In 1502, Amerigo Vespucci asserted that the newly-discovered lands were no part of Asia but a mundus novus, a new world, a new continent. By 1539, there was already a printer’s press operating in what is now Mexico City. Were things to progress at a similar pace today, taking into account changes in the media’s preferences, this year’s Big Brother would be broadcast from the moon. But it seems that notions that had been so integral to modernity’s self-definition, like ever-accelerating time, quickening speed, rhythms, beats – our entire set of concepts about time – are no longer givens.
True, on the one hand the segmentation of time in every area of culture tends toward increasing speed, as we experience in the shortening of film clips or the ever-smaller units into which television news has come to be edited. Slices of time are getting thinner and thinner. This phenomenon is also evident in culture’s construction of segments by marking out new boundaries and new periods. On the other hand, there may be something to Hume’s skepticism regarding the epistemological reliability of the temporal ordering of events: the fact of temporal sequence does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship – perhaps least of all when we are dealing with time itself. We cannot draw conclusions about the speed of time’s passage based on changes that have taken place in its manner of segmentation (either the fact or the manner of its sequencing). To illustrate this with a musical example: extremely fast rhythms and beats can create a very slow effect, practically a standstill, like a soundscape. (This is really just a simile though, as the effect of slowness or even motionlessness created by a rapid tempo, perceptible underneath or behind it all – for it is not entirely clear that it is there at all, or truly audible – this “underneath” and “behind” exist only in musical time and cannot be translated to the strata of culture-time.) The slicing up of time, its segmentation, can apply to future, present, and past alike. Since the strata are hardly independent of one another, changes at any one point will presumably affect other areas as well – especially when we are dealing with the kind of radical segmentation observed by T.J. Clark who refers to the recent past as distant: “Modernism is our antiquity; in other words, the only one we have.”1
Modernism, rendered radically as an element of the past: This might even be the next step for culture’s here-and-now to create a more secure self-consciousness, self-reflection, and identity. After attempts at positive distanciation by various versions of the postmodern (which perhaps proved insufficient, or even went out of date themselves), now we have a distanciation based on a denial, an antiquification: “… already the modernist past is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp” (Clark, p.2). Clark’s description, however, makes no attempt to be an ideology of a more secure self-consciousness, not even remotely. “It has not happened, in my view, that we have entered a new age… On the contrary, it is just because the ”modernity” which modernism prophesied has finally arrived that the forms of representation it originally gave rise to are now unreadable” (Clark, p.3).
Modernization is the process that led to the discontinuity of modernism itself. Modernization’s continuous progress reached the point where it excluded modernism, regarding it as a past that had run its course; this still does not constitute a break in its own continuity. Declaring modernism antique is merely tantamount to saying yes, this is a segmentation of time, and makes no attempt to suggest a cause-and-effect relationship. Instead – implementing the next step in Hume’s argument that sequentiality understood as cause and effect is ever a prerequisite for praxis, for action – it is necessary for practical needs. In order to secure and maintain the unity of the here-and-now, a more intensive segmentation of time is required, and ever-thinner slices. From this point, though, the question deals not so much with the notion of economies of time, or operationality, or mnemonic techniques. These now tend to become symptoms indicating social practices, rather than mere phenomena.
This essay attempts to treat phenomena as phenomena – all the more so because the aforementioned ones are in themselves paradoxical. All the more so, because the phenomenon that turns modernism, which has just ended, into an unapproachable, incommensurable distant past is so clouded by affinities and prejudices – perhaps a very consequence of its being a symptom.
The postmodern, in distinguishing itself from the modern, had no qualms about following some elements of the tradition of breaking with tradition, like the artworld’s treatment of the new as the most relevant and most interesting. But if we set aside the argument that “everything modern was once postmodern,” then all aspects of modernism that made this attitude valid lose their legitimacy now, as this outlook devolves to the artworld alone. For what was newest was not, at least according to the modernist myth, most interesting because it belonged to the here-and-now but because it was contiguous with the future and therefore bore powers of prognostication. Nowadays, though, validity is purely a function of here-and-nowness; all that has value is what is current – which is, for now at least, insufficient to explain many phenomena within the artworld.
To put it as a cliché: the modern world, the one that modernism prophesied, considers space to be a function of speed, and time an independent variable; hence controlling time is a precondition for controlling space. Various forms of modernism – primarily its avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, and post-neo-avant-garde currents – have radically identified with acceleration and speed; it is part of their purpose to have been before their time, observing the heres-and-nows from the perspective of an indeterminate future. This is all a commonplace, even to the point of having become anecdotal.2 (Though for this very reason it is far from obvious that this is what modernism consists of – on the contrary. Still, these clichés almost certainly help to make particularly interesting what is newest and in greatest proximity to the future.) The modernist here-and-now, and particularly the avant-garde one, is imbued with the future, a partially fictional temporality; the here-and-now was never presented and interpreted through traditions that were themselves imbued with fictions to whatever extent, but through something that did not yet exist. The “idea of the world’s availability to knowledge,” then, was always projective, hypothetical, extrapolative, and experimental.3 The tradition of breaking with tradition contained a hypothetical, experimental forward continuum with the future – and precisely this continuum was broken by the postmodern. (The future, for twentieth-century science fiction, a modernist genre almost by definition, was transformed into a near future by the arrival of cyberpunk. In fact, since then it has been set in an undefined, alternative present.) Hence a culture that cuts time into ever-thinner slices will more quickly push back the horizon of the modernist future – even more quickly than it will distance the modernist past.
It is perhaps less of a cliché to carry this line of thought further: it is my presentiment that a less metaphorical reformulation of modernism’s antiquity would have the here-and-now in which we are living be modernism’s radically unrealized future. Modernism is ancient because the horizon of the future it once entertained is empty in the here-and-now. The here-and-now in which we live is an alternative future – the future of a different past – to the one contained in modernism. The present text aims to articulate this presentiment.
Once the future dimension of modernism has been suspended and its past turned into the distant past, the here-and-now becomes a solid here-and-now, a robust present. This is why I felt it necessary to begin by saying that the acceleration of time’s segments is not the whole picture. This is a speed that has no vector, since modernism’s future-oriented dimension of time is no longer a part of it. Perhaps the very precondition for the existence of the here-and-now is the not-here-and-not-now. In other words, robustness is hardly its only feature.
In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze elevates Samuel Butler’s Erewhon to the status of a philosophical concept – an extension of the primeval “nowhere” to the here-and-now.4 Erewhons are correlates of the heres-and-nows. “First, they are conditions of real experience, and not only possible experience. In this sense, because they are no larger than the conditioned, they reunite the two parts of Aesthetics so unfortunately dissociated: the theory of the forms of experience and that of the work of art as experimentation.”5
Where aesthetics (qua the science of perception) and art (qua experimentation) form a continuum we find the preconditions for actual, real experience(s). (Not the preconditions for possible experiences, which would depend on ideas and concepts, and hence not be aesthetic.) The here-and-now of actual experiences is given shape, made perceptible, and senseful (or even emphatically nonsensical) through the nowhere of experimentation, full of hypothetical, projected, extrapolated – in a word, fictive – elements. The Deleuzian implementation of erewhon, its elevation to a conceptual status does not (necessarily, at least) include the relationships between lived experience and the fiction of the nowhere that form the particularly modernist complex (vectors, speed, or even the prominent role granted to dimension(s) of time). It merely presents the relationship between the experimental, fictive nowhere and the indeterminate here-and-now. To put it in more concrete terms: there has to be something that compels us to be just as absorbed by obvious fictions, some reason they inspire not just empathy but even more so interpretive activity, just as if they were real, though all the while being only fiction or an ambiguous mix of fictive and real elements (nowheres and heres-and-nows). This does not mean that fiction necessarily reaches toward the real, but rather that particular fictions create particular correlations, convergences and memory traces. This essay attempts to examine more closely the conditions for these correlations, convergences, and memory traces.
It is specific to the modern – or even more so, to the modernist stance – that it presents the nowhere of the here-and-now as a nowhere-ever. In other words, the precondition for the unity formed by what is lived and experienced – the precondition for experience – (the condition which must be satisfied or the experience of here-and-now will not yet be experience) is overwhelmingly more temporal than spatial. Moreover, its hypotheses, conjectures, and projections are oriented not so much toward the past (the inherited; tradition) as toward various alternative presents (the present, the here-and-now as another time, another epoch) or, even more often, toward the future. The here-and-now becomes experience by hypostasized, alien presents, and particularly by such futures.
Historical changes of the space-time continuum, analyzed by M.M. Bakhtin, are thus more than orders of fiction: chronotopoi are structures and organizations that operate as the precondition for real experiences. It is precisely Bakhtin’s analyses that show how manifold these orders can be, as a changing existence also causes the apprehension and conception of existence to change (or as the plans and visions of experience can produce experience in their own right). There can be shifts and slides in the borders between presents, pasts, and futures, as in their contents, their significance and their effects on one another. In the Hellenistic adventure novel, for example, the passing of time can be insignificant or even irrelevant, since the protagonists’ age does not change no matter how many adventures they go through. They live in a hypothetical here-and-now, no matter where they may be, or when. As surprising as this may seem to a reader today, the Hellenistic reader would find it just as stunning that in modernism, spaces increasingly become subordinated to time, and distance the function of the length of time needed to reach a goal, that differences in spaces are eliminated by simultaneities, or that there are layers of time but hardly ones of space. The chronotopoi of the visual arts, too, are teeming with temporal operators. The avant-garde, running before its time, observes the here-and-now from a hypothetical future (no mere extrapolation from the trends of the here-and-now, which would be insufficient for its conception); the span of time required for a picture to be created becomes itself the picture just as the time of observation and the temporality of apprehension are themselves constitutive elements of the chronotopos.
If, then, it is not even obvious that time is the most important agent of possible real experiences, it is worth spending a moment to examine how time-centered chronotopoi come to be.
A Brief History of Time and Space, from the Early Modern Age to the Present Day
Abraham Ortelius drew a map of Utopia as part of the parergon to the first atlas of the world, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570).6 The Atlas was an encyclopedic undertaking of collecting and redrawing the most up-to-date available maps. It has no Avalon or Prester John’s Land, or headless peoples. It does, however, portray some islands that have since proven to be fictive, as well as fictive creatures, though these are perhaps intended purely as ornamentation.7 It is a given that not everything is a given, that there exist yet-unknown, uncharted territories. Also given are the geometric guidelines of the Mercator projection. The surfaces exist, in other words, but there is only imperfect knowledge of what lies in some parts of them. What put unknown territories on the map, so to speak, what turned them into an atlas, was their becoming inhabited to some extent: knowns alternate with almost-sures, with probables and maybes. Movement is the process of defining the unknown through the known. An atlas, a graphic order, can only come into being with the help of what is hypothetical, inferred, or supposed. Hypotheses are the real world’s extensions toward the possible. (It is no fantasy world containing elements of the real, but quite the contrary: the surfaces and areas are there, and the question is what occupies them.) In this respect, what is reliably known, what is accepted as real (the sum total of the here-and-now of the knowable), nature, and depicted facts are partly, in a “modern” sense, the opposite of the fictions of human imagination, and partly, in a premodern or “a-modern” sense, we can say they occupy different points on a continuum.
The “modern constitution” (that of modernity, not modernism), in Bruno Latour’s interpretation, “by ‘purification’, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other.”8 Paradoxically, mutual exclusion seems to aid “hybrids” – the creation and activity of mixed human and nonhuman agents; these are what have actually created knowledge, and this is the other ingredient of the “constitution.”9 But this will be a later account: Latour, through interpretations of Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, presents the embryonic condition of the modern constitution, where the poles are still moving apart. Hobbes defines science mathematically, with social objectives in mind, while Boyle corroborates the results of experiments with the help of a practice from the legal world, the testimony of honored citizens. “[…] Boyle chose a method of argument – that of opinion – that was held in contempt by the oldest scholastic tradition. […] Instead of seeing to ground his work in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle relied on a parajuridical metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, the matter of face, even if they do not know its true nature.”10 In fact, both approaches are hybrids, though they exclude the admission that this is so, as the one is presented as exclusively scientific knowledge and the other as a social theory. The success and operability of the modern constitution rely on the exclusion of hybrids in principle but their multiplication in practice.11
For Ortelius’ Atlas, there still exist hybrid situations that are mixed and ambiguous. The atlas represents a continuity between knowledge and imagination, partly setting the two in polar opposition, and partly explaining this continuity. Utopia may belong, peripherally, to the surface of the earth as long as there are other “imagined corners” as well. Erewhon is a part of the continuum; the pushing back of these imagined corners in space and time is a dimension of the future, while the relationship between knowledge and fiction as Utopia – erewhon – is exclusively spatial (or more precisely, planar: Utopia occupies an alternative slice of the atlas’ surface).
This is all quite close to the Renaissance order, where order itself becomes meaning; controlled space is known space; ideal and idealized spaces (arranged according to the laws of perspective) are interpretations and epitomes of existing spaces. With its controlled pictorial surfaces and geometrical order, the Renaissance seems to exclude the possible worlds of maybe-yes-maybe-no occupying the pictorial spaces – or replaces them with the idealized cities shaped and controlled by geometrical order. Formalizing and canalizing fictions, the Renaissance renders the map of Utopia as pure content. The order of organization overwrites that of the represented: to express this through the categories of Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance linearity is the geometrical reformulation of represented objects. Arrangement follows surfaces, in accordance with the projections of perspective. It is a closed form where the composition organizes the depicted with regard to the borders and proportions of the picture.12 All these organizing principles make unnecessary any consideration of the status – actual, historical, or fictive – of what is depicted. The principle of organization is itself the real; the status of what is being organized is of less moment.
This all changes fundamentally in the Baroque, where – using Wölfflin’s categories once again – things are not linear but painterly, when contours and outlines dissolve in the effects of light and shadow. The Baroque does not use prior knowledge of things when formulating their visual appearance (objects do not separate from their surroundings and all “seems to struggle forward out of the darkness”). The painterly organizes its depictions according to perception and not knowledge. Similarly, the borders and proportions of the picture are not defined by those of the things it contains. This is one important principle that, in contrast to the unifying efforts of the Renaissance, tends rather to thematize the relationship between the here-and-now of the depicted and what is possible but not actualized. The imaginable is that which might be possible – and may well exist “offscreen” outside the bounds of what is presently depicted. Perhaps, though, what is actually depicted is no more than an allusion to what is possible and to what might or might not exist. In the same fashion, the offscreen of even the purest fiction extends towards the real. Thus real spaces always allude to possible spaces: they are not closed off, but open to the possible. Neither the spaces outside the surface of the picture nor those inside it are canalized or controlled.
The other important principle is formulated by Wölfflin as the opposition between planarity, which he defines as organization into flat planes, and the spatiality of depth. The Baroque unifies by arranging in space, but it does not arrange space itself, so form remains open, in contrast to the closed form of the Renaissance. While depth is an organizing principle, verticality is a thematic one; the openness of space is a depth in which the borders of what is portrayed blend with those of what is not – not only horizontally but vertically as well. The simplest example of this is the Baroque theme of the apotheosis, which establishes a continuity between the real and the possible, earthly and heavenly, known and unknown, here-and-now and erewhon. These are all parts of one and the same chain or series.
But in the Baroque, the above of the apotheosis has a corresponding below as well. A typical token of Baroque thinking is the imagining of spaces and worlds under the earth: beneath the fairly well-known surface, “below” becomes the domain of possible worlds. The most famous example is Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus, quo universae denique naturae divitiae (1664–1678), in which established knowledge based on observation is mixed with explanations of traditional beliefs and mere speculation. The tides, for example, are caused by the movement of the subterranean oceans; mythological creatures – or ones similar to them – are to be found in the spaces below. The possible, the uncertain, and the fictive are arranged vertically, from above to below. Thus the Baroque was thinking of subterranean worlds while using the image of upward movement as well (just as ballet’s typical resistance to gravity is also a Baroque characteristic). Floating, flying, anti-gravity – the extensions of the here-and-now tend upward and downward alike. Order is the order of spaces, and the chronotopoi of early modernity are spatial ones. The ancient past, as for example the creatures of ancient mythology, may exist perhaps not in past time but in this spatial arrangement. The rise of modern temporality means the close of the early modern period – and as we shall see, even its negation, as it transforms the Baroque’s spatial order into one of temporality, its below into a past, and its above into a future.
The “quarrel of the ancients and moderns” (the longstanding debate about whether perfection can only be achieved by following classical models) may not have led to a victory for either side: the dilemma seems almost to have resolved itself once the absolute concept of perfection was supplanted by the acknowledgment that ancient and modern works can be judged by relative standards of beauty, as they belong to different periods.13 This acknowledgment led to the view of the antique as an entirely incommensurable other, an idea first expressed by J.J. Winckelmann. It brooks no comparison; it may be imitated, but not continued. For the here-and-now of the modern, the antique is the absolute past, and can no longer be understood by us moderns.14 Culture’s temporal distances have taken on a new dimension, that of an absolute past, and have crossed a “Great Divide.”
Winckelmann’s theses correspond to contemporary views on the absolute past in the temporality of nature. In Kircher’s Baroque order, the depths of the earth were spaces for possible worlds; later it became clear that these depths did not so much contain enormous cave systems, underground seas and unknown creatures, but rather time, past time, deep time: the pit of time. Geologic time, a concept first formulated at the end of the 18 th century by James Hutton, is the consequence of a long series of discoveries and hypotheses probably initiated by Nicolaus Steno’s Prodromus of 1669, in which he describes not only geological strata but also formulates an account of the biological origin of fossils. Winckelmann’s and Hutton’s approaches to the depth of time are presumably part of the same story, dating the origin of the “mature” modern conception of time.
All this, though, was the beginning of only part of the palette of modernists’ chronotopoi. If deep time, the pit of time, indicates the past, then a time-elevator becomes possible as well, a time-space moving upward: the future. This other area, the chronotopos of the future, involves such elements as experimentation, anticipation, divination, and the fragmentary, a form that cannot yet be created as a whole in the here-and-now and whose future tense is not an extrapolation from trends but some undefined futurity. All of these appear almost simultaneously in the earliest years of the nineteenth century primarily, though not exclusively, as contributions of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, to be used – or reinvented – later by modernist currents.15
Briefly, modernism reflects two products of that modernity that distinguished itself from its own early version: deep time and the incommensurability of ancient and modern. What is lost in the worlds below ground (there being deep time instead of deep space) is regained with the radical division of the time-axis into two: the antique cannot be continued, if only because reflection alone may mediate between it and the modern.
The operationality of the modern – later to become modernist – chronotopos lies in the unfolding of the fictive/real relationship into an ever-more temporal one, to the point where antiquity objectifies the antique by virtue of its complete otherness and incommensurability (thereby excluding early modernity which does not think in discontinuities). We no longer have anything in common with it, we are not a part of it, we cannot continue it, nor can it be continued at all. The dividing line is unambiguous. At the same time, the antique becomes the object not only of science but the imagination as well. Yet as long as it remains an object for science, the borderlines between imagination and knowledge remain under control.16 Based on this model the future has also broken off from the here-and-now, having become a real playground for the real and the possible. This is precisely the chronotopos of modernism: the coordination of relationships between the fictive, the possible, and the real within the ties between radical past, recent past, present, and future. The future, though, ultimately passed before it even arrived.
The History of the Future from the Present Day to Modernism
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) thematicizes with unparalleled precision the space of modern times and the time of modern spaces. The title refers to the downward arc of the ballistic path (rain-bow, the falling arc). At the end of the Second World War, V2 rockets with ballistic warheads are still falling on London. Their point of impact is unpredictable, and yet it appears that there are one or more people who turn up at those very spots not long before the rockets hit. Is it part of a conspiracy, or does there exist the ability to mark these places in advance? Just as the Enigma code was successfully cracked, it might also be possible to mark out the rockets’ point of impact beforehand. Here, the Baroque science of ballistics meets the demand to move beyond that very science. Ballistics is the organization of space-time, where space contains moments of time, and the trajectory can be calculated by assembling them. If there ever was a chrono-topos, this is it. Every single slice of space can be assigned a moment determined by time; change, and the trajectory, consist of a coordinated series of states. All is static, yet the moments can be strung together to produce movement.17 It is impossible to know whether it is still space (or spaces) that determine movement and thereby time, or whether temporality is the dominant force. This uncertainty – times within spaces or spaces within times – this indeterminateness is the novel’s own space and time. Can the next step be taken towards anticipation, towards the calculated future? Pynchon thematicizes the modern concept of time, and he does it by making it spatial. He creates a chronotopos that is the novel’s own, where knowledge of the future would be one that transcends the laws of ballistics. The future is upwards (as antigravity tends to be in most science fiction literature); the descending arm of the rainbow’s arc strikes into the present as if from the future. (It is as if the writer himself were prognosticating here, though not for the first time, or the last; it is the infinitely urgent now, the imperative of the threatened state, the robust validation of the here-and-now that invalidates the actuality of excursions into alternative spaces and times, projecting an advance view of the now-obvious condition of the society of risk that Ulrich Beck was probably the first to formulate theoretically in 1986.18) The strong now resulting from the actuality of risk legitimates all approaches; the modern order which – apparently successfully – maintained the distinction between hypothesis and fiction, breaks down completely and collapses: every hypothesis becomes a possibility. In addition to physics and mathematics, everything – (Pavlovian) psychology, sex, mediums, synchronicity – anything that might allow the point of impact to be predicted, comes to be of interest. In a interpretative excursus on Proust in his Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin suggests that “the moment of awakening is identical with ‘the Now of knowability’, when things assume their true, surrealistic face.”19 The here-and-now is an imperative, and for that very reason it subordinates itself to the maybes and perhapses of a science-fiction-like erewhon. The “surrealist” element is a dreamlike logic that creates such connections, or entire networks of them, that the here-and-now of the waking state rejects.
Martin Kippenberberger’s Metro-Net World Connection of the 1990s was shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale. In the display room were a drawing and the kind of ventilation duct often seen in subways. From below, the sound of a rumbling train; the air rushing up due to the difference in pressure was easily felt. The real space of visual and auditory experience opened up an invisible, fictive one similar to Kircher’s mundus subterraneus: the space of the subway thundering by underneath Venice, a fiction that triggers an imagination of spaces much more than times. Kippenberger imagined a subway system that linked the entire globe, though apparently it had no stations in Venice but simply passed through below.
Yet this fictive space can open up a much more subjective dimension as well, a temporal one: the memory of the ghost trains that passed beneath the former East Berlin. These were just as clearly audible through the ventilation grilles, and the rushing air just as palpably felt. It was, as it were, a vehicle of communication that belonged to another world order – more precisely, it ex-communicated, as there were no stations in East Berlin (in fact there were, but the train did not stop there; the train was not a ghost train, but rather its stations ghost stations). Here were two systems that, in this one circumstance, were not different territorially, but layered, hence necessarily temporally different. Indeed, socialism’s planned future – at least on the level of ideology – arranged and organized its past and present in a completely different way from the view to the future implied in the ups and downs of stock prices within the capitalist order. The then suggested order, rendering socialism’s surface as present and future and capitalism’s depth as past proved in time to be quite the opposite, with the then-surface level becoming historical, part of a not-yet-deep time, albeit a deepening one.
To stick to the subjectivity of the association: Why does the time-axis come up at all? Is purely spatial imagination not enough? Is it perhaps a built-in reflex of modernism to insist on a temporal reference? Furthermore, why does the association not point toward the future? The concept of a subway that links the entire world might originally have been a utopian one in some of its aspects at least, but by 2003 it was clear that this conception no longer had a place in any idea of the future. Or does this mean that I, associating backwards in time, dissolved into a present in which, supposedly, the postmoderns dissolve the future? (“The future is now.”) Or why does an alternative future not emerge, one where fictive space generates an alternative temporality alongside the one we know as real – if for example Venice, in contrast to the role she once played, were not to play the mediator and merchant in distant lands – and in fact were not even on good terms with a world linked by subway, as evidenced by the lack of a stop there.
Today, the time-aspect of the spatially-conceived fiction floats, remaining subjective; this may summarize the difference in the poles of the time-span between the work’s conception in the early 90s and its exhibition in 2003. There is no clear chronos associated with the topos, even if an empty time were linked to it, a time void of meaning and content: a time when nothing ever changes.
In the year 2046, a vast rail network spans the globe. A mysterious train leaves for 2046 every once in a while. Every passenger going to 2046 has the same intention: They want to recapture lost memories, because nothing ever changes in 2046. Nobody really knows if that’s true, because nobody’s ever come back. Except me.20
In Wong Kar-Wai’s work, as in Kippenberger’s, there are tracks ringing the world, but these are above ground instead of below. Common between them is today’s global communication, here expressed as what is likely the technology most emblematic of the nineteenth century. The opening sentences of the film, which seem to be the words of a narrator until we hear the phrase “except me,” contain multiple, surrealistic, dreamlike associations and connections (all this while trains of apparently endless length pass through an urban landscape). This is the year – 2046 – by which time China has promised that “nothing will change” in Hong Kong, meaning that social change will not be enforced there. Until then becomes then: nothing changes in 2046. In 2046, trains leave for 2046. At the same time, “2046” is the name of a sector for which the train is headed, hence is a spatial point of reference also. “Nothing ever changes in 2046” – here indicating the sector rather than the year. The film, though, is set largely in the past, in the 60s; it turns out that 2046 is the number of a hotel room, in other words a part of the past, not the future.
The film encloses the present (c. 2004), the here-and-now, in a system of various futures’ times and places, as well as in the lost memories of the past. From the point of view of the sixties, today’s here-and-now is a future that has not been realized and probably never will be. The past’s future today: this is erewhon, a never-nowhere, “lost memory.” An erewhon that can be presented only offscreen is possible only through the past and a future time-place, 2046; this time-place is in turn the reference point of another, indeterminate future, because if one travels into this time and this sector, she might be going there from 2046’s future. The future is a place where (when?) nothing changes. This is the place where forgotten memories are stored. The future is memory – the modern’s memory.
The present, the here-and-now, is not only not robust; it cannot even be presented. It is perceptible only through a whole system of nowhere-nevers, like a Baroque, offscreen, possible world.
*
The organization resulting from the quarrel between the ancients and moderns, the one that makes time-space relationships thinkable in the forms of the chronotopoi that establish modernism, no longer seems given. Modernism will not become antique the way the Antique did. The “modern” refers not so much to an antique as to futures that have not happened, as if these were visions of the future conceived in possible worlds – if only because, while the chronotopoi of possible worlds had some view of the future, this is less true for this real one. Meanwhile, amid unrealized futures, presents (which are lost memories), and times that accelerate but have no vector, it would seem that possible spaces are again appearing, emerging from the premodern or early modern: the nowhere-evers of the here-and-now, erewhons that are arrangements serving as preconditions for real experiences. Maybe the future belongs to them.
Translated by Jim Tucker
1 T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, Yale University Press 1999, p. 3.
2 Just as Rosalind Krauss mentions, not without irony, that Frank Stella considered a baseball player to be the greatest living American because his vision was fastest ( In: The Optical Unconscious, October Books, MIT Press, NY, 1993, p. 7). Perhaps even more revealing is a brief dialogue from Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes (2003; the quote stems from Strange to Meet You of 1986): “ I like to drink a lot of coffee before I go to sleep so I can dream faster. I can dream like when they put a camera on the Indy 500… when they put a camera in the car, and it’s just whipping by like that. Dream after dream after dream after dream.”
3 T.J.Clark, ibid., p.1: “ What idea of the world’s availability to knowledge would they reckon the vanished imagemakers had operated with?”
4 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1967), Athlone Press 1994, p.285.
5Ibid.
6 Paul Binding, Imagined Corners: Exploring the World’s First Atlas, Headline Book Publ., 2003, p.13. (It remains unclear whether this map was published together with the atlas, as the fictive and the real are mingled even here: the here-and-now of the Atlas, and the nowhere of Utopia.)
7 This does not prevent the king of such an ultimately-fictive island from attacking Iceland (according to the Atlas), which ultimately repelled the attack (ibid., p. 241).
8 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 10-11.
9 Which, “with the aid of ‘translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture.” (ibid., p.10.)
10Ibid., pp. 38-9.
11 “…the more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes – such is the paradox of the moderns…” (ibid, p. 12). The purificatory practices of the “modern constitution” are in evidence in modernist theories of art as well.
12 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock (1888).
13 Hans Robert Jauß, “Ästetische Normen und geschichtliche Reflexion…”, in: Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, München, Eidos, 1964, pp. 8-64.
14 The incipient incomprehensibility that signaled the absolute distance of modern from ancient was treated in parodistic fashion as early as Sir Joshua Reynolds. “The travellers into the East tell us that when the ignorant inhabitants of these countries are asked concerning the ruins of stately edifices yet remaining amongst them, the melancholy monuments of their former grandeur and long-lost science, they always answer that they were built by magicians. The untaught mind finds a vast gulf between its own powers and these works of complicated art which it is utterly unable to fathom. And it supposes that such a void can be passed only by supernatural powers.” ( Discourses on Art , San Marino, California, Huntington Library, 1959, p. 94.)
15 To make this highly sketchy outline a little fuller, we might mention the transformation to which Friedrich Schiller subjects the concepts of ancient and modern (in his On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry), with unreflective (naïve) behavior becoming characteristic of the antique and its reflective, sentimental counterpart the property of the modern – setting aside the age we now call “early modern.”
16 This is the equivalent of what Latour calls “purification.”
17 ”… the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement” – the principle of motion pictures –has been in use since “Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air.”
18 Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1986.
19 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften v.1., Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1991, p. 578. Perhaps T.J. Clark’s aforementioned formulation “the idea of the world’s availability to knowledge” also refers to this sentence of Benjamin’s, precisely because it is the very conception of modernist works, trying to reach from the Now into an indeterminate future, that is fading into incomprehensibility.
20 Wong Kar-Wai, 2046 (2004).