Postmodern contingency in intimate life extends rather than ruptures modern tendencies

Evidence

If the Titanic is going down [a reference to the slogan “If you’re sailing on the Titanic , go first class”—L.G.], how long is it going to take? If the bomb has already gone off, can it go on “going off” forever? You can’t be another century constantly confronting the end of the world. You can live this as a metaphor, suggesting that certain contemporary positions and ideas are now deeply undermined, rendered increasingly fragile as it were, by having the fact of the world’s end as one of their imminent possibilities. That is a radically new historical fact and, I think, it has decentered us all. In that sense love and human relationships in the postmodern period feel very different—more temporary, provisional, contingent. But what we are looking at here is the tempering and elongation of the very same profound cultural and historical tendencies which constructed that break with “the modern” which we call “mod ernism.” And I want to be able to retain the term “modernity” to refer to the long history—the longue dur é e —of those tendencies. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 720

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes ‘modernism’ (a break within modernity) from ‘modernity’ (the long durée) — a key Hall distinction.
• QUESTION: Postmodern intimacy as provisional and contingent — worth chasing the claim that world’s-end awareness ‘decenters us all’ into daily life.