Definition of History of the Present

What is History of the Present?

A radical creativity begins with the creative refusal of our current historical models of creativity, and to do that, we need a critical “history of the present.” We need to ask: ‍How did we come to be the kind of beings we are today? How did we come to have our explicit and implicit beliefs, concepts, and practices? How did our models of creativity emerge and why?

Every bit of who we are and what we do has a history and every bit of this could be otherwise.  A critical “history of the present” (a term/practice that Michel Foucault developed) is not a neutral and generic history of what interesting and different things happened in that distant exotic land of the past. Histories are not holidays. Rather it is the active uncovering of the interwoven processes, concepts, development of embodied habits, tools, infrastructure, rituals, and environments that is co-shaping us into the beings we are.