There is, at the moment, a preoccupation with time. Svetlana Boym has called nostalgia—the longing for a different time—a “symptom of our age.”” And Andreas Huyssen has called the “slow but palpable transformation of tem-porality in our lives” the defining characteristic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.” This preoccupation with time and longing for another time is an effect of the “speeding up” of a globalizing late capitalism in which the increased pace of communication and exchange—of money, goods, images and people—has produced a fundamental shift in people’s relation to time. This shift can be characterized by an “increasing instability of time and the fracturing of lived space” that disorientates people’s perception of living their lives in a diachronic continuity between past, present, and figure.” Jerome Binde, making a similar argument about the temporality of late modernity, has argued that this shift in people’s relation to time has opened the way for the “tyranny of emergency” in which governments, politicians, and citizen-consumers forgo “forward-looking deliberation” in favor of instantaneous gratification, immediate results, and abstract certainties.” For both Huyssen and Binds, this “attack of the present on the rest of time”” has resulted in a crisis of the future that marks the present state of global economic and political relations.
Huyssen writes of the practice of “musealization” as symptomatic of a generalized fear of the loss of the past and of tradition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From Hollywood movies like Titanic and Forrest Gump, to cable channels like the History Channel, to the proliferation of memorials and monuments, musealization represents an attempt to resuscitate a (comforting) past in a present that has become alienating and disorientating. Biade calls this rush to musealize the past the “transformation of tradition into ideology” whereby the future is only imagined in terms of the repetition of an (idealized) past, a compensatory move that attempts to deny the passage of time itself. For Binde, this temporal crisis in which the future can only be imagined as the return of an illusionary past is a “measure” of our inability, as late modem societies, to relate to others. By refusing to think the future in relation to the present, and by reverting to a claim on the past that is at once invented and “frozen” in time, we remain locked within a wholly solipsistic enterprise: the familiar has to be maintained at the expense of reaching out to the difference of others.
-From Feminist Time Against Nation Time by Lisa Diedrich and Victoria Hesford
