Harvie Ferguson is a professor of sociology at the University of Glasgow.He has written extensively on the development of cultural, philosophical, and psychological aspects of the development of western modernity.
We no longer experience a world, or sense ourselves as the subject of that experience; we are, rather, shrouded and carried along in the moodiness of the present.
As in the postmodern world, all distinctions become fluid, boundaries dissolve, and everything can just as well appear to be its opposite; irony becomes the perpetual sense that things could be somewhat different, though never fundamentally or radically different.