actually a central pivot that occurred during the 10s. But, this was mostly in the latter half of the decade, and was in many quarters at the time, roundly rejected.
Given that we’ve only just begun then, consider the possibility that, to the extent that we’ve already been opening ourselves to a kind of speculative orientation, we’ve largely been doing so on the basis of a questionable definition of “the future”. What if time is not merely a “stubbornly persistent illusion,” as Albert Einstein famously said (much less a “growing block”), but instead, as recent philosophers of time like Lee Smolin and Roberto Unger have argued, what if, after all, time is real? If so, then the future, too, is real, but not in eternalist sense. For Smolin and Unger, the laws of physics, like all laws, are rooted in a kind of cosmic stare decisis, or case law, but it is a kind of meta-case law in which the law itself, on the level of the universal, is repeatedly destroyed and recreated. Laws evolve over time, but so does law itself, and what that means is that it is not time that is subject to law, but law that is subject to time. Similarly, in the tension between space and time, or even in “spacetime”, it is not time that is subject to space, but space that is subject to time.
What this also means is that the mathematical models of time proper to physics are not so much too abstract — or too materially accurate — as that they are not yet abstract enough, to close the circle. They abstract away from physicality sufficiently enough to break free of our singularly embodied positionality within it, thereby allowing a broader view, but then become trapped within the equation itself, at least in the worst eventualities. What we need instead is an approach to time that goes through this process of limited abstraction, but then rematerializes into the reshapable, concrete flux of material becoming and change, an acentered state of real abstraction that is open and mutable. Much as Nietzsche and Foucault did with the genealogical method for our understanding of the present and the past perhaps, what’s needed now is a “progenology”, or a genealogy of the future.
Politically speaking, one problem with the notion that time is nothing but a “stubbornly persistent illusion”, is that then humans have no real agency, such that, while we can imagine the future, we have no capacity to materialize it, to bring it into being in a particular, preferred manner. But if time is real and the future is open, or at least partially open, then we can begin to think about strategies through which make something of its mutability. This can also assist in rethinking what the left might be and what it might be about: in the revolutions of the 18th century, the left was capitalist, and the right was feudalist; in the 19th and 20th centuries, the left was socialist and the right was capitalist; today, the left is once again being redefined, and the terms of political discourse are in flux. The schizophrenic exuberance of the early 10s gave way to the paranoiac reaction of the late 10s. But this too, is giving way to a third, more reflective period, which will in turn set the stage for the creative portion of the 20s. How will we make something of these moments?
At the cusp of the third decade of the 21st century, the approaching, concrete flux of the future — as much as our still anxiety-laden projections upon this largely unidentifiable mass — is throwing everything we thought we knew from “the 10s” into disarray. We are becoming agnostic again, and as a result, it is becoming apparent that the time that is left is not only a constructed time or a modeled time, but also one that grasps that there is no term of political discourse that remains, or ever could remain, stable and uncontestable. The resonances of the term “democracy” for instance, was for some time, captured by the logic of popularity, while “socialism” was captured by that of condition, rather than what it has also meant, transition. Perhaps it is the case, that all terms of political discourse refer to transitional states, or more accurately, to the transitional state that time itself is. And if that is the case, we can speculate that convergences and collectivities that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago, can not only be modeled, but also actualized.
Jaden Adams is the Co-Editor of The Future Left, the co-founder of The New Centre for Research & Practice, and the author of “Occupy Time: Technoculture, Immediacy & Resistance After Occupy Wall Street” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Adams has been published in Jacobin Magazine, Critical Inquiry, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Radical Philosophy, amongst other venues. They teach in the Department of Political Science at Seattle Central College.
