Foreword
This text is the revised version of a text originally published, in French, in the proceedings of the conference «Les Temps Modernes, cette chose énigmatique», 10-11 Dec 2021 (Sorbonne Université): “Des Temps modernes aux Temps qui restent, Histoire et avenir d’une revue, histoire et avenir du monde”, in Esther Demoulin & Juliette Simont (eds.), Les Temps Modernes, d’un siècle l’autre, Brussels, Éditions Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2023. It differs from the latter by a few changes. For instance, the Council was originally called “Parliament” and the Collective “People”. One of the first sovereign decisions of the so-called Parliament was precisely to rename itself - and thus perform its own existence on the spot!
I thank Juliette Simont not only for having invited me to join Les Temps Modernes many years ago (in 2007, to be precise), but also for having supported without trembling the re-launch of the journal on this new basis, and having accompanied the first issue with the same rigor and the same efficacy with which she carried at arm’s length the journal directed by Claude Lanzmann.
I want to express a particular gratitude to Jeanne Etelain, who also accompanied the realization of this project for the power of faith, intelligence and rigor she puts into everything. Without her contribution, the journal would probably not exist.
I also thank all those who joined with enthusiasm and imagination the working group that helped turning the following paragraphs into something more than an idea: a project, which became a reality, our reality. Special thanks to Jim Schrub, Esther Demoulin, Agathe Nieto, Luca Paltrinieri, Mathieu Watrelot, Pierre Niedergang, Valentin Denis, Vanessa Morrisset, Haud Gueguen, Bastien Gallet, Lissa Lincoln, Étienne Balibar, Emmanuel Levine, Dimitra Panopoulos, Francis Haselden, Guillaume Pitiot, Arnaud Cudennec.
Eventually, I want to thank Warren Sack, Michael Flower, Martin Savransky, as well as Alexander Miller, for their help and advice about this translation.
In memory of Bruno Latour, disappeared while I was putting the finishing touches to this text.
Introduction
Whether we have ever been modern or not, we are certainly no more. The time has come to inherit modern times. But how? What is the legacy of Modernity? Do we have to accept it or are we free to refuse the bequest? Is there anything to inherit anyway? Might this doubt itself be part of what it means “to inherit modern times”? Those questions will certainly occupy many years to come. But here is one modest suggestion: we might better inherit modern times if we take seriously the apparently very anecdotal fact that one of the most famous intellectual magazines intended to a general readership in Post-War France, which, along with its founder, Jean-Paul Sartre, came to embody the very idea of the public intellectual, both nationally and internationally, named itself after the historical sequence it aimed at embracing: Les Temps Modernes. Modern times are over not only in the sense that Modernity is behind us, giving way to the post-modern, trans-modern or other-than-modern; but also in the sense that the journal created by Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and others in 1945 has been discontinued in 2018. The time, it seems, has come to inherit Modern Times, both as an intellectual magazine and as a historical sequence.(note: [1] Can the question of the legacy of the journal, which seems very specific, concerning only those who were involved in its fabrication, help us to elaborate the question of the legacy of modernity as such, which concerns all of us? All of us, really? Who is this ‘us’? Who is the ‘we’ who could become the subject of this legacy? This is precisely where it might be worth addressing the question of this heritage in its dual resonance.
Les Temps Modernes was intended to the largest possible readership and aimed at taking account of the Whole (i.e., that which matters to all) in individual and collective lives, without making any presupposition about it: how am I, are we, are you, are they, part of something that concerns us all, and what is this whole when apprehended exclusively from the standpoint of its partial realizations in your, in my, in their, particular forms of agency? How to shed light on this rather vague but imperious idea of “engagement”, commitment, which questions the articulation between parts and whole? The journal had no other raison d’être than raising this question of the We, in response to some totality in the process of forming itself through our various actions and interactions (and inactions).
Today the question of course remains, but the ‘Whole’ might no longer be the Whole of world history operating at the anthropological level that Sartre imagined; it is rather the Whole of terrestrial history operating at the geological level. It is not the world; it is rather the planet. The planetarization of historical agencies forces us to break with the concept of temporality specific to modernity, which implied the idea of a radical break between a before and an after, a here and an elsewhere, and to think differently about the relation between continuity and discontinuity that all inheritance implies. In fact, the global ecological crisis, or whatever we want to call it, leaves us with no choice but to inherit modernity, which has been irreversibly inscribed in geological strata and the earth system, so that we need to look back to modernity to better understand our present and redirect its dynamics, in order to take advantage of the time that remains to open up other possible futures, other times still in reserve in the vaults of the future. In other words, we have no choice: we have to inherit modern times.
This injunction was not heeded with respect to the journal. It was discontinued in 2018 following the unilateral decision of the title’s owner, Antoine Gallimard, against the advice of the last editorial board (which learned of the decision in a letter sent to subscribers on 6 December 2018). This decision was accompanied by the promise of a revival of the title in another form, that of a book series perhaps - a promise not kept, and which was probably never intended to be kept. The committee itself presented various formulas for a possible relaunch of the journal, but these did not convince the publisher, who declared himself nonetheless convinced of the need to continue in other forms the work of “deciphering the present” that had once taken shape in the journal.For the editorial board’s position, see its article, «Le but des Temps Modernes était d’apporter une intelligence globale du monde», Le Monde, 2 May 2019, and Antoine Gallimard’s response, «Pourquoi j’ai pris la décision d’arrêter Les Temps Modernes», Le Monde, 22 May 2019. This is why we can say that Les Temps Modernes has not really ended, but only been suspended: the question of the possibility and the form of reviving, if not its title, at least its inaugural gesture, the question of its legacy, has never really been discussed, either privately or publicly; it remains mouth agape with inchoate expression.
The amphibology of the locution takes on its full meaning here. It’s not by chance that “Modern Times” also refers to a historical sequence. The founders used it to announce what they aimed at: a permanent and all-encompassing investigation of modernity. But the phrase ‘Temps Modernes’ did not just refer to an era with its own particular content; it designated a certain way of relating to the present, ‘present’ being here understood as that from which it is impossible to escape, that which, in the contraction of time, creates a subjective responsibility. For they knew that the present has a history that is not only that of its content (such and such actions, such and such institutions, such and such innovations, such and such events, etc.), but also that of its regime of temporalization, that is, the particular figure or variant that it presents of time in general.This thesis was later clarified by François Hartog (Régimes d’historicité, Présentisme et expériences du temps, Paris, Seuil, 2012), but it could be shown that it was already present in other forms in Sartre, Beauvoir or Merleau-Ponty, as well as in Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze or Foucault. By so entitling their journal, the founders were in effect declaring that, in their minds, something of the very form of a general interest intellectual magazine (which Les Temps Modernes ended up incarnating in Post-War France) was linked to Modernity understood as a way of being in time.
It is this conjunction that Antoine Gallimard probably no longer believes in.In line with the same diagnosis, Gallimard ceased publication of Le Débat, another prominent journal it published – although this one was not authoritatively interrupted, but properly ended, self-terminated by the editors themselves who explained that the present time was not worth their work anymore… Along with the concomitant launch of the small ‘Tracts’ series, it shows that the interruption of Les Temps Modernes is truly motivated by a consistent diagnosis made by the publisher about the very form of the intellectual magazine intended at a general readership (i.e. what is called in French a “revue généraliste”): he simply sees no future in it. It would be presumptuous to prove him wrong a priori. But neither are we obliged to attribute to him more prescience than power evidently has, since it has the capacity to bring about the future it anticipates, self-fulfilling its prophecy… On the contrary, we might even say that the project of Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty is strikingly topical today. Not in the very vague and somewhat grandiloquent sense that the publisher articulated in his article in Le Monde (“men will continue to forge their freedom, individual and collective, through a critical understanding of the world in which they find themselves engaged”), but in a very precise sense, that of an articulation between a global and a local standpoint, making it possible to shed light on the way in which individual lives fit into the destiny of a whole that they do not control but which they more or less shape in spite of themselves. I will argue here that the best way to characterize the task facing us today is indeed to say that we have, collectively and individually, to inherit from modern times. There are now good reasons to define Modernity no longer as a civilizational mutation, but as that which has led us into the Anthropocene, or more precisely into what I will call the Great Planetary Contraction. Whether we like it or not, we cannot invent any future but from the midst of what remains of times not past, but modern. Asking ourselves the question of the legacy of LesTemps Modernes (the journal) is perhaps, after all, to stand at a privileged point to ask the fundamental question of our time, namely, that of the legacy of modern times (the historical sequence). I would like to deploy here this hypothesis in some of its implications and consequences.
I will do this in four stages. First, I will offer a brief chronicle of the journal’s interruption, a tiny yet profound symptom of a general situation. Next, I will explain why the revival of Les Temps Modernes, albeit under a different name, resonates with the urgencies of the present in a singularly relevant way: firstly, I will show that Modernity did take place, and secondly that the most characteristic question of our present is indeed how we inherit it. Finally, I will introduce the concrete proposal that has been put forward by a group initiated by the members of the last editorial board of the historical journal to answer these questions: the foundation of a new space for collective expression entitled Les Temps Qui Restent. Modern times are gone? Get ready for the Times that remain!
1. Chronicle of an interruption.
On July 5th 2018, Claude Lanzmann passed away. The editorial board of Les Temps ModernesAt the time Antoine Gallimard decided to cease publication of the journal, the editorial board consisted of the following people: Jean Bourgault, Michel Deguy, Liliane Kandel, Jean Khalfa, Jean-Pierre Martin, Eric Marty, Patrice Maniglier, Anne Mélice, Juliette Simont. knew that the journal could not go on as before. It had long since ceased to be that special place where the age questioned itself with fervor and fury. As we pointed out in the article we published afterwards, and as Antoine Gallimard kindly acknowledged, this was neither due to the quality of our editorial work, nor to the texts we published: we had proved capable of accompanying and even anticipating some of the major issues of our time (on the Arab revolutions, the 2008 crisis, Venezuela, the squares movements, etc.). But it’s true that we rarely succeeded in affecting the public debate. The present looked the other way. The prestige of the title remained, and of its director. But this double prestige was as much a burden as an asset. The journal was in danger of looking like the luxurious survival of a bygone era, as well as the flagrant proof of the inability of that past era to bring its passions and its tools to bear on the present: the 20th century was over… It was legitimate to be more ambitious for such a title, or to recognize that it was time to put an end to it if its ambition no longer found the conditions for its implementation.
It was in this context that Juliette Simont and myself were elected director and deputy director of the journal by the editorial board and asked to draw up a plan for relaunching the journal, which we presented to Antoine Gallimard. This project was based on the conviction that, far from rendering the journal’s original intellectual project obsolete, the present moment was, on the contrary, giving it a relevance at least equal to that which it had at the end of the Second World War. In particular, it insisted on two aspects of this intellectual project: first, to take on the whole of what is happening, that is, to have a synthetic (and even encyclopedic) ambition with regard to the present, and second, to do so without any a priori ideological line, rather by accumulating investigations, analyses and reflections, in order to allow a line to emerge a posteriori from this restless mass, in accordance with a very Sartrean principle: freedom. We argued that in these two respects the journal could play an essential role in the present moment: it had to become an encyclopedia of Modernity in the context of its exhaustion and of the demands of the ecological ‘transition’, using a synthetic a posteriori method that would bring genres, styles and ideological orientations into dialogue, thus opening up a unique diagonal of freedom in a public space saturated by clashes and spectacle, the theatrical brutalization of the public sphere. We stressed the importance of continuing such a title in order to show that the resources developed by the intellectuality of the 20th century had not simply become obsolete, and could not be neglected, left behind, as if we did not have to take on this legacy in all its dimensions, its assets as well as its liabilities. We proposed transforming Les Temps Modernes into a multimedia title, in which the paper journal would no longer be exclusive, giving ourselves the task of taking stock of what, of Modernity, was likely to be remobilized in the current context, this context being itself almost entirely a consequence of that Modernity which had to recede.
This project did not convince the publisher. Antoine Gallimard justified his decision to discontinue the journal by citing a «lack of incarnation» following the death of Claude Lanzmann, as evidenced by a drop in sales and subscriptions. It was an odd argument: the decline in sales predates the death of our director (the figures rather suggest that the decline in sales of paper issues is correlated with the start of online sales of the journal, about which we never had any precise figure), and the project we had submitted suggested mobilizing personalities who were themselves prestigious, and who, while not having the monumental character of Claude Lanzmann, were nevertheless likely to embody something relevant for the present, in continuity with the ‘cap of non-infidelity’ that Claude Lanzmann himself had vindicated in his relation to Sartre and Beauvoir. The truth is that Claude Lanzmann’s presence certainly protected the journal (as subsequent history has amply demonstrated, since his death brought about the end of the journal), but also weakened it in the long term, since Claude Lanzmann did not like death at all, to say the least, and the hypothesis of the journal’s projection far into the future necessarily straddled his own death. Beyond this infrangible limit, nothing made sense to him – nothing, in any case, that was in one way or another a continuation of what had been, and therefore also of both modern times and Les Temps Modernes… Like any genuine bereavement, Claude Lanzmann’s death could have been an opportunity to ask ourselves how we could invent this continuity, by reviving the journal’s original motives and giving them a meaning relevant to the present day. Antoine Gallimard thought it unnecessary to try.
His decision was motivated in part by anecdotal reasons, which I won’t go into here: they had to do with the quarrels that accompany ill-prepared successions and the assessment he had made of his own interests as a publisher as well as of our team (a rather unfavorable assessment, it seems). But I do not believe that these anecdotal reasons were ultimately the most decisive. There are deeper - and more interesting - reasons for his decision. It’s likely that he didn’t see (and still doesn’t see) a future for the form of an intellectual journal for a general readership in today’s editorial and political world.
This decision is symptomatic of a general situation. This situation is that of the difficulty of inheriting modern times in the sense not of the title of the journal, but of the historical sequence to which the form of the intellectual magazine, in its different formats and realizations, is an integral part. The setbacks of Les Temps Modernes are symptomatic of the difficulty we have in imagining the continuity between the historical sequence named ‘Modernity’, and what comes after it as a result of its own internal dynamics. It seems that our present, although entirely determined by the injunction of modernization (which took various forms, of which European Modernity is only one, out of many), hesitates between two positions. Sometimes it sees itself as in complete agreement with it, as can be heard in the discourse of Elon Musk, geo-engineers, Emmanuel Macron and other transhumanists or ecomodernists who see the eco-planetary catastrophe underway as merely another techno-scientific problem to be solved, the solution to which will lead to social, political and economic progress. Sometimes it conceives of itself as a complete break with it, turning away from this sequence with disgust or indifference, and ultimately retaining only the patrimonial insignia that add to the assets of the largest fortunes (those who can afford to buy Picasso and Rothko paintings or Proust and Céline manuscripts, for example).
This is one of the reasons why the question mark raised by the abrupt closure of the journal Les Temps Modernes will not go away any time soon: because it points to a much more complex enigma, namely, how we are to collectively inherit the modernization of our societies and our environments, as well as of the planet itself. Behind a very small story, lies a very big story - one might even say: the question of History itself, in the sense in which no one other than Sartre understood the term, i.e. as a form of totalization that implies the dimension of time, a way of re-characterizing each being by the operation that is its own in an ever wider and deeper process of totalization from which no one can extricate itself, but which no one can control either. As I will explain later, this question of totalization takes on a new meaning today in the context of the Great Planetary Contraction: that of a global apprehension of our present situation, precisely because it is characterized by a very singular interweaving of the whole and its parts.
It is precisely because we believe that this question mark deserves to be raised that we did not let ourselves off the hook after the publisher’s decision. We set up a university research project to build a new collective team, to test and possibly modify the project we had initially presented to Gallimard, and in any case to reflect on this question: does it make sense to take up again today the gesture that was at the origin of the journal Les Temps Modernes? If so, in what form? And what does this say about our present time?This project was funded mainly by the EUR (Ecole Universitaire de Recherche) ArTEC, as well as by the HAR laboratory (Histoire des Arts et des Représentations) of the University of Nanterre, the Centre de Recherches en Philosophie of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Philosophy Department of the University of Liège. See «Les Temps Modernes au XXIe siècle: une uchronie expérimentale»: https://eur-artec.fr/temps-modernes/. I would particularly like to thank Laurent Jeanpierre for his immediate and enthusiastic support for this project. This project was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, but it too has survived and we have come up with a proposal based on these reflections. The proposal is simple: we have to accept the legacy of modernity by launching a general-interest journal whose mission statement can be summed up as follows: the challenge of the present is to inherit Modern Times - and this journal will be called Les Temps Qui Restent, times that remain. I’ll go into the details of this project later. But first I’d like to clarify this expression, ‘inheriting Modern Times’. And to do that, we first need to clear up a legitimate doubt: does it make sense to talk about Modernity as a real historical sequence? As Bruno Latour has so masterfully demonstrated, isn’t Modernity the very illusion that we can be modern?Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, Paris, La Découverte, 1991. So, can we continue to characterize our present by reference to such a dubious term?
2. Modernity has taken place: the Great Planetary Contraction.
The idea that the question “whether or not to continue, and in what form, the journal once called Les Temps Modernes”, raises the question of our relationship to Modernity as such, immediately leads us to questions so complex that they should be addressed collectively - typically through a journal. Foremost among these questions is whether the word ‘Modernity’ actually means anything real at all, whether Modernity has happened, and what that might mean.
Have we been Modern?
Many illustrious minds have tried to characterize Modernity in the past (from Baudelaire to Latour, via Weber, Durkheim, Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, Arendt, Foucault, Blumenberg, Habermas, Lyotard, Koselleck, Giddens, Beck, etc., to mention only the most explicit). If this debate has had its interest, it seems to have come to nothing conclusive, diagnosing here the disenchantment of the world, there the enframing of Being, elsewhere the triumph of individualism, or the reign of criticism, or the heroization of the new, before giving in to the grand narrative of the end of the great narratives, of liquid modernity or late post-modernity… So much so that reasonable minds have come to doubt, quite wisely, the relevance of the question itself: It has become fashionable to refrain from any kind of universal history and to be content with describing mechanisms of transformation of reality that are perhaps more dispersed but more concrete (such and such a transformation of capitalism, such and such a sequence of colonization, such and such a mechanism of inhibition of technological risks characteristic of environmental history, such and such an operator of ‘globalization’, etc.).
It is for this reason, moreover, that it has been doubted whether an intellectual project like the one Sartre had for his own philosophy and for his journal could still make any sense. For this project was intended to be ‘synthetic’, ‘totalizing’ and ‘totalitarian.’«And what is this conception of man that you claim to be discovering? We will reply that it is commonplace and that we do not claim to discover it, but only to help clarify it. I will call it totalitarian. («Présentation des Temps Modernes», republished in Situations, II, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, 2nde edition, 2012, p. 214, my translation). «Thus we resort, against the spirit of analysis, to a synthetic conception of reality…» (p. 219). We will return to these texts later. It defended the idea that the intellectual act as such only makes sense if it posits an integral, global horizon of totalization. By the 1960s, this kind of project seemed obsolete. The criticism of the Sartrean figure of the intellectual, by Foucault, Bourdieu, and Deleuze, among others, was based on this diagnosis. Whether we contrast Sartre’s ‘total intellectual’ with the ‘specific intellectual’ (Foucault), or the ‘collective intellectual’ (Bourdieu), or even the ‘becoming-minor’ (Deleuze and Guattari), whether we value the hybrid, the singular, the decentered or the specific, we signify incredulity in the face of any «synthetic» approach of the kind Sartre defended.
And yet, Modernity has taken place.I am, of course, misappropriating the title of a famous article by Merleau-Ponty, ‘La guerre a eu lieu’, which appeared in the first issue of Temps Modernes, and which is in some respects a manifesto for the journal (reprinted in Sens et non-sens, Paris, Nagel, 1966). Let us remind that Merleau-Ponty acted as the managing editor of Les Temps Modernes for about 8 years, since the launch of the journal until he disapproved Sartre in 1953. But to find evidence of this, we need to look not at human societies, using the disciplines that study them (anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, etc.), but at the Earth, using the disciplines that discover it (geology, biology, ecology, planetology, climatology, etc.). For Modernity is nothing other than what brought about the Anthropocene. Better still, our present is best characterized, in its specific task, its characteristic problem, by this question: how are we going to inherit what Modern Times has done to the Earth? And this question justifies a global, synthetic, even, to use Sartre’s embarrassing word, ‘totalitarian’ approach.
We can doubt as much as we like about the reality of a universal event called Modernity, but we cannot avoid acknowledging that an event of planetary dimensions has actually taken place as a result of certain human socio-technical activities. To see this, we need only think of the discussions in geology about whether or not to add the concept of the Anthropocene to the timeline of geological eras, and whether it should be dated to the end of the 18th century or to the 1950s; or to think of the curves of what has been called the Great Acceleration, which record the correlation between the sudden exponential growth of certain anthropogenic parameters on the one hand (world population, GDP, fertilizer consumption, etc.) and of parameters belonging to the Earth-System on the other (quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, etc.). All of which sounds awfully like the kind of event that modernity claimed to be.
Indeed, what, at the very least, was meant by ‘Modernity’? This word only has meaning in contrast to another, that of tradition. It makes a broad division between, on the one hand, relatively stable societies and, on the other, societies swept up in brutal, discontinuous transformations that are both transversal (occurring in all areas of human experience at the same time: economic, religious, political, scientific, technical, etc.) and convergent (repeated in more or less similar ways in different geographical contexts and carrying over societies in some similar future). Modernity is the age of rupture, the age of new beginnings. As a result, it is also the age of History, insofar as societies feel that they are contemporaries of their own discontinuity and are questioning their ability to steer this transformation. Modernity is experienced as a time of exception, what in mathematics would be called a singularity, i.e. a point in a series that escapes the law of that series by the very way in which it fits into it: Modernity is that temporal sequence in which time itself changes qualitatively, gets out of hand, changes tempo. This is the first condition. The second is that this rupture is not merely local, limited to certain parts of humanity (in extension) or certain domains of human experience (in intension), but concerns them all and is destined to sweep them all along in its own movement: it divides human history in its entirety between a before and an after.
What scientists are trying to capture with names such as the Anthropocene or the Great Acceleration is an event that, starting within the European continent, has ended up introducing a radical discontinuity not only in human history but in the history of the planet. It is an event that 1) constitutes an exception to the deep history of humanity, dividing all human societies into a before and an after (and unifying them in this very division), 2) takes place in a relatively short span of time and has a geography that is the very geography of ‘modernization’ (from the European continent to its colonial projections and back again), 3) virtually and actually affects not only all aspects of human experience (knowledge, techniques, spiritualities, social organizations, etc.), but also all human groups (cultures and religions) as well as non-human groups.
The thesis that Modernity has taken place is difficult to accept, however, because it presents two paradoxes. The first is that Modernity became real at the very moment when the best minds in the world were tending to stop believing in it – better still, it occurred precisely at the moment when people were beginning to think that the hypothesis of an event of this nature could be nothing but superstitious. This period, from the 1960s to the present day, when we were abandoning the grand narratives and the idea of Modernity, is the very period when the Great Acceleration was at its height and when it began to be recorded. The second is that this hypothesis was posed in anthropocentric terms, probing the depths of the European human experience, whereas it should have been posed in geocentric terms. Modernity is something that happens to the Earth. But what exactly? How can we qualify the modern event as a terrestrial event?
The Great Planetary Contraction: a geocentric definition of Modernity
Global warming comes to mind, of course. But it is only the most spectacular and best-identified of the planetary effects of this enigmatic event that the word «Modernity» allows us to grasp in spite of itself. These various effects, which include the collapse of global biodiversity, the modification of major biogeochemical cycles (such as nitrogen, water, phosphorus, etc.), ocean acidification, massive release of new synthetic molecules with uncertain effects (such as microplastics, endocrine disruptors and also, in another genre, antibiotics), and many other measurable changes, all converge at least partially in a single event affecting an extremely complex but in some ways individual entity, the Earth. The Earth must be understood here as a set of interlocking regulatory mechanisms that are liable to be disrupted to the point of entering new (metastable) equilibria, thereby affecting the conditions of existence of the entire terrestrial race.
The word Anthropocene is now one of the most popular, and it is interesting because, as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has aptly noted, it refers to the unexpected conjunction of two hitherto heterogeneous temporalities: geological temporality and historical temporality, the time of Lyell and the time of Thucydides.Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2020. For an introduction to Chakrabarty’s work in French, see Jeanne Etelain & Patrice Maniglier, «Ramener la critique sur Terre: le tournant planétaire de Dipesh Chakrabarty», Critique, 2022, 8-9.It has, however, been contested both because it seems to overextend a term that had a precise meaning in its original context (geology) and because it seems to make humanity as such (anthropos) the cause of an event that in reality has a much more precise chronology, geography and sociology, thus masking a set of inequalities that are both factual and moral (hence the proliferation of terms such as Capitalocene, Eurocene, Anglocene, Androcene, Plantationocene, etc.).
In a more neutral way, some scientific studies have, as I said, called this event «the Great Acceleration» and calculated it by correlating socio-technical sets of data and planetary sets of data.Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeil, «The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? [Ambio, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, vol. 36, no. 8, December 2007, p. 614.
This way of characterizing the event of which we are both contemporaries and actors does indeed make it possible to grasp a global discontinuity (since it shows a spectacular inflection of all the curves at roughly the same time: after a long period of slow increase, they suddenly soar), but it has the defect of not allowing us to see immediately what is problematic about this discontinuity: an exponential curve could after all continue asymptotically to infinity. This is in fact the promise inscribed in iron on the Paris skyline with the Eiffel Tower, an allegory of progress materialized in four exponential curves pointing upwards to infinity. Remember also the title of Vannevar Bush’s famous memoir to President Roosevelt in 1945: Science, The Endless Frontier – a perfect embodiment of the idea that through science and technology, the pax americana can spread around the world and put an end to history.
It therefore seems to me more accurate to characterize this event not as a “Great Acceleration” but as a “Great Contraction”, to designate the shrinking of a space that was previously available to us, a space that is both geographical and temporal. This space is what researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Institute led by Johan Rockström have called humanity’s ‘safe operating space’Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K. et al. A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461, 472-475 (2009). and it is characterized by the gap between the current values of a certain number of planetary parameters and the values of these parameters that constitute thresholds beyond which the dynamics of the Earth system change qualitatively and with no return, so that we can no longer guarantee that they will remain as favorable to the development of human activities as we have known them since the appearance of the species – hence the notion of “planetary boundaries”.
This notion in turn raises a number of difficulties (can we delimit the notion of the human species so clearly? Is there not a risk of confusing the interests of the species with those of a way of life particular to certain members of that species? Should we stick to this anthropocentric point of view? etc.), but it has the advantage of emphasizing three essential points. Firstly, the Earth is both the condition of possibility for all terrestrial life, and its effect, with every way of being terrestrial contributing to maintaining the Earth that makes it possible (which is exactly the definition James Lovelock gave of what he called Gaia). Secondly, all life on Earth has a certain margin of variation within which it can change, improvise and modify itself, without transforming the major planetary balances that allow it to exist and vary. Thirdly, today there is a way of living on Earth that is specific to certain humans and that narrows this space of free variation, to the point that the variations in this way of living have direct consequences on its own planetary conditions of existence, as well as on those of a very large number of other terrestrial beings (and possibly all).
Using the term “Great Planetary Contraction”, as I propose, to describe the event we are taking part in today, is trying to characterize it better by grasping several things at once: the tightening of planetary boundaries, which more and more constrains the margins of human action (we have little time left to act, or, more precisely, to maintain a certain capacity to act, because once these thresholds have been passed, the feedback loops will very likely cause the system to spiral out of control, making it more difficult to act on its dynamics); the «time-space compression» that Marxist geographer David Harvey refers to in relation to capitalism,David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. which means that every person on Earth is now more exposed to the actions of other people on Earth than ever before (your carbon emissions affect ecosystems with which you are not in direct contact); and lastly, the muscular spasm caused by a shock, which is how the Earth system reacts to our civilization. So, from now on, we’ll say: the Great Contraction has taken place.
On the one hand, we are now relatively well equipped to recognize, at the level of planetary mechanisms, the reality of the Great Contraction (i.e. to confirm the reality of some dramatic tipping point and radical historical discontinuity affecting the very flow of time). We can also describe its workings and effects, but on the other hand it is difficult to characterize precisely its cause. There is no doubt that some human activity is to blame. But what is the right name for the human activities responsible for it? Are they specific to the human species in general? This is doubtful. Should we talk about a «civilization», or just a fortuitous conjunction of diverse, non-intrinsically linked factors? Is it capitalism? But is capitalism enough to explicate the scientific and technological procedures that were necessary to bring about such a massive change? Is it technoscience then? Or productivism? Or extractivism in general? Fossil extractivism maybe more specifically? Patriarchy? Colonization? Monotheism? Secularization? Many suspects are present in the commissioners’ office.
I think there is no better word than ‘Modernity’ to describe the main suspect. Firstly, because each of the suspects has, at one time or another, been held to be the essence of modernity, and together they form its matrix. Secondly, because it has the merit of being notoriously ill-defined, so it forces us not to forget that a lot of work remains to be done to find out what we are talking about, whereas words like ‘capitalism’, ‘extractivism’ or ‘colonialism’ perhaps close the investigation too quickly and risk, moreover, making us lose sight of the physical, biogeochemical - in short, planetary - dimensions of the problem. Finally, because it emphasizes a certain regime of temporalization, since the word ‘Modernity’, as we have seen, designates nothing else than an alteration of time itself - and what better solution is there, to characterize an enigmatic event, than to grasp it as a new way for events in general to happen, in other words as an event that happens to the very notion of event?
We have gone astray in trying to understand Modernity in an anthropocentric way, by imagining, for example, major civilizational changes. I think things will become clearer if we approach it from a resolutely geocentric point of view: starting with the Great Contraction, we will ask ourselves what, in certain human ways of making a terrestrial sojourn, provoked such a planetary event. Modernity is - and is nothing other than - what led to the Great Planetary Contraction, the texture of our present time, of our way of being in (and making) time in the present (and therefore also of what led to the Anthropocene, to the Great Acceleration, to the Sixth Extinction, to Global Warming, all these terms being so many metonyms and metaphors of the Great Contraction). ‘Modern times’ refers to the historical sequence that saw the establishment and spread, often through extreme violence (colonial and neo-colonial, and even in the construction of new State powers that emerged from colonial independences) of a certain number of human ways of doing things that resulted in the Great Contraction. Enquiring about modernity only makes sense if it means looking at this sequence from the perspective of the Anthropocene, and asking what has brought about such an event, and what is still bringing it about today. It’s not an optional question, one that we can take on or turn our backs on, at the whim of our curiosity. It is an imperative question that we cannot ignore without turning our backs on the truth of our condition, just as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty said that their contemporaries could no longer turn their backs on History after the Second World War – which is precisely why they founded a journal.
3. Inheriting modern times
If deciphering Modernity is vital for our time, it is because this time pre-empts all future times in a way that has no precedent in the history of the human race. The Great Contraction in fact locks all earthlings into a future that is too univocal. We simply have no choice: we cannot but inherit modern times.
The present time as remainders or the forced legacy of Modernity
Modern times are not merely a historical period, which may have passed, which we could put behind us to move on to something else. Nor are they merely a pure and simple illusion that we could dispel in order to get on with the real historical tasks at hand. They have left a material remainder, a remainder so big that it constitutes a world in which we have to live. Their remains cannot be put aside but cover the surface of the Earth and are made to last, and to last even longer than the human species itself! Some radioactive waste will remain radioactive for several hundred thousand, or even millions, of years. Similarly, the mass extinction event currently underway will have consequences for the entire future of life on Earth (it is estimated that it will take tens of millions of years for biodiversity to recover); the last comparable such event dates back 66 million years. The intrusion of modernity in the workings of the Earth system will remain an indelible scar on the history of the planet - which is, as a matter of fact, why geologists speak of the ‘Anthropocene’, which also encourages us to say that modernity can and must be seen as a terrestrial and not just a human event, approached from a geocentric and not just an anthropocentric point of view.
Our present has no more urgent task than learning how to live in the remains of modernity. Our time now, the way in which time flows for us in the present, could not be better characterized than as the time of what remains – the time it will take for the remains of modernity to cease recovering all alternative times. As far as we can anticipate the future, we will have no other time than this one. If the exact name of the regime of temporalization of which Sartre’s journal sought to be contemporary was modern times, ours has no better characterization than this: what remains of modern times.
Understanding our present situation therefore means describing what will inevitably remain of Modernity, i.e. the way in which all earthly processes have been modified by it, and what exactly it means from an earthly point of view, and even more precisely for each particular earthling, be it an individual, a collective, a territory, an institution, a species, etc. We are only beginning to understand the task. But the time that remains is also the time that separates us from the crossing of planetary boundaries, the time that we still have to interfere in the terrestrial activities that are causing this cataclysmic reaction of the Earth System, or, as Bruno Latour so rightly said, to bring the Moderns back to Earth.
Strange temporality of the remainder: the remainder is both that which does not pass from the past, and that which, in its insistence on the past, opens up a future, the time that remains because not everything has passed. Our entire capacity to act is now included in this logic, or, more precisely, in this ontology of the remainder. Acting upon these anthropic activities that lead to the Great Contraction does not mean stopping any particular activity immediately. Modernity is not a set of actions that can be interrupted from one day to the next; it is an infrastructure that persists, in other words, that continues to exist even when we stop using it, even when it no longer has a reason to exist. Whether it is a material (technological, logistical…) infrastructure, or an immaterial (legal, economic, organizational and intellectual…) infrastructure, it doesn’t need us to do anything for it to be there and to impose its effects.Here I draw on the valuable analyses of Emmanuel Bonnet, Alexandre Monnin and Diego Landivar in their important book: Héritage et fermeture, Une écologie du démantèlement, Paris, Divergences, 2021, and more generally on the notion of “negative commons”. Worse still, it conditions our very possibilities for action, including those aimed at altering our terrestrial trajectories. It is simply impossible to stop being modern and move on to something else, precisely because Modernity is not just a kind of social and cultural superstructure placed upon an intact nature, but a way of inserting vital interests into terrestrial chains, earth-system loops, organizing our subsistence and configuring our attachments to them. Being a living critter on Earth (as Donna Haraway says) implies having diverted many terrestrial processes, having woven many alliances, either symbiotic or prosthetic, to secure a small pocket where some life can be sustained. This is as true of the wasps that became what they are at the same time as the orchids with which they formed alliances across the species barrier, as it is of the workers at a coal-fired power station who have built their homes, forged their love affairs and learned to dream in dependence on this fossil fuel. Billions of human and non-human beings live in and from the Anthropocene. Interrupting an authentic terrestrial process in one fell swoop is nothing short of murder. Changing a way of life takes time, because it can only be done with the very resources that sustain it. We cannot do better than redirect our ways of living from within the remains of Modernity, which is our condition of existence for a long time to come.
It is therefore important to know what remains of modern times, not only to gain a better understanding of our situation, and better describe what is happening to us, where we are and what is happening, but also because it is only by making use of this remainder that we will be able to take advantage of the time we have left, to pass on a little of Modernity, to reduce its impact on earth, to reopen the door to other possible times. One way to describe one task worth taking on would be: mobilize what remains of modern times so that the Earth can have a future other than that of being the persistent remains of those times. The times that remain also evoke those other virtual futures that still remain for the Earth, provided that the claw of the modern loosens its tyrannical grip on it; it designates those unknown futures, absolutely unanticipated, that we risk blocking forever if we miss this landing, or reterrestrialization, of Modernity.
It is then clear that there is no point in asking whether we should accept or reject the legacy of Modernity: we cannot reject it; it is a forced inheritance. It is a curious form of inheritance that does not include what is known in law as the option to inherit. Heirs of Modernity (like myself) have neither the power nor the right to refuse the bequest. We will only truly cease to be ‘modern’ when we understand that we cannot break with Modernity in the same way that Modernity has claimed to break with so-called ‘tradition’. The paradox of Modernity is that it becomes an event where it doesn’t happen, through its externalities, through its remainders. To think about this strange event, we need a new conception of time, of the articulation between continuity and discontinuity, a different understanding of the words ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’. Inheriting can no longer consist in preserving certain values that emerged in the past and whose effectiveness we try to extend into the future, precisely in the name of their value; inheriting, here, means taking note of the impossibility of abandoning what remains to the past, because the only way to open up a future is to take charge of it. The ontology of the remainder and of the remains must be at the heart of this new conception of temporality.
That’s why “inheriting modern times” is the best way to describe our condition, the condition of all earthlings (whether modern or not), for a long time to come. Such is the topic of the most important discussions we will have in the decades to come: how do we inherit modern times? How do we stand in what remains of modernity? What do we do with what’s left? Tell me how you plan to inherit modern times and I’ll tell you who you are.
From existentialism to terrestrialism
If we accept this way of diagnosing the present, it will be easier to understand why we need to return to the very act that motivated the founding of the journal Les Temps Modernes. What was that gesture? Sartre said it very clearly in his famous ‘Presentation of Les Temps Modernes’ in 1945This text appeared in the first issue of Temps Modernes, then republished in Situations, II, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, pp. 7-31, and reprinted in the expanded edition by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre in 2012 (op. cit., pp. 205-226). :
… with regard to forthcoming political and social events, our magazine will take a stand on each case. It will not do so politically, that is to say it will not serve any party; but it will endeavor to identify the conception of man from which the theses in question are inspired, and it will give its opinion in accordance with the conception it supports. […] And what, it will be asked, is this conception of man that you claim to be revealing to us? We’ll reply that it’s out there, and that we don’t claim to be discovering it, just helping to clarify it. I’ll call it totalitarian.
The word ‘totalitarian’ here of course must not be understood in its political sense, but rather in the sense of synthetic, global-oriented, concerned with the issue of totalization. Now, replace the word ‘man’ (itself unfortunate) with the word ‘Earth’ in the preceding text, and you have more or less the blueprint for a journal that would rise to the challenge of the present. Sartre thought of this articulation of the particular and the universal in humanist or, more accurately, anthropological terms: each and every one of us, through her choices, is supposed to take on responsibility towards humanity as a whole, not necessarily because that choice has causal consequences that would indirectly affect all human beings, but because it is impossible for a person to exist effectively without relating to himself or herself as to what others might be, and therefore without immediately settling into the element of the universal. Universality, far from being a distant horizon to be reached by extension or projection of certain determinations, is conceived by Sartre as the minimal condition for the existence of this irreducible singularity, here, now, as it is, a singularity that constitutes the very essence of human subjectivity. Sartre was, in short, an existentialist. As we know, after 1945 he made a truly heroic effort to reconcile this existentialist perspective with a Marxist framework, that is, with a reflection on the deployment of this singular universal in world history. He would thus reintroduce the mediations between the singular and the universal that he seemed to have short-circuited in his first formulations. This was the magnificent tour de force of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, which remains one of the summits of modern thought. But he would never cease to think that it is at the level of a certain figure of Humanity that this question of totalization is played out.
Our horizon of totalization is no longer of this order, but this only makes it all the more imperious for it. If each of my actions implies something of the whole, if each piece of information I read in the newspaper has to be understood in a ‘totalitarian’, ‘synthetic’, global or, more precisely, holocentric perspective, it’s not because it brings into play subjective figures of Humanity, or even a kind of collective destiny determined by the problem of the projective realization of this universality in the singularity of each individual, but more prosaically (and also, in my humble opinion, more profoundly) because it helps to determine a certain trajectory for the planet as a whole, affecting humans and non-humans alike, affecting them as earthlings, not just today, but for centuries and possibly millennia to come. We have so reduced the space between our actions and the reaction of the Earth’s system, we have so interfered in the dynamics of the terraforming processes (typically the major biogeochemical cycles of carbon, water, nitrogen, etc.), that a single additional particle of greenhouse gas that we release into the atmosphere causes the Earth System to react. The Earth has become extremely sensitive to our actions - irritable, as Isabelle Stengers so nicely put it.Isabelle Stengers, Au Temps des catastrophes, Résister à la barbarie qui vient, Paris, La Découverte, 2013. The era we call “modern” is precisely the one when human beings had space to err, remained at a certain distance from planetary reactions, and could act without modifying the conditions that enabled them, and all the beings coexisting on this planet, to enjoy a terrestrial sojourn. The very belief in history is based on the delayed reaction of the Earth System to these actions, typically the emission of greenhouse gases. We had a bit of leeway. We no longer have any. We are already in the process of modifying the Earth’s equilibrium and feeling its consequences, not just locally, but everywhere (although very differently), and that’s how you know it’s about Earth: each of our actions has become immediately planetary and can be characterized by the way it terraforms our planet.
A new form of responsibility follows from this new condition: a new way by which the singular constitutes itself by taking charge of the universal in its own relation to itself. We are no longer existentialists, but terrestrialists. Sartre’s theses on ‘engagement’ have often been compared with Pascal’s famous adage: we are on board. But how much more accurate would this formula be today! To ignore the terrestrial dimension of any unit of action, the part we play in the terraforming of our planet whatever we do, is to turn our backs on a reality whose imposition characterizes precisely our present. For Sartre, the necessary implication of our being in an ongoing totalization constituted a responsibility, that is to say a challenge addressed to each of us at the most original point of her being, of her own possibility of existing, showing that no one could stand in a relationship of truth towards himself without taking into account her position in the movement of the Whole. The same is true for us today, except that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty aptly said, this whole is not the (anthropocentric) globe but the (geocentric) planet. The terrestrial condition opens up to a new kind of responsibility: it is impossible to know who we are without trying to better determine where we are on Earth, i.e. what we are doing with the remains of modern times and how we relate to the way they altered the face of the Earth as a planet. Nothing terrestrial can be foreign to us, simply because we affect and are potentially affected by everything terrestrial so closely that we can no longer ignore it (and in a sense this is what we experienced with the Covid-19 pandemic, a distant mutation of a small strand of DNA that led to global paralysisI tried to highlight the link between pandemics and global contraction in my book, Patrice Maniglier, Le Philosophe, la Terre et le virus, Bruno Latour expliqué par l’actualité, Paris, Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021.). The way in which we feed, shelter, cover, move, love or wage war affects the Marshall Islands or the Arctic ice pack, the Amazonian or Indonesian forest, the city of Jakarta or Bordeaux.
The notion of “engagement” in the planetary era
For Sartre, it was at the very point where this global responsibility affects us that the act of editing a new journal met its foundation. For Sartre, as for Merleau-Ponty, collective intellectual activity, the idea of bringing together various workers in the fields of knowledge and culture in a single project, had no other justification than to acknowledge the duty that arises from the truth of the involvement of the Whole in individual or collective lives. If Les Temps Modernes was created in the aftermath of the Second World War, it was because the war had forced us, or so Sartre thought, to recognize this inseparability of individual activities, whatever they might be, even literary and abstract ones, and the global movement of the world. This war was not called a ‘world war’ for nothing: it was perhaps the first truly world war (or even the first truly world event), because never before had any war, or even any event for that matter, mobilized all the dimensions of life and all the regions of the planet with such intensity, with all beings experiencing through it, in a more or less synchronized way, the fragility of their separability, the precariousness of their distances. The founders of the magazine had experienced the ‘global’ dimension of this event in the impossibility of remaining aloof from it, of pretending that it didn’t concern them, as if there were a space, a corner, a niche, where people of culture could retreat and leave human turmoil to its own waywardness. We understand nothing of the problem of “engagement” if we don’t put it in the perspective of this question of the “whole” that breaks into each and every singular existence.
But such a project can only make even more sense today. If we are now talking about the planet in our ordinary lives, we understand that something that has to do with the whole is necessarily involved in understanding our situation, as particular or local as it might be. Never has a ‘global’, ‘synthetic’ or ‘totalitarian’ approach been more justified than today. Sartre would have recognized, in this planetarization of our lives, one of the unexpected but rather predictable figures of this totalization which he had sensed was the only element in which to characterize each singular activity or life. This totalization takes the form not of the realization of a paradoxical (dialectical) essence, human existence, but of the re-immersion or re-insertion of a way of using the Earth, that is, a mode of terrestrialization, within certain planetary limits. The Great Contraction, defined by the fast narrowing of our distance from a set of irreversibility thresholds, situates each being on this Earth in terms of how it contributes, more or less, in one way or another, to this immense shrinking of time and space, or on the contrary, how it counteracts it. A space is open for potential action, the space that still separates us from crossing these thresholds. It is in this space that it still makes sense to speak of History. Sartre was right: History is indeed a process of totalization. This totalization, however, takes place not at the anthropological level, as he thought, but at the geological level, and it takes place in reverse, through the way in which each of us inflects the processes that precipitate us towards these thresholds, negative futurity qualifying present existential projects. Tell me how you contribute to the Great Contraction, and I’ll tell you how you contribute to universal history.
But here is yet another difference with Sartre: this responsibility cannot be purely and simply rooted in moral life, norms, ideologies and duties: it also implies something on the side of material life or what is commonly called reality. In short, it has ontological foundations, not just axiological or psychological ones. This, too, is a lesson we can learn from Sartre’s existentialism, albeit in the opposite direction to that attributed to it by a tragic humanism in phase with the spiritual tendencies of the modern period, which was imbued with its metaphysics of sovereign and guilty subjects. Our subject now emerges from the bowels of the Earth, rather than from the problematic relationship it is supposed to have with itself. It is nonetheless a subject, in a sense still admittedly obscure and yet to be elaborated, but one which we will only clarify if we accept to perceive our own temporality as a way of immersing ourselves in the times that remain.
We can therefore understand the astonishing lack of understanding of the present that the decision to terminate Les Temps Modernes today demonstrates. Ceasing publication of this journal shows a lack of understanding not only of the present, but also of the way it relates to the past, as well as of the task facing us if we want to come to terms with this very present by clarifying our relationship to the past, and the way in which it still makes sense to talk about future and collective action in such a context. The need for an intellectual journal aimed at a general readership has never been more pressing than today, and for an intellectual journal of exactly the kind Les Temps Modernes aspired at being, i.e. a journal that addresses the question of the shared, distributed responsibility for an ongoing process of totalization that carries everything in some common fate, although very differently. And nothing qualifies our present, and the urgency with which it confronts us, better than this challenge to each particular unit of agency (be it individual or collective) in his or her relationship to the whole.
It may be objected that it is characteristic of Moderns never to understand what they are doing – that it is therefore in the logic of a journal called Les Temps Modernes to close down at the very moment when its original project finally acquires its maximum meaning and unquestionable evidence. Fair point. But we are all the more compelled to refuse this simple liquidation. Precisely because Modernity cannot be liquidated like that. It will take a lot of work to get it through. And that’s why there might not be any better place than the very interruption of the journal Les Temps Modernes for those who want to respond to the most profound challenge of our time. We find in it all the ambiguities and equivocations characteristic of the problem of our present insofar as it finds itself in the situation of coming after, and therefore in a certain way of continuing without repeating what preceded it, and above all of resisting a certain toxic mode of temporalization that perpetuates itself in its very way of believing itself to be past.
All this, I hope, clarifies the urgency of the moment: to create a collective framework in which we can take note of the inevitably totalitarian (terraforming) dimension of our lives, by multiplying investigations, points of view, hypotheses and audacities, in order simply to become more precise about the way in which we make the planetary whole that makes us in return, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, and this in each of our actions (whatever their ‘scale’ might be) and, above all, our inactions. The real question is to know what kind of earthlings we are, and also how many kinds of earthlings there are on this Earth, how these earthlings can unite or fight each other precisely according to their respective modes of terrestrialization, what alliances and what front lines we need to draw according to the Earth we want. Inheriting modern times therefore means looking back at the history of modernity to discern both what the remains of modernity are doing to the Earth and what can be diverted from these dynamics, which are rolling fast towards a certain number of irreversibilities on which we can still act, in order to change the course of things and reopen up a destiny for the Earth other than that of being no more than the remainder of an exhausted Modernity.
For all those reasons, we shouldn’t resign ourselves to the discontinuation of Les Temps Modernes, but rather inherit Les Temps Modernes. Now, the question is: how? This is, as ever, the most important question: what is to be done? We must finally come to that.
4. Les Temps Qui Restent.
The small group that the last editorial board brought together, at the initiative of Juliette Simont and myself, to consider what should be done with this interruption of Les Temps Modernes, took up and discussed the project that we had presented to the publisher. At the end of these discussions, I presented a draft that met with the approval of many of us, both inside and outside the editorial committee. It is this draft that I would now like to present to readers, so that they in turn can judge how it resonates with what they perceive to be the demands of the present, understand better what we are doing under the heading of Les Temps qui restent, and possibly decide to join it in one way or another.
A title : Les Temps Qui Restent (TQR)
One thing is clear: such a project could not be called Les Temps Modernes. Firstly, as I said, because there is a legal owner of this title, as we discovered during our dealings with Antoine Gallimard. Secondly, because, after all, such a title would probably not mark enough of a break in the continuity that the project itself sets out to capture: to follow on, to take over, to inherit, cannot be purely and simply to reaffirm. We can’t turn our backs on modern times, true, but we have nonetheless to change our relationship to it – and the title of our project had to mark this blend of rupture and continuity.
One title stood out: Les Temps Qui Restent – the times that remain. We have been driven out of modern times? So be it. We will contribute to shape the times that remain! The journal will no longer be call “the TM”, it will be called “the TQR”.
This title, of course, retains the same amphibological play as the one it succeeds. Les Temps Qui Restent is at once the name both of a magazine and of an era, more precisely of our present, characterized, in its most specific sense, as those times that remain, this short span of time we still have to bend the processes underway before the thresholds of irreversibility more or less conceptualized through the ‘planetary boundaries’ are passed. Those “Times that Remain” are also, of course, what remains of the journal Les Temps Modernes, which, let us repeat, has not been formally achieved but interrupted, and interrupted by the authority of an owner who neither initiated it nor produced it on a daily basis, who has, therefore, in the exact sense, appropriated it. We believe that the abrupt break with the journal that called itself Les Temps Modernes and with the epoch it sought to capture through that title, came at the wrong moment, and that we now need a journal devoted to making an inventory of the remains of Modernity in which we are condemned to live, and which constitute the condition for the collective or individual actions we can take to reopen an earthly future what would regain its openness, its diversity, its adventurousness. Those “Times that Remain” are therefore also these other times that have yet to be discovered, that are not yet here, that we do not yet know how to make room for, those multiple futures that we can only give a chance to if we really stop being modern. So there you have it, enough arguments in favor of this title: Les Temps qui restent it will be.
A project: an intellectual journal for a general readership
Les Temps Qui Restent refers to the forced inheritance of Les Temps Modernes. But why does it have to be a journal? Is this the most appropriate form to respond to the problem captured by the very title of this project? And besides, what is a journal?
The question remains rather enigmatic. For my part, I have arrived at a fairly simple, albeit precise, definition: a journal is a collective of producers of worked cultural forms, in search of a common desire. Let’s break down this definition a little, which will help us to clarify the project.
A journal is first and foremost a collective, in other words a tool for coming together, for pooling forces in order to have a greater capacity to act on the world. There’s always a simple reason for forming a collective: one is weaker than many. A journal, like any other collective, is necessarily part of the balance of power that structures the world in which and from which we live, and tries to influence it in order to change something in its order, or at least, in its course and trends. It is therefore necessarily political in nature: it is a small war machine. Gathering forces, forging alliances, mapping out convergent vectors, in order to carry more weight – such is the function of a journal, and we must never forget it and end up believing that a journal could be an end in itself.
But a general interest journal is not just any kind of collective. Each collective is defined both by its type of action and by its aim. The kind of action taken by the collective that makes up an intellectual magazine of general interest can be defined as follows: it hopes to act through what I would call ‘worked cultural forms’. The expression ‘producers of worked cultural forms’ would replace with advantage what Sartre called ‘intellectuals’, which in turn replaced the reviled expression ‘men of letters’, mocked by Sartre in his ‘Presentation of Modern Times’. Both terms correspond to an outdated state of the world order, of its division in fields of activity, of the forms of legitimacy and authority; both are at odds with the question we need to deal with in the times left to us. Our intention is to bring together people who can give shape to this still obscure relationship between our particular (individual or collective) actions and the form of the ‘Whole-Earth’ that makes us as much as we make it. Since this relationship is by definition non-immediate, we need to create forms, sensitive realizations,that allow it to be felt. This can be done in many ways: by elaborating concepts (philosophy), by providing correct information (knowledge), by changing our perceptions (arts and literature), by inventing devices for action (be it technical, political or militant), in short by intervening in one of the aspects in which human beings deploy their own earthly existences, which after all can be properly referred to as ‘culture’. The distinctive feature of a journal aiming at a general readership, as opposed to a scholarly journal or the internal organ of some established organization (party, trade union, company, NGO, administration, etc.), is that it is concerned with potentially any area of culture. Les Temps Qui restent will therefore be interested in any practice that contributes to shaping a mode of terrestrial habitation that has a knock-on effect on the planetary trajectory that makes it possible. It will mobilize the entire field of culture in a reflection on its own present.
However, I use the term “worked cultural forms” because, if we adopt an objective (socio-anthropological) definition of culture, everyone produces cultural forms all the time, if only by speaking (but also by dressing, styling one’s walk, listening to music, becoming aware of a landscape, etc.). On the other hand, making of one’s work on a cultural form the goal of one’s activity, or more precisely producing a cultural form that manifests in itself the fact that it has been produced as a result of hesitation, research –in short, work– specifies a particular kind of activity, which, without being confined to the overly rigid compartments of “high culture” (literature, philosophy, science, etc.), nevertheless prevents dissolving it into the whole range of human activities. We want to bring together people who are involved in cultural production in a specific way: because they work in it.
By «worked cultural forms» I therefore mean texts, but also images, sounds, actions and events which, without necessarily being produced by specialists, are nevertheless the result of some work and therefore of a normative commitment to what that practice should be, and which moreover manifest in themselves the fact that they are the result of that commitment. It doesn’t only mean those cultural forms that are the result of some reflection (you can listen to music with a great deal of thought, care and discrimination), but cultural forms that include in their realization the manifestation of a normative decision about the practice they belong to. We produce knowledge every day, without even realizing it; but knowledge content that is produced while promoting a certain idea of what knowledge (or a certain kind of knowledge) should be, corresponds more or less to the field of science (and also, incidentally, to what a shaman does when she ‘dreams’ by giving herself visions). The same applies to all cultural activities: they require more or less spontaneous, more or less thoughtful, forms, but also more or less work – and all of this (spontaneity, thought, work) do not amount to the same. ‘Workers of cultural forms’ therefore include scientists, whether from the social sciences (sociologists, economists, anthropologists, geographers, etc.) or the so-called ‘natural’ sciences (climatologists, physicists, geochemists, mathematicians, etc.), as well as philosophers, anthropologists, geographers and also writers, artists, film-makers, graphic artists, stylists, designers, not forgetting engineers, doctors, craftsmen and even those who want to invent new ways of living in the ordinary sense, love or sexual practices, styles of friendship and kinship – anyone, in short, who tries to put one part of culture or another to work, provided, of course, that this work is intended to be (or can be seen to be) in one way or another a response to the problem of the Great Contraction.
Finally, I spoke of a collective in search of a common desire, because I don’t think there’s any point in founding a journal if we don’t think that there are several of us who want to do things together. – ‘We’? ‘We’ who?, you might enquire. – We, the producers of worked cultural forms who will decide to form this We by recognizing themselves in the intention of this journal, to the exclusion of other ways of producing worked cultural forms, and therefore against other collectives. This last point is essential, and helps us to better understand the difference between a journal and a medium or a newspaper.
We had the chance to talk to Sylvain Bourmeau, the founder of the online ‘daily newspaper of ideas’ AOC, about this difference, during the preparatory meetings that led to the decision of launching this journal. AOC is a newspaper. It deals with news of a specific kind, since they are ideas, but it is a newspaper, not a journal, because it doesn’t seek to bring contributors together so as to investigate a hypothetical collective desire that would bring them together in this medium. Admittedly, it allows different groups to do so indirectly: by reading it on a daily basis, you can get a map of what’s going on in French, francophone, and partly international ‘intellectual’ life, making it easier to identify your sympathies and antipathies. But a newspaper doesn’t try to define a line of force likely to bring everyone together in a common direction. AOC is like Le Monde, Libération, The Guardian, The New York Times, and so on. It’s about providing information. It singles itself out by providing information about ideas; but it provides information. If it has an editorial line (just like all other newspapers), it concerns the quality of the publications: the aim is to give a certain idea of the diversity of quality work being done around us in the fields of culture, research and ideas, so that each and every one of us can then, individually or collectively, create our own polarized vision of the present moment in a more informed way (which is what we can expect from a good newspaper in general). Of course, no newspaper is impartial, but it operates nonetheless on the backdrop of the hypothetical separation of fact and comment: if it were to abandon this distinction, it would no longer belong to what has been called ‘journalism’.For a discussion of the historical originality and ontological form of this invention of ‘news’, which has accompanied what has been called ‘journalism’, see the recent work by Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Qu’est-ce que l’actualité politique? Événements et opinions au XXIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 2021. Ideological bias and partiality are inevitable, but they cannot be in themselves the aim of any journalistic project worth this title – or it has become something slightly different from ‘journalism’ (understood precisely as a modern institution).
On this respect, a good journal is quite different from a good newspaper. It must aim for more than the quality of the content it offers in terms of news or information. It must aim to clarify a collective desire with regard to an important issue. A good newspaper may seek to defend at least relative impartiality, precisely in order to aim for quality of information; a journal must never stop there. It must at least have the hope of drawing a line, that is to say, an image of how collective energies can be brought together in one direction, in this case the direction that best meets the civilizational challenge of the Great Contraction. While it must maintain a certain quality of information, this is not its primary aim, but only a necessary condition if the mobilization of collective energies it aims to achieve is to be effective and meaningful.
This, however, does not imply that it should have an a priori ideological line: Sartre always opposed to this, and we will maintain this attitude in the TQR. But a journal must operate under the presupposition of the possibility of having such a line emerge a posteriori and must work in view of such a clarification. A journal gives an image of what we could do together. It is according to me the essential core of any journal: the collective desire of workers in cultural forms who do not necessarily know in advance precisely what they want to do together, but who, until there is proof to the contrary, want to find it, and who ensure that the people selected to do this work together have something coherent to propose. The journal is therefore the place where we continually question the grounds of this desire we have to do something together. A journal unfolds the hermeneutics of such a desire by a collective of ‘cultural’ workers.
It follows that all workers in cultural forms who recognize themselves in the question ‘how to inherit Modern Times’ as I have formulated it, who think that we need to unite in order to weigh in on this question in a certain sense, and this against certain forces that do not allow this particular sense of the question to be asserted, and therefore also against other collectives of cultural workers, are all likely to be part of the collective of the journal Les Temps Qui Restent.
Admittedly, that’s a lot of people. But a journal is defined not only by its own question (in this case, for us: how to respond to the Great Contraction, how to reterrestrialize Modernity) and a certain intuition that guides its recruitment a priori (which I’ll come back to), but also by its style. What will be the stylistic features of Les Temps qui restent? Let’s turn to this now.
A style: freedom of format, content and direction
There was a stylistic or formal identity specific to Les Temps Modernes, and it’s worth asking ourselves whether or not we want to inherit it. What was that identity? I would simply say it with an eminently Sartrean word: freedom.
First of all, freedom of format. The extraordinary heterogeneity of forms and formats is one of the most striking features of the archives of Les Temps Modernes. This freedom is evident in all areas. Unlike many other publications, Les Temps Modernes refused to impose a fixed word count; it did not demand any particular linguistic register (formal, scientific, serious, satirical, or other); it did not impose any a priori standards of scientific rigor or aesthetic orientation. It included texts of 100 pages as well as others of just one page, prose as well as poetry, statistical graphs as well as interviews…
This has been a constant in all the discussions we’ve had about the various projects we’ve come up with to relaunch the journal: this characteristic feature of Les Temps Modernes has never been called into question. Les Temps Qui Restent will retain the freedom of Les Temps Modernes: no size limits, no stylistic standards, no format obligations, – to which we will add: no restrictions on the medium (text, images, podcasts, videos, etc.). Not that we intend to publish everything that is sent to us. But we don’t think it’s a good idea to limit the publishable space in advance on the basis of criteria of this kind, and we’re leaving it to the critical intelligence of the collective to judge on a case-by-case basis what should be included in the body and corpus of our publications. We feel that such diversity is essential if we are to produce a magazine for a truly general readership, i.e. one that captures something of the Whole or of what matters to all (although differently). The freedom that will reign at Les Temps Qui Restent is the counterpart of the problem it tackles. For how can we a priori format a collective that sets out to better grasp our respective dealings with the “whole-Earth”?
Freedom of format, then, but also freedom in the choice of subjects: it should be possible to discuss geopolitics, economics, literary theory, monographs on authors or surveys of contemporary events. Freedom, too, in the profile of the authors: in Les Temps Modernes you could find anonymous young people involved in the ‘black blocs’ alongside some of the most established writers of the time, without any of them being able to sign using their titles, which never appeared in the signature, much to the surprise of some…
And finally, freedom in relation to established ideological orientations. This last point, of course, is essential. As we have said, if a journal is justified only by the possibility of seeing a general line of thought emerging on the horizon, it does not have to presuppose it. This was exactly Sartre’s position: «We are all approaching the study of these problems in a common spirit; but we have no political or social agenda; each article will commit only its author. We only hope, in the long run, to identify a general line of thought.»Sartre, «Présentation des Temps Modernes», loc. cit. p. 225. The journal was characterized not by a line, but by a method. Merleau-Ponty said that the aim was «to decipher the present in as complete and faithful a way as possible, in a way that does not prejudge its meaning, that even recognizes chaos and nonsense where they happen to be.»Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, Paris, Gallimard, 1996, p. 205. (my translation)
Les Temps Qui Restent will inherit this ‘synthetic a posteriori’ spirit that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty put forward, but with a new condition: the terrestrial condition. Like them, we believe that we must be wary of the temptation to identify too quickly what gathers us all together. We have no reason to believe that the current divisions in the ideological field actually correspond to those we need in order to grasp the real problems posed by the Great Planetary Contraction. We should not necessarily suspend, but at least avoid hardening, the dividing lines that distribute allies and enemies in relation to the great task of inheriting modern times. Rather than embracing the current cleavages in the ideological field, we will make it our mission to constitute, in relation to the challenge of the Great Contraction, a diagonal of freedom, capable of composing a more relevant and effective force in the field of relations of forces (and weaknesses), within which we have to act collectively, to take charge of our present.
An online multimedia journal
But what will the journal actually look like? Paper or digital? Periodical or non-periodical? What will be the recruitment procedure? What rules will govern the selection of contributions? It’s time to get down to these very concrete questions.
After a great deal of thought, it became clear to us that the most reasonable form for such a project was that of an online journal, in other words a website. This does not preclude the possibility of occasional publications in paper form, but the life of the journal as we imagine it would no longer be centered on this. Is it still a journal? In the sense in which I have defined it, it seems to me that there is no doubt. But the words don’t matter. The fact is that the public sphere is now, and will be for many years yet to come, digitalized. And it is in this world that we want the TQR to make a difference; we must therefore take it as it is. Working in this digital world is the most direct way of implementing our project, which will not, of course, preclude paper publications associated with the journal.
I would first like to describe the architecture of the website as it is designed to structure the content, before concluding on the governance of the collective.
As far as the architecture is concerned, the key word that has guided our choices is the need for clarity, so that the terrestrial significance of what is happening to us can become clearer to as many people as possible. The journal will be divided into sections designed to make it easier to understand the proposed content and how it relates to the journal’s editorial project. They are six, which I will explain briefly.
The first section is entitled «Interventions»: it brings together contributions that draw attention to certain problems that are already identified in the public arena, possibly in order to displace them, and sometimes formulate opinions (either individual or collective - typically what we call “op-eds” in newspaper columns), sometimes reviews (critique of books, films, shows, YouTube channels, etc.), sometimes attempts at popularization (typically of scientific articles that have appeared elsewhere, possibly even in the journal itself, which can have two versions for one argument, an esoteric and exoteric one). This section will feature contributions that aim at shaping the public sphere by going out to find it where it stands, making efforts to explicate why something apparently specialized is in fact relevant for it, always in a spirit of generosity that consists in situating oneself in the midst of current events, debates of the day, passions and fashions, in that zone of the public sphere that is formatted by the press, social networks, ordinary conversations, in short, rumor. Of course, this content must be relevant to the question at hand: what to do with the times that remain?
Second section: «Studies». Here you will find contributions that may be academic, technical, scientific («hard sciences» or «soft sciences»), in the arts or in technology, likely to count in a relatively expert community. By separating the «Interventions» section from the «Studies» section, we try not to overwhelm the website’s users with contributions that are important for understanding the times that remain, but are nonetheless likely to put off non-experts, because they have to submit to judgment by peers rather than to information in the public arena. It would be desirable for the “Studies” contributions to also have a concise version published in the «Interventions» section. One of the great difficulties of our time is to reconcile the specialized dimension of knowledge, which we obviously need in order to deal with the times ahead, with the large publicity that goes hand in hand with the global nature of the times that remain. With this pair of sections, we will attempt to respond to this difficulty.
Third section: «Propositions». The aim here is to make room for works, whether texts, visuals or sounds, which neither respond directly to a particular problem already constructed and easily identifiable in the public sphere, nor claim a certain value in specialized areas of research and creation, but which in a way offer themselves to the world for their own sake. While “interventions” are generalist in nature, “studies” specialized, “propositions” have to do with the modality of singularity. If you write a philosophical axiomatic to sketch out a major metaphysical system, by definition it will not have a very clear relationship with this or that current disputed question, but it may nevertheless seem relevant to the overall project of the journal. It’s a way of proposing a world. A work of art can also fall into this category, and it is very important that artists should have a full place in this project, with their own desire, which is not necessarily to intervene explicitly in what is already preoccupying the public arena, even though their undertaking has, in their own eyes, and in our eyes, a relationship, perhaps still a little obscure and only intuitively perceived, with the collective questions that drive us. The same applies to a technological innovation or a scientific theory: we may feel that it communicates in spirit with a move to reterrestrialize its domain, even though we do not wish or cannot establish a direct link with the project to draw modernity back within the planetary boundaries. The aim of this section is to take on board the impossibility of describing, step by step, the mediations that link a human invention to the whole that conditions it and that it affects in return.
Fourth section: «Documents» – and the modality of this one is the fragmentary. It will bring together archives, personal accounts (it was one of the hallmarks of Les Temps Modernes to give a voice to people without authority, through the famous ‘lives’),See Esther Demoulin, “La vie des hommes infimes, Paroles d’anonymes dans Les Temps Modernes“, in Esther Demoulin & Juliette Simont (eds.), Les Temps Modernes, d’un siècle l’autre, Brussels, Éditions Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2023, pp. 247-267. as well as press reviews, graphs, statistics, announcements of events (conferences, performances, militant actions), and perhaps other formats that we cannot yet anticipate.During the preparatory workshops, Luc Boltanski, for example, expressed the wish to create a section devoted to the analysis of controversies. And, of course, with always the same requirement: to contribute in one way or another to giving us a better understanding of our involvement in the times ahead, themselves apprehended from the standpoint of how the Earth is being terraformed and how this could be made differently. The difference between the contributions in this section and the documentation that could be used in other contributions (e.g. scientific articles or essays) is that here documents are presented in their raw form, without any commentary, with only a caption (and possibly a short description) to highlight the nature of the document.
The penultimate section will be entitled «Dossiers» and it will be the thematic section of the site. These dossiers can either be ordered in advance, or generated a posteriori when a certain number of contributions belonging to the previous sections are found to form a thematic unit. Artificial intelligence tools could even be used to enable individual readers to automatically generate thematic dossiers based on their interests, going beyond a simple keyword search. The aim of this section is to constantly reorganize the various contributions within the journal into problematic groupings, thus compensating for any feeling of dispersion that the diversity of the contributions and their distribution in different sections may give rise to, and allowing an encyclopedic dimension to emerge a posteriori.
Finally, the last section will be entitled «Debates». After generality (militant), specialization (studious), singularity (inventive), fragmentation (documentary) and unity (thematic), comes division (internal). The aim here is to make visible the cleavages that run through the collective itself, in order to treat them as issues that are themselves collective, and as very real symptoms of the dynamics of reterrestrialization that constitute the core of our action. Unlike the ‘Interventions’, which can of course contain positions on issues that are disputed outside or inside the magazine, this section will stage the discussion explicitly, either by organizing conversations (written, podcasted, or filmed), or by mirroring positions that are clearly articulated in a dissensual mode with each other. The times that remain are not times of consensus. But divisions are not obstacles: they are tools of intelligibility. They also reveal what is still unresolved in our problems.
Such is the general structure of the Les Temps Qui Restent. Contributions can be published in French, English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and other languages, although the architecture of the site is in French. We will of course encourage translations, but we will not provide them systematically. Finally, the journal will have a specific periodicity: it will be quarterly. However, it will be fed by a continuous and irregular flow, with a weekly newsletter providing information on the contents published in the previous week and planned for the following week. Everything that will have been published online during the three months of the quarter will belong to it. The first issue of the journal is dated January-March 2024.
Governance: the Collective, the Council and the Executive Committee of the Temps qui restent
What is the governance of such a project? By its very nature, it does not seem to us to be compatible with the old notion of editorial board. Its governance will be based on what we propose to call a Council.In the first versions of this text, and in the published one, it was called the Parliament. But many expressed their discomfort with the political connotations of this word and one of the first decisions of the first ‘Parliament’ formally gathered as such, was actually to rename itself Council.The notion of editorial board seemed too restricted, too likely to give rise to well-known mechanisms of capture and power, deleterious in general and harmful in particular when it comes to mobilizing a very large number of people to contribute to a task as wide-ranging as that of bringing Modernity to land back on Earth. The Council is not comprised of but a few individuals, but of dozens.
The governance of Les Temps qui restent involves four circles:
the people who get courage and ideas from their attendance to the website and the other outcomes of our work (in short, our audience);
the people who contribute to fabricate this content on a more or less occasional basis (we’ll call them the «Collective of the Temps qui restent»);
the people who recognize themselves in the project and wish to take part in it to varying degrees in varied forms (this is what we call the «Council of Les Temps qui restent»);
the people who will be running the project on a day-to-day basis (who will form the «Temps Qui Restent Executive Committee»).
The functioning of the group will be based on the articulation of these four coexisting circles. The spirit that has guided us in defining the few procedural rules that organize this linkage is the desire to encourage the broadest possible involvement of each and every person in the achievement of a common goal (the reopening, from within the Anthropocene, of other futures for the Earth). We have to respond to a twofold constraint: to mobilize in large number, but to set a demanding course. To this end, we have organized the greatest possible asymmetry between the power to propose and the power to block, in favor of the former, in order to encourage the dynamic of participation, while taking care to avoid the privatization of the collective project. Proposition will always be more important to us than negation. Without going into the details of our little Constitution, here are a few details that will give you a better idea of how we work. After all, the way in which a terrestrial entity deals with the question of power says a lot about the Earth it projects…
Anyone (individual or collective) who has published in the TQR is automatically part of what we will call the «Collective of the Temps qui restent»: they have a page on the site where they can introduce themselves as they wish. However, we will add a few inclusivity constraints: we aim to have as many men as women at all levels of activity in the journal, just as we hope to have as many people under 40 as over 40, and finally, we would like there to be at least as many people who consider themselves to be part of a minority group (in other words, with a trait that triggers processes of discrimination, belittlement or exclusion, whether it be sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnic, racial, linguistic, health or class prejudice, etc.) as people who belong to the majority groups in our environment (white, straight, cis, CSP+, etc.)We are content to rely on people’s self-declaration to give us an assessment of these balances. Such questions always provoke fierce discussion: people will ask what the criteria are, whether we are confining people to their supposed «identities», etc. These difficulties are largely overestimated: the aim of such a measure is simply to keep the collective’s internal concerns about its own composition alive, it being understood that it would be rather strange for a collective that sets out to take up the question of the entanglement of the Whole in particular lives to be too homogeneous in its composition, at the risk of expressing a very biased point of view on the terrestrial question without even realizing it… A journal is not an administration, and it can afford flexible criteria: self-declaration as a person belonging to a minority sensibility (in the sense of being marked by historical and persistent processes of exclusion, intimidation and delegitimization) may therefore suffice.. If ever it turns out that there is a major imbalance, whether in the Collective of the TQR, its Council or its Executive Committee, we will use this as a reason to try to restructure these groups, going so far as to suspend our activities until a better balance has been found.
Thus, instead of an editorial board, Les Temps qui restent have a Council. The Council is the team that fabricates the TQR. Its role is to act, propose, discuss and, to a lesser extent, decide.
Power to act: any Councillor may unconditionally become a member of the Executive Committee and therefore have full capacity in the TQR.
Power to propose: any Councillor may make three types of proposals: a publication (by herself or others); the recruitment of a new member for the Council; the exclusion of a Councillor.
Power to advise: any member of the Council may participate without restriction in the discussions held in internal forums.
Power to decide: each member of the Council has three votes per year on each of the points mentioned (publication of texts, recruitment of members, exclusion of members).
Only members of the Executive Committee have unlimited voting (and therefore decision-making) powers, but there is no condition for membership of the Executive Committee other than to put oneself forward. The reason for this restrictive provision is to encourage the involvement of as many Councilpersons as possible in the Executive Committee and to associate power and action as closely as possible. Any Member of the Council can take part in the discussion, give their opinion and thus contribute to the debates, even if they do not vote. In this way, they can contribute to the collective decision without necessarily becoming involved in the operational labor of the journal. As one can easily see, it’s a question of creating an intermediate space between interest and commitment, which makes it possible to take account of the different gradients in the existence of a collective and the involvement of its forces.
The raison d’être of our journal is to bring about a collective force. Meeting is therefore essential. The Council of the TQR is in permanent contact via the private area of the website, but it will be invited to meet in person at a General Meeting twice a year, ideally on the occasion of public events organized around the publications of the TQR. Exceptional General Meetings may be called at any time by a majority decision of the Executive Committee. Smaller meetings on specific issues or thematic areas are encouraged.
How do you get into the TQR Council? Recruitment is obviously a key issue for any group, and one where power is particularly at stake. For Les Temps qui restent, the principle is simple: co-optation. A desire only exists if it is both determined and open: it doesn’t know where it’s going, but it knows where it’s starting from. That’s why any member of the Council of Les Temps qui restent can nominate another member. This candidacy is then open to online discussion and is approved or rejected by an online vote organized within three months of the proposal (except in the event of an emergency or extension procedure decided by the Executive Committee). A member of the Council cannot vote more than three times a year for the recruitment of a new member unless they have been a member of the Executive Committee for at least one year (i.e. they have carried out a certain number of editorial tasks: composed a dossier, managed the website, organized meetings, etc.). If at least two members of the Council wish to exclude another person from the Council, this proposal is put to the vote. And, of course, anyone can resign from the Council: they then have the right to write a text (or a contribution in any other media) which will be published immediately in the next issue, in the «Debates» section, explaining the reasons for their resignation. Conflicts will never be stifled at Les Temps Qui Restent.
As for the Executive Committee, any member of the Council may join it by their own decision. They must then publicly inform the Council as a whole. There is no vote on this point: the mere fact of having accepted a person into the Council means that we have also accepted that person’s active involvement in the Committee. Otherwise, why accept her at all? Les Temps qui restent will never be a party with members who are just so many dead souls. We believe in action and commitment, not approval and delegation.
The role of the Executive Committee is to carry out all the operational work required to fabricate the journal and to implement Council’s decisions. All members of the Executive Committee have the technical power to put contributions online on the public part of the website. Of course, they are expected to do so only if and when the texts have been validated beforehand, in accordance with the procedure I will outline below. Members of the Executive Committee are expected to reread the validated texts and suggest any corrections (language, style, clarification), in order to ensure the editorial quality of the publications. They are also expected to encourage contributions, produce dossiers and, in short, fabricate the journal regularly.
A person may be excluded from the Executive Committee on two grounds. Failure to act: this person is then excluded by a vote reserved for members of the Executive Committee (who alone are capable, in principle, of assessing this failure to act). A substantive reason: a person may be excluded from the Executive Committee for a substantive reason (i.e. not because she doesn’t do anything, but because the majority disapproves what she does), but she must then also be excluded from the Council, in accordance with the procedure reserved for this purpose. Any person subject to a procedure for internal exclusion from the Executive Committee on the grounds of inaction may always challenge this decision before the Council, which thus retains the power to determine what constitutes a good threshold of commitment for membership of the Executive Committee.
Finally, the main power within a journal is, of course, that of selecting the contributions that are made public, and thus determining the identity of the collective. Here again we will be seeking to maintain the delicate balance between rallying and selectivity. The first step is to ensure that contributions are open to anyone, whatever their title, status or network. Anyone can submit a contribution to the journal via a dedicated page on the website. The contribution is then made available to all members of the Council of the TQR in the private area of the site. This contribution is only proposed for publication if it has been validated by at least one member of the Council. The contribution is then considered pre-validated.
A contribution that has not been approved for 3 months is deemed to have been rejected. But, conversely, any contribution prevalidated by a member of the Council is automatically accepted if no one objects. This provision is important because it ensures that participation in the Council is not so much the power to judge texts as to propose them. Any member of the Council can submit a contribution (of which they might be the author) and prevalidate it themselves: it is then immediately proposed for publication. Being part of the TQR Council means being able to contribute to it. Not only is there no objection to a person wishing to have a contribution published in the journal she contributes to edit, but it is the very aim of the journal to create both an internal conversation and a collective capacity of action and reflection. Similarly, it is perfectly acceptable and even expected for anyone who wants to publish something in the TQR to contact directly a member of the Council she knows, who can then submit herself the contribution, and prevalidate it immediately, so as to have it discussed by the Council. One of the functions of the Council is precisely to bring in interesting contributions by joining our networks and webs of alliances.
Once a contribution has been submitted to the internal section of the website, a forum is opened, in the form of comments following the contribution, allowing online discussion on whether or not the text should be published, on the possible conditions for revision under which it would be considered publishable, or on any substantial questions it raises. Past 3 months, if no one has objected to the publication of a contribution pre-validated by a Member of the Council, it is automatically accepted. It is then passed on to the Executive Committee.
If at least one member of the Council is opposed, he or she makes this known, and an online vote is held in which the whole Council can participate. But beware: a Member of Council may not refuse more than three contributions per year if not involved also in the Executive Committee.
Once a contribution has been accepted, at least one member of the Executive Committee is tasked with reviewing it and, if necessary, correcting it, making only minimal corrections, of course, in discussion with the authors of the publication, but taking into account what he or she considers to be the journal’s quality requirements and possibly the outcomes of the discussions held within the Council about this contribution. The same person puts it online on the public section of the website. In the event of disagreement between the author and the member of the Executive Committee responsible for the editorial follow-up of the contribution, the author may inform the Executive Committee, which will appoint another member to continue the editorial work.
Entering the times that remain
Here is the little machine we’ve come up with, to follow on from Les Temps Modernes. Modern times no longer have a future, but they haven’t vanished into the past. They will be with us for a long time to come, and it would be a terrible mistake to turn our backs on them: we have to inherit modern times – which is why we also have to inherit Les Temps Modernes. Neither a continuation of the same thing, nor a radical break to go elsewhere –there is no elsewhere–, Les Temps Qui Restent proposes a formula to keep us in our own present without renouncing either what it receives from the past, or what it owes to the future. These times that remain are also those in which we have the opportunity of becoming real subjects, that is, of responding to a call surging from the depths of things, or to put it again differently, of inventing a new form of responsibility. Will we respond to that call? The question is an open one, and there is no guaranteed answer. But it is only more urgent to put ourselves to the test. Let’s get to work, then. Let’s see how we can shape collectively the times that remain!