Naming the present as a completed historical instant masks a fear of change

Evidence

The multiplication of “theories of history” strikes me, however, as the symptom of an even deeper cultural illness: an attempt to outsmart the present, first of all, to think your way behind history to the point where even the present itself can be seen as a completed historical instant (as the birth of some new sensibility, the mark of some ultimate and decisive cultural mutation, at first visible only to initiates; or as the first signs of an eschatological cataclysm, if not merely the first straws in the wind of a new fashion or the first indices of a new depression); to name and label the moment you are standing in even before it reaches its ultimate consecration sub specie aeternitatis in the history books themselves. Such a mode of thought springs from a profound horror of time and fear of change; it is a very different kind of mental operation from the Marxist sensitivity to the present as history, which welcomes and rejoices in an ever more intense existential awareness of the historicity of life. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 660

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Jameson’s own later account of postmodernism-as-period concept, but also connects to Benjamin’s Jetztzeit and the dialectical critique of historicism that Jameson draws from the Frankfurt School. — connects to: Modern time conception treats the present as continually moving — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 116; Concepts function as psychological reassurance against historical rupture. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 180; Treating time as a series of nows annihilates past, present, and future alike — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 408 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: the proliferation of ‘theories of history’ and epoch-labeling (postmodern, Anthropocene, etc.) as a symptom of terror at temporality — reading contemporary trend-babble as existential evasion.

Broader Connections

• Concepts function as psychological reassurance against historical rupture. #corroborates (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 180
• Modern time conception treats the present as continually moving #complicates (0.80) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 116
• Treating time as a series of nows annihilates past, present, and future alike #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 408
• Enframing the present with futures-forecasting habits defuses the shock of imagined catastrophe #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 624