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always already been there’. 12 From a different perspective, Bruno Latour has
suggested that ‘we have never been modern’, since reality has never adapted to the
contours of a universal rupture dividing historical time into pre-modern and modern
times. Rather, modernity works as a conceptual tool dividing the present into a now
and a then, that is, defining which parts of it belong to the modern and the pre-
modern world respectively. 13
‘It is the present that polarizes the event into fore- and after-history,’ writes
Benjamin. 14 He regards modernity as an endless renewal of ‘primal history’; where
traces of archaic and pre-modern practices survive even in the most modern times,
but in a way that often marks a radical break in their form and content. 15 This is
reflected in the conception of time itself. Since the advent of contemporary mod-
ernity in the nineteenth century, the social control of time has expanded rapidly and
established the universal spatio-temporal order of the homogeneous and empty time
of the clock. Within this order, time turns into an eternal passage, without internal
meaning or goal. Hence the need to fill it with ‘dream-images’ or ‘collective wish
images’, often expressed by archaic or pre-modern symbols that are like mirrors in
which modernity sees itself. Through these dream-images, the empty ‘space-time’
(Zeitraum) of modernity becomes a ‘dreamtime’ (Zeit-traum), a time one can awaken
from but also project upon times to come. 16 Things that are comprehended as lost
or buried in the past feed dreams of tomorrow. Paradoxically, the collective wish
images of modernity that break with its recent past are themselves derived from a
more distant archaic or pre-modern past. Hence there is no utopia without nostalgia,
and vice versa.
This makes the concept of the present equally paradoxical, since it does not coin-
cide with the now-being or the presence of the now: ‘One could speak of the
increasing concentration (integration) of reality, such that everything past (in its
time) can acquire a higher grade of actuality than it had in the moment of its
existing.’ 17 To Benjamin there is a dialectical relationship between now-being
(Jetztsein), the presence of the now (Jetztzeit) and the present (Gegenwart), that breaks
the atomic character of the ‘now’ and makes it to something other than a simple or
uncomplicated moment in the unfolding of time and history. But Benjamin also
stresses that the embodied now-time or ‘the now-being of “the present time”’ is more
important to the modern time-consciousness and its conception of history than the
homogeneous and empty clock-time: ‘History is the subject of a structure whose site
is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now
(Jetztzeit).’ 18

THE TEMPORAL DUALISM OF MODERNITY
Benjamin is not alone in pointing to this temporal dualism of modernity. Since the
end of the nineteenth century, the gap between standardized world time and indi-
vidual time experience has been a recurrent theme in the philosophical and sociolog-
ical discourse on modernity. The modern sense of time is organized by a basic
dualistic structure of abstract versus concrete time. Contrary to the abstract world

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