Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Considering a range of present-day phenomena, from the immediacy effects of literature to the impact of hypercommunication, globalization, and sports, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes an important shift in our relationship to history and the passage of time. Although we continue to use concepts inherited from a "historicist" viewpoint, a notion of time articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the actual construction of time in which we live in today, which shapes our perceptions, experiences, and actions, is no longer historicist. Without fully realizing it, we now inhabit a new, unnamed space in which the "closed future" and "ever-available past" (a past we have not managed to leave behind) converge to produce an "ever-broadening present of simultaneities."

This profound change to a key dimension of our existence has complex consequences for the way in which we think about ourselves and our relation to the material world. At the same time, the ubiquity of digital media has eliminated our tactile sense of physical space, altering our perception of our world. Gumbrecht draws on his mastery of the philosophy of language to enrich his everyday observations, traveling to Disneyland, a small town in Louisiana, and the center of Vienna to produce striking sketches of our broad presence in the world.

Genres: Philosophy

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of French & Italian (and by courtesy, he is affiliated with the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures/ILAC, the Department of German Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought & Literature). As a scholar, Gumbrecht focuses on the histories of the national literatures in Romance language (especially French, Spanish, and Brazilian), but also on German literature, while, at the same time, he teaches and writes about the western philosophical tradition (almost exclusively on non-analytic philosophy) with an emphasis on French and German nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. In addition, Gumbrecht tries to analyze and to understand forms of aesthetic experience 21st-century everyday culture. Over the past forty years, he has published more than two thousand texts, including books, translated into more than twenty languages. In Europe and in South America, Gumbrecht has a presence as a public intellectual; whereas, in the academic world, he has been acknowledged by ten honorary doctorates in seven different countries: Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Russia, and Georgia. He has also held a large number of visiting professorships, at the Collège de France, University of Lisbon, University of Manchester, and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, among others. In the spring of 2017, he was a Martin Buber Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Reviews

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a series of short essays around the central theory that our relationship with time has changed in the contemporary era from the historicist perspective of narrative histories of cause and effect where the present is a tiny point in a continuum to a new perspective where the past is always with us and the road to the future is indeterminate, so that the effect is a great broadening of the present. Gumbrecht examines developments in language, globalization, intellectual history, sports, and information technology to find common themes around this changed relationship with time. One might think that this broadening of the present would result in a greater sense of immediacy and connection with present people and events or perhaps some happiness in being relieved of the burden of past and future, but, except in sports where Gumbrecht sees positive value for both athletes and spectators in the broadening of the present, he seems to have a pessimistic view, in which the past barely even exists, the present is a great sea of impersonal and nearly incomprehensible information and communication flow, and the future looms unknowable and threatening. How sad! He makes some good and thought provoking points along the way, but I think that he is ultimately too pessimistic, and he did not convince me. He is weakest in his view of the future, which looms, but is not really explained or fit neatly into his paradigm for the present and past. Moreover, his theory about the end of historicism is in some ways itself an historicist theory, a way of imposing a narrative on time to try to create meaningful structure and predictive power, so that in some ways, if his theory is right, it fails as a theory because a theory such as this one can no longer be meaningful in the new time perspective that he posits. Finally, I think that most of us in our everyday lives don't really have any relationship with time at all in the sense that he describes it; it is mostly just one damn thing after another. Putting this kind of structure on top of time is interesting and fun to think about, but ultimately may be an academic "just so" story that is artificial and does not actually disclose any underlying truth.

But despite my doubts about Gumbrecht's theory, I gave the book four stars. It definitely got me thinking, and in the end I don't ask for more from a book than that. It is written in a mostly engaging and clear style, although Gumbrecht occasionally slips into very German academic style that is denser than necessary. And I greatly enjoyed the structure of the book -- short essays in the style of Montaigne, discussing interesting philosophical issues in a context that relates to aspects of contemporary life that all of us experience. I have sometimes thought that it would be fun to write a series of short philosophical essays in this vein so it is encouraging to see someone else do it and to demonstrate that it is a project that can yield an engaging and thought provoking result.