The Time of the Modern: From Paris to New York

Abstract

I Universal Ending Hegel's conception of history is that it will one day end, end in triumph, and its mission has always been, will always have been, have come to have been, the self-realisation of Spirit: 'Universal history [ ... ] is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially' (The Philosophy o/History, 17-18).1 This history' [the History ofthe World] travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning' (103). It seems obvious that Hegel sees culture unfolding over the course of time, with a clear direction and endpoint. But what if this end is not one, i.e. neither singular nor actual: what if defining by the end, in the light of the history still to come (for Hegel) means actually to define by the impossibility of ending? The impossibility, then, of coming to be. Hegel signals this question within The Philosophy o/History, writing that 'America is [therefore] the land of the future, where in the ages that lie before us, the burden ofthe World's History shall reveal itself (86), and that, not only will the future occur in America, it must move on from Europe, rather than being 'an echo of the Old World' (87).2 F or Europe to be the End and for America to be the future signals an important paradox, one that will play itself out in modernist conceptions of time (which, I will argue, are inherently avant-gardist) and in how this relates to the issue of 'capital of world culture'. After all, Hegel gets it spectacularly wrong before coming right, given what most agree to be Paris's pre-eminence in the nineteenth century. Also occurring within and as the paradox ofthe end of History is the non-identity of culture, the non-identical time in which a culture unfolds: in other words, there is never simply a specific,present world capital, as its status is bound up in preceding capitals and in anticipating its future loss of status. Asia becomes world leader of culture once Greece takes over (The Philosophy o/History, 103, and see also 101): America will bea future capital only insofar as Europe is seen not just as the current highpoint of culture, but the end of culture. America will be a decentred capital, temporally, and in terms of what it is capital of. In fact, America only becomes the future on condition that Europe be the end-Europe cannot end, and even though it can come to be a prior capital of world culture, it can never close off this time.