Temporal Politics and Banal Culture

Before the Future
This book addresses the absence of orientations to the future in contemporary social life and explores the shift towards anomalous temporal experience as a tool to rouse political imaginations.

This book addresses the absence of a strong alignment with the future in contemporary social life and explores anomalous temporal experience as a way to expand political imaginations. In the aftermath of the modern myth of progress, it argues we have entered into a kind of dystopia—brutal or seemingly benign—of the continual present that is resistant to systemic change but is nevertheless animated through cycles of novelty and obsolescence. Exploring a condition in which we are out of ideas and facing a ‘non-future’ of blind technical improvement and fear, the author examines the heterochronia of eerie atmospheres and temporal suspensions. Rather than a reinstatement of the great dream of The Future, a temporality of possibility is explored in strange dimensions of otherwise mundane sites: logistic spaces and ex-urban landscapes; boredom connected to digital media; and the material culture of a recently abandoned town. Drawing on contemporary social and cultural theory, as well as urban geography and media studies, the book develops its conceptual position through a series of vignettes of key sites and experiences. Through an elliptical and generative approach, it analyses zones where novelty collapses and where figures of defiance and possibility might emerge. A rigorous theoretical examination of contemporary life and culture grounded in a close examination of sites and material examples, Temporal Politics and Banal Culture: Before the Future will appeal to scholars of social theory, sociology, cultural geography, cultural studies and social philosophy.

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