We are no longer modern; we are contemporary.
By the 1970s, the idea of the modern had become timeworn, and critics and philosophers diagnosed a turn to the postmodern. Now we seem to be in the midst of another turn. Over the past decade, the idea of the contemporary has come front stage in art history and criticism, and is starting to draw the attention of a number of thinkers in the other humanities as well.
The art historian Terry Smith, at the University of Pittsburgh, is looking at how contemporary art and curating are unique in the way they come from around the globe, from anywhere, in any medium, representing a new generation. The British philosopher Peter Osborne has theorized that contemporary art is “postconceptual” and projects “a single historical time of the present.” The French anthropologist Marc Augé has foregrounded contemporary “non-places” like supermarkets or airports, and the strange affective sense they produce. And an interdisciplinary working group of literary and other scholars at Stanford University is examining “the contemporary with a focus on key moments with worldwide significance, such as 1945, 1973, 1989, and 2001.”
To be sure, such work has not yet gelled into a clear consensus: In 2009 the art journal October published 32 responses to a “questionnaire on the contemporary.” Opinions were mixed: “This leaves me with a distinct feeling of ‘déjà vu,’ " one skeptical art historian quipped, while another intoned, “The years following 1989 have seen the emergence of a new historical period.” Similarly, some literary and critical theorists claim that our current moment is just an extension of the postmodern era, as in the title of a 2012 book by the literary theorist Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism (Stanford University Press). But the philosopher John Rajchman, in a 2013 essay, “The Contemporary: A New Idea?” answers his question with a qualified yes.
Postmodernism named a shift in art, architecture, and literature away from the austere formalism and the sometimes sanctified tenor of modernism, often employing pastiche and transgressing the boundary between high and low art. (Think of a Roy Lichtenstein silk-screen that takes the form of a cartoon frame, or a Robert Rauschenberg painting that combines a portrait of JFK, a torn page of a newspaper, and an abstract swatch of yellow and red.) It also described a turn in literary theory and philosophy toward a focus on language itself, exposing the constructedness of what we had assumed were natural categories. In a word, postmodernism was meta.
Indeed, some theorists argued that the postmodern named not only a style but also an era. Notable among them was the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, whose Postmodern Condition (1979) contended that we had lost confidence in “grand narratives” of previous periods.
Like ideas of the modern and the postmodern, the contemporary brings up the question of whether it simply designates a new style or more deeply captures the state of society and the feeling of our era. Key elements seem to run throughout discussions, especially the speedup of time and the leveling effects of globalization. If postmodernism was self-conscious about language, the contemporary is hyperconscious of time. Instant and constant communication roots us in the present as never before, and the speed with which we traverse space heightens the impact of globalization.
As was the case with postmodernism, a good deal of discussion of the contemporary has occurred among the arts. Smith has been one of its strongest proponents, with What Is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Prentice Hall, 2011), and Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2012). Distancing himself from what he called in an interview with me “superficial up-to-dateness,” he stresses the transnational turn in art and innovative institutions such as artist collectives, new media, and participatory culture, particularly among rising generations.
Globalization is a fundamental factor for Smith and most other theorists of the contemporary. There were, of course, international movements in art and culture before, but they gravitated to the centers of modernity, to major cities like New York, Paris, and London. Globalization suggests less vertical and more fluid relations among cultures, so that a current exhibition might be in Kolkata or Cape Town, not just New York City, and feature artists from Africa or Australia who were formerly considered primitive or provincial.
Because of the leveling of cultures, the question of the contemporary also has particular relevance in anthropology. Anthropologists typically observe different cultures coexisting at the same time, but previously they tended to see them on an evolutionary scale, with modernity at the apex; those that weren’t modern were judged undeveloped or otherwise lacking. Augé, in An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds (Stanford University Press translation, 1999) and elsewhere, has called attention to the new sense of contemporaneity that comes with the “shrinking of the planet” and “the acceleration of history.”
Expanding on Augé’s work, the literary scholar Pedro Erber, in “Contemporaneity and Its Discontents” (2013), notes that decentering Western power is “not just an economic phenomenon” after an era of imperialism. Rather, it represents a new sense of “the generalized sharing of time [and] the growing contemporization of diversity.” We’re aware that we share the planet with others, but is time the same for the Amish person driving a horse and buggy as for the guy in the sports car trying to pass him while talking on his cell?
Globalization is why many theorists set the starting date of the contemporary at 1989, because the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of dividing the world between the capitalist West and the communist East. That is why postmodernism is no longer adequate. As Smith told me, “The best descriptions of postmodernity, like Fred Jameson’s, come from the early 1980s, and since then we’ve had 1989, 2001, 2008.”
Smith notes that, at the same moment, different people have different experiences of time. Globalization tends to emphasize that we are multicultural, but one of the more striking implications of the contemporary is that we are also multitemporal.
That quality inevitably broaches the question of our media and information technologies. Smith argues that “we are immersed in an infoscape capable of instant communication of all information and any image anywhere.” That is a chief difference from previous eras, even the postmodern. Postmodernism might have responded to media like TV, but the contemporary arose with the advent of personal computers, on every desk, beginning only in the 1980s and now in our pockets. Those change our sense of time, plugging us into our contemporaneity.
They also prompt some cautions about the contemporary. In his book Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013), Osborne observes a shift in our very perception of time, “projecting a single historical time of the present” that abnegates tradition, collapsing segments into “shorter and shorter duration,” and bringing us into a kind of perpetual present. Events last until the next update, and things last until the next purchase. The aesthetic theorist Jonathan Crary, in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013) goes further, finding that this sense of time alienates us from our biological rhythms, immersing us in an anxious hypercapitalism.
Literary critics have been more hesitant to embrace the contemporary as a distinct period. At first the term was a catch-all for literature produced after World War II, in the wake of the classic modernist works of the first half of the century. The journal Wisconsin Studies in Literature, which was inaugurated in 1960 and renamed itself Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature in 1968, is a case in point. The process was similar to the founding of many so-called museums of contemporary art in the postwar years, museums that might display a variety of art from modernist paintings to contemporary installations.
In the past decade, however, literary scholars have become more focused on debating “What comes after postmodernism?” (Look, for instance, at the so-titled issue of the journal Twentieth-Century Literature in 2007). They generally agree that postmodernism has waned. But they are undecided about how to define its successor. One after-effect of postmodern theory is questioning categories and the shoeboxes into which they squeeze diverse phenomena.
Some critics favor time-stamps like “post-1945,” presumably more neutral than names like the “modern,” “romantic,” or “classical.” In fact, a coterie of younger critics has formed an organization called Post45, holding a series of conferences and sponsoring a website, online journal, and a book series with Stanford University Press. They overlap with another group that favors, instead, the term “the present,” taking as its name Association of the Study of Arts of the Present, or ASAP. It, too, holds conferences and has a website and online journal.
One new appellation, promoted by the influential journal American Literary History, is “21st-century literature,” as in its 2011 special issue, “The Twenty-First-Century American Novel.” This approach is also relatively neutral, reading literature by centuries, although some critics see the focus on the 21st century as suggesting that 9/11 was determinative.
My own leaning is to see American literature as moving from modernism to midcentury to the contemporary. In other words, I would fold postmodernism into the general midcentury period. American literature flourished in that time, with authors like Ellison, O’Connor, and Lowell, leading up to the postmodern experimentation of Pynchon, Ashbery, and Paley. They held the field through the 1980s, when a new generation of authors started to emerge, gaining dominance in the 2000s.
Midcentury literature responded to the liberal consensus in politics as well as in culture, against communism and for building the welfare state, as Lionel Trilling observed in his classic The Liberal Imagination (1950). Postmodernism expressed the breakdown of that consensus. The contemporary responds to what is called “neoliberalism,” the turn away from the liberal welfare state to privatization and the shrinkage of government services that emerged politically and economically in the 1970s and found its artistic expression beginning in the 1980s. (Interestingly, the Marxist theorist David Harvey provided one of the first diagnoses of postmodernism in his 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity, but he has gradually left that appellation behind, revising his diagnosis to neoliberalism, notably in his 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism.)
My sense of periodization has been reinforced by my graduate students. When they are constructing reading lists for their qualifying exams, their definitions of what is contemporary are very different from those of many of their boomer professors, who are still fixed on postmodernism with its Bellows and Pynchons. To my students, born in the 1980s or early 1990s, those authors are already part of the tradition. The postmoderns are not contemporary; Michael Chabon, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Colson Whitehead are.
Critics are sorting through the mass of current literature, noting its turn to popular modes like genre fiction and realism, as well as bringing in authors from around the globe. But they haven’t had much interchange with art historians about the contemporary, at least not yet. Those who do tack toward the theoretical. The working group at Stanford, for example, includes Sianne Ngai, a professor of English at the university, theorist of affect, and winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for her book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012). Ngai has organized a workshop for the group, and she taught a seminar on “The Contemporary” last summer at the annual School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.
Ngai opened both the workshop and her seminar with “What Is the Contemporary?” That short essay, by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, raises the question of whether we can see the moment we are in while we are in it. While Agamben is often cited (the question is fundamental), he does not really offer an answer. Ngai favors Osborne’s definition of the contemporary, which emphasizes its fictiveness. It “projects a nonexistent unity” onto disjunctive moments in the lives of different people, who experience time differently.
The converse of the shrinking of time is a recent focus on the extent of time, stretching to the existence of humans, or what has been called “the anthropocene,” or to the existence of the planet itself, to geological or “deep time.” Wai Chee Dimock, a professor of English at Yale University, has tried to expand our sights in Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton University Press, 2006) and a forthcoming web-and-print anthology, American Literature in the World. She points, for example, to the way that the Star Trek series reuses the ancient epic Gilgamesh. What’s interesting about studying literature, for her, is making connections across time rather than staying in one period, as most scholars and college classes do. She, too, is a theorist of multitemporality, emphasizing how literature continually contemporizes itself, putting old stories in current skins.
The question of the anthropocene or “deep time” has also come to the fore because of climate change, spurring the growth of environmental or ecocriticism. It represents the flip side of the speeding up of time: While our electronic devices quicken the pace of everyday life, we also have a heightened sense of time because the threat of its end hangs over us.
I think there is one other factor that has put time on our minds: our lack of it. Our escalating and unrelenting busyness is the downside of the contemporary. Americans work more hours than ever, thinking up names for contemporary work processes that are usually taken as advances: We are in the era of “speed up,” “just-in-time” production, and “rapid innovation.”
The contemporary, then, is, not only a literary period but also a condition of our lives, at least of our work lives. In its midst, time is not on our side, so perhaps the crux is how to take it back.
Jeffrey J. Williams is a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University and an editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. His most recent book is the collection How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University (Fordham University Press).
