Our past had several futures. One that became our present is one of them. There is no one closed Hegelian future unfolding down the lanes of history. In fact, there is no one history. There are several pasts and one such past has been lifted up and written as history mainly by vested interest. History, thus becomes a mirror reflection of our society. It is the story of the present. It is ‘His’ story written in the alphabets of the present. There is no room for ‘Her’ story in our patriarchal society. It is the present anxieties and concerns that drive the narrating of the past. History therefore, is a history of the present. It tells us more about the present rather than the past. It is the present regimes of time that influences the narration of history.
These regimes of time not just define our present anxieties, concerns, they also open up our future expectations and aspiration . It is these the living present and aspirational futures that deductively produce the need of taking up a certain past as history. This means past itself could become history in the plural but its narration then bring to us history in the singular. History is a product of retrospection. We write it in hind sight. The past that we narrate as history does not stay in the past. It becomes past of the present. It then, returns in the present and often haunts us. The past is therefore, synchronous with the present and the alternate futures of the past that were suppressed open new possibilities for the present. This is why past can be easily politicized.
Historian brings a certain past to life while at the same time kills other pasts. Those who try to police the line between the past , future and the present, often use past to fire politics of the present. In fact, the politics then takes the shape of border patrolling. Thus, for instance, the claim of mandir being under masjid disrupting our present society is one instance of such politics. Such a politics puts several other pasts into grave while embracing others pasts as legitimate and historical. This means there are hierarchies of pasts, future and the present that are governed by the regimes of times that operate in our society.
Today the future no longer works as an utopia of Ernst Bloch. Earlier we could see plenty of future in the future. Today, we seem to have lost this imaginary. The futures in the plenty have become narrowed as the future seemed to be hallowed of the promise of the futures. This means the futures of the future and the future of the present appear to be lost. In some way, we seem to feel things have become untimely. Time is not on time. neither it is on our side. Time has lost its joint. The future seems to have stopped being an Eldorado of hopes. Time that was seen as linear and progressive have begun to feel obsolete.
The future has stopped being a resource that energized our society. This is why it seems that the horizon of expectations has contracted and we seem to be put into aimless, purposeless drift living for the moment. Hence, what we seem to be left with is the presentness of the present. It is atomizing time and delinking the relation of the present with the past and the future. We might realize this if we consider the primetime debates over mass media. Although, they appear to be timely, but paradoxically with their proliferation itself, they seem to be injecting amnesia in us since we cannot process the overdose that we have face day in and day out. We seem to be facing crisis of consciousness of time. The future, having lost its luminosity, the burden of the past began to lay its heavy weight on our shoulder. This indicates the futures of the present appear enstranged and our present at times appears to be trapped into a past. It has become the present of a past. Our present is laden with present pasts. We in India appear to be trapped in present past. Our present has indeed become a present of a past!
We have to come to understand our sensibilities to time. Our sensibilities to time are complex. They are non-reduceable to a singular mode. The closed future seemed to at times drift us into an aimless limbo and at times we are pushed in to present of a past. Our temporal orderings and orientations manifest our sensibilities to time. Time is complex. When we break into past, future and present, we subdivide it from the privileged location of the present. Hence, we have the present of the present, the past of the present and the future of the present. Besides, we have the futures of the past and pasts of the future. There are also futures of the present and the presents of the futures. Moreover, there are also futures of the future.
It is a chicken and egg question: does our sensibilities to time define our orientations to temporality and hence we lay importance to futures of the past , present of the past , present of present etc., ? The issue is complex and cannot be linearized on a cause effect chain. Our sensibilities to time irrupt disruptively. Hence, psychoanalysis may hold the key to some understanding of our shifting relations with time. Our relation to time is not linear but is circular. It is the circle of life that temporalizes our time into past, present and future. Where we are in the circle of our life that shape our sensibilities to time.
