All time is now

A.V. Ashok

Postmodernity seems a huge assault on sequence. The instantaneous hyperreality of CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC that take us "Live" anywhere in the world anytime and the electronic Gaia of our wired world of "nanoseconds" that makes us inhabitants of a simultaneous reality have abolished movement and delay. The hypertexts of websites on the Internet are a cornucopia of non-sequential pathways of information and non-linear nested/encased/embedded modes of cognition. With marvelous archival memory, postmodern TV overloads the present with the past and in the process unwittingly diminishes our sense of sequenced subsequence. The TRex and I-Max coexist in unsequenced a-yogyata (inappropriateness) in postmodern experience. Like the past, the future too is "now" for the postmodern mind.

In an annulment of akanksa and what can be called a Macbeth Syndrome, the postmodern psyche messes up the natural rhythm of temporal sequence and wants the future ahead of its time and cannot wait for the future to happen at its own appointed time. As a consequence, the postmodern present has lost its natural duration of expectation of the future and has succumbed to an odd sequenceless obsolescence. Out of its acute inclination to subvert the known as a monologic error or a false finality with a dialogic depiction of improbable otherness, the postmodernist narrative imagination shatters sequence into esoteric discontinuities that are " not meant to represent any temporality other than that of the text at all" (Heise 64) and that annul our very belief in sequence. As for MTV, it is a horror of imploded sequence. All in all, the post-industrial informational epoch is a cyber utopia without sequence where all time is now and everywhere is here. But postmodern simultaneity is a digital delusion of sequencelessness of the hubris/power of the ego that is only the latest in a long line of surrogates for eternity that change from age to age in the history of the ego and not at all the egolessness of true liberation in sequenceless Spirit.