Instantaneity-An Experiece Of Modernity

This paper aims at a tentative discussion of the aesthetic experience of man in"speed times"in the perspective of instantaneity. It attempts to draw an inference that in modern society acceleration of speed by virtue of technological development leads to a drastic change in man's experience of time and space, with distance becoming more and more insignificant and temporal experience represented as a kind of"instantaneity"feel of the presence. In art and literature,"instantaneity"experience of modernity with the aesthetic feature of"instantaneity poetics"undertakes a transformation from"shock"to"dizziness".This paper is divided into four parts: Introduction,Chapter One,Chapter Two and conclusion.In"Introduction", the key concepts are defined and the significance as well as the value of this paper is illustrated.Section One mainly discusses the transformation of space and time in"speed times"from Industrial Revolution to electric media ,with distance tending towards"zero"and time towards"instantaneity".Section Two talks about a kind of"light modernity", in the light of thoughts of Zygmunt Bauman, the English socialist. In modern society ,being"light"replace of being"heavy", being"quick"tops being"slow"and"instantaneity"substitutes"eternity". We are now living in an instantaneity-centered era, where all the enduring and lasting things are deprived of value and an"instantaneity"experience with no memory or future dominates our experience of the world today.By combining Milan Kunsera's novel slowness, Section Three talks about the instantaneous feelings of quickness and slowness in literature and art. This section is developed mainly from"speed and oblivion(forgetfulness)"﹑"the shriveling of the communicative experience between people"﹑and so on. It affirms the value of"slowness", and believes that slowness is in effect describing modernity.The next chapter focuses on"instantaneity poetics". It is as well divided into three sections.The first section by mentioning Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin's discussion of his works emphasizes the aesthetic instantaneous experience of"shock".By talking the ring of the bell in the works of Edgar Allan Poe﹑Charles Baudelaire﹑Virginia Woolf, for example. Section Two specifically talks about the aesthetic connotation of"shock"and points out that"shock"as a topical experience of modernity is in essence a kind of"instantaneity poetics".In accordance with the discussion about"speed"by the French theorist Paul Virilio , Section Three puts emphasis on his"aesthetics of disappearance".In the information and digital age movie﹑television﹑emulating technology﹑ ubiquity,instantaneity and immediacy, the sweeping away of the time interval and space procrastination of instantaneity and immediacy ,gradually made"dizziness"an important feeling in the aesthetic experience.The conclusion summarizes the points mentioned above and at the same tine indicates that"the instantaneous feeling"is actually a kind of"time feeling". To experience instantaneity is a special way to experience our world; To experience time is to experience life itself an age we are living . Whether man can adapt to speed is essentially a question of whether humanity can adapt technology. Literature and arts should pay more attention to the new experiences of the day.