I believe it was a total failure of individual and collective memory and imagination, including professional memory and imagination, resulting in "intense individualism" and "intense
presentism" governing the decision making and leading it astray.
(5) But Jones remains firm in his refusal of
presentism. What he offers instead is a promising model for a performance-oriented approach to Shakespearean ecocriticism.
the time, Crown counsel said this: "
Presentism [is collapsing] the
A pertinent example of this distinction appears in Hartog's analysis of the rise of
presentism in the twentieth century, which "started out more futurist than presentist, and ended up more presentist than futurist" (107).
They cover the ancient history from the pre-Socratics to the dawn of the medieval period, the modern history to the beginning of the 19th century, McTaggart and the unreality of time, the A-theory and the B-theory of time,
presentism versus eternalism, the open future, perdurance and endurance, the experience of time, time travel, and physics and the philosophy of time.
The key message, and the attitude shift for some, is to favour productivity over
presentism.
Nardizzi abjures choices between historicism and
presentism, criticism and activism, human and nonhuman, subject and object; instead, he practices a mode of historicist "eco-materalism" that is as motivated by climate change as it is by the peculiar puzzle of looking at Sir John Falstaff and beholding a venerable oak (73-76).
This anthology contains fascinating pieces such as that by Thomas Holt, who exhibits a brave willingness to incur the inevitable barbs that reviewers bound by historiographical convention will no doubt hurl at him for
presentism. He nevertheless points out the glaring parallels between Reconstruction and contemporary limitations on "freedom"--some of them lethal--and explores the sometimes debilitating divisions in caste, class, status, and geography within various groups of blacks then and now.
Moreover we shouldn't be overly guilty of the sin of"
presentism," judging historical figures by contemporary standards.
And if one can very well argue, in general analytical terms, that one of the modalities of the hegemonic cultural expression of global capitalism is the promotion of an incessant "
presentism," namely, an unending search for novelty and immediate gratification that dismisses the careful and critical reflection needed to comprehend the concept (to speak a bit in Hegelese), it is equally true that the world has lived and is living an enormous amount of developments and transformations.
Eshel's Futurity responds to widespread descriptions of contemporary times as frozen in an ineffectual
presentism: breaking off from the past or deferring the future.