Cirrus@Austlit

'We do not live our lives entirely in the incident light of the present. The moment of actuality that we call ‘the now’ is suffused with memory. This is of two kinds: retrospective and prospective. We look back to the past, to what we recall as individuals and what is captured in mnemonic form by the communities to which we belong. And we look forward to the future, building scenarios about what could happen next, exercises in mental foresight that help us to manage the opportunities and risks of a contingent world. Retrospection  and prospection are coextensive with living in the present, and our time-binding activities as human beings are continual, active and essential. Part of living in ‘the now’ involves making sense of it as a pattern of actual and virtual events, drawing a line from the past through the present to the future. The most obvious tool used to do this is narrative. The function of a story is to gather past, present and future into a coherent, cognitively traversable whole. The accounts so generated are open-ended. As long as we are alive, the narratives we tell ourselves are subject to continual revision. A ceaseless flow of new events, ideas and relations in the present, changes our view of the past and future also. Instead of thinking of past, present and future as separate kinds of time, we can see them as reflexive categories of understanding linked together in mysterious ways. Thus we can talk, as Jacques Derrida does, of a ‘non-present present, [a] being-there of an absent or departed one [that] no longer belongs to knowledge’:2 of the present haunting the past. Equally, we can talk of Mark Fisher’s ‘lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate’:3 of the futures haunting the now. The use of the plural is significant. As a virtuality, the future is a flickering quantum field of possibility, existing in a number of alternative states simultaneously. This should prompt energetic engagement with them. The ghosts of the future are more restless than the ghosts of the past, and ask for more than acknowledgement or a settling of accounts. They ask for concretisation and purposeful action, the transformation of desire into deed. If we have trouble with this aspect of our memory, it restricts the choices we make now, the decisions about what we will leave to the future when, eventually, we haunt it as the trace of the past ourselves.' 

(Introduction)