The critique of modernist ideology from France’s leading radical theorist
Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Jacques Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of this in two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, and exposed the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists.