Marc Augé - Non-Places (Non-Lieux), p. 31, The Near and the Elsewhere.

"So it is with an image of excess - excess of time - that we can start defining the situation of super-modernity, while suggesting that, by the very fact of its contradictions, it offers a magnificent field for observation and, in the full sense of the term, for anthropological research. We could say of supermodernity that it is the face of a coin whose observe represents postmodernity : the positive of a negative. From the viewpoint of supermodernity, the difficulty of thinking about time stems from the over-abundance of events in the contemporary world, not from the collapse of an idea of progress which - at least in the caricatured forms that make its dismissal so very easy - has been in a bad way for a long time; the theme of imminent history, of history snapping at out heels (almost as immanent in each of our day-to-day existences) seems like a premiss of the theme of meaning or non-meaning of history. For it is our need to understand the whole of the present that makes it difficult for us to give meaning to the recent past; the appearance, among individuals in contemporary societies, of a positive demand for meaning (of which the democratic ideal is doubtless and essential aspect)may offer a paradoxical explanation of phenomena which are sometimes interpreted as the signs of a crisis of meaning; for example, the disappointments of all the world's disappointed: disappointment with socialism, with liberalism, and (before long) with post-communism."