Bagehot And Problematic Presentism

What we might still attempt to do in this current conjuncture to offset this historicizing reflex is to begin the difficult labor of creating a discourse on modernity that speaks to the world, one centered principally in understanding the history of our present as the unity of uneven temporalizations differentiating global geopolitical space, rather than merely affirming or cheering on a globalizing project that sees the world only as the true space of the commodity relation.    Harry Harootunian 

Which I think you'd agree is a pretty mind-boggling sentence. My brain has today been trying to unravel this ontological ball of wool whilst also thinking about Shakespeare, Bagehot (yes them again), and the conflict of presentism and non-contemporaneous contemporaneities. The conclusion of all this unfocused thinking is that it's a funny old world that defies easy analysis. As if you hadn't figured that out for yourself.

Did Bagehot anticipate modern presentist criticism? Would he care? Is presentist criticism in fact nothing more than old criticism dressed in post-modern clothing? I have previously (mischievously) advertised myself as a post-structuralist - that sentiment being based on seeing a photograph of a very cool looking Roland Barthes smoking a vast cigar. I must now disavow that school and align myself with a division of criticism I have invented for myself. Ladies and gentlemen I give you Fluid Presentism. Or is it Multi-Layered Historicism? Or Multiple Contemporaneous Materialism?

Sod it. I give up. Put it this way - I like Shakespeare and I like Bagehot and I think each has something interesting to say about the other. All I now have to do is say this in eighty thousand or so original words and then you can call me doctor. Don't hold your breath.