The concept of the future itself has mutated across the twentieth century

Evidence

I believe something has happened to the nature of time, in this century, because something unprecedented, and, for me, unnameable, has happened to human beings in this century. It means something, I think, to observe that, with artists, the century begins with the smashing of the clock—Proust, Joyce, Stein, for example, and even, in fact, Henry James—and the violent rearrangement of space—Picasso, for example—and reaches its terrifying climacteric with the smashing of the atom. So far as we can now know, no age before this one has been so relentlessly cataclysmic—the very word, cataclysmic, in the face of our enormities, fades into a weird nostalgia. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 458 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Arno Mayer has reminded us, with a salutary shock, of the persistence of the old regime well up into the twentieth century, and the very partial nature of the “triumph of the bourgeoisie” or of industrial capitalism in the modernist period, still predominantly rural and at least statistically dominated by peasants and landlords with feudal habits, among which the occasional motorcar strikes a jarring but exciting note, along with intermittent electrification and even the sparse aviational pyrotechnics of World War I. … The very value of the New and of innovation (as these are reflected in everything from First World hermetic forms to the great drama of Old and New played out variously in the Third and Second World countries) clearly enough presupposes the exceptionality of what is felt to be “modern”; while deep memory itself, which inscribes and scars the differentiation of experience into time and evokes something like the intermittencies of alternate worlds, would seem also to depend on “uneven development” of an existential and psychic, fully as much as on an economic, kind. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 780 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The twentieth century’s catastrophes shook faith in historical progress. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 58; Modernist temporality grew from uneven development rather than modernization itself — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 780; The twentieth century shattered time, space, and the atom — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America…, 458 (+1 more)

Related

• The twentieth century shattered time, space, and the atom (similarity 0.88)
• The twentieth century’s catastrophes shook faith in historical progress. (similarity 0.83)
• Modernist temporality grew from uneven development rather than modernization itself (similarity 0.82)
• Naming the present as a completed historical instant masks a fear of change (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• The twentieth century shattered time, space, and the atom #exemplifies (0.80) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 458
• Modernist temporality grew from uneven development rather than modernization itself #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 780