The trace of the future

Abstract

To the ordered mind, memory does not exist in any easy or natural relation to the future. These are concepts, or activities of the mind, with manifestly different orientations, that point in opposite directions along the line of time: one points towards the past, and is concerned with the recovery of what has been; the other points forwards, concerned with what is to come. Their opposition draws upon the asymmetry of time, which confers fixity and actuality on past events and regards the future as open, virtual and susceptible to our efforts of will. This means that our sense of the contradiction between memory and futurity is connected to other tensions in our conceptual system, between certainty and uncertainty, necessity and contingency, or fixity and freedom.