ALTERNATIVITY AND NON-SYNCHRONOUS HISTORIES

The strange historicity of plural times has already been well theorised as a symptomatic cultural logic of the long twentieth-century present. In this theorisation, the experience of multi-temporality arises from the political unconscious that Fredric Jameson identified as ‘incomplete modernization’, in which people ‘still live in two distinct worlds simultaneously’. Jameson describes this aspect of modern life in his conclusion to Postmodernism in more or less science-fictional terms: the temporal thematics of modernism is the logic of this transitional economic period and should be seen as ‘uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development, or to what Ernst Bloch called “the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous” […] the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history – handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance’. In contrast, by the 1990s Jameson's postmodern present had at last become ‘more modern than modernism itself’: ‘we are no longer encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalisation (at least from the perspective of the “West”).’ In ‘full postmodernity’ there is no more unevenness or strange temporal juxtaposition, because the total domination of capital has made everything fully contemporaneous.

The disappearance of alternatives and the end of temporality are direct consequences of this complete-modernisation-as-postmodernity thesis from the point of view and material position of the West. Stuck in an eternal present, the rising frequency of apocalyptic fiction in the twentieth century signals a frustrating retreat to the sublime distractions of world catastrophe, rather than a genuine grappling with the state of emergency and the resiliently opportunistic implosion that is the current, dominant economic system. Among the terabytes of thinking about the state of things in the twenty-first century is the bit of critical folk wisdom, often attributed to Slavoj Žižek, which traces back to Jameson: ‘Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.’ The refusal to succumb to this failure of imagination, for Jameson, means getting post-contemporary – breaking with and getting beyond modernisation and its destruction of historicity in order to grasp the process historically.