the thick now of modernity
Modernity is the name that a culture gives to itself (its period as a metonym for itself as a whole) when it experiences the present thickly. It names itself in terms of an infinitely expandable, yet blank, present periodicity rather than any non-abstract referent.
Just how thick modernity is is captured elegantly by the appearance of phrases such as “post-modernity” or “late modernity,” which suggest a now so thick that it has phases or even outlives its own end. If something ended in order to give on to postmodernity, it is something not much more than the now that precedes our present even thicker now.
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