Dissonant Times

The contribution aims at analyzing the different layers of meanings contained in the notion of “dissonance” from the aesthetic, cognitive and emotional point of view. To then make them available for the exploration of the different forms of “dissonant time” analyzed by contemporary thought, in particular by thinkers such as H. Blumenberg, R. Bodei, R. Koselleck, E. Traverso, E. Bloch, H. Rosa, G. Wilder and the studies on the “new urban world”. In this context, notions such as the following become relevant for understanding the temporal experience of late modernity: gap between world time and life time; intertwining and overlapping of future-facing past and present; changing and at different speeds “geologically” multi-layered relations between space of experience and horizon of expectation; “presentism” and breakdown of social frameworks of memory and individualistic reification of the past; “contemporaneity of the noncontemporary”; montage and kaleidoscopic temporal dialectic; disconnection between spheres of economic, social and generational life and lack of time; multiple temporalities and cross-connections across urban spaces; concrete utopianism and multiple lines of time. So that dissonance seems to be the most appropriate conceptual and figural tool to effectively render the condition of contemporary temporal experience in its real irreconcilabilities and perspectives.