Towards a Post-Modern Sense of Time/Presence

“the breakdown of temporality suddenly releases this present of time from all the activities and the intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis; thereby isolated, that present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material – better still, the literal – Signifier in isolation.” (Jameson, 13-4)

In my post today, I would like to interrogate Jameson’s contention about the move “beyond real historical time” (10) as distinctly characterizing postmodernism as well as the “nostalgia mode” (that paradoxically accompanies the first) as defining the postmodern experience of time. If deconstruction is indeed the postmodern strategy par excellence (which Jameson does not explicitly claim in this essay, however), then it appears to me – in light of Jameson’s argument – that the relation of postmodernism to time can be read in terms of the deconstruction of this category (which is a logical impossibility if we accept Kant’s proposition that time – just like space – is an a priori intuition). The result is, according to Jameson, a sense of intense present-ness, established and reinforced through pastiche – the mechanism that operates to ensure the cultural dominance of postmodernism.

In opposition to Jameson’s argument, I would suggest that, rather than a “desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past” (9-10), the post-modern mode of engaging with time constitutes a successful and creative strategy for preserving the past as well as a radical mode of dealing with a present past. The problem – if there is one – consists not in the “loss” or “lack” of historical time, but in an acute presence, actualization, and re-actualization of the past – precisely the realization of “the possibility of experiencing history in some active way” (11) (in this respect, it is significant, I believe, that “the archive” has become a dominant cultural metaphor in recent years). The result is, I would suggest, an intense sense of pastness-in-the-present, potentially amounting to a deferral of the present which, once internalized (the deferral), leads to an ontological (rather than ideological) shift in the experience of “liveness” towards a post-modern (necessarily technologically mediated) liveness/presence as ontology.