Working Thesis

Late-modern governance operates through a temporality that converts probabilistic hope into normative entitlement by disavowing contingency, thereby sustaining future-oriented agency under conditions of uncertainty. This paper argues that this structure is best understood as protentional teleology: a dual-level temporal formation in which short-cycle anticipatory renewal, grounded in the protentional structure of lived experience and calibrated to temporal discounting, generates the asymptotic appearance of directional progress required for institutional legibility and economic reproduction.

Abstract

Late-modern cultures are commonly described through affective vocabularies of optimism and pessimism. This paper argues that such descriptions obscure a more fundamental temporal mechanism: the institutionalisation of the expected future arrival of fulfilment rather than the cultivation of positive affect itself. Across therapeutic discourse, productivity culture, and narratives of self-realisation, probabilistic hope is progressively converted into normative entitlement through the disavowal of contingency, stabilising endurance in the present while sustaining commitment to future-directed activity.

To explain how this expectation persists despite the intermittent and weakly coupled character of experienced satisfaction, the paper integrates phenomenological accounts of protention with behavioural evidence of temporal discounting and critical analyses of institutional legibility. Short-cycle anticipatory renewal repeatedly regenerates motivation at a near temporal horizon, while institutional narratives translate this iterative structure into a legible trajectory of personal progress and productive continuity. What appears as teleological advancement thus operates, at the level of lived temporality, as cyclical protentional reinforcement.

The paper names this dual temporal formation protentional teleology: a future-directed orientation generated not by the progressive realisation of distant ends but by the continual renewal of short-range anticipation that produces an asymptotic appearance of direction. By situating this mechanism at the intersection of phenomenology, behavioural economics, and critical social theory, the analysis reframes contemporary optimism as a structurally necessary condition for sustaining future-oriented agency under uncertainty and clarifies how late-modern institutions govern not only behaviour but the lived experience of time itself.