Conclusion

Abstract

The idea of unilinearity is not a shibboleth solidifying an aesthetic and historical period dialectically; rather, unitary time – its putatively isochronic character, its anthropocentric narrativity and its monochronic nature – is a phenomenon that arose in particular technological and cultural conditions, and which provoked or was met with a hotchpotch historicity expressed in certain aesthetic and cultural objects, political orientations and scientific theories. Time is a stable backdrop in other conjunctures, and time has been conceived as unstable in other cultural and historical currents in the past. However, the difference this study underlines comes from the insistent attempt to think of timespace and history as literally multiple – with irregular internal consistency and pace, variable scales and distinctive frames of reference. To hold apart timespace and history analytically, and to keep individual experience separate as well, has often resulted in the preservation of unitary time as the fundamental base layer, as that which underlies narrative sense-making at the level of chronology of fabular order, on which we deploy tropes and figures in rendering both individual and collective experience to ourselves. But there are many base layers, many times.