ABSTRACT
Supermodernity is characterised by three excesses: of time, space and materiality. In this chapter, the first of these three excesses is tackled. Temporal excess is manifested in presentism—the overwhelming relevance of the present over all other times; in acceleration and hyper-eventfulness, and in the very annihilation of time—through genocide, ethnocide and memoricide. However, the contemporary era is still one of many different temporalities which the ubiquitous concept of acceleration fails to capture: the idea of heterochrony, which is explored here in relation to materiality, does justice to other experiences of time that coexist in our age. The chapter ends with a consideration of the way in which archaeology reveals the temporality of tragedy and hope in the contemporary era.
