The contemporary conditions of globality – or what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls a planetary age – and the changing temporal quality of the present challenge a particular Modern Western understanding of time and history (and futurity), based on continuity and progress, where history is seen as a continuous process towards a qualitatively different future; a process that can be planned, created, and accelerated by humans.^[1]1See Reinhart Koselleck, “’Neuzeit’: Remarks on the Semantics of the Modern Concepts of Movement,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time [1979], trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1985). The qualitatively different future towards which the temporal logic of modernity is orientated implies a certain idea of historical linear progression. Modernity as a discourse of progress, acceleration and teleologytherefore also constitutes a practice of totalization, excluding those who do not comply with its parameters. Itattributes lateness to colonized nations and subaltern subjects, and progress is thus defined in terms of theprojection of certain—that is, Western—people’s presents as other people’s futures.

In our current times of climate catastrophe – of pandemic, genocide, war, chronic emergency – we seem to have lost the modern belief in progress and all societies moving towards a better future.^[2]2As remarked for instance by anthropologist Anna Tsing: “[I]ndustrial progress has proved much more deadly to life on earth than anyone imagined a century ago. The economy is no longer a source of growth or optimism; any of our jobs could disappear with the next economic crisis. And it's not just that I might fear a spurt of new disasters: I find myself without the handrails of stories that tell where everyone is going and, also, why. Now it seems that all our lives are precarious.” Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 1-2. And now crisis seem to be replacing progress as the main tool fortransnational synchronization.^[3]3See Helge Jordheim and Einar Wigen, “Conceptual Synchronisation: From Progress to Crisis,” Millennium, 46:3 (2018): 421-439. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818774781. This lack of futurity has generated a feeling that a contemporary extension of the present issubstituting for the temporal logic of modernity.

As François Hartog remarks, the category of the present has developed into “presentism,” and the present has now become omnipresent.^[4]4François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015 [2003]). Hartog coined the notion “regime of historicity” to describe changes in time experiences, thehistoricity of the experience of time, of how the relationship between past, present, and future is ordered, and toinvestigate how people situate themselves and develop in time. In the Modern regime of historicity, actions wereguided by the future, and they ceased to be understood in direct continuity with the past – the “horizonof expectation” was increasingly severed from the “space of experience” in the anthropological terminology of ReinhartKoselleck. In the contemporary regime of historicity, on the other hand, the present has become the privilegedtemporal category according to which the past and the future is conceived, but also a category that absorbs the pastand the future,^[5]5See Christine Ross, The Past is the Present; It’s the Future too (New York: Continuum, 2012), 13f. whereby historical time and any ideas about a qualitatively different future seem to be suspended. Thepresent reproduces itself without leading to any future, creating a feeling that the historical present in which welive is no longer defined by any directional vector of historical development.^[6]6See Juliane Rebentisch, “The Contemporaneity of Contemporary Art,” New German Critique, no. 124, 42:1 (2015): 225.

The present ways of articulating past, present, and future therefore not only makes our present, here and now, different from previous presents, but it also testifies to a change in our experience of time itself; an experience of an ever expanding, perpetual present, which, in a certain sense, can be seen as a time-relation that has no temporal horizon other than itself – in line with how Fredric Jameson described the postmodern.^[7]7Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), XI–XII.

It should be noted, however, that most of the discussion of presentism deals almost exclusively with time experiences within a Euro-American framework – including Hartog's recent proposal to think about a new anthropocenic regime of historicity.^[8]8François Hartog, Chronos: The West Confronts Time, trans. S.R. Gilbert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022 [2020]). Proposing to employ an Anthropocene regime of historicity to link the temporal gaps between the time of the Anthropocene and the times of the world, between a digital presentism and the world's other temporalities, and between that presentism and the Anthropocene, Hartog remarks, “It is no longer, as it was in the good old days, a matter of simply articulating past, present, and future, but of taking into account pasts, presents, and futures, whose impacts may differ, diverge, even contradict each other, but which nonetheless form a nexus or a web of temporalities in which, to one or another degree, we act and are acted upon.” Hartog, Chronos, 233. What I find crucial about our present, the present present, is that it is conditionedby con-temporaneity, understood as a global interconnection of differentpresents, with different pre-histories, and of different time-experiences, or what Helga Nowotnycalls Eigenzeiten, in the same present.^[9]9On the notion of Eigenzeit see Helga Nowotny, Time. The Modern and Postmodern Experience [Eigenzeit: Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefühls, 1989], trans. Neville Plaice (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). My understanding of contemporaneity is explained in greater detail in Jacob Lund, The Changing Constitution of the Present – Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity (London: Sternberg, 2022), and Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016). It is an idea of contemporaneity as a, at least in principle, shared present across divisive culturaland historical differences; of a temporary unity of the present across the planet. This means that it is necessary totry to establish a global, or rather planetary perspective on the present (see planetarity).

Against this background, we are in need of at least imagining a qualitatively different world, of projecting a futural moment, that transcends the all-encompassing temporal horizon of presentism without falling back into the synchronizing and universalizing discourse of progress – and now of crises – which characterizes Western modernity; as Hartog remarks with a quote from Bruno Latour, “We cannot continue to believe in the old future if we want to have a future at all.”^[10]10Hartog, Chronos, 220. See Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 245..