ABSTRACT

What is the ‘real space and time’ in which our culture lives? A hundred years ago it would have been easier to say, but the twentieth century has complicated things. In its early years relativity theory displaced the Newtonian paradigm of space and time as empty formal containers. At the other end of the century, postmodernism has shattered our linear future-orientation: the self’s modernist alienation has given way to a fragmentation which releases our subjectivity from the intentionalities that used to focus it, encouraging a more fluid and multiple sense of personal and social identity.