I came across the following in a book of interviews with Michel Foucault this morning:
What is today? What are we today, who live today as the central present of our lives, as that which makes our lives present to us? And how can we recognize--as a way of resisting a set of narratives that continue to tell us that this today is a day unlike any before, that we face a set of challenges that have changed "everything"--the ordinariness of today, including the ordinariness of its fear, its war, and its violence?
Whether it's Sept. 11 or the recent presidential election, I think the danger of imagining today as the one time (the greatest damnation, the new world world order) is that it gets in the way of thinking productively about an actionable relation to the future. The thing that changes "everything" always comes to us from an apparent outside (Al Qaida, red-state America) and because of that threatens to leave us feeling helpless.
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