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This chapter reconstructs and critically examines the history of the modern time regime. The worldview associated with modernity's time regime rests on various presuppositions, five of which are examined in this chapter. These issues are closely related and directly build on one another: temporal rupture, the fiction of beginning, creative destruction, the invention of the historical, and finally, acceleration. In doing so, the chapter attempts to find out how the modern time regime came into being and the values associated with it that started Western civilization on its particular trajectory. It also considers how that regime has been translated into action and collective self-awareness, historically and politically. Where the values of Western culture come from, how they inform its sense of the rest of the world, and which of these values are worth safeguarding or are considered problematic are also explored.

This chapter demonstrates how Bob Dylan has shown a fondness for narrative both in his songwriting and his public persona, as seen from his self-mythologizing days in Greenwich Village to his memoir, Chronicles. It focuses on how “Love and Theft,”Modern Times, and Tempest continue to reflect Dylan's playful and experimental approach to the organizational framework of narrative, which in its broadest sense refers to the representation of a series of events. The chapter shows Dylan divesting from his work the idea of an autonomous, self-sufficient text, and situating his work in a longitudinal spectrum of literary influences where narratives are suggested laterally throughout an album, as well as historically via the use of preexisting text.

This chapter argues that we are not at the terminal end of the modern time regime but merely at the beginning of its renewal. Before sketching out the main features of this renewal, the chapter first considers the disorientation and uncertainty that accompanies this temporal reorientation. Like William Shakespeare's Hamlet at the beginning of the Renaissance four hundred years ago, we are today being confronted with a change of temporal ontology. Here, Hamlet's cry, “The time is out of joint!” is an alarming diagnosis that has been steadily intensifying since the beginning of the twenty-first century. And as this chapter shows, it has only become more and more deafening.

This chapter argues for the repair of the modern time regime. It shows that saving the past by means of a “culture of preservation” is itself a central part of Western modernization. However, there is as yet no straight line leading from this compensatory culture of preservation to the entire spectrum of practices, problems, and controversies associated with the “cultures of memory.” Under the paradigm of cultural memory, the past in particular is no longer the exclusive domain of the historian, nor can the use made of it be reduced to the function of a comforting medium of deceleration. The new entanglement of the past with the future—of the space of experience with the horizon of expectation—that characterizes the present time regime has implications, requirements, and effects that are much more far-reaching. New perspectives on and interests in the past now have important roles to play. The modern time regime therefore needs not only compensation, but also repair.

This concluding chapter shows that a common view among some observers of the contemporary Dylan, observing the pastiche of half-borrowed melodies and lyrics on both “Love and Theft” and Modern Times and questions that have been raised about the veracity of Chronicles, is that in fact Dylan is simply the consummate “bullshit artist.” However, the chapter rejects the claim that there is nothing coherent or compelling in Dylan's body of work. Writer Sean Wilentz, for instance, have shown that Dylan in fact has a powerful and well-educated mind honed not just by his personal experience but by wide, self-guided reading, particularly in American history.

This chapter uses violence as the topic of exploration of “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, since the destructive life of humankind has run through Bob Dylan's work and seems a good laboratory for tests of relevance and significance. Violence is a bountiful device for several aesthetic satisfactions: frisson from descriptions of violent acts; psychological tension in the dramatic promise of violent conflict or its avoidance; the relief of a climactic narrative resolution; and the intellectual triumph of explicating the thesis, antithesis, synthesis that will become tomorrow's authoritative version of today's violence. By updating traditional folk themes of crime, corruption, revenge, and impulse with contemporary facts of racist brutality and Cold War terror, Dylan's songs struck listeners as a populist cultural tradition in the service of contemporary events.

Instead of reading motion pictures as aesthetic artifacts, this chapter describes the political-aesthetic discourse that surrounds film. With the exception of one of Charlie Chaplin's, it does not undertake readings of individual films, if only because scholars such as Jonathan Auerbach, Jane Gaines, and Miriam Hansen bring much more expertise and insight to that endeavor. The chapter's use of Chaplin, moreover, does not present a reading of an early film, since it is concerned with treating Modern Times (1936), a film whose date of production makes it anything but an early film, as an artwork essay that provides a retrospective commentary on the vanishing prospect of motion pictures as a collective, even global, aesthetic medium. The chapter explores how social activists, psychologists, actors, and filmmakers invoked aesthetic principles to adduce political possibilities from what was heralded as a new, universal art form promising to inaugurate worldwide sensus communis.

This chapter examines how time was understood during the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century opened with many ordinary people as well as the highly educated believing that human time and the age of the earth coincided. The key to finding the hidden meaning of human time lay largely in the prophetic books of the Bible. In just a hundred years, three generations of eighteenth-century Euro-Americans questioned all inherited orthodoxies, and they did so within the framework of putting in place a new, secular understanding of time. They moved from Christian to modern time as it is known today. For twelve years from 1793 onward, the French nation abided by a new calendar that erased Christian time entirely. By 1800, time became an entirely human invention without end, open to the narratives of every individual life. Just as time expanded conceptually, technology in the form of clocks and pocket watches brought it into daily living.

This chapter discusses how the public adapted to the use of synchronized public clocks in telling time. After the adoption of national standard time, Americans living in towns and cities began to rely on public clocks for a sense of synchronicity, which was called the “perfect accord.” Public clocks not only inspired devotion among citizens, but also gave rise to suspicion. This suspicion was rooted in the incidents of public clocks being unsynchronized, resulting in confusion about which clock should be followed. Amidst the confusion, railroad clocks garnered more authority as they adopted standard time for the train schedules. This practice led citizens to move toward the modern time discipline.

By a recurrent logic of inversion, screen comedy makes light of, by bringing to light, the machinations of its own medium. This takes place in a way theorized implicitly by Henri Bergson, in regard to the mechanization of body and language in comedy, and exemplified by classics like Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924), and the oddball metafilmic farce of Helzapoppin! (1940). The essential filmic comedy in each case includes photogrammic in-jokes about the progression of the image file, turned at times to a kind of metafilmic slapstick based on the misrecognized or reversed image. Classic examples are contrasted with the digital manipulations of the later comedy Click (2006) as a measure of the electronic eclipse of photochemical progression.

This chapter discusses how Masked and Anonymous certainly does not mark a peak in Bob Dylan's long artistic journey. Precisely set between “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, however, it is an important key to understanding his commitment and intention in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Also in the film are plenty of what Dylan calls “appropriations” from a large spectrum of sources. Intertextuality is indeed a major attribute of Bob Dylan's work, particularly from “Love and Theft” onward. Masked and Anonymous's references go from the speeches of U.S. presidents to novels, plays, sports books, and religious texts.

This chapter examines how the destruction of the 9/11 incident, the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, and other formidable fires and floods constitute a sort of paralyzing Mississippi River fog upon the currents of this dawning century. Bob Dylan navigates bracingly between this world's mighty opposites, as seen when he produced the album “Love and Theft”, the film Masked and Anonymous, the first volume of his autobiography Chronicles, his interview in Martin Scorsese's film documentary No Direction Home, and the album Modern Times. The chapter also shows how tensions between romantic love and divine love, violence and frivolity, and homelessness and homecoming become more seamlessly joined together even as their contrary parts conspire to break apart.

Chaplin’s Modern Times confronted the effects of the Great Depression in a way unique for its socio-economic realism at the time of its mid-1930s making. In examining reception of the movie in the US, UK and France, this essay debunks notions that Hollywood movies were part of some uni-directional current of ‘Americanisation.’ It suggests instead that the differing national receptions reflected local circumstances and their own social, cultural and political identities and preoccupations. A complex transnational text, Hard Times was made by a Hollywood-based Englishman influenced by ideas developed on his world tour of 1931-32. Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp,’ making what would prove his last film appearance, could therefore be interpreted with differing national contexts as a victim of industrialisation and the Great Depression, an inadvertent radical, a defender of order, or the ultimate survivor.

This chapter combines writings from different parts of Warren's career, describing in detail Warren's community-building and economic experiments, including the Time Store in Cincinnati; Utopia, Ohio; and Modern Times, New York.

This chapter analyzes the narrative temporalities in the legal drama Damages. Drawing on philosophical critiques of “modern time consciousness,” it argues that Damages’s temporal structures rely on an emphatic conception of modern time. Thus, the show reveals the complicity of these temporalities with a modern knowledge economy and power structures. Damages ultimately discards its “modern time consciousness” in favor of a notion of time as “intelligible becoming.” This shift in narrative temporalities simultaneously brings about a shift in the knowledge economy and power relations represented in Damages.

This introductory chapter describes a change in the modern temporal order. The first is a general sense that the future is no longer much of a motivator in the arenas of politics, society, and the environment. Indeed, expectations for the future have become extremely modest. Within a relatively short period of time, the future itself has lost the power to shed light on the present, since we can no longer assume that it functions as the end point of our desires, goals, or projections. We have learned from historians that the rise and fall of particular futures is in itself nothing new. However, it is the case not only that particular visions of the future have collapsed in contemporary times, but also that the very concept of the future itself is being called into question. Alongside the future's eclipse, the chapter contends that we are also witnessing another anomaly of our long-held temporal order: the unprecedented return of the past.

This chapter considers changing perspectives of modern time. It argues that newspapers are stuck in late-nineteenth-century modern time, raising complaints and objections to the new time regime. In contrast, television news is mired in mid-twentieth-century modern time, and the web editions of legacy media, after a moment of turbulence, returned to reflect the modernist time of an institutional memory they share. New interactive and mobile technologies create for news media a space of temporal discomfort. The modern sense of time empowered practitioners, giving them clear tools for selection and sequence, the discipline of deadlines, and the competition of the scoop and the exclusive, with the underlying assumption that time is money. The new sense of time removes their illusion of some control in a political life formerly attuned to their own news cycles.

This concluding chapter poses the question of whether or not we have too much past and too little future. After all, the notion of the past has dramatically increased in its range of meanings, as has the future. The relation between the past, the present, and the future is a three-fold relationship in which one dimension cannot exist for long without the others. Ordering this three-fold temporal structure anew and bringing the three dimensions into a balanced relation, however, continues to be an open adventure. To be sure, it is also the greatest challenge posed by the demise of the modern time regime.

This chapter considers the notion of news time. News producers, researchers, and observers agree that American life has become busier, with little time to spare. The time crunch seems to have led reporters and editors to focus on the real present instead of the modern tasks of gathering background, spotting trends, or ferreting out future problems. It is argued that the commitment to modern time made news producers resistant to new kinds of information practices and options for conceiving of time. The emergence of other media has been an important element in how the press became entrenched in its version of modern time. The main alternative to newspapers appeared at midcentury: television, a medium that broadcasts in real time and opens the possibility of a return to the realist present.