Advisor/tutor: Bassam el Baronii
Arnhem, July 2015

Abstract

My attempt in this text has been to chart out how I have seen the two words future and self put together to mean different things at different eras/places/times. While it this is not a chronological study, it does look at time as a focal point, a fulcrum which we always seem to return to – to re/define ourselves, re/construct definitions and re/historicise what we already know. Time, with the future at the center of it.

What do we do with the unshakable urgency to set right all that has gone horribly wrong, and what do we do next? The crisis in meaning is not new and has certainly changed over the years, as has our perception of what we think identity or reason means. With this comes a sense of hope that is purposefully and methodologically cultivated – again pleading toward the future for some answers, somewhere!

I have structured this paper along the lines of a journey: Beginnings, Export, Sighting in Time, Take Off etc., which already pre-supposes duration; it takes time to travel, to take-off and to land, to situate oneself and to measure all of it. There is already a deterritorialization and reterritorialization happening within movement, in however minute a scale: “Everyone, at every age, in the smallest things as in the greatest challenges, seeks a territory, tolerates or carries out deterritorializations, and is reterritorialized on almost anything: memory, fetish, or dream”

What then is our relationship to the Earth, and the Earth to thought?