Temporality and the Culture of Modernity

Abstract

It is often claimed that the emergence of a post-modern or post-historical culture carries ramifications for how contemporary agents conceive time. While as Fredric Jameson and others have argued, the culture of modernity was temporally structured around the emergence of a commodified, linear and homogeneous time, the culture of post-modernity is geared towards the present. Post-modern culture has achieved something that lay dormant as an expectation in modern culture but was never fully actualised: namely, the creation of a more or less complete break with the continuities and expectations of tradition. Post-modern culture thus sparks off a crisis of historicity that itself seems to be registered in ideas like the end of art, the end of philosophy, the end of politics, and so on. It also, however, involves a rejection of any narrative of progress around which the pursuit of transcendent goals can be organised and thus – in stark opposition to modern culture – a loss of any determinate sense of futurity together with an almost complete disappearance, it would seem, of the utopian horizon that remained a hallmark of all the great modernisms since the French revolution.