ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the reality of time, its relevance to understanding natural and cultural systems, its resistance to and otherness from spatial representation, and its irreducibility to terms and frames of explanation. The present itself, always a continuous present that never passes into the past, is nevertheless present to itself. Instead of the past being regarded as fixed, inert, given, unalterable, even if knowable in its entirety, it must be regarded as inherently open to future rewritings, as never “full” enough, or present enough, to propel itself intact into the future. The future erupts through a kind of leap or rupture—a phase transition, in the language of Prigogine, a moment of the eruption of the untimely or the nick—analogous to the leap into the past that constitutes memory proper. Only if the present presents itself as fractured, cracked by the interventions of the past and the promise of the future, can the new be invented, welcomed, and affirmed.
