Abstract
We live by remembering the past as much as by anticipating the future. Continuous recursive remediation is structured by both what comes before and what is expected to come after. Past and future are ontologically asymmetric: the past is actualised, the future unfinished. In mesocosmic coordination, however, the past and the future co-constitute each other. Mixed pastness distinguishes causal residue, incorporated trajectory and relationally consequential history; mixed futurity distinguishes projectable constraint, self-modifiable and jointly constituted possibility. The present is the recursive fold converting the second into the first. Differential temporalities across the five mediations, amplified in humans by material-symbolic infrastructure, explain why living requires coordinating heterogeneous timescales.
I. Introduction: Why Time Has Been Everywhere Without Becoming a Separate Theory
Temporal concepts recur throughout Living Value Theory, and none of them was introduced as part of a theory of time. Mixed futurity, the asymmetry between past and future, recursive opening and reopening, sedimentation, returnability, the persistence of trauma, the limits of prediction, the life of narrative, the setting of goals, the reconstruction of archaeological pasts, ageing, the rhythms of sleep, the law's conversion of past acts and counterfactual futures into present obligations: each of these was worked out in response to a particular problem, and each turned out to require a claim about how pasts and futures act in a present. Read singly, they look like separate temporal applications of a theory that is not itself about time. Read together, they show a pattern that needs explaining.
The explanation is simple to state. Living Value Theory studies continuous recursive remediation, and recursion is temporally structured by definition. A living process never begins again from zero. Every present coordination occurs under conditions partly produced by earlier coordination, and every present remediation changes what will subsequently be available. Something happens; what happens changes the conditions for what can happen next; what happens next takes up what happened before. A minimal architecture of before and after is already contained in the definition of recursion, and any theory that takes recursion as fundamental will keep encountering time, whatever problem it sets out to address.
The order of discovery matters here. Rather than beginning by asking what time is and then applying an answer to living processes, the theory began with living processes, with metabolism, discernment and coordination across five mediations, and it repeatedly encountered temporality because continuous mediation entails differential temporality. That order is also the order of justification. A metaphysics of time independent of life might establish that time has a direction, or that the future is open, or that the present is real, and then leave the living to fit themselves into whatever it had established. The argument here runs the other way. It asks what time must be like for the beings who live in it, given that they live by remediation, and it treats the answer as sufficient for its purposes without claiming to settle what time is apart from them.
The task of this article is therefore limited in one direction and ambitious in another. Rather than creating a sixth mediation called time or offering a metaphysics of time detached from living coordination, it makes explicit the temporal architecture that has been implicit in recursive mediation all along, and it shows that this architecture explains a wide range of phenomena, from a dog's anticipation of a walk to a pension system's forty-year promises, within a single account.
The central claim can be stated in a phrase: temporal directionality without temporal separability. Past and future have different ontological structures. The past has been actualised; the future has not. Yet living present activity can never be purified of either, because every present is made of what has been carried forward and what is anticipated, and neither can be subtracted without dissolving the present itself. The article develops two mirror concepts from this claim. Mixed pastness names the fact that pasts differ according to whether what persists from them was produced through nonrecursive, selfrecursive or interrecursive processes. Mixed futurity names the fact that futures differ according to whether what will happen depends mainly on nonrecursive constraint, selfrecursive remediation or interrecursive response. Both are multimediated, and both are enormously amplified in human life by the coupling of multimateriality and multisymbolization, through which archives, monuments, contracts, calendars, laws, plans, forecasts, genealogies, wills and models allow pasts and futures far outside immediate metabolic experience to become active in the present.
II. Why Time Is Not a Sixth Mediation
A reader might reasonably ask why, if temporality is so fundamental, time does not appear as a sixth mediation alongside embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multimateriality and multisymbolization. The answer is that time does not mediate alongside them. Every mediation unfolds temporally. Embodiment has temporal structure, in heartbeats, growth, fatigue and ageing. Relationships have temporal structure, in the timing of turns in a conversation and the accumulated history of a friendship. Dwelling has temporal structure, in days, seasons and the slow changes of a landscape. Material forms endure and decay. Symbols can persist, anticipate and recur. There is no additional channel called time through which living coordination occurs; there is only the temporal character of the channels there are.
An analogy helps. Every mediation has spatial extension: bodies occupy space, relations span distances, dwelling is always somewhere, objects have dimensions, and even symbols require a spatial substrate to exist. Yet space, which characterizes them all, is not thereby a further mediation standing beside the others. Temporality likewise characterizes the ongoing process of mediation as such, rather than supplying a sixth dimension of it. To list time as a mediation would be a category mistake of the same kind as listing length among the materials of which a table is made.
The point can be sharpened. Mediation without temporality would cease to be remediation. If nothing carried forward from one moment to the next, nothing could be recursively modified, because there would be no prior state for the modification to modify. If nothing could become otherwise, there would be nothing to remediate, because every condition would already be final. Remediation requires both a retained past and an unfinished future, and it is precisely the relation between them that makes a process recursive rather than a series of disconnected occurrences.
This gives a deeper reason why Living Value Theory cannot be a static ontology. Its fundamental units are processes rather than states, and a process is something that has a before and an after and is organised by the relation between them. What might look like a static classification in the theory, five mediations, five levels of recursivity, three types of recursive counterparts, describes a configuration that is continuously updated, and the updating is where the theory's objects actually live. Temporality is therefore the medium in which the architecture operates rather than a further item within it.
III. The Asymmetry: The Past Has Happened, the Future Has Not
The ordinary explanation of why hindsight is easier than foresight is epistemic: we have more information about the past than about the future. The stronger claim that Living Value Theory makes is ontological. The past and the future differ in structure. Interrecursive futures remain open because the responses that will constitute them have not yet occurred, whereas past recursive sequences have already acquired determinate form. The future is unfinished; the past is finished in occurrence.
The contrast has a striking consequence. The deep past can be more intelligible than the immediate future. A site like Göbekli Tepe, built by hunter-gatherers some eleven and a half thousand years ago, can be reconstructed with considerable confidence in its embodied labour, its material and logistical intelligence, its environmental setting and the organizational scale of its gatherings, while the outcome of a negotiation to be held next week cannot be known at all, however much is known about the parties. The builders of the site are no longer responding to anything, including the archaeologist's interpretation of them. The parties to the negotiation are still constituting it.
The asymmetry needs refinement at once, and the refinement motivates everything that follows. Closed does not mean fully known. Open does not mean unconstrained. The past can be almost completely lost to us: whole languages, whole ways of life, whole relationships have left no trace from which they could be recovered. The future can be heavily stabilised: the sun will rise tomorrow, the tide will turn at its appointed hour, a well-established institution will very probably meet next Tuesday as scheduled. The distinction concerns actuality, not certainty.
Stated precisely, the difference is this. What happened in the past is no longer ontologically negotiable, although its interpretation can remain recursively open. What will happen in the future may be tightly constrained, but it is not yet fully actualised, and where recursive beings are involved in producing it, it is still being made.
A second distinction follows, and it will carry much of the later argument: the distinction between ontological closure and recursive reopening. An event cannot unhappen. Its significance, however, can become newly consequential. A letter discovered in an attic, a diagnosis that reveals the meaning of old symptoms, a court judgment that reclassifies what a contract was, a story that retells an ancestor's deed: none of these changes what occurred, and each can change what the occurrence now does. The past is closed in one respect and open in another, and conflating the two respects produces most of the familiar confusions about whether the past can be changed. Unchangeable in occurrence, it is changed constantly in consequence, because it is continually being taken up by present remediation that did not exist when it happened.
The same distinction clarifies why historical controversy is possible at all. If the past were ontologically open, disputes about it would be disputes about what to make happen, and could be settled by acting. If the past were recursively closed as well, disputes about it would be settled by evidence alone. Actual historical controversy has neither shape. It is argument about a determinate past whose significance remains in play, which is why it can be fierce, consequential and interminable while still being about something that cannot be altered.
IV. Mixed Futurity: Three Ways the Future Can Be Open
Mixed futurity is sometimes read as a claim about degrees of predictability, as if futures simply ranged from easy to forecast to hard. The concept makes a stronger claim. It distinguishes different ontological structures of futurity, according to the type of recursive counterpart whose activity produces the future in question.
Nonrecursive futurity. Here the counterpart does not respond to being anticipated. Gravity, tides, the trajectory of a falling rock, the mechanical wear of a bearing: none of these alters its behaviour because someone predicts it. Weather, despite its extreme complexity and the practical impossibility of forecasting it far ahead, is nonrecursive in this sense. The storm does not arrive later because the forecast says it will arrive early. Prediction in such domains may be practically very difficult, but its difficulty is a matter of complexity, sensitivity and incomplete information, and the prediction itself does not enter the process it predicts.
Selfrecursive futurity. Here the future depends partly on what the living being presently does with itself. Learning, healing, training, the formation and breaking of habits, the anticipation of pain and the arrangement of life around it, the acquisition of skill: in each, the being's own present remediation is among the conditions of its future. Expectation can modify the trajectory it expects. A runner who anticipates fatigue paces differently; a patient who expects recovery may rest in ways that help it along; a student who believes a skill is beyond her may practise less and thereby confirm the belief. The predicted self becomes an input into the acting self.
Interrecursive futurity. Here another recursive centre responds to what one does, and may respond to one's anticipation of what they will do. Conversation, courtship, negotiation, conflict, markets in which actors respond to forecasts, politics, therapy: in all of these the future is jointly constituted. Neither party holds it. Robert Merton's self-fulfilling prophecy, in which a false belief that a bank is failing produces the run that makes it fail, is the canonical case (Merton 1948). Ian Hacking's looping effects, in which the classification of kinds of people changes the people classified and thereby the classification, extend the point to the human sciences (Hacking 1995). In interrecursive domains, a published prediction is an intervention.
A qualification is essential: interrecursivity does not equal unpredictability. Long relationships can be highly predictable, and much of culture consists in making interrecursive coordination settled enough to be relied on. Storms can be wildly unpredictable. The distinction concerns what produces the future, not how hard it is to forecast. An old married couple may be able to finish each other's sentences with near certainty; the certainty is still an achievement of their mutual responsiveness, and it can be broken by either of them in a way that no degree of meteorological uncertainty can break a storm's indifference to being forecast.
Hence the formulation of mixed futurity: every lived future combines differently weighted nonrecursive, selfrecursive and interrecursive components. A farmer's harvest depends on weather, which is nonrecursive; on the farmer's own skill and effort, which are selfrecursive; and on markets, neighbours, lenders and the state, which are interrecursive. A patient's recovery depends on the course of a disease, on the patient's own conduct, and on the responses of doctors, family and insurers. There is no single generic future. There are only futures of mixed constitution, and much practical wisdom consists in discerning which component dominates a given situation and treating it accordingly.
The discipline of this discernment is old. Aristotle's discussion of whether it is true today that there will be a sea battle tomorrow already distinguished what is necessary from what is contingent on deliberation and action, and refused to let the contingent be absorbed into the necessary merely because statements about it must eventually turn out true or false (Aristotle, De Interpretatione 9). The account given here specifies what makes the contingent contingent in living life: the involvement, in its production, of beings who are still remediating.
V. Mixed Pastness: The Missing Mirror Concept
If futures differ according to recursive structure, pasts must differ too. The concept of mixed pastness completes the symmetry that mixed futurity implies, and it has been the less developed half.
Nonrecursive pastness. A rock face, a river's course, a burned layer in a soil profile, a broken bone considered as a material trace: in each, past conditions persist causally. Reconstruction concerns what happened and what physical consequences remain. It may be difficult, requiring stratigraphy, dating, chemistry and inference, and it may be highly path-dependent, requiring reconstruction of the particular sequence by which a present state arose. What it never has to recover is an interpretation. Nothing in the nonrecursive counterpart took what happened as anything.
Selfrecursive pastness. A wound one learned to compensate for, a skill acquired over years, a fear developed after an accident, a habit, a changed bodily capacity: here the past persists partly because the same recursive being took it up and reorganised itself through it. The past has become part of present self-remediation. A limp is not only the trace of an old fracture but the continuing solution that a body has found to it, and a pianist's hands carry the past as capacity rather than as scar. To reconstruct a selfrecursive past is to recover not only what happened to a being but what that being made of what happened, and what the making did to what followed.
Interrecursive pastness. A promise, a betrayal, a marriage, a humiliation, an alliance, a conversation, a family history: here reconstruction may require not only what happened but what A took B to have done, how B understood A's response, what each subsequently carried forward, and how later relations changed as a result. The past persists in several recursive centres at once, each with its own version, and the differences between versions are themselves among the facts to be reconstructed. Such a past is historically closed and recursively open. What was done cannot be undone, and what was done can still be taken up, reinterpreted, forgiven, avenged, disputed or honoured by those who carry it forward.
Narrative is the most familiar human means of dealing with the third kind. It retains enough of an interrecursive past for later action to remain intelligible as response to earlier action. Mixed pastness, however, is not a theory of narrative. Narrative is one human technology for handling especially dense forms of mixed pastness, and it coexists with many others: the court record, the ledger, the medical history, the genealogy, the archaeological section, the scar, the habit. Each is suited to a different mixture. The court record is designed to fix an interrecursive past in a form that can be adjudicated; the medical history, to follow a selfrecursive trajectory through a body; the geological survey, to reconstruct a nonrecursive sequence with no participant stakes at all.
The mirror formulation can now be given, and it is one of the article's central sentences: mixed futurity concerns differently constituted possibilities; mixed pastness concerns differently constituted consequences. A future is mixed because its possibilities are produced by different kinds of counterpart. A past is mixed because its consequences were produced by different kinds of counterpart, and persist in them differently.
Mixed pastness also explains the differential recoverability of the past across mediations. Nonrecursive consequences persist in material and environmental traces, which can survive for immense spans. Selfrecursive consequences persist in bodies, which die, but whose shared anatomy lets later bodies grasp much of what earlier ones underwent. Interrecursive consequences persist in relations, which thin rapidly once the participants are gone, and in symbolic records, which survive only where durable inscription and ordinary discourse survive. The deep past is thus most recoverable in its nonrecursive and embodied dimensions and least recoverable in the explicit symbolic meanings through which its participants coordinated across absence. The optimal window for reconstructing a recent interrecursive past lies roughly ten to twenty-five years after the events, when the loops have closed enough for their pattern to be visible and the participants are still alive to correct one another's accounts.
VI. A Systematic Past/Future Matrix
The two concepts can be set side by side in a single matrix, crossing the three types of recursive counterparts with the two temporal directions.
| Recursive counterpart | Pastness | Futurity |
|---|---|---|
| Nonrecursive | causal residue | projectable constraint |
| Selfrecursive | incorporated trajectory | self-modifiable possibility |
| Interrecursive | relationally consequential history | jointly constituted possibility |
Read by rows, the matrix shows a symmetry. Nonrecursive past and future have the strongest potential for projectability: what persists from a nonrecursive past is causal residue, which can be read without any participant's view being consulted, and what lies ahead in a nonrecursive future is constraint, which can in principle be projected from present conditions. Selfrecursive past and future introduce learning and self-alteration: the past is an incorporated trajectory that the being has made its own, and the future is a possibility the being can modify by what it does now. Interrecursive past and future introduce multiple responsive centres: the past is a history whose consequences are relational and differently held, and the future is a possibility that no participant can produce alone.
Read by columns, the matrix shows an asymmetry that the symmetry of the rows must not be allowed to hide. The arrow of actualisation runs in one direction across all three rows. The future becomes past through actualisation, and the past does not become future again. A projectable constraint, once the tide has turned, becomes causal residue in the sand. A self-modifiable possibility, once the practice has been done or not done, becomes an incorporated trajectory. A jointly constituted possibility, once the conversation has been held, becomes a relationally consequential history. Nothing in the right-hand column is ever produced from the left-hand column by reversal. The past can be recursively reopened, and its significance can change, but it does not return to the condition of being undecided.
This yields a formulation that the next section develops: the present is the conversion zone between mixed futurity and mixed pastness. The present, on this account, is a zone of active remediation in which inherited conditions encounter open possibilities, and in which the open is continuously converted into the closed. What happens in the present is the actualisation of some of the possibilities in the right-hand column, and their consequent entry into the left.
The matrix is deliberately simple, and actual situations mix its cells. A single morning's work in a garden involves the nonrecursive past of the soil, the selfrecursive past of the gardener's skill, the interrecursive past of a disagreement with a neighbour about the fence, and on the other side the projectable weather, the gardener's intention to finish the bed before lunch, and the neighbour's likely response to the new planting. The matrix describes the components from which every situation is temporally composed, rather than kinds of situation.
VII. The Present Is Not a Point: It Is a Recursive Fold
The present is always temporally thick. A person's current posture contains years of learning to stand, walk and sit in particular ways. A relationship contains its remembered exchanges, including those neither party could now recall. A house contains the decisions of those who built it. A spoken word activates centuries of linguistic stabilisation, without which it would be noise. At the same time, the present contains anticipation: what I expect you to say, where I am going, what I fear, what I have promised, what I expect this object to do when I lift it.
The present therefore cannot be a knife-edge separating past and future, a point-instant with no duration of its own. Augustine already saw that the three times exist, if they exist anywhere, as a present of things past in memory, a present of things present in attention, and a present of things future in expectation (Augustine, Confessions XI). William James called the experienced present "specious" because it has a breadth in which a sequence can be grasped at once (James 1890), and Edmund Husserl analysed the living present as a field structured by retention of what has just passed and protention of what is about to come (Husserl 1991). Each of these accounts describes the thickness of the present as it appears to a conscious subject. The account here generalises the point from consciousness to living coordination across all five mediations, and from the moment of experience to every scale at which remediation occurs. The present is where sedimented pasts and anticipated futures become mutually consequential, whether in the millisecond adjustment of a foot to uneven ground or in the parliamentary session that implements a manifesto promise under the weight of a century of constitutional precedent.
Hence the qualification that must accompany the asymmetry of Section III: past and future can never be absolutely separated in continuous living remediation. Every present operation draws on both, and no operation can be performed by a being that has only one. A being with no retained past could not recognise what it now encounters; a being with no anticipated future could not orient toward what to do with it.
Yet the inseparability must not be allowed to collapse the directional difference. Past and future remain structurally different, and what cannot be separated is their operation in present coordination rather than their ontological status. The anticipated future acts in the present as anticipation, which is itself present; the retained past acts as retention, which is also present; and the difference between them lies in what each is anticipation or retention of, a determinate actuality in one case and an unfinished possibility in the other.
A second formulation captures this, and it may be even cleaner than the first: ontologically asymmetric, mesocosmically entangled. The two formulations belong together. Temporal directionality without temporal separability states the principle; ontological asymmetry with mesocosmic entanglement states where each half of the principle holds. The asymmetry is a fact about what past and future are. The entanglement is a fact about how they operate in the world of a living being.
VIII. Differential Temporalities: There Is No Single Mesocosmic Clock
Different mediations operate across radically different characteristic durations. These are tendencies rather than exclusive ranges: each mediation has a bandwidth, with a zone to which its processes are typically drawn and massive variation around it.
Embodiment works across sensorimotor adjustments of fractions of a second, the seconds and minutes of hunger, pain and arousal, the hours of sleep and fatigue, the years of growth, ageing and training, and the span of a single lifetime in bodily development. Its bandwidth, measured against the other mediations, is relatively short: even a sequoia's two thousand years are a moment on the scale of a landscape.
Being-with works across the fine timing of interaction, the turn-taking that falters if a reply comes half a second late; the minutes of a conversation; the years of a friendship; the decades of a marriage; the generations of kinship. Once symbolically extended, being-with can reach across centuries of remembered hostility or alliance. Its temporality is also the most open of the five, since its counterpart responds to one's own responses, and its future is therefore jointly generated.
Dwelling works across momentary orientation in a place, the daily return to the same ground, seasonal movement, the habitation of a region across generations, and landscapes that unfold over centuries or millennia. The rhythms of dwelling are largely set by processes that owe nothing to the living: the rotation of the planet, the tilt of its axis, the migration of rivers and the slow advance and retreat of ice.
Multimateriality works across the hammer blow, the tool that lasts decades, the house that lasts centuries, the road system that lasts millennia. Material mediation extends the effective lifetime of action beyond the actor. Its characteristic aim is durability, or at least predictable change, since a material form is useful to the extent that its future behaviour can be relied on.
Multisymbolization works across the spoken word that vanishes as it is uttered, the promise that lasts years, the legal category that lasts centuries, the religious text that lasts millennia, and the mathematical statement that is potentially reproducible without limit. Symbolization rests on the premise that a symbol is the same symbol each time it is used, and it thereby aims at a kind of release from time; mathematics is the purest case, since a proof is valid whenever it is checked.
The strong claim follows: there is no single mesocosmic temporality, because a mesocosm coordinates processes operating at radically different temporal scales. Living is therefore in large part the continuous coordination of heterogeneous temporalities. The body's need for sleep, the relationship's need for attention, the season's demand for sowing, the tool's slow wear, the contract's due date: all must be coordinated within a single life, and none of them runs on the others' time.
Clock time does not solve this problem; it is one of the instruments for managing it. The clock is itself a poietic achievement, a multimaterial and multisymbolic device that stabilises one uniform measure across all the mediations so that their heterogeneous rhythms can be coordinated against a common reference. E. E. Evans-Pritchard distinguished among the Nuer an ecological time set by the rhythms of cattle and seasons from a structural time reckoned through lineage and age-set, and noted that neither was experienced as an abstract continuum against which activities were measured (Evans-Pritchard 1940). E. P. Thompson showed how industrial capitalism imposed the clock on working life and how contested the imposition was (Thompson 1967). The five mediations cannot be meaningfully measured in clock time alone, because clock time is a symbolic stabilisation laid over their differential temporalities, and its usefulness depends on its indifference to all of them.
This opens the possibility that many forms of misalignment are fundamentally temporal. A process can be too fast or too slow, too early or too late. A being can wait, lag, rush, outlive or be left behind. The body can demand rest while the deadline demands work; a child can need years while a policy allows months; a grief can require a pace that the workplace will not grant; a landscape can change on a timescale that institutions cannot perceive until it is too late to respond. Hartmut Rosa's account of social acceleration describes one historical intensification of such misalignment, in which technological, social and personal tempos pull away from one another (Rosa 2013). The account here locates the possibility of such misalignment in the structure of living itself: wherever several mediations with different bandwidths must be coordinated, their rhythms can come apart.
IX. L1 to L5 as Increasing Temporal Articulation
The five levels of recursivity can be read as a tendency toward increasing temporal articulation, provided the reading is taken as a tendency rather than a rigid sequence.
At L1, temporal coordination occurs without explicit time. Walking, conversational turn-taking, a familiar routine performed without deliberation: in each, timing is exquisitely coordinated, and no one needs to say "now". L1 is saturated with temporality; it simply does not make temporality an object.
At L2, temporal misalignment is felt. Something is too soon or too late; something is taking too long; the rhythm is wrong; something has changed. The misalignment is registered before it is named. Much L2 misalignment is temporal before it is anything else, since the first sign that a coordination has gone wrong is very often that it no longer arrives when it should. L2 also has strong metabolic limits. Felt misalignment is costly to sustain, and a being cannot remain at L2 indefinitely without harm. Chronic pain is the clearest case: a signal of misalignment that persists without resolution, occupying the present and pressing on every anticipated future, so that the whole temporal field is reorganised around a disturbance that neither settles back to L1 nor resolves into action.
At L3, temporality becomes explicit. "When?" "Before." "After." "Yesterday." "Tomorrow." Narrative, promise, plan and deadline all belong here: the past and future are articulated as objects that can be referred to, arranged and argued about.
At L4, collective temporal ordering is stabilised. Calendars, school years, working hours, legal limitation periods, retirement ages, historical periods, developmental stages, timetables and forecasting systems are temporal articulations that have become durable, transmissible and collectively organising. They no longer need to be negotiated each time; they hold, and they coordinate large numbers of people who never meet.
At L5, recursion turns on temporal classifications themselves. Why is this deadline here? Why do we divide life into these stages? Why is progress imagined as a line? Should this future, which I or others set, still govern me? Is this historical periodisation useful, or does it hide more than it shows? L5 makes the temporal order of L4 available for reflection and potentially for revision.
The crucial point is not that L1 is timeless and L5 the most temporal. Every level is fully temporal. What changes across the levels is the degree to which temporality itself becomes available as an object of recursive manipulation. Symbolization increasingly makes time something that can be referred to, stored, planned, divided, contested and redesigned, and the higher the level, the more of time's organisation is itself subject to deliberate remediation.
X. Recursive Opening, Closure, and the Temporal Life of the Past
Past events sediment. Most cease to demand active attention and become part of the settled ground from which present coordination proceeds, the L1 background against which nothing needs to be noticed. Then something triggers reopening: a photograph, an anniversary, a legal claim, a diagnosis, a story, a chance encounter in the street. The past becomes recursively available again. It demands attention, reinterpretation and response, until it settles once more, usually in a changed form.
The sequence can be set out as a single chain: event, consequence, sedimentation, closure, trigger, reopening, reinterpretation, reclosing. Each link is a distinct phase. An event produces consequences; the consequences are taken up into present coordination and sediment; sedimentation achieves a closure in which the past no longer needs active remediation; a trigger reopens it; reopening demands reinterpretation; and reinterpretation, once the past has been made to fit the present again, allows it to close in a new form. The chain can repeat many times across a life or a history, and each repetition changes what the next reopening will find.
A distinction resolves what might otherwise look like a contradiction. The past is closed, as Section III insisted; and yet the whole theory of recursive reopening treats the past as something that can be opened again. The contradiction dissolves once one sees what is opened. The past itself does not become ontologically open again. Its present recursive relevance does. The event remains exactly what it was; what reopens is its standing in current coordination, the question of what it now requires, what it means, and what should be done about it.
This is why reopening can be so disruptive without ever reaching back into what happened. A family learns, decades later, that a grandparent had a first marriage and a child who was never mentioned. Nothing in the past has changed. But the family's present, its sense of who belongs to it, what was concealed and why, what is now owed to relatives newly discovered, has been reopened, and the reinterpretation may reorganise relations for years. Legal systems institutionalise reopening and also limit it. Appeals allow judgments to be reopened on specified grounds; limitation periods prevent claims from being reopened after a certain time; the principle that a matter once finally decided may not be litigated again is a deliberate closure of relevance, imposed so that the past can serve as settled ground.
XI. How the Future Acts in the Present Without Backward Causation
The future acts in the present constantly. Goals, promises, threats, forecasts, deadlines, appointments, plans, diagnoses, risk categories, projected careers and retirement plans all organise what people do now in light of what has not yet happened. A future that does not yet exist can reorganise the whole of a present life.
It does so without causing the present backwards in time: what acts is a present representation of a possible future, and the representation reorganises present coordination. The deadline next month acts today through the diary entry, the anxiety, the schedule and the colleague's reminder, all of which are present. Reinhart Koselleck described modern historical time as the widening gap between a "space of experience" and a "horizon of expectation", with the horizon increasingly detached from what experience would justify (Koselleck 2004). The account here specifies the mechanism by which any horizon of expectation acts: through present symbolic and material configurations that carry an anticipated future into the conditions of current action.
The temporal structure of this mechanism can be set out in four steps. A future is projected. The projection is stabilised as a representation, in words, numbers, images or plans. The representation is materialised as a commitment, in a signed contract, a public declaration, a budget, a booked ticket, an institutional target. And the projected future is then allowed to reorganise present action, often with great force, because the commitment makes deviation costly. Goal-setting is one special case of this future-mediated present remediation, and so is every promise, every plan and every threat.
Humans can thus construct a symbolic future and then submit present life to it. The capacity is enormously productive. It allows coordination over timescales that no bodily anticipation could span, and it allows many people to align their present actions toward a future none of them could produce alone. It also creates a distinctive danger, which may be called prospective recursive closure: the condition in which a projected future, once stabilised and materialised, forecloses present remediation that would otherwise have been possible. One can become trapped by a future one invented. A career plan made at twenty can govern a life at forty long after its maker would no longer choose it; an institutional target can distort the practice it was meant to improve; a five-year plan can require that fields be sown by date rather than by weather.
Prospective recursive closure is the mirror of being trapped by a past. In one case, a retained past forecloses the future by making it too knowable, so that the present can only repeat. In the other, a projected future forecloses the present by making it answerable only to the projection. Both are failures of the recursive fold, in which one direction of time comes to dominate the present so completely that remediation can no longer draw freely on both.
A further asymmetry distinguishes the two ways that absent times bind the present. A record constrains by existing: once written, it goes on constraining whether or not anyone enforces it, because it is there to be consulted. A commitment constrains only while it is maintained: a contract that no one will enforce, a plan that no one follows, a promise that both parties have forgotten, loses its hold on the present. Past-directed stabilisation works by deposit; future-directed stabilisation works by continuing commitment. This is one reason why futures are institutionally more fragile than pasts, and why the apparatus required to keep a future in force, enforcement, monitoring, renewal and sanction, is so much more elaborate than the apparatus required to keep a past available.
XII. The Human Amplification: Multimateriality and Multisymbolization as Temporal Machinery
Many living beings respond to past experience and anticipate what is coming. Humans do something that is both quantitatively and qualitatively extraordinary: they externalise both directions of time. The key mechanism is the synergy of multimateriality and multisymbolization.
Past-directed technologies include graves, monuments, genealogies, archives, books, photographs, museums, recordings and databases. Future-directed technologies include calendars, contracts, plans, budgets, maps, blueprints, insurance policies, wills, timetables, forecasts, targets, constitutions and appointments. In both directions, the work is done by a pairing. Symbolic articulation alone is fragile: a date remembered may be forgotten, a promise made in words may fade, an intention held by one person dies with that person. Material form alone has no stabilised reference: a stone set upright means nothing in particular until a shared recognition of what it commemorates gives it a point. Together, they allow absent times to act in the present. A calendar entry on a device survives the lapse of memory. A signed contract materialises a promise so that it can be produced, read and enforced years later. A written will allows a dead person's intention to organise the distribution of property among people the testator may never have met. A government can obligate people decades ahead through legislation and through infrastructure: the gauge of a railway, the route of a motorway and the capacity of a sewer commit future generations to patterns of movement and settlement they had no part in choosing.
The two poietic mediations have characteristic temporal orientations, and their complementarity explains why they work so well together. Multimateriality aims at durability, or at predictable change: a material form is valuable because its future behaviour can be relied on. Multisymbolization aims at identity across occasions: a symbol is the same symbol whenever it is used, and in that sense stands outside the times of its use. Coupled, the durable and the identical allow a past to be deposited in a form that will be the same when retrieved, and a future to be specified in a form that will still mean the same thing when it arrives.
This yields the article's major thesis: human beings do not merely remember pasts and anticipate futures; they build material-symbolic infrastructures through which absent times acquire present causal force. No other known living being does this at remotely comparable cumulative scale. It is perhaps the single largest human expansion of mixed temporality, and it explains why temporality is so extraordinarily elaborated in human life while remaining continuous with the recursive temporal organisation of other living beings.
The infrastructures have their own characteristic failure modes, and these confirm the account. When the material half fails while the symbolic half persists, as when records are destroyed but the obligations they recorded are still acknowledged, the absent time survives in memory and argument but loses its capacity to be checked; disputes multiply. When the symbolic half fails while the material half persists, as when a monument outlives the community that knew what it commemorated, the absent time survives as an object whose reference has thinned, and the object may be recruited into new meanings. Göbekli Tepe's carved pillars are the extreme case: the material and much of the organizational past are recoverable, while the explicit reference of the carvings across absence, what the fox or the vulture stood for, is not. The symbolic and material halves of temporal infrastructure preserve different things, and they fail differently.
XIII. Temporal Infrastructure and Civilisation
The previous point can be taken up one level. Civilisation can be partly understood as the scaling of temporal coordination through accumulated material-symbolic infrastructure.
Irrigation requires seasonal anticipation and the maintenance of channels across years. Agriculture requires calendrical recurrence, the knowledge that sowing now will be followed by harvest later, and the reservation of seed from present consumption for a future planting. Debt links present consumption to future obligation, and money itself can be read as a device for carrying claims across time. Inheritance links the dead to beneficiaries who may not yet be born. Law preserves earlier decisions for later application, and precedent allows a judgment given a century ago to govern a dispute today. Education invests present effort in imagined future capacities. States build archives linking present administration to earlier decisions. Pensions organise decades, collecting contributions from people in their twenties against payments to be made in their seventies. Climate policy attempts something harder still: to coordinate present populations with people not yet born, and its central disputes, over the rate at which future harms should be discounted against present costs, are disputes about how much weight absent times should have in present decision.
Institutions also regulate the reach of absent times. The common-law rule against perpetuities, which required that an interest in property vest within a life in being plus twenty-one years, was a deliberate limit on how far the dead could bind the living through their wills. Statutes of limitation limit how far the past can be reopened in court. Sunset clauses limit how far a present legislature can bind a future one. A civilisation is characterized not only by how far it can extend temporal coordination, but by the institutions through which it decides how far that extension should go.
This connects directly to the account of culture as cultivation. Multimaterial and multisymbolic cultivation allows coordination with the absent, the dead and the unborn, whom embodied bonding alone cannot reach. Here that general point becomes explicitly temporal. The absent are absent in space or in time, and the dead and unborn are absent in time by definition. What culture cultivates, in cultivating coordination beyond co-presence, is to a large extent coordination across time.
A formulation captures this: human institutions are machines for making absent times socially present. A contract, an archive, a calendar and a monument each do this differently. The contract brings a future obligation into the present so that it can govern action now. The archive brings a past decision into the present so that it can be consulted and relied on. The calendar brings a recurring future into the present so that many people can prepare for it together. The monument brings a past into the present so that it can be honoured, contested or ignored in public. What unites them is that each converts a temporal absence into a present configuration with causal force.
XIV. Why This Kept Appearing Everywhere
The recurrence of temporal concepts across Living Value Theory was structural rather than accidental, and the account now in place can show why each of them appeared where it did.
Trauma. Trauma is often described as a past that will not stay past. The account here specifies what that means. A traumatic past is one that makes the future too knowable. It colonises futurity, so that every anticipated situation is read as a repetition of what happened, and the openness of the future, its capacity to be otherwise, contracts toward a single expected outcome. What is lost is the recursive fold's balance between retained past and open future.
Narrative. Narrative keeps mixed pasts sufficiently available while preserving open futures. It retains enough of what happened for later events to be intelligible as responses, and it leaves enough unresolved for the question of what happens next to remain open. Narrative flourishes exactly between a past that matters and a future not exhausted by it.
Archaeology. The past is closed but differentially recoverable through different mediations. Material and embodied traces can remain highly accessible across immense spans, while explicit symbolic reference across absence becomes fragile once the ordinary discourse that carried it is gone. Mixed pastness explains this profile: nonrecursive and embodied consequences persist in durable substrates, while interrecursive meanings persist mainly in relations and inscriptions that decay.
Prediction and science. Prediction succeeds most strongly where future openness can be reduced toward nonrecursive regularity. Its failures in economics, politics and epidemiology are structural rather than technical, because in those domains the objects of prediction respond to being predicted.
Goal-setting. A symbolically projected future can descend into present life and govern it, productively or oppressively. Prospective recursive closure names the case in which the projection forecloses what present remediation would otherwise have done.
Law. Law continually converts past acts into present obligations and projected futures into present claims. It is the institution most explicitly devoted to managing the conversion zone of the present, deciding which pasts may be reopened, which futures may be secured, and with what finality.
Diagnosis. A present classification reaches backwards to reinterpret symptoms that had been lived as something else, and forwards to reorganise prognosis, treatment and identity. A diagnosis is a moment of recursive reopening in one direction and projection in the other.
Returnability. Return always asks whether a previous relational configuration can become actionable again after interruption. It is a question about whether a retained past can still meet an open future, and its answer depends on the differential temporalities of the mediations involved: a body may be able to return to a place long after a relationship has ceased to be returnable.
Sleep. Living viability requires synchronisation across temporal scales, and sleep is where that requirement becomes most visible. Circadian rhythm, daily routine, the developmental course of a life and the schedules of social institutions must all be brought into workable alignment, and disturbed sleep is one of the most reliable signs that they have come apart.
Ageing. Age is the accumulation of selfrecursive and interrecursive pastness in a body and a set of relations, and its discernment by others is a discernment of temporal depth. Chronological age is a late symbolic stabilisation of one dimension of this discernment, an L4 measure laid over a process that runs on no single clock.
Rather than separate temporal applications of the theory, these were repeated encounters with the temporal structure of recursive mediation itself, approached from different directions, and each encounter produced a concept that the others turn out to need.
XV. Pastness and Futurity Across Species
Mixed pastness and mixed futurity do not begin with humans. A dog learns the sound of a particular car and waits at the door before it stops. A migratory bird anticipates seasonal change and leaves before the cold arrives. An octopus modifies its approach to a puzzle after previous encounters with it. Social animals develop relational histories in which past alliances and conflicts condition present encounters. Western scrub-jays, which cache food, recover perishable items preferentially when little time has passed and switch to durable items when a longer interval has elapsed, discriminating what, where and when a cache was made (Clayton and Dickinson 1998); they also cache food in places where they have learned they will be hungry the next morning, provisioning for a future need they do not currently feel (Raby et al. 2007). Plants time their flowering to the lengthening of days. All living beings keep circadian rhythms.
These already imply selfrecursive and, among social animals, interrecursive temporalities. The human difference lies less in the possession of past and future than in the enormous extension of both achieved through the poietic mediations. Other organisms carry most of their temporal organisation in bodies, relations and habitats: in circadian physiology, learned expectation, social memory and the rhythms of the environments they dwell in. Humans increasingly offload temporal coordination into material-symbolic structures, which can outlast every body that made them and coordinate people who never meet.
Hence a formulation that avoids the trap of human exceptionalism while still specifying a real human difference: symbols do not create temporality; they make temporality massively portable, extensible, recombinable and recursively inspectable. Materiality makes those symbolic constructions durable. The scrub-jay provisions for tomorrow morning; a human community can provision, through a seed bank, a trust fund or a constitution, for people who will live in three hundred years. The underlying capacity is continuous. The scale, and the capacity to make time itself an object of reflection and redesign, are not.
XVI. Historical Knowledge and Prediction Are Not Mirror Sciences
Archaeology and history have an epistemic advantage that their comparison with the predictive sciences usually obscures: their objects no longer respond to the theories that describe them. The builders of Göbekli Tepe do not read the excavation report; the politicians of the Weimar Republic do not change their decisions in response to the historian's interpretation. The economist's model, by contrast, enters the market it describes, and the epidemiologist's projection changes the behaviour that drives the epidemic.
The present account generalises this observation. Historical reconstruction and forecasting are not symmetrical operations aimed in opposite directions along a single line. History works from actualised mixed pastness; forecasting works toward unfinished mixed futurity. The first reconstructs consequences that have been constituted and are now stable with respect to the reconstruction. The second anticipates possibilities that are still being constituted, often by beings who will respond to the anticipation.
This explains why more data cannot erase the asymmetry. The past can be poorly evidenced, and the future can be well constrained. But scarcity of evidence and ontological openness are different problems. The first can in principle be remedied by finding more evidence, and archaeology and history progress largely by doing so. The second cannot be remedied by any quantity of evidence, because what is missing is not information about a determinate state but the determinacy itself. In nonrecursive domains the two problems coincide, since the future of a nonrecursive system is fixed by its present state and more information about the present yields better projection. In interrecursive domains they come apart, and forecasting that treats the second problem as a case of the first mistakes an ontological condition for a methodological shortfall.
It also explains why learning the lessons of history cannot mean straightforward extrapolation. The saying that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it assumes that history behaves like a nonrecursive system, in which the same causes produce the same effects. Interrecursive futures, however, are constituted partly by what participants know of the past, and knowing what happened before changes the anticipatory field within which they act. What the past gives is ontological literacy rather than a copy of the future: the capacity to recognise what kind of recursive situation one is in, which mediations are most engaged, and what range of dynamics is structurally possible, without claiming to know which of them will be actualised.
XVII. The Good Life as Temporal Coordination?
One further implication can be stated as a hypothesis, without being developed here. If living involves coordinating mediations with different characteristic temporalities, then one dimension of flourishing may be successful temporal synchronisation. The body requires sleep now. A relationship needs attention this week. A child develops across years. A home is kept for decades. A scholarly project unfolds across a career. Institutions plan across generations. Each has its own tempo, and none can be served on another's time without cost.
Failures of living can then arise when one temporal scale colonises all the others. Immediate urgency dominates long-term maintenance, so that the roof leaks because every day's demands came first. A distant goal destroys present life, so that the years spent preparing for a future are years not lived. A remembered injury forecloses future possibility, so that a life is organised around preventing the recurrence of something that will not recur. Institutional deadlines override bodily rhythms, so that sleep is sacrificed to schedules that answer to no living need.
A proposition follows, offered as a hypothesis: a good life may require neither maximising present satisfaction nor sacrificing the present to the future, but maintaining workable coordination among heterogeneous temporal scales. The formulation avoids two familiar positions, the hedonist's present and the ascetic's future, by locating flourishing in the relation among temporalities rather than in any one of them. Whether it can bear the weight of a full account of the good life is a question for separate treatment. What can be said here is that the temporal architecture described in this article makes the question askable in a form that neither position anticipates.
XVIII. Conclusion: Living Between a Closed Past and an Open Future
Life is continuous remediation. Every living present is therefore constituted by what has already been carried forward and by what remains possible. Past and future are structurally asymmetric: the past is actualised, and the future is unfinished. The living present, however, continuously entangles them, so that no present operation can be performed on the basis of one alone. Temporal directionality without temporal separability, ontologically asymmetric and mesocosmically entangled: the two formulations describe one condition from two sides.
Mixed pastness describes what kinds of consequence have been inherited: causal residue, incorporated trajectory, relationally consequential history. Mixed futurity describes what kinds of possibility remain open: projectable constraint, self-modifiable possibility, jointly constituted possibility. The present is the zone in which the second is continuously converted into the first. Differential temporality explains why no single timescale can capture the mesocosm, since each mediation has its own bandwidth and living consists in coordinating them. The levels of recursivity show how temporality becomes progressively available as an object of articulation, stabilisation and reflection. And multimateriality and multisymbolization explain why humans can extend temporal coordination far beyond immediate bodily and relational horizons, through infrastructures that make absent times socially present.
Living Value Theory does not add time to life but discovers it inside remediation itself. Every recursive act inherits a mixed past and alters a mixed future. Human beings elaborate this basic living condition to an extraordinary degree by building material and symbolic structures through which what is absent in time can act in the present. The past is closed, the future is open, and living takes place in the continuously remediated fold between them.
Selected References
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