Every extension of progress beyond what was still attainable by the present and individual consciousness endangered the structure of meaning which guaranteed the intended share of the individual in the continuance of the whole .. . Speeding up under the idea of 'progress' could and would not just mean securing its inner logic and making it irreversible, but also retrieving an indefinitely open future and putting it into lifetime proportions. Or at least supplying the extent of the individual lifetime with as many future possibilities as are attainable. The future dimension of progress should thus be anything but the temporal counterpart of the past whose dimensions are newly discovered and still to be discovered . . . In the tension which arose through the dissociation of lifetime and world time, it amounted to drawing or forcing more and ultimately perhaps everything into the life expectancy of the concrete and frail subject. Therefore progress' becomes something which does not just spring from its inevitability as regards objective content. . . , but which can be advanced by method, organization and institution, and condensed by speeding it up.³
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From the Future to the Extended Present