This book addresses the absence of a strong alignment with the future in
contemporary social life and explores anomalous temporal experience as a
way to expand political imaginations. In the aftermath of the modern
myth of progress, it argues we have entered into a kind of
dystopia-brutal or seemingly benign-of the continual present that is
resistant to systemic change but is nevertheless animated through cycles
of novelty and obsolescence. Exploring a condition in which we are out
of ideas and facing a 'non-future' of blind technical improvement and
fear, the author examines the heterochronia of eerie atmospheres and
temporal suspensions. Rather than a reinstatement of the great dream of
The Future, a temporality of possibility is explored in strange
dimensions of otherwise mundane sites: logistic spaces and ex-urban
landscapes; boredom connected to digital media; and the material culture
of a recently abandoned town. Drawing on contemporary social and
cultural theory, as well as 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
analyses 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.
