Cultural History and Psychoanalysis (original) (raw)
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This chapter is an attempt to think about history and historical understanding from the future. My excuse for choosing such a big and speculative topic for a very short essay is mostly tactical – it is written as a sort of prelude, to sketch out main themes, put forward key concepts, and see if and how readers would react to them. The main argument I propose for discussion is that our contemporary regime of historicity is producing new modalities of the future that have, retroactively, an important impact on our historical thinking. Put differently, my interest is in discussing how to make sense of the past in a world where the future is not what it used to be.
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Referring somewhat subversively to the main idea of this publication expressed in the question "What IS THE PULSE OF THE PRESENT (#now) and what IS COMING", I would like to focus here on the past, and more specifically, to consider how much what has gone by determines the current pulse of what is coming. I assume that in human experience, both that of individuals and communities, including the experience of art both from the perspective of its creators and recipients, the past, present, future and eternity are inseparably intertwined and determine the uniqueness of human being-in-the-world. Nevertheless, both individuals and cultures can valorize particular dimensions of temporality differently, which means that we can distinguish four temporal orientations: retrospective, presentistic, prospective, and eternistic. These orientations may not only be different for different individuals (or cultures), but also in the life of the same individual (culture), different temporal attitudes may prevail over others. "Politicizing" reflection on these orientations, I would like to consider whether the adoption of a retrospective orientation (also in the field of art) is inevitably linked with a conservative and traditionalist attitude prevailing today, or whether it can convey a counter-hegemonic subversive, emancipatory and progressive potential.
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The love that collectors harbour for the objects of their desire is very special, for collecting something implies that it is divested of both its usage and its actual purpose. A wine collector would rather drink a beer than his most unique bottle of wine. This ambivalent devotion also has something to do with death, as Jacques Derrida describes in his work Mal d'archive, published in English as Archive Fever.
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It is a cliché of our time that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than a transformation in its political and economic values. The future looms over us, and yet is continually foreclosed by an unyielding present. This future and its foreclosure are both historical: in current society, they are framed by catastrophic climate change arising from the industrial use of fossil fuels, and by Francis Fukuyama’s idea of a post-Communist end of history. But the futures that people in the past imagined and predicted still reverberate and circulate as what William Gibson described as semiotic ghosts, “bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own.”
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