Temporal Politics and Banal Culture: Before the Future

The book explores the absence of a strong alignment with the future in contemporary social life and proposes anomalous temporal experience as a way to expand political imaginations. It examines the heterochronia of eerie atmospheres and temporal suspensions in logistic spaces, ex-urban landscapes, boredom connected to digital media, and the material culture of a recently abandoned town. Drawing on contemporary social and cultural theory, urban geography, and media studies, the book develops its conceptual position through a series of vignettes of key sites and experiences. It offers a rigorous theoretical examination of contemporary life and culture grounded in a close examination of sites and material examples.

Format: Hardback
Length: 102 pages
Publication date: 17 January 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book delves into the lack of alignment between contemporary social life and the future, exploring anomalous temporal experiences as a means to expand political imaginations. In the wake of the modern myth of progress, it contends that we have entered a dystopian realm of the continual present, resistant to systemic change yet driven by cycles of novelty and obsolescence. The author examines a state where ideas are scarce and we face a "non-future" characterized by blind technical improvement and fear. Instead of reviving the grand dream of The Future, the book explores the heterochronia of eerie atmospheres and temporal suspensions in strange dimensions of otherwise mundane sites such as logistic spaces, ex-urban landscapes, boredom associated with digital media, and the material culture of a recently abandoned town. Drawing on contemporary social and cultural theory, urban geography, and media studies, the book develops its conceptual position through a series of vignettes of key sites and experiences. Through an elliptical and generative approach, it analyzes zones where novelty collapses and where figures of defiance and possibility might emerge. A rigorous theoretical examination of contemporary life and culture grounded in a close examination of sites and material examples, Temporal Politics and Banal Culture: Before the Future will appeal to scholars of social theory, sociology, cultural geography, cultural studies, and social philosophy.

Weight: 250g
Dimension: 223 x 143 x 13 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781472474377