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By '76 we'll be A-OK
Jan. 22nd, 2008 02:18 pmWhat is the Now? We talked about this today in Postmodernity class. Modernism is largely centered around the Now--thinking and acting for the Now, and consciously trying to construct the Now. What the fuck is the Now?
A) It's literally now. It's always now. One minute ago was "now" one minute ago. One minute in the future will be the "now" in one minute. This is a very literal interpretation of the word, but it cannot be denied that it's pretty true, as literal things often are.
B) It's whatever we think is normal. (I get why this would be a possible interpretation, but it totally ignores the temporal implications of the term "Now.")
C) It's the epoch we live in, in which we understand that some things belong to the past and those things are not involved in the Now. This is problematic because the idea of discrete epochs and discrete units of history is an approximation, a construct to make things easier to handle for historians and schoolchildren. Ideas and artifacts from the past do not pass away, they only mutate and hang on beneath the cultural radar. There are still people who lead their intellectual lives in an environment better suited to the 12th century.
D) It's the balancing point between the set of aesthetics, ideas, and technology that is considered to belong to the Past, and that which belongs to the Future. These are nearly-arbitrary ideas, given point #3 (but not entirely arbitrary, as my teacher pointed out, because we did really have things like corsets and castles in the Past, and we still don't have flying cars. Except that we still have things like corsets and castles--those are part of the literal Now, but not the ideal one--and we may never have things like flying cars), and so the Now is a nearly-arbitrary idea that is defined by being the neutral point between these two sets.
In that case, I actually think we passed the Now sometime in the 1950s, and we're all living in the Future. A future, anyway, not necessarily the future.
A) It's literally now. It's always now. One minute ago was "now" one minute ago. One minute in the future will be the "now" in one minute. This is a very literal interpretation of the word, but it cannot be denied that it's pretty true, as literal things often are.
B) It's whatever we think is normal. (I get why this would be a possible interpretation, but it totally ignores the temporal implications of the term "Now.")
C) It's the epoch we live in, in which we understand that some things belong to the past and those things are not involved in the Now. This is problematic because the idea of discrete epochs and discrete units of history is an approximation, a construct to make things easier to handle for historians and schoolchildren. Ideas and artifacts from the past do not pass away, they only mutate and hang on beneath the cultural radar. There are still people who lead their intellectual lives in an environment better suited to the 12th century.
D) It's the balancing point between the set of aesthetics, ideas, and technology that is considered to belong to the Past, and that which belongs to the Future. These are nearly-arbitrary ideas, given point #3 (but not entirely arbitrary, as my teacher pointed out, because we did really have things like corsets and castles in the Past, and we still don't have flying cars. Except that we still have things like corsets and castles--those are part of the literal Now, but not the ideal one--and we may never have things like flying cars), and so the Now is a nearly-arbitrary idea that is defined by being the neutral point between these two sets.
In that case, I actually think we passed the Now sometime in the 1950s, and we're all living in the Future. A future, anyway, not necessarily the future.