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When Paul de Man writes in Blindness and Insight about the tension between lit- erary modernity and literary history-a locus of antagonism, in his view-he seems in many ways to be prefiguring current discussions of contemporaneity as the term has been used recently in art critical and theoretical circles. De Man reflects that "there may well be an inherent contradiction between modernity, which is a way of acting and behaving, and such terms as 'reflection' or 'ideas' that play an important part in literature and history. The spontaneity of being modern conflicts with the claim to think and write about modernity" (142). Substituting here the term "con- temporaneity" as a formulation for our current way of relating to the present, we arrive at a succinct description of the field of antagonism the idea of contempora- neity is meant to evoke. In discussions of contemporaneity, as in de Man's formula- tion above, the present becomes eternal through a constant reflective practice and a recognition of its own incessant incipience.
Has the postmodern moment therefore passed? Discussions of contempora- neity appear to mark a new stage of postmodernism and to describe what Okwui Enwezor refers to as the antagonisms of the "postcolonial constellation" and what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt would call "empire."1 Such discussions intend to counter Eurocentric ideas of both the modern and the postmodern that in their rigidity fail to take into account the full range of possible "modernities" that might coexist and conflict at a given moment, sharing a temporal moment but nonethe- less asynchronous with respect to one another. Terry Smith, Marc Augé, Enwezor, Negri, and others describe the current cultural, political, economic, and artistic climate as one of "contemporaneity." For Smith, contemporaneity "consists pre- cisely in the acceleration, ubiquity, and constancy of radical disjunctions of per- ception, of mismatching ways of seeing the same world, in the actual coincidence of asynchronous temporalities, in the jostling contingency of various cultural and social multiplicities, all thrown together in ways that highlight the fast-growing in- equalities within and between them" (8-9). Given the simultaneous and conflicting movements toward both universalization and particularization on the planet, Marc Augé has formulated the question, "How may we conceive together the unity of the planet and the diversities...