Residues and Presents in Contemporary Shrinking Temporalities
Residues and Presents in Contemporary Shrinking Temporalities

Summary/Abstract: Taking into consideration the inherent crisis in our experience and perception of time, we will have to ask ourselves what is the link between the way in which we engage with the “present” and with the “aesthetic” in our postmodern societies as we experience the opposing categories of the “resisting” and the “elusive”. Zygmunt Bauman believes that our “liquid culture” is marked by discontinuity and forgetting as our social realities become more and more fragmented. Frederic Jameson also mentions the ways in which “the displacement of old-fashioned industrial labor by the newer cybernetic kind” has changed continuity-based possibilities of engaging with reality. A temporality of “passive reception” rather than “agency” characterizes our possibilities of making sense of reality. It is highly important to discuss about the language of an aesthetic, cultural and subjective “present” as a possibility of creating meaning from inside categories of experience that oppose our culture of the fugitive and disengagement.

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