The Distant Past

I can still remember how it ended. The twentieth century, I mean. We were free to make whatever moves the constraints of physics and chemistry permitted. Amid dreams and visions, signs and wonders, everything was relative, value neutral. All behaviour was culturally relative and socially constructed.

We all knew, after all, that social reality is a kind of collective evolving fiction, constructed and maintained by the processes of socialization, institutionalization, tradition and everyday social interaction, all through the medium of language, the jostling world-views of different social classes, religions, cultures, media exposures, and so on, to be escaped only through drugs and alcohol, religious transcendence, psychotherapy perhaps, schizophrenia or love. Only then do our hallucinations and fantasies become real, and metaphors become literal.

Thus everyone's actions were morally equivalent to everyone else's actions. Heroes acted out of self-interest, just as criminals did. The guy who risked his life racing into the burning building to save the child was no better than the arsonist who had set the blaze. There were almost no taboos left to transgress. After Tito died, the Croatian authorities renamed the streets after Fascist leaders.

Some of us aspired to a refined hedonism, a celebration of luxury, of the pleasure of satisfying desires in the most refined way, with no expense spared. Others of us scrounged in litter bins, hoping to find the remnants of a Big Mack or a sweet-and-sour takeaway that the flies and rats had not already commandeered. There was the texture of plastic and new-age philosophy, the re-release of Star Wars and the re-appearance of flared trousers, all parts of a kind of nostalgia industry for the increasingly recent past, to fill the void that lay at the heart of experience.

The demand for musical and artistic genius had all but died out. Accordingly, strident monotonies issued from loudspeakers and a host of galleries, museums, workshops, and sidewalk shows appeared along with government or business programs to exhibit, sell or send abroad as propaganda the increasing mass of visual art. All wall space accommodated children’s art, art by the physically or mentally disabled, art by convicts, art by chimpanzees. We were embracing entropy, doing our bit to hurry along the heat death of the universe, without knowing that the event had been cancelled. Every public space was filled with the sound of the ring tones of mobile telephones and one side of all the subsequent conversations.

We got a constant rundown on the fashion themes. Retro or vintage-inspired styles from the twenties through the eighties were on the racks, all made in China, by peasant girls from villages, living ten-to-a-room in the barracks of sweat shops in Shen Zhen.

The world was defined by two elements: a gigantic web of bureaucratic control and the interpenetration of government and big business into a form of state-capitalism so that in effect, Nazism and the New Deal had become related systems in pursuit of the same objectives. In a general sense, a burnt-out era lacking any sense of future, filled with a feeling that it's all over with, that everything's been done and done badly, that nothing lies ahead but degeneration or repetition of the same.

Decline, disappearance, detritus; these were the buzzwords. The one central psychological fact of contemporary culture resided in the phrase “nothing sacred”, a sort of background radiation of the social and intellectual universe. The post-modern had come into existence following that tell-tale instant after which things were no longer the same.

In the realm of politics and economics there were passionate debates about the possible devaluation of the Yuan and the implications for both the gulags and the shopping malls. People conjectured about the failure of legitimacy and the inevitable, impending, only-a-matter-of-time collapse of the Chinese Communist Party. After all, only a mere decade had passed and people had not yet completely forgotten.

“If only the Chinese democracy movement could get its act together,” people said to one another, as if it were a sports team having a bad season.

Social historians were debating the relative significance of moveable type and double entry bookkeeping as compared to packet switching. The word globalisation was being chanted like a mantra of politics, of economics, of even culture; partly because of the collapse of the Soviet Union; partly because of the Uruguay round of the GATT; partly because of information technology.

In certain quarters, the talk and the connections spread person to person amid a palpable, visceral, jealous hatred for Bill Gates, starting from how the Apple computer with its icons and mouse had emerged from the misty mixture of MSDOS and the old counterculture only twenty-two years before, as that very counterculture turned to Whole Earth politics and the dream of small-scale, electronically bonded communities, hyper-reality, virtual worlds, cyberspace, interactive global communication, and then beyond to artificial intelligence, neural networks, cyborg culture, an anxiety about the edges of the body and the limits of the machine, to nano-technology, genetic engineering and the dawning of a post-biological age, overworking the collective pronouns as if everyone spoke English and had a computer and an email account connected to a broadband network. Always we who will all soon be on-line, our world shrinking into a global hyper-reality, the new social formation apparently no longer required to obey the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle.

There was loud and vigorous, but not strident, argument, each faction voicing its opinion but at the same time, each being careful to agree not to disagree on how serious to take it all; the proper tone of voice, the politically correct vocabulary, the appropriate degree of seriousness, the mutual respect, the framework in which the debate could remain acceptable to all.

Socialism,” said one faction, “the inclusion of all people into citizenship through the provision of the economic minimum which allows for self-respect.”

“Liberalism,” said another, “the principle of individual achievement of social position on the basis of merit.”

“Conservatism,” said a third, “the continuity of the past and present, in order to shape the future as a necessary condition of a civilized order.”

Note was taken of the fact that not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather realistic, or at least reasonable; that this means the effacement of the frontier between high culture and mass culture; that the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, terror, sex and economics; that poetry is rooted in love, and love in desire, and desire in the hope of continued existence.

There was a group of young, optimistic poets and writers who shared sparsely furnished flats. They drank Mexican beer with lime slices jammed into the necks of the bottles, and talked eagerly through the night, trying to call into existence, as if by collective endeavour, as if by magic, a refined, literary world, and failing, caught up in their own embarrassed self-consciousness, searching for gestures and turns of phrase they hadn’t all seen in the cinema, or worse, on MTV.

Television rehearsed the turn of the century for months in advance of the event, its large glass eye blinking and flickering almost everywhere you looked. One could be forgiven for thinking that the great events of the millennium, or at least the century, are those for which archival footage exists, that history has come to be told by the photographic image in its cinematographic and televisual forms, whether the image was originally enlisted to produce desire, encourage commodity consumption, entertain, educate, dramatize experience, document events in time, celebrate identity, inform, misinform, or offer evidence. And it was clear that everything from the sexually explicit to psychological squalor and extreme and overt expressions of social and political defiance and repudiation no longer scandalized anyone but had become institutionalised and were at one with the public culture.

There were random fragments of political and economic history, with images of the Brandenburg Gate, Auschwitz, and oil on terrible, beautiful, awe-inspiring fire against the black sky of Kuwait. Some fuzzy, dark figures on horseback, with long overcoats and fur hats, galloped with their sabres drawn, in front of the Winter Palace. That helicopter on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. Bill Gates. Pol Pot. Jimmy Swaggart. Albanians poured out of Kosovo, Chechens out of Chechnya. Long lines of Kurds struggled their way up a muddy footpath on a snowy mountainside while helicopters circled overhead. There was not a single reference to the countless millions who have died un-televised, as anonymous as drowning victims in a Bangladesh ferry accident.

Can anything remain unthinkable? Not even dead soldiers dragged by jeering mobs through the streets of Mogadishu? Made all the worse by the rationalizations of the supposed good intentions that were used to sell the intervention in the first place.

We were all so innocent still. None of us had yet, of course, imagined or contemplated either the dark silhouette of a passenger jet impacting an office tower, or the terrible beauty of the subsequent fireball. And certainly none of us could have anticipated the total hypocrisy of Tony Blair, or the sheer terrifying idiocy of the younger Bush, former governor-executioner of Texas, made all the more outrageous by the Supreme Court decision in Florida.

But we weren’t completely ignorant. We had an operational scale of evil. We certainly knew that Saddam Hussein was awful; not as bad as Hitler and Stalin, of course, but worse than Laurent Kabila, and way worse than Ghadafi, probably worse than Slobodan Milosevic and Idi Amin, but not as bad as Pol Pot.

The television montage continued with degraded black and white landscapes of schlock and kitsch, the banal, the prosaic, the disgusting, blossoming into colour occasionally with plaster busts of Elvis and colourized clips from some old, forgotten television series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising images and famous sound bites and highway-side motels, of late show personalities and dead presidents and the actors and actresses of grade-B Hollywood films.

And then victims-as-commodities; the smiling, gracious, skin-and-bones Diana, fixed on the camera with a look somewhere between imperial and heartbroken, we read into it what we wish – after all, visiting orphanages and refugee camps is such a wretched way to spend the day - and that plump young-woman-on-the-make named Monica, and the great classic billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle, and faces defiantly shouting into microphones, and variations on the heroic stances engendered by the electric guitar. Who could possibly have anticipated that one of the major media concerns of the late twentieth century would turn out to be the distinguishing marks on the American president’s dick?

There was no simple now anymore. Our consciousness of a period comes after the fact, with the re-editing of the original media coverage. None of us were even sure that there was anything as coherent as a zeitgeist any more.

Post-love, post-fear, post-grief, we saw, yet again, as if for old times sake, the CNN coverage of the first Gulf War when negotiations had broken down; an ultimatum had been issued, and we had turned on our televisions to see surveillance, simulation, and strike, operating both in the virtual and the material. We and the pilot experienced smart bomb simulations, while other people got burnt alive - aesthetic production integrated into commodity production; slaughter as a video game, death imitating art, the image as a substitute for first-hand experience.

In the centres of the great cities, Times Square, Piccadilly, the Champs-Elysees, the Ginza, people gathered in the streets under the blinking neon signs to share the vibrancy of the milling crowd in anticipation of midnight. Amid ominous buildings, ugly bridges, clogged roadways, and a multitude of traffic signs commanding NO, STOP, DO NOT, the night was filled with the sounds of distant car alarms. With raw audio clarity we heard the sirens of emergency vehicles echo in the canyons of the high tower blocks. As if from the window of a jet, we saw the staggering vista of the night time megalopolis strung like diamonds, sapphires and flashing rubies on black velvet. In Rio there were many excited people moving as one to the heartbeat thud of drums. In all those places a fantastic fireworks display filled the night sky. And then it all faded away, dissolved, evaporated, and the twenty-first century began.