the future is old and dead

by Michael Templeton

"So you think that just as a time goes to pieces its houses ought to go too?"

"Of course! Would you value your Keats letter if the signature was traced over to make it last longer? It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the foot-steps of women with hoop-skirts and men in boots and spurs.”

I used to read this quotation from Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned as a potential commentary on the issue of authenticity. It speaks to a host of popular ideas like the simulacrum and the general problem of the reproduction of the image. It is also just an interesting question for anyone who owns a great old relic of a by-gone time. It is one thing to leave an old worn toy or copy of the family Bible in its worn out beaten state. We just arrange these family relics on shelves or in cabinets and never touch them. It is another thing when we begin to consider Gloria’s question in her own context. Do we let an old house decay around our ears? And what should I do if I have a letter signed by John Keats that is fading away? I will soon have an unlivable house and a blank sheet of paper that will begin to crumble in my fingers. Yet, tracing over the signature destroys the signature. I would no longer have the signature from the hand of the great Romantic poet. I will have an image of a signature by the great Romantic poet, and at this point, it is a worthless trinket. Not even, just a doodle. I wonder if anyone really asks these kinds of questions anymore, or are Gloria and I just more crumbling relics of a by-gone time who will soon crumble to bits or fade to nothing.

The reason I wonder about these questions is because all around me I see a world that is in a light-speed hurry to cover over everything with a digitally rendered version of all that was already present. As for old houses, these are just props on House Hunters, and even the gentrifiers are losing time against those who would cover over the entire earth with brand new subdivisions sticking up out of cornfields packed tight with houses made entirely of synthetic materials so toxic that the average time to a complete structure burn is now less than ten minutes. After a couple of decades of concerted gentrification in nearly all urban areas in the United States, the money gods have returned to demolishing old (poor, Black, and Brown) neighborhoods to make way for new stadiums. My hometown got a new stadium for a soccer team, which is now called “football” because we ain’t a buncha rubes no more, that came with graffiti tags painted right onto the joint to replace those on the old buildings that were turned to dust. Finally, something as delicate as an old signature from Keats can now be preserved in a climate controlled space removed from public view to keep it safe, while a precise reproduction made from ink mixed according to the exact chemical specification of the early Nineteenth Century is digitally inscribed onto paper made from the trees genetically engineered to have the precise composition as those from which Keats’s paper was pulped. At the same time, AI renderings so perfect that experts cannot tell the difference are being made and sold online to anyone who would like one. The problem of the reproduction of the image and the simulacra seem quaint at this point in the progression of images and things that reproduce them.

It no longer matters, it seems, this idea of authenticity. At some point we came to realize that everything we saw as authentic was itself some kind of derivative version of something else. Gloria sees the original signature by Keats as the authentic signature, and to trace over it, no matter how carefully, is to nullify that authenticity. In our time, authenticity simply cannot exist because under the reign of the society of the spectacle, in which everything is an image of the life that is meant to be authenticated, “nothing is more inauthentic or more suspect than “authenticity” (The Theory of the Bloom, 70). Spectacular existence demands that even the most singular entity have within itself the objectified version of itself in order to verify its singularity. The authentic one is always already two and therefore not one. We live this every day as we find that there is no way for us to live a meaningful moment without instantly posting it online as a meaningful moment, and no one is living anything at all unless they have found the proper way to experience what they are living from the online representations of what they hope to experience. Does anyone go to a restaurant without reading reviews before they go out to eat? Can anyone risk the possibility of having an “authentic” meal without finding out what others had to say about it before you go? One may object and say, why would I risk having a bad meal? To which I will reply, why wouldn’t you? Why not subject ourselves to this now horrifying thing we once called the unknown? Is it because we can no longer conceive of such a thing?

We are not even allowed to experience the unknown even if we wanted to. The system that makes the world exist to us is precisely the system that eliminates the unknown. It was invented to eliminate the unknown. The internet, the “other scene” on which our lives are plotted, our desires are found and given meaning, and through which we are compelled to correlate every feature of ourselves and our lives—this system was, from its earliest kernel, conceived of as a mechanism to reduce if not completely eliminate the unknown. The system we now know as the web was dreamed up decades ago by military planners who wanted to control outcomes on the battlefield. The keys to winning a war is to control outcomes, to eliminate surprises and the unknown. The best way to do that is to close the whole system of temporal progression and provide future outcomes ahead of time. As it turns out, capitalism suffers from the same weak spots. Eventually, what emerged was the internet. The next step was to induce people to use the system and begin to allow the system to take over their lives of their own free will. To accomplish this, all the engineers of capital had to do was make us all think we were doing everything of our own free will, and then transform the entire system into the single portal to life in its entirety. We went from passive users to the objects of use in a span of about a decade, and now no one can imagine life any other way. You can read about all this in a book by Tiqqun called The Cybernetic Hypothesis. The closed system simply involves shutting down all temporal progression and insinuating another version of temporal progression, one that consists of a present that never really exists because it is produced from information and effects which have already occurred, a past that consists of the same data endlessly re-arranged into something like a collective memory (but not memory at all, nor is it collective. It is privately owned) which is reintroduced into the present at complex but not at all random intervals, and a future which consists entirely of pulped data from a large sample set of pasts arranged and re-arranged by algorithms which analyze relevance and simultaneously optimize their own complexity capabilities. It sounds bleak because it is. It is a simulacrum of a dystopian world that is our world and has no other real beyond the simulacrum.

In all this, there is a tendency to wish we could back to a life and world in which something real and genuine existed in the world, that there was once a time... We now live with this problem in the form of a grotesque nostalgia. It is not so much that things from the past are making a comeback, it is more a condition in which the past never leaves. The past never recedes into the past. This is why we get the endless parade of pop cultural icons of past decades filling up the popular media as if they were the next big thing rather than the big thing from 30, 40, 50, or even 60 years ago. The Sex Pistols are on tour right now. So is Oasis. The Rolling Stones are out there too. They began in 1962. We have a new Sherlock Holmes coming soon. There is a remake of Friday the 13th. Even Christ himself is getting resurrected in a sequel to The Passion of the Christ called, you guessed it, The Resurrection of the Christ. It is fucking stupid. Gloria in The Beautiful and the Damned hates the rebuilt rebooted old houses precisely because they become ridiculous. She tells us that those who will not let the old house age have “made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.” All this endless irrational attachment to the old is like painting up an old person like a young person and rendering them a pathetic old clown. There is no shortage of the past because the present is completely consumed with it. We cannot leave the past in the past because our present is swollen, like a boil, with the festering puss of the past. The progression of time only works one way: the future recedes toward the past, and we experience this in our lives in discreet moments of the present. What is lacking, then, is a future. We appear to have by-passed the future.

In Maurice Blanchot’s novel The Most High, a revealing moment occurs when the protagonist is talking with a representative of the regime in a futuristic dystopian world. The representative explains that the totalitarian regime, unlike previous totalitarian experiments, is not threatened by suggestions and reforms. Quite the opposite, he explains, “we aren’t afraid of anything like that: we are the future, the future’s been made, and our lives illuminate it” (The Most High, 134). The regime is not of the future. It does not hold the keys to the future. It is the future, and the way it functions as the future is by always reorienting everything that has ever happened to the present it holds in its entirety. It is not that things will stop happening; that there will be a cessation of events. It is that all events will always be reconciled to the forms of meaning currently held within the regime as the future. Our protagonist reflects on this problem and explains that “Everything necessary for my enlightenment has happened, and if nothing more happens it’s because nothing that’s happening adds to the truth in which I move” (135). Everything that can happen from this point on is superfluous for the form of truth that is given within the regime or the system so that “every step I take I can recall, from beginning to end, the movement, filled with hardship and triumph, which permits all of us to say the last word by justifying the first” 135). Everything is always reoriented and justified within the system because the system instantly orders everything according to the ways the system has come to justify the truth of the world. Within the digital world, which has come to be the only world, everything is always already rendered as a usable piece of information, or it does not exist. What can function within the interoperative system of equivalence as data is all that exists. What does not function in this way does not exist. As usable data, it exists as an exchangeable unit of data. That is all. All meaning is retroactively converted into data that fits the equations for exchange and circulates within digital systems of interoperative usability. We have reached the Most High, and it is the future.

It seems that there is something like an inevitability to it all, that all that has come to be is all that can ever be, and to even think of anything at all is to think from within this “thing” that is all there is. What is important to bear in mind that this “thing” is in fact a thing. It is big, and it is way ahead of us before we even think, but it is, in the final analysis, a thing—a dumb machine made out of dumb machines. Bifo tells us, in a book aptly titled After the Future, that we have before us “a new cultural task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dislocation, of desertion from the scene of the economy, of nonparticipation in the fake show of politics” (148). The key words here are withdrawal and desertion. We need to leave the room. Stop working within the thing that makes us miserable because there is another world out there. It never went away. We just got led into believing we needed the digital world to make the other world make sense, and this is another key point: stop worrying about making sense. The best thing we can all do is to stop rendering ourselves intelligible to something that forces us to click on images of stop lights to prove we are not a robot to a fucking robot. Bifo calls this a “singularity insurrection” because the key to it all lies in a “creative singularity,” which should not be confused with “a personal way to salvation” because “they [singularities] may become a contagious force” (148). This is the heart of the insurrection. It all requires work, and thought, and creativity—it is not going to be easy. Bifo values things like vibration, refrains, resonance—musical terms that describe the ways living bodies live, interact, and create together. He uses musical terms because they are exterior to the digital codes, and in fact they are meaningless to digital codes. They are only accessible to living bodies that can feel vibration and resonance. These are the keys to something other than what is. I end this with the words of a poet, and because the whole point now is to create a singular insurrection.

"A revolutionary movement does not spread by contamination / But by resonance / Something that constitutes itself here / Resonates with the shock wave given off by something that constituted itself elsewhere / The body that resonates does so in its own way / An insurrection is not like the propagation of the plague or a forest fire a linear process spreading little by little from a spark / But rather this / It becomes embodied in a MUSICAL way / and whose focal points / Dispersed in / time and space manage / To impose the rhythm of their VIBRATION / To get ever more dense / to the point where one can no longer desire to turn back." (Jean-Marie Gleize. Tarnac, 73).

Huge thanks to my brilliant wife for the reference from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Works Cited:

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” After the Future. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Most High. Translated by Alan Stoekl. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Beautiful and the Damned from Classic Works: Tow Novels and Nineteen Short

Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Fall River Press, 2013.

Gleize, Jean-Marie. Tarnac, A Preparatory Act. Translated by Joshua Clover, Abigail Lang, and Bonnie Roy.

Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2014.

Tiqqun. Theory of the Bloom. LBC Books, 2012.

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