Today, however, the urgent desire prevails to recognize the consequent effects as early as possible even in the extended present, in order to steer them into desired or undesired channels. So much that is new has been and is being produced that the old is becoming too much. Hence the pressure for limitation is growing. Finiteness is entering into the conceptions of time. But it is not enough, following linear thinking, to remain confined to quantities or to labour under the illusion that the answer is to produce less. Cyclicality seeks to provide a remedy here. It offers a point of view in which the necessity is taken into account, theoretically at least, of making the processes of innovation predictable as early as possible, in order to learn to control the prerequisites for one's own surprises. The present is thereby extended further. But transforming the moment of becoming into the decisive point of selection holds dangers which result from the inadequacy of the instruments of diagnosis and prognosis, and from the multiplicity, still good for surprises, which results from the possibility of human behaviour. Creativity has many forms of expression, errors must remain tolerable and systems amenable to error. The other option attempts to come to terms with the end, to risk the evolutionary leap, and to find solutions for the problem of waste and obsolescence which are suited to a scientific and technological culture. Here, too, the quantitatively linear point of view is not sufficient which seeks merely to preserve, for how much and what can be crammed into museums, classified as a historical monument, artificially stored in reserves? Hence it is a question of the conversion of energy, matter and knowledge. It is a question of the revaluation and transformation of waste, of technological procedures for this as well as institutional economic incentives and a changed social awareness. The cyclical conception of time offers the model of flowing back into the cyclical process, of recycling. Time is so construed here that it is the finiteness of a variety of cycles, which mutually influence one another in their features and can be influenced by human behaviour. At the end, after decay or completion, something new can begin. But the new is no longer as light-heartedly new as the belief in progress once promised. It is new material into which old material flows, not as a past continuing to have a linear effect, as the lead weight of a tradition, but as recycled proper time of a cycle of innovation. Only thus can new social forms of existence emerge from the proliferation of multiple times: in the extended present instead of in the future.
From the Future to the Extended Present
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