The best part of the present is that you can sometimes almost get away with ignoring it completely. The “contemporary” part of contemporary life is, in various ways, entirely optional. We often exercise this option and drop nearly entirely out of our current time. Never all at once or totally - how could we? - but all the same, gradually and seemingly accidentally, we untether ourselves from the time in which we ostensibly live. This sounds far more fantastical than it is. The process isn’t complex or onerous. It’s very easy. So easy, in fact, that we don’t usually recognize our unmooring from this “now” and slow drift into some “then” until a good amount of time has passed.
A string of indifferent days will pass. We’ll stop checking the newspapers, overlook the pop culture websites, pay diminished attention to social media, and let the notification bells of Spotify, YouTube, et al. stay unrung. Little by little we’ll lose track of 2023 and whatever it contains, whatever it urges us to attend to or be concerned with. We don’t though spiral off into nowhere (or, we guess, nowhen). This gradual letting go of the present is always coupled with a grabbing hold of the past. We’ll pick up old books, old movies, old television shows, and old songs.
This isn’t deliberate exactly. It just happens. This isn’t, even, guided by anything personal. It isn’t nostalgic or escapist. We’re not looking to falsely relive a past experience or reanimate a previous historical moment. We’re really just casually seeking things that motivate interest and (hopefully) somehow rewards it. When we turn to the past, we turn usually to things for the first time. We don’t focus only on stuff that’s made some lasting impact, carries some kind of import, or imparts cultural capital. Really we’re looking only to hook up with anything that calls out. An R&B album from five years ago, a thriller from ten years ago, and so on. There’s no plan. We unthinkingly meet up with past things that, for whatever reason, we overlooked or couldn’t initially see. We treat the past just like the present. It’s replete with the valuable and invaluable, the entertaining and annoying. We find as much pleasure and frustration in the old things that are new to us as we do in the new things that are new to everyone.
Turning to older stuff for novel experiences isn’t, of course, unusual. We’re not the only ones unanchored to the present. Most folks, even, likely live most days immersed in multiple different times. They’ll, say, hear Radiohead on the radio as they drive to work or rush through chapters of Middlemarch on the metro. They’ll talk to folks about having caught Time Cop on cable or having finally seen Primer. Pulled in somehow they’ll watch Pushing Daisies or Good Times in the evenings from pilot to finale. We are all, in our own way, now navigating culture (in a broad sense) according to our own rhythm or whim. We each leave the zeitgeist when we can or want or must or so please. It’s a geist after all. Hardly restrictive.
In addition to slipping out of the present moment, we sometimes also (like others we imagine) take leave of our present setting. Rather than right here right now, we opt for some random over there whenever. Montreal is sometimes pretty good, but all the same we’ll regularly opt to culturally float from Tokyo to Los Angeles to Seoul to Cairo. Sometimes, rather than navigate from nation to nation, we’ll throw ourselves headlong into just one for a while. We’ll read and listen and watch nothing but, say, cultural objects from Mexico for a couple weeks. Or, wanting vaster terrain, shirk this continent entirely and spend a month or so in different versions of Europe.
We are no more geographically fenced in than we are historically. This means that we sometimes get wildly disoriented. We’ll go from 1950s America to 2010s Spain to 1900s Austria and on and on. We’ll spend day after day in places and times we have never physically visited or can never physically visit. We’ll throw ourselves fully into anything from any place and any time such that we’ll get a little off on the sudden and sharp discontinuities we force upon ourselves. Going from some 1590s sonnets to some 2019 hyperpop, a 1950s noir to 1990s emo, 1920s stream of consciousness to 1800s epistles. Rather than trusting maps or calendars to make things make sense, we instead just make it all get close together in and with us and try to note what happens to it and us at once. Nothing fits together save that we’ve made it fit somehow together in our experience.
We like, sometimes, getting intimate with things that seem very far away. We’re not, we don’t think, alone here. Moving around and about and across culture regardless of history and geography is maybe so common, so quotidian, that it seems weird to call attention to it. Of course you listen to songs from places other than here, watch movies from years other than this one. Why wouldn’t you? How couldn’t you?
The ability, though, to leave our (cultural) here and now almost entirely behind without having to spend much money, expend much effort, etc. is, though, remarkably new. The accessibility of the cultural past has crept up on us. Books, of course, have been keeping the past present for a long while. Music has, since it’s been able to be recorded, likewise done a pretty good job of establishing an archive with records, 8-tracks, cassettes, and CDs. Movies (and eventually television) used VHS, laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray to render old stuff newly or constantly available. Physical media, though, was stupidly physical. You had to search it out, find it, get it, and care for it. You had to move bodily to it or have others move it in packages to you. For a while now (as you know) you can search more easily, find more quickly, get immediately, and care not at all. Everything is now here and, being here, we can fuck with it as and when and if we like. So we do.
Byung Chul Han has written (vaguely) about this particularly 21st-century phenomenon for the last twenty-ish years. He talks about how, in the present, we have all become cultural tourists. We visit Indonesian film, read German lit, and so on. We establish a home in no culture in particular, but visit everywhere shallowly. He suggests that we are now (in a broad sense) afflicted by a kind of wanderlust, a peculiar cultural nomadism, that is enabled or provoked (he’s a little unclear on this point) by the fact that late capitalist cultures (and cultural products) are sufficiently homogenized such that little epistemic or emotional effort is required to hop from one place to the next. We visit cultural objects from all over the place because all places are essentially now the same which renders all their cultural objects effectively the same.
Mark Fisher, similarly, suggests that the post-Y2K cultural landscape is marked by a-temporality, by an amorphous kind of historical indistinction. Fisher suggests that 21st-century culture is all roughly identical by dint of being produced in late capitalist circumstance. There is, to his eye or ear, no notable distinction to be made between art made in 2004 and art made yesterday. It’s all a fallen and flat mass that can not (or does not) bear the mark of the particular period in which it was made. There are, of course, some exceptions to this totalizing and dour proclamation - but they’re few and far between and merely prove the rule that the history of the present is no history at all.
They’re both wrong obviously. Claims of this kind can’t be right. Han is wrong that national/geographic distinctions have been elided from contemporary cultural objects (popular music charts are the easiest and quickest way to note the persistence of not only national, but regional cultural specificity both in terms of production and reception) and Fisher is wrong that historical distinctions are no longer operative in contemporary culture (watch the first Fast & the Furious movie and the most recent one for a fascinating (albeit painful and insane) illustration of how the 2000s and 2020s differ markedly in a litany of ways relating to aesthetic form and content).
But, despite being wrong, Han and Fisher do seem to point towards something right, namely, that contemporary cultural engagement might be marked by a certain kind of historical and geographical sluttiness.
You might - if you’re inclined to defend Han and/or Fisher - say that the sluttiness of which we speak is just a consequence of the cultural symptom they diagnosed. We are inclined to historical and geographical sluttiness because the here and now of contemporary culture is so empty, impoverished, uniform, etc. We don’t want to settle down and get monogamous with our temporal and spatial surroundings because they’re craven, unattractive, and constantly talking about an upcoming recession. This, though, is a hard argument to substantiate.
We might be sluttier than past generations, but we are also the first generation capable of such unrepentant sluttiness. It is only very recently that digital media (i.e. streaming, downloading) has effectively and holistically supplanted physical media. We are, for the first time then, no longer beholden to certain market forces, trends, strictures, etc. or limited by cumbersome material means of access to music, movies, and television from elsewhere. Our present is distinct, but it is distinct because of material conditions rather than demographic inclinations. It seems, from where we’re sitting, likely that past generations would have happily hopped out of bed with their immediate time and place for the allure of strange other times and places had they had the opportunity. Low-cost airfare and accomodations means increased tourism, low-cost digital devices and fast-speed internet means increased cultural sluttiness. Taking a trip to Ibiza doesn’t mean that Atlanta is unpalatable just as spending time in 1850s London doesn’t mean 2020s Beirut is awful.
We could, here, canvas all the ways that this cultural sluttiness has had an impact on our contemporary cultural landscape in a positive sense (e.g. rediscovery of neglected artists/authors/etc., increasingly diverse cultural markets composed of international objects) and a negative sense (e.g. musical nostalgia tours and festivals, endless remakes and revivals and sequels) - but we’re, as we said, not all that invested in the present at present.
We’re more curious about the future, about what becomes of contemporary culture when it is (in the next five to ten years) created by folks who have grown up culturally slutty. What kind of now will they create?
While we - personally - skip from time to time, place to place, we are always (in effect) doing some kind of contrastive work. We’re always, at least loosely, noting differences between the cultural objects we were raised on or through and the generic conventions or cultural assumptions or historical situations of others. This kind of contrastive work may not make any sense to the Alphas who, by dint of the current digital landscape, are being raised with/by cultural objects from anywhen and anywhere indiscriminately. While we’re aware that history and geography are meant to be meaningful (but sometimes opt to set this imposition to the side), Alphas (or really just anyone with an anachronic and polygeographical cultural upbringing) might not note or recognize or admit its hermeneutic import at all.
This isn’t to say that Alphas will have no sense of time or place, that locales and periods will lose all meaning, but rather that the cultural archives from which they draw will maybe be far more historically and geographically varied than those that came before them which, then, can’t help but have an impact on how they conceive of history and geography (their own and those of others) more broadly. We could speculate here on how that might play out, but who’s to say what these younger folks will make of and do with the world they’ve involuntarily inherited.
It’s probably the case that ongoing trends of devaluing creative work, rendering basic material conditions for such creative work (like food and shelter) prohibitively expensive, and actively turning the earth into an inhospitable, unpredictable, and unwelcoming terror zone will nullify whatever potential Alphas have to create an exciting and novel cultural world that is uniquely and fully their own. Their cultural rootlessness is and will be coupled with the ever-increasing geographical rootlessness of people fleeing their homes and searching out new and different potentially habitable places, areas hopefully safe from ecological or political or social catastrophe.
Our present privilege of being historically and geographically slutty in regards to culture may be widely shared, but it is not of course wholly shared. While living in a place here and now that does not threaten or impinge unduly on our survival or basic well-being, we can afford to culturally flee. We try not to take this small miracle for granted, try to recognize that the higher-order pleasures we find in art and the like are possible only because more fundamental necessities are taken care of, unthreatened, and so on. It is, we confess, hard though to constantly keep both the good and the bad of the present in sight at all times. This, really, might be one of the unacknowledged reasons we find ourselves taking or seeking refuge in the past. While the past, too, is full of horrific and harrowing matters, the distance from them we’re afforded makes them matters of thought and feeling rather than matters of direct concern.
There’s a bitter tension in the present. It is the most exciting and best moment to be alive if you are interested in (or able to interest yourself in) culture because it is all available. You can listen and read and watch and fuck with EVERYTHING and for cheap (or free if you know your way around Russian search engines). It’s unbelievable. And yet at the same time the world that surrounds culture (i.e. literally everything) is so damn chaotic and dystopic and dead-ended. It often feels like living in a cul-de-sac with endless sources of entertainment and enrichment but no opportunity for fruitful labor or meritorious action. While culture is open and available and exciting, the world at large seems increasingly closed-off and unapproachable and even hostile.
It is a remarkable time to be a cultural consumer, but a challenging and dispiriting one to be a cultural producer or just a simple person looking to meaningfully participate in and contribute to the world as it stands.
And, but, so, what then? What about those of us (like us) who want to create things, who want to turn our flings with the good and bad stuff of other times and places into something right now? How do we turn our geographical and historical sluttiness into something more substantive, more generative? How do we transform our private trysts with culture and make them into some kind of public good?
Well, the good thing about the present’s lack of concern with the present, about the present’s disastrous state, is that you can do often get away with doing whatever the fuck you want without gaining much immediate or lasting attention. You can just do whatever weird thing you want, contribute in the small or ambitious ways you are moved to, and hope (against hope) that at some unknown and unknowable point in the future - maybe next week, month, year, decade, etc. - some felt effect of your labor will follow and someone will happen across your words or colors or shapes or pictures or actions and that future person (themselves perhaps culturally slutty in their own way) will take interest or find solace in that past thing you did right here in the present and they’ll be moved to do something in turn for still future folks and so on and so on and so on until there aren’t people anymore and all our problems are solved.
The best part of the present is, like we said before, that you can sometimes almost get away with ignoring it completely. We can ignore it for the sake of the past, for the sake of acquiring knowledge or experience from what has come before, but also ignore it for the sake of the future, for the sake of building something for unknown others on the basis of what we’ve learned and experienced. The only way we know to act in the present is by knowing that it is transitory, trivial, and will itself become the past so quickly and suddenly and irreparably that we won’t even notice it happening.
And so long as the present continues to contain that single best part maybe, in some sort of way, we’ll be OK or better than we might have been or will be otherwise. So, then, in our own way, we do care about the present so long as it persists as a chance to hold together all the possibilities of the past and future for a quick and fleeting moment and to turn, hopefully, those possibilities into better and different, unforeseeable and unforeseen actualities.
Right here and right now, we don’t much care for the present save being able to leave evidence that we lived in and through it for the sake of sharing some common or uncommon stuff with other people in other times and other places whose right there and right then might be better or worse or just plain other than ours so that they, too, can know that their present is, in its own way, ignorable for the sake of other people in still other times and other places. And so on forever or at least a while hopefully.
"it's a remarkable time to be a cultural consumer, but a challenging and dispiriting one to be a cultural producer " 😜 so true and yet my favorite part of this article was when you gave us a little bit of hope. It's in there if we look hard enough