The End of Unified Historical Time

Modernity existed not merely as an era of ideas, institutions, and technologies. At its foundation lay a much deeper and rarely acknowledged assumption: humanity lives in one common historical time. This time has direction, it has logic, it has a future. People could argue about paths, they could conflict about forms, but the very idea of a unified trajectory was almost never questioned.

Even the wars of modernity occurred within this framework. Opponents could be irreconcilable, but they were still in the same historical field, recognizing a common scale of development. Some saw the future as liberal democracy, others — as socialism, others — as the nation-state, but the future itself was conceived as something common that everyone would eventually reach. Differences were interpreted as differences of speed, stages, or errors, but not as differences of times.

And this made universalism possible. If time is one, then truth can be one. If the future is common, then one model can be offered to all. If history is linear, then progress is inevitable, and resistance to it is merely a temporary deviation. It was precisely this hidden belief in unified historical time that allowed modernity to conceive itself not just as an era, but as the norm.

Postmodernity was the first blow to this construction, but not in the sense usually described. It did not create a new time and did not offer an alternative historical logic. It questioned the very idea of directionality. History lost its necessity, the future ceased to be a promise, and progress — a moral imperative. However, in place of the destroyed linear time, the multiple did not arise. A pause emerged. Timelessness. A state in which any large temporal constructions became suspicious, and any claims to meaning — ironic.

This was a comfortable state. It allowed living without historical tension, without responsibility to the future, without ontological obligations. But precisely for this reason it proved unstable. Postmodernity could deconstruct, but could not hold. It eroded foundations without offering new supports, and thereby undermined even those structures that continued to function by inertia.

Today it becomes increasingly obvious that we have moved beyond this timelessness. But this exit occurs not as a return to linear history and not as a restoration of modernist progress. It occurs as the disintegration of the very concept of unified historical time.

The world no longer lives in one temporal logic. This is not a metaphor and not a cultural image. This is a fundamental shift. Different societies, cultures, and civilizational spaces exist in different rhythms, relate past, present, and future in different ways, and proceed from different ontological presuppositions. And this difference is not reducible to the level of development or degree of modernization.

We are no longer speaking of lagging or aheadness. These categories are possible only within one time. Today we are dealing with incommensurability. Some societies conceive history as movement forward, others — as return and preservation, others — as a complex interweaving of cycles and leaps. Some strive for acceleration, others — for holding form, others — for synthesis of technology and tradition. None of these positions is an error of history. They belong to different historical times.

And it is here that universalism finally loses ground under its feet. It is possible only where common time and a unified scale of the future exist. When this is no longer the case, attempts to impose a universal model somewhere generate conflicts, somewhere remain empty declarations. That is, either a return to ideological narratives in the spirit of modernity, or postmodernist post-reality. Not because someone is malicious or mistaken, but because the very conditions of possibility of universality have disappeared.

Exmodernity begins to sprout at the moment when this becomes obvious. Without proposing a new linear history and without striving to replace one universal project with another. This is the fixation of the fact of the multiplicity of times as an ontological reality. History has not ended. It has ceased to be the only one. It has multiplied, branched, and at the same time — reconnected with roots.

This returns humanity to a state that already existed in other scales and forms. The ancient world, the world of poleis, the world of cultures living in different logics and rhythms did not require a unified future for its existence. But now this situation has become global. Not regional, not peripheral, but planetary.

The end of unified historical time does not mean chaos and does not mean refusal of power, conflict, or realism. It means the end of the claim to a universal future. It means that history again becomes multiple, and therefore — open. And it is precisely in this space that the possibility of exmodernity arises: not as a project and not as an ideology, but as an era in which different historical times can coexist, collide, interact, and develop without reducing to one axis and one finale.