Revolutionary moments compress time so individuals’ instant decisions shape history

Evidence

Conflict was the means by which time was overcome through sustaining intra-temporal tension within the work. Conflict concentrates past and future in the present. Ibsen’s dramaturgy expressed this with the formula: the measure of conflict is the power of the past in the present as the threat of the future. In the very idea of drama the interconnection of intra-temporal moments becomes so condensed and the relationships between them so comprehensively articulated that the mere passage of time takes on form and shape as a powerful configuration of meaningful relationships on the level of conflict before ultimately finding resolution. The temporality of absolute drama would be the instant which reveals itself in a flash from the crystallization of all the temporal relationships within the action. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 118 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A police crackdown transformed a small fare protest into a mass uprising — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 40; Big Data is blind to the singular event that actually shapes history — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 176; Freedom can objectify its own past, rupturing temporal continuity with the instant (+3 more)

Related

• Dramatic conflict overcomes time by condensing past and future into the present instant (similarity 0.86)
• Naming the present as a completed historical instant masks a fear of change (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Dramatic conflict overcomes time by condensing past and future into the present instant #corroborates (0.88) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 118
• Freedom can objectify its own past, rupturing temporal continuity with the instant #expands (0.75)
• Naming the present as a completed historical instant masks a fear of change #contradicts (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 660