Summer 2003
Volume 29, Number 4

After the end of history, what?¹ No further beginnings being foreseen, it can only be the end of something else. But modernism already ended some time ago and with it, presumably, time itself, as it was widely rumored that space was supposed to replace time in the general ontological scheme of things. At the very least, time had become a nonperson and people stopped writing about it. The novelists and poets gave it up under the entirely plausible assumption that it had been largely covered by Proust, Mann, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot and offered few further chances of literary advancement. The philosophers also dropped it on the grounds that although Bergson remained a dead letter, Heidegger was still publishing a posthumous volume a year on the topic. And as for the mountain of secondary literature in both disciplines, to scale it once again seemed a rather old-fashioned thing to do with your life. Was aber war die Zeit?

What is time? A secret–insubstantial and omnipotent. A prerequisite of the external world, a motion intermingled and fused with bodies existing and moving in space. But would there be no time, if there were no motion? No motion, if there were no time? What a question! Is time a function of space? Or vice versa? Or are the two identical? An even bigger question! Time is active, by nature it is much like a verb, it both "ripens" and "brings forth." And what does it bring forth? Change! Now is not then, here is not there–for in both cases motion lies in between. But since we measure time by a circular motion closed in on itself, we could just as easily say that its motion and change are rest and stagnation–for the then is constantly repeated in the now, the there in the here....Hans Castorp turned these sorts of questions over and over in his own mind.²

In any case, neither phenomenology nor Thomas Mann offered promising starting points for anything calculated to fire the imagination.

See Also Fredric Jameson: Culture and Finance Capitalsm (Autumn 1997) Timothy Brennan: The Empire's New Clothes (Winter 2003) Wayne Booth: Critical Statement for 2003 Board Symposium (Special Features)

What clearly did so, however, was the spatial alternative. Statistics on the volume of books on space are as alarming as the birthrate of your hereditary enemy.³ The rise of the intellectual stock of architecture accompanied the decline of belles lettres like a lengthening shadow; the opening of any new signature building attracted more visitors and media attention than the newly published translation of the latest unknown Nobel Prize winner. I would like to see a match between Seamus Heaney and Frank Gehry, but it is at least certain that postmodern museums have become at least as popular as the equally postmodern new sports stadia and that nobody reads Valéry's essays any more, who talked about space beautifully from a temporal point of view but in long sentences.

So the dictum that time was the dominant of the modern (or of modernism) and space of the postmodern means something thematic and empirical all at once: what we do, according to the newspapers and the Amazon statistics, and what we call what we are doing. I don't see how we can avoid identifying an epochal change here, and it affects investments (art galleries, building commissions) as much as the more ethereal things also called values. It can be seen, for example, in what has happened to what used to be called the système des beaux arts or the hierarchy of the aesthetic ideal. In the older (modernist) framework, the commanding heights were those of poetry or poetic language, whose "purity" and aesthetic autonomy set an example for the other arts and inspired Clement Greenberg's paradigmatic theorization of painting.

The "system" of the postmodern (which claims not to have one) is uncodified and harder to detect but I suspect it culminates in the experience of the space of the city itself–the renovated and gentrified posturban city, the new crowds and masses of the new streets–as well as from a music that has been spatialized by way of its performance frameworks as well as of its delivery systems, the various boomboxes and walkmans that inflect the consumption of musical sound into a production and an appropriation of sonorous space as such. As for the image, its function as the omnipresent raw material of our cultural ecosystem would require an examination of the promotion of photography–henceforth called postmodern photography–from a poor relation of easel painting into a major art form in this new system of things.

But such descriptions are clearly predicated on the operative dualism, the alleged historical existence, of the two alternatives. The moderns were obsessed with the secret of time, the postmoderns with that of space, the "secret" being no doubt what André Malraux called the Absolute. We can observe a curious slippage in such investigations, even when philosophy gets its hands on them. They begin by thinking they want to know what time is and end up trying more modestly to describe it by way of what Whitman called "language experiments" in the various media. So we have "renderings" of time from Gertrude Stein to Husserl, from Mahler to Le Corbusier (who thought of his static structures as so many "trajectories"). We cannot say that any of these attempts is less misguided than the more obvious failures of analytic cubism or Siegfried Giedeon's "relativity aesthetic."⁴ Maybe all we do need to say is contained in Derrida's laconic epitaph on the Aristotelian philosophy of temporality: "In a sense, it is always too late to talk about time."⁵

Can we do any better with space? The stakes are evidently different; time governs the realm of interiority, in which both subjectivity and logic, the private and the epistemological, self-consciousness and desire, are to be found. Space, as the realm of exteriority, includes cities and globalization, but also other people and nature. It is not so clear that language always falls under the aegis of time (we busily name the objects of the spatial realm, for example), while as for sight, the inner light and literal as well as figurative reflection are well-known categories of introspection. Indeed, why separate the two at all?

2. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: A Novel, trans. John E. Woods (New York, 1995), chap. 6, p. 339.

3. Some five thousand volumes in the last three years, according to Worldcat (Internet).

4. Siegfried Giedeon, Space, Time, and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 850.