Contemporaneity, a Sublime Experience?

TY - CHAP

T1 - Contemporaneity, a Sublime Experience?

AU - Lund, Jacob

PY - 2020/7/6

Y1 - 2020/7/6

N2 - The purpose of this chapter is to try to relate the notion of contemporaneity to the discussion of the sublime, or at least to a few aspects of this discussion. Contemporaneity has to do with the temporality of globality, of the globalized world in which we live today. "Contemporaneity" designates the bringing together of a multitude of different co-existing temporalities in the same historical present; it is an intensified planetary interconnectedness of different times and experiences of time. On a global macro-level, contemporaneity therefore refers to the temporal complexity that follows from the coming together in the same cultural space of heterogeneous cultural clusters generated along different historical trajectories, across different scales, and in different localities, which also - on a micro-level - affects the time-experience of the individuals and groups inhabiting these clusters. This interconnection and bringing together of different times and experiences of time at a global or planetary scale, and their taking part in the same historical present, is what characterizes our present, what constitutes what I propose to call the contemporary contemporary. Thus, the contemporary contemporary is about a changing temporal quality of our or, perhaps more objectively, the historical present and how something like the present and presence is perceived. It is about changes in what sociologist Helga Nowotny calls our Eigenzeit, self-time or proper time, understood as 'the totality of a person's or group's ideas and experiences of time.' In this chapter I try to investigate whether aspects of these changes in our experience of time itself might find resonance in the Kantian analysis of the sublime. Thus, I try to focus on the experiential aspect of contemporaneity and how this historical coming together of times on a global scale might be experienced by the human subjects for whom it has become a condition.

AB - The purpose of this chapter is to try to relate the notion of contemporaneity to the discussion of the sublime, or at least to a few aspects of this discussion. Contemporaneity has to do with the temporality of globality, of the globalized world in which we live today. "Contemporaneity" designates the bringing together of a multitude of different co-existing temporalities in the same historical present; it is an intensified planetary interconnectedness of different times and experiences of time. On a global macro-level, contemporaneity therefore refers to the temporal complexity that follows from the coming together in the same cultural space of heterogeneous cultural clusters generated along different historical trajectories, across different scales, and in different localities, which also - on a micro-level - affects the time-experience of the individuals and groups inhabiting these clusters. This interconnection and bringing together of different times and experiences of time at a global or planetary scale, and their taking part in the same historical present, is what characterizes our present, what constitutes what I propose to call the contemporary contemporary. Thus, the contemporary contemporary is about a changing temporal quality of our or, perhaps more objectively, the historical present and how something like the present and presence is perceived. It is about changes in what sociologist Helga Nowotny calls our Eigenzeit, self-time or proper time, understood as 'the totality of a person's or group's ideas and experiences of time.' In this chapter I try to investigate whether aspects of these changes in our experience of time itself might find resonance in the Kantian analysis of the sublime. Thus, I try to focus on the experiential aspect of contemporaneity and how this historical coming together of times on a global scale might be experienced by the human subjects for whom it has become a condition.

KW - Contemporaneity

KW - Globality

KW - Immanuel Kant

KW - Now-Time

KW - The Sublime

KW - Walter Benjamin

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85114260974&partnerID=8YFLogxK

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9783631792186

SP - 39

EP - 50

BT - Aesthetics in Dialogue

A2 - Somhegyi, Zoltán

A2 - Ryynänen, Max

PB - Peter Lang

CY - Berlin

ER -