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The production of modernity and the time hiatus
Smyčka, Václav
The topic of this study is the emergence of the modern time regime during what is known as the Sattelzeit, i.e. the turn of the 18th and the 19th centuries in the Central European context. This transformation in temporality is even thematized historically at the theoretical level as a topos of cultural studies using several material examples summarized within three chronological profiles. While the first part of the study focuses on criticism of the various ways to describe this transformation in historical temporality, the second part is meant to demonstrate the specific application of the approach developed by Reinhard Koselleck, and in particular by Aleida Assmann and Niklas Luhmann. These describe the transformation of the time regime as an attempt by society to create its own temporal structures by narrowing down the present in order to facilitate the operationalization of experience and expectations. A clearer division of experience into lived and expected, old and new, facilitates the selection of memory and likewise the selective formation of future action scenarios. However, this imposition of a time hiatus upon an ever narrowing present may only produce modernity at the expense of the present being perceived as an unstable, ever-fugitive point, which paradoxically does not offer sufficient space for action. Hence the present in the modern time regime is only perceived as a rapidly passing transitional period and a crisis between a transparent past and a clearly illuminated future. Material cross-sections through Czech history, journalism, philosophy of history and literature from the 1790s, the Napoleonic Wars and the end of the pre-1848 period are presented by the study as three stages in this process of the temporalization of the modern time regime.
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