The Voice Over

The resulting picture does not look at all like what happened in 1917 or 1933: it is not an attempt to redraw the world in a new image but to lock it up from the inside. The things happening today in America, Europe, not to mention Russia, have more to do with metaphysics than politics. What I’m watching with fascination, and what is changing the map of the world now, is the desperate attempt at a battle with time, with the inevitability of aging and decay. One of my favorite writers would say that this is an illness typical of secular societies, which take death way too seriously.

In a world that has fallen out of love with its own future, the very idea of progress, of a gradual movement toward betterment, seems useless. So is the idea of the new—not the newest model of a gadget but the unknown-new, the scary-new, which turns life into a zone of responsibility and courage. Rimbaud’s demand “to be absolutely modern” has been abolished by the new sensibility—or, even worse, has become a parody of itself—because it veers into the domain of fashion trends and Instagram hashtags.

And where are the Ciorans, the Mayakovskys, the D’Annunzios of today? Experience shows us that historical processes are accompanied and secured by cultural processes: the currency of ideas is easy to convert; texts turn into events. I cannot help thinking that even this is no longer true today: history and culture are refusing to cooperate, their trajectories move in opposite directions. The right turn does not require the help of culture to accomplish its tasks. And for culture it’s boring to inhabit the logic of passéism: it is so used to thinking of itself in a progressive paradigm, oriented toward a bettering of the world—as an open collective project, a factory building the new.

Here, however, I would offer a caveat. It seems to me that the mass game of “the past” has been partially shaped by the high culture of recent decades—that very cult of historical memory, whose task was not to let the past repeat itself. Nazism and communism thoroughly compromised the very idea of an optimistic project, utopias gave way to anti-utopias—the futurology of the postwar period began with 1984 and still continues in that spirit. The main task of culture was working on mistakes—and that implied a turn toward the past, possibly greater than what we could afford. I am also talking here about my own practice, which is not so singular: for so many today the past is the main point of interest, the optical instrument for examining the present, the language we use to talk about the future. Maybe this is what artists and cultural figures, who do not at all sympathize with Trump or the AfD, still have in common with people who do. The fear of the future, the fascination with the past, the distrust of the idea of collective labor—I believe this also describes us.

The framework of obligations that the Enlightenment put in place is becoming defunct before our eyes. The importance and value of knowledge and self-improvement, the need to apply the inventory acquired from them to the world and to one’s neighbor, no longer seem obvious and recede into the zone of lost time (along with the very concept of a good education, classics departments, and long hours of studying literature). The windmills of the Enlightenment are still turning, but in this changed air their blades spin in vain. There is still art of the new time, which perceives and examines itself in relationship to the Other. But the vectors are changing; if the new sensibility had poets like Pound, their slogan would be “make it old.”

In a culture that shuns the unfamiliar, the vacancy of the Other will be redundant, if not dangerous. The new central object to be described and understood will be the Own and the Our, a plaster cast gallery of copies and reflections, an infantry regiment of models and precedents that give an unexpected meaning to the postmodernist tool kit. The Other will become the Foreign, despised and cast out of sight in outer darkness.

In Shvarts’s tale, which was written on the eve of that which could not be undone, one detail stands out to us today: in order to regain the lost-and-stolen time, the hands of the clock must be wound back seventy-seven times against the current of history. It means that the sorcerers rushed time, chased it forward (making themselves younger and more vigorous, and pushing those around them into a fake old age). From our current vantage point of a premature, shameful old age, which has taken over America after Russia, and is whiling away time remembering better days, it often seems like we are advancing into the future way too fast. The main lesson of the notnew age may be that, in any case, there is nowhere to return to. If we turn the clock back seventy-seven years, the clock of humanity will show 1939 again. We would be wise to avoid this.

 

November 2016

Translated by Maria Vassileva

IV

Over Venerable Graves

Essays (2010–2013)