The Future is the Past
Introduction to Narrative Machines
Written 2015, published 2017
“Reality itself is material for artistic construction, and they therefore naturally demand the same absolute right to dispose of this real material as in the use of materials to realize their artistic intent in a painting, sculpture, or poem. Since the world itself is regarded as material, the demand underlying the modern conception of art for power over the materials implicitly contains the demand for power over the world. This power does not recognize any limitations and cannot be challenged by any other, non artistic authority, since humanity and all human thought, science, traditions, institutions, and so on are declared to be subconsciously (or to put it differently, materially), determined and therefore subject to restructuring according to a unitary artistic plan.” — Groys
We live in an age which most of all resents itself, a painful awakening to a present that is at odds with our most cherished wishes and hopes, a future which never arrives until it is too late. It is always in the process of arriving, of accelerating. We feel alternately, paradoxically, that we must be saved from progress, or from tradition. “Save us from the future,” cries one protester, while the other shouts just as loudly, “save us from the past!”
Who writes the greatest fictions and who pen the greatest truths? Even superheroes have to be placed within the hyperreal to become believable again. We can only take irony seriously, and must heap scorn on the serious, and risk the heresy of laughter always at someone’s expense. It is most of all to myths of the retro-future that we all seem to look. The only questions we can ask are aesthetic: which parts of the past do we include in this Frankenstein’s monster, and which do we omit? Which fits the personal brand of ourselves, of our imaginary, glorified Movements? We have never been quite so alone, in terms of the fragmenting and atomization of communities.
And yet never have we been so surrounded by a diversity of myths, in which we can dream ourselves and our world. So it is that the coming retro-future is an invention most of all of editors and artists. Worst of all, few of them know it, and yet it would seem terrible artists make great dictators.
Meanwhile, it is becoming the scientists and anthropologists that preach the End, should we continue upon the course on which we find ourselves.
The End of History as a static utopia has been revoked. Or perhaps, it has been revealed for what it truly is: an eschatology. But it is also likely that Fukuyama has been consistently misread. The End of History is either a gravestone, or a high point from which we must recede. Every major geopolitical event of this decade seems to point in this direction.
The present is, in some sense, always an End of History, a point of departure where a future without end along the lines of thought of our present conditions seems possible. The spirit of the postmodern age is seen precisely in this anxious clawing forward and backward at the same time. Maybe it is a “new” modernity, inasmuch as anything is truly new. At this very moment we too are subject to this “new” force of mythic history and culture, and are under their sway as if they flowed from reality itself, Hegel’s zeitgeist, but we can’t see it from the inside. We need our myths to situate us, to frame the boundaries and horizons. It is to the artists to help us see the contours of that narrative, to help us see ourselves. This link of mirror and myth makes the social role of the artist finally clear.
Our dreams of revolution and apocalypse too are weapons that have been used against us. We would all like to start again, an opportunity for a cosmic “do over.” Our uncertainty about the spirit of the age raises a significant problem. Are we still living in the shadow of World War? Is post-modernism really a path to the End of History or has it proved itself, as many have determined, a cul-de-sac? Are we still trudging through a psycho-historical framework that was shaped by the mutual annihilation of modernity in the fires in Dresden, the death camps, or the leveling of Hiroshima? How did it get to be 4AM and where is our pants?
We can only begin here, wherever “here” happens to be, using the materials that are available to us, provided by our misremembered past, and whomever’s graves we can plunder. Psychology is always rooted in history, but what it reacts to is rarely clear to the conscious mind except in retrospect. This assemblage also presents a certain departure from what is now a sort of orthodoxy in cultural theory, while at the same time following in its footsteps. The spectacle distracts us from ourselves, and that is the only apparent value of art in the age of propaganda. (And don’t let the self-parody postmodernism has turned to lead us astray: we still live in the modern, the prefix “post” only signifying a fun-house mirror of so-called “schizophrenic times.”)
Games, movies, books, have no need to interrogate us about who we are, though they may challenge or vilify our fears and desires. Only so far as it is done primarily in service to the market. Movies can be ranked in quality based on ticket sales or votes at the ballot box, and so we have universally come to determine “the good” by consensus. They commodify and entertain, allowing us to build identities as one might shop in a virtualized shopping mall. We are an assortment of Simpson’s quotes and repackaged ideologies.
“Whatever I say is good, is good” is the mantra of the masses. The popular is always great, by this standard. Metrics of this sort have allowed corporate interests to turn the world into Reality TV, an ongoing performance that we must undergo to demonstrate that we are “good”, valuable enough to have the privilege of human rights.
The problem is always in the fact that everything is remade in our minds, but it isn’t remade from scratch. We will come to see how little we have managed to escape the clutches of the past. Its story calls to us still.
Yet this is ever as it was, no ontological sea change has actually occurred, beyond an accelerative cultural leap of the sort that followed the printing press. Baudrillard recognized that “Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is unexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial.” The question, then, is what follows. In his estimation, a collapse. “Where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs.”
But maybe it isn’t quite so univocal. This isn’t a Marxist attack on capital, nor a Frankfurt school style tirade about consumption. There is no use in a class battle over which symbols and forms of media are high and which low, which messages are vulgar and which refined. In this sense, we are engaging in a sort of theoretic burlesque. This work is for people who are engaged in understanding and creating culture, but it isn’t purely for academics.
We will appropriate instead from whatever suits our purpose, without any consideration for the rigidity of academia or the myths of common sense or plain speech. Pretension is our friend, so long as we can use it to get up on that stage and start the show. So long as it remains playful. We may take our ideas seriously, but should never do the same ourselves. Laughter is the final form of freedom.
We may wonder what purpose a text such as this can possibly serve. For the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, a book is an assemblage: “Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity…” much like a Self or a Society, visions and voices gathered together to speak as if we are One. It is edited, curated, but without any appeal to the authority of authorship, as it is composed from a multiplicity of sources, which is fitting for any work which embraces pluralism, and the ethic and aesthetic implicit within assemblage as a concept. This concept must remain immanent rather than transcendent because it is the codification of experience and intuition, ideas ground from our collective bones and flesh, contrasting mythos with logos, a unified attack against the supposed authority of a singular demiurge, a transcendental reason that defies fracture. Whereas the logos is the word of God, the divine fiat that structures and moves our universe, so the mythos is an indefinite set of articles, tales told for the telling itself, with no hard and fast authority, no assertable Ultimate Truth, no attributable origin grounded in cold solidity.
And yet, despite all that, this winds up in many ways a critique of the postmodern flight from truth, to whom such methods are quite familiar. Brian Eno once said, “The question, ‘What does it mean?’ really asks, ‘What does it symbolise?’ Well, my notion is that art does something, not that it means something. Its meaning is what it does.” The systems thinking heuristic “the purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID) says much the same.
Nothing is original, in the sense that it has never before appeared in some guise. But it is nevertheless unique, for it has appeared nowhere else, at no other time, in this configuration. The re-purposing of image and idea is the theoretic art form of the present moment — it is re-contextualized for new use. To what future use any of these present puzzle pieces will be put, of course, we can only now guess.
The explicit purpose of theory is not necessarily to act, though theory is always a covert action, in another sense. Our words are without fixed, absolute meaning, but they always do something. Poetry, it might be said, is the art of misunderstanding. Nothing in this text will seem by any traditional measure poetic, but its aims remains more poetic than scientific, more mythos than logos, merely performed at another level of remove, the critique of a modern meta-mythos.
It is our pretension that we might get out the filleting knife and lay bare the mechanisms through which we understand ourselves. That can hardly be done within a few hundred pages. But directions can be suggested, those one might explore after it is done.
At best, this is a launching pad, a manifesto toward a movement of artists and theorists who recognize that both art and theory are acts within the world. At worst, it is degenerate philosophy, proudly made by degenerates, for degenerates.
Only this much is certain: we are narrative machines. We combine, reconfigure, and regurgitate material that is never in an essential sense our own. We are never one. We are many disparate bodies, never fully unified, except for through our myths. The only question is whether we embrace or resist our isolation, and dance with our masks on, or hide in the darkness.
As Antonin Artaud said in The Theater and Its Double, “All writing is filth.” Help us give birth to an abomination.
