of the other two temporal modes (past and future), under the priority of its futural dimension.21 The concept of the contemporary thus projects into presence a temporal unity that is actually, in principle, futural or anticipatory. The concept of the contemporary is thus inherently speculative, not just because it is epistemologically problematic in its application to history, but because it is structurally anticipatory, as such. For Heidegger, it is this essential futurity that allows one to be ‘for’ one’s time.22
Third, within the terms of these two problematic theoretical aspects, as a historical concept, the contemporary is also empirically problematic. At the level of the empirical investigation of the contemporary as a problematic concept (the possibility of problematic concepts, Kant says, ‘has to be investigated’),23 the relational totality of the currently coeval times of human existence undoubtedly remains fundamentally socially disjunctive. There is no socially actual shared subject-position of, or within, our present from the standpoint of which its relational totality could be lived as a whole, in however epistemologically problematic or temporal-existentially fragmented anticipatory form. Nonetheless, the concept of the contemporary functions as if there is. That is, it functions as if the speculative horizon of the unity of human history had been reached. In this respect, the contemporary is a utopian idea, with both negative and positive aspects. Negatively, it involves a disavowal; positively, it is both an act of the productive imagination and the establishment of a task.
The concept of the contemporary involves a disawoval – a disavowal of its own futural, anticipatory or speculative basis – to the extent to which it projects into existence an actual total conjunction of times. This is a disawoval of the futurity of the present by its very presentness; essentially, it is a disavowal of politics. More positively, it is a productive act of imagination to the extent to which it performatively projects a non-existent unity onto the disjunctive relations between coeval times. In this respect, in rendering present the absent time of a unity of present times, all constructions of the contemporary are fictional, in the sense of fiction as a narrative mode. Epistemologically, one might say, the contemporary marks that point of indifference between historical and fictional narrative that has been associated, since the critique of Hegel, with the notion of speculative experience itself.24 More specifically, the contemporary is an operative fiction: it regulates the division between the past and the present within the present. And it does so, in part, not simply by recognizing certain contemporaneities, but by projecting contemporaneity – the establishment of connections within the living present – as a task to be achieved. (In Kant, the ideas of reason ground, first, morality, and later, historical politics, as infinite tasks.)
We can see this regulation at work in, for example, the transformation of the effective meaning of ‘generation’. Based in the periodicity of the human life span, ‘contemporary’ is at base a generational term: generations share time. However, in the wake of modernity’s subjection of the temporality of generations to the destruction of tradition (the handing down of knowledge and practices between generations), and its consequent subjection of the temporal rhythms of the social transmission of knowledge and experience to those of communications technologies, the social actuality of ‘generational’ change no longer just corresponds to human generations, but equally, possibly predominantly, to ‘generations’ of technologies,25 to which all human generations are subjected, albeit unequally. And these generations are of shorter and shorter duration. The fiction of the contemporary is thus becoming, in this respect at least, progressively contracted. The present of the contemporary is becoming shorter and shorter.26
It is the fictional ‘presentness’ of the contemporary that distinguishes it from the more structurally transitory category of modernity, the inherently self-surpassing character of which identifies it with a permanent transitoriness, familiar in the critical literature since Baudelaire. In this respect, the contemporary involves a kind of internal retreat of the modern to the present. As one recent commentator has put it, contemporaneousness is ‘the pregnant present of the original meaning of modern, but without its subsequent contract with the future.’27 This fictive co-presentness of a multiplicity of times associates the contemporary – at a deep conceptual level – with the theological culture of the image. In Michael Fried’s famous phrase – from which all sense of the imaginary, fictitious character of the experience is absent – ‘presentness is grace’.28
If modernity projects a present of permanent transition, forever reaching beyond itself, the contemporary fixes or enfolds such transitoriness within the duration of a conjuncture, or at its most extreme, the stasis of a present moment. Such presentness finds its representational form in the annihilation of temporality by the image. It is in the photographic and post-photographic culture of the image that the contemporaneity of the contemporary is most clearly expressed. The image interrupts the temporalities of the modern and nature alike. It is with regard to the disruption of these normative rhythms that the contemporary appears as ‘heterochronic’ – the temporal dimension of a general heteronomy or multiplicity of determinations – or even as ‘untimely’ (unzeitgemässe), in Nietzsche’s sense.29 The contemporary marks both the moment of disjunction (and hence antagonism) within the disjunctive unity of the historical present and the existential unity of the disjunctiveness of presentness itself.
This disjunctive, antagonistic unity of the contemporary is not just temporal, but equally – indeed, in certain respects primarily – spatial. This is the fourth respect in which the concept of the contemporary is problematic: the problem of the disjunctive unity of times is the problem of the unity and disjunction of social space – that is, in its most extended form, the problem of the geopolitical. The idea of the contemporary poses the problem of the disjunctive unity of space-time, or the geopolitically historical. The temporal dialectic of the new, which gives qualitative definition to the historical present (as the standpoint from which its unity is constructed), but which the notion of the contemporary cuts off from the future, must be mediated with the complex global dialectic of spaces, if any kind of sense is to be made of the notion of the historically contemporaneous. That is, the fiction of the contemporary is necessarily a geopolitical fiction. This considerably complicates the question of periodization: the durational extension of the contemporary ‘backwards’, into the recent chronological past, at any particular time. This durational extension of the contemporary (as a projected unity of the times of present lives) imposes a constantly shifting periodizing dynamic that insists upon the question of when the present begins. But this question has very different answers depending upon where you are thinking from, geopolitically.30
The historical motto, ‘to each present, its own prehistory,’ must thus be interpreted to mean: to each geopolitically differentiated construction of the present, its own prehistory. In this respect, we can distinguish the subject of the contemporary (the contemporary’s ‘I’) from that of a classical modernity. For as Ricoeur has put it, the ‘full and precise formulation’ of the concept of modernity is achieved only ‘when one says and writes “our” modernity’, at the level of the concept of history.31 And one can only say and write ‘our’ modernity at the level of history, in the collective singular, by positing, following Hegel, an ‘I that is we and we that is I’ as its speculative absolute subject.32 When one says or writes ‘our’ contemporaneity, on the other hand, one is referring to the temporal conjunction of differential subject positions, differential temporalities, which produces not ‘a we that is I’, but a we that is a conjunction of a plurality of temporally co-present ‘I’s. The subject of modernity (and there is ultimately a singular one) has a ‘collective’ dialectical unity; the equally speculative, but differently unitary, subject of the contemporary has a ‘distributive’ unity.33 In this respect, one might suggest, the discourse of nationally or regionally specific ‘multiple modernities’ can achieve theoretical coherence at the level of the whole (history) only in articulation with the concept of the contemporary – despite the discrete conceptual content of modernity and contemporaneity as temporal ideas. For the idea of an immanently differential global modernity presupposes a certain global contemporaneity as the ground of its immanent production of the temporal differential of the new.
For all these theoretical problems of the fictive character of temporal unity and the disjunction of spatial