MEMORIES OUT OF THE WINDOW
Two meditations on history and the role of image
Intro: pseudo-philosophical adventure
The Death of God, the End of History. This is the main plot everybody’s talking about since the middle 60s. Prominent thinkers of our time was sensing it long before it started. Think of Marcuse, Baudrillard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Agamben, Cioran or Flusser – everywhere you will find this exact notion, mutated in any way to fit the exact philosophical concept. We must be sincere. We don’t really know what this means, perhaps because we were already born in the post-historical times.
Everyone speaking of the end of history should be able to explain what is history. Let’s follow Flusser and assume that history is a process where time flows out of the past and into the future, where everything is the consequence of causes and the cause of consequences and where, more importantly, the chain of causality is recognized and controlled by Man, so the attitude of historical being is one of engagement in world changes. Historical time is linear, every day is new and singular, bringing new opportunities and possibilities and thus taking them all away when the day is done. History is somehow a game played by men, a game with clear rules and definite goals. History, then, is a course of events, a narrative, its goal is to identify all events (or, still following Flusser, we would say, all images) as historical events. History is an alphabet.
But narrative is no longer the model for such events, or historical happenings. Most thinkers we’ve spoken of admit that post-historical time is cyclic and rhythmed like that of the Myth, which actually means that the past is no longer important, as time and space are no longer separated. Only the moment is real, and therefore past and future are only real when they are made present. As Berardi writes, citing Marcuse, historical absolute knowledge is materialized in the universe of intelligent machines. This is not history, but the virtual assemblage of the interconnections preprogrammed by such machines, so today nothing is true if it’s not registered by the media universe, by the computer-generated totality. This is Hegelian theory come-true, reduction of reality to Logos of the media, where historical events are replaced by the matrix, with which everything must become compatible in order to be socially recognizable and relevant.
Every narrative has as ending, and post-historians believe that all narratives now are approaching their endings. When all the stories lose their narratability, nothing can be narrated anymore, nobody tells a story any longer, as all the stories turn in circles. When nothing more is narrated, then nothing more will happen, and this is the true meaning of post-history. Happenings are not events anymore, but scenes, as the model for the post-history is not narrative, but film, not the course of events, but the number of images. One can speed up the film, watch it in slow motion, or cut the tape and splice it back, the way William S. Burroughs offered. And thinking of Burroughs, we must admit that not the text (linear alphabetic writing), but the image is the true virus.
We are surrounded with post-historical images and things, such as computers, modern warfare, new social institutions, et cetera. Some say that we are slowly mutating according to the post-historical changes and new order of things, or, more precisely, new things. The brain’s cortical operations involve constant revision and remapping, and elimination of pathways that fall out of use. Our neural interface is constantly changing, according to visual and cognitive ergonomics, neural selectionism of some sort, and slowly we are adjusting to the new order of technological myth, the cinematic time and space, what Deleuze calls a cinematic history.
We do believe such mutants exist, but we are not among them yet, or will never be among them. As Flusser puts it, the notion that history is an attempt to solve problems does not speak to us anymore, the entire philosophical, political and social historicity is an anachronism, and therefore there’s a strong contradiction between our mentality and the surrounding world we find ourselves stuck in, as in our thoughts we still grab onto categories, values, moral, all that useless out-of-date prolific gibberish. And what was nothing more than a game of thoughts and mosaic of ideas for Flusser, became reality for us, as no prophetic thinker can experience the state of shock and trauma we are facing.
The other thing is over-communication. Post-industrial cognitive labor, which is literally communication put to work, robbed it of its character of pleasurable and erotic contact, turned it into an economic necessity and joyless fiction. More importantly, bombarded by numerous messages, by unrealized possibilities coming from all sides into the present, we sense that we are getting nothing new, and give nothing in response. It’s way too much altogether, too much information turns out to be the lack of information. The contradiction between our still historical mentality and the new order of things prevents us from experiencing this order as reality.
So, what is the easiest way out? Not giving a f*ck, as American comedian George Carlin puts it, and that’s what everybody’s doing. Producing more and more useless stuff, such as photography, movies, books, drugs, fashion, we are simply not giving a f*ck. This is the true meaning of the words “I love you” nowadays – “I don’t give a God-damn f*ck”, and the only thing these words can offer is not even a sexual healing, but just a short-term comfort, an illusion, or pornography.
Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin puts it another way: post-industrial and post-historical society exists and works as long as it is believed in, because its complexity is far beyond any knowledge and any possible governance. When you tend to verify the basic principles upon which economy and politics are working, the only thing you can get is world crisis, deeper and deeper crisis. Probably, we’ve already reached the point of no return, as we don’t believe anymore. We are damn tired of watching the post-historical film over and over again, and opposition, understood in any way, has nothing to put forward instead, simply because it’s the part of the film. We are all parts of the film which is now being demonstrated with our complete non-involvement. This is what Heidegger feared – us being deprived of the authority to rule the world and even ourselves, and us “not giving a f*ck” about it.
What does that mean in terms of photography? Photographs, according to Flusser, are post-historical images as they set linear texts into the image, and set a new way of thinking, based entirely on images instead of texts. Photography is the result of mixture of mechanics, chemistry and optics, which has little or nothing to do with the historical consciousness based on the linear code of the alphabet rather than the code of numbers. For Lacan, generic trait, or mark of art is its ability to deceive and go round human senses, and photography fits it well. The whole history of photography, from Arab camera obscura to Renaissance painting, from the invention of film camera to modern digital technologies is the history of flattening the medium in order to simplify manipulative strategies. Photographs, programmed to model the future behavior of their addressees, instead are still treated as documents, images of the past, and therefore become even easier to manipulate. Photo-montage and digital imagery are entirely based on the belief that the thing depicted really existed. Photographs, wrongly perceived as copies of scenes from the past, constitute the post-historical film we’re so tired of, photographs execute indifference, non-involvement, apathy and inhumanity.
Mitya Nesterov
Moscow Institute of Kosmic Anomalies
