contemporalities

We know by now that there can never be a ‘timely ghost’, and that if we are to investigate the cultural forms and meanings of the contemporary, then we must watch for the moments in which contemporalities intersect and diverge, in which one time transects another.

1999, Roger Luckhurst, Peter Marks, Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, Longman, →ISBN, page 10, →ISBN

I think that the kinds of contemporalities that we are dealing with at present are not going to depend on notions of mediation, because notions of mediation essentially try to regulate certain kinds of flows and to reorganize them. Arbitrage is the handling of the contemporalities, that’s all it is.

2000, Ian Cook (editor), Simon Naylor (editor), et alii, Cultural Turns / Geographical Turns: Perspectives on Cultural Geography, page 22 (Prentice Hall; →ISBN, 9780582368873)

Hyperion jokingly switches between primitive tribes, medieval monks and Knights Templar, the cyberpunk near future and far-flung interstellar travel. The core mystery of the book, the Time Tombs of Hyperion, have their own temporality, moving backwards through time, transecting the pilgrims’ present. But even amidst this chaos of contemporalities, Simmons also uses these conventions to restate the uneven development of late twentieth-century Earth.

2005, Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction, Polity, →ISBN, page 226, →ISBN