One of the key points I'll be making on Sunday (and make in my forthcoming book) is that it's not enough to deconstruct, say, Enlightenment-era narratives of progress when we try to tell the story of human origins, or the history of consciousness.

To state it emphatically: we can, and even ought to, start telling different stories about who we are and where we came from. And by all accounts, the history of consciousness is in need of a re-visioning. If we throw away stadial narratives of progress, more interesting stories, with their own concepts, principles and patterns, come forward.

And with these new histories, new futures become possible too.

So it is only when we re-vision the past, tell new histories, that different kinds of futures become available to us.

The whole idea behind an 'integral' time is precisely that - the past and future are twin horizons. They are zones of the indiscernible, as Deleuze might say, where myth and imagination meet fossil and stone. These mythic horizons ask us to tend to them. And remember: they are entangled, past and future always shifting, in a dynamic and living present.

So what is the thesis, here? That in order to find ways to make a life 'in the ruins' of progress and capital, what we need is a new temporality adequate for the task (fortunately, as Gebser emphasizes, this 'new time' is already present, if latent, and something we are already living).

We don't need to cede big picture thinking to the dustbins of outdated Eurocentric thought. We can and ought to find ways to 'go meta,' but from here on out, the way we do is going to be radically different.

To conclude, this will be the focus of lesson I: inspired by Deleuze, Gebser, Taylor, and others, we will embark on an exercise of revisioning history. This new narrative gladly embraces a non-linear history that nonetheless constitutes a different sort of meta-narrative, helping us to land in the present, and perhaps attain clearer sense of the 'whole.'

Think of this lesson as an exercise in speculative, philosophical myth-making.

The benefit of a ‘speculative history’ is that it affords us different premises and concepts, orients us towards alternative, emergent principles, and, one hopes, opens the way towards alternate speculative futures (and so, again, past and future entangle, and speculative history becomes science fiction possibility).

Even though we will be talking about the past, implicit in this telling will be a line of flight, where the possibility of a ‘different end of the world’ might shine through the ruins of an impossible present.

Looking forward to exploring all this with you in the class!