WHERE WE ARE WE
Jonathan Splitlog
Jonathan Splitlog
where we are we
what to do when you show up at the end
introduction
History’s construction of the Past is a flawed philosophical framework that distorts perceptions & interpretations of the Present. The Present is a wild fluctuating vacuum that is in constant tension with the narrative structure of the Past. By critically analyzing historical theories from Modern and Postmodern thinkers, this essay explores and contends: 1
Historians’ narrative tendencies, personal biases, and academic constraints establish an unreliable groundwork for the objectivity Historical writing is credited with. The notion of objective re-tellings of the collective human experience in narrative formats is a farce.
2
The Postmodern condition feels Post-Historical, aimless, and adrift from time because of its inability to reconcile the past with the rapidly-changing present. The Present moment feels irreparably exploded and separate from the false narrative continuum of history.
3
The contemporary condition is one of identity crisis. In the age of existence beyond the scope of history, humans must find new & novel ways to define themselves.
part one
where we are we
History’s Clutch on the Present
1 THE RUBBLE OF HISTORY
History is—as critic Michael Foucault
interrupts the process & progress of
put it—an abstract “archaeology of
History’s hungry advance.
knowledge.” [1] Historians collect & analyze the salvageable detritus of
Historians have forged a narrative arc
Humanity that has inexplicably survived
of mythologized events that joins the
the destructive vortex of the Present.
chaotic & unknowable Present to the very beginning of human experience.
Modernism’s Historical thinking
Historiography & historical theories
reframes the Present as the bleeding
project a narrative of cause & effect onto
edge of the Past. The Past is seen
great spans of loosely related events
as a giant, comprised of all human
over time; simultaneously discarding
experience, lumbering linearly through
a great majority of “unworthy” human
time. The Present is dismissed as a
experience that doesn’t fit into a neat
pesky inconvenience that momentarily
linear structure.
theories of everything
Historical Materialism is examplary of Modernist theories of History.
Historical Materialism focuses on the causes, effects, and reactions to the organization of labor & production. Popularized by scholars like Karl Marx & Friedrich Engles, this theory attempts to link social revolutions across space and time based on perceived patterns of class structure.
From Marx’s historical vantage point, in the context of social revolution and upheaval, he believed himself able to perceive “a coherence aris[ing] in human history.”[2] Under the lens of this theory, all of the disparate social revolutions across time and geography had a connective throughline of Proletariat vs. Bourgeois. This line led straight to Marx’s Present moment of tumultuous upheaval and social revolution.
Divining an overarching pattern of behavior in the noise of the Past seems like an enormous academic & social revelation. Taking this line of thought further along, however, reveals its restrictive framework.
Late Modernist/Early Postmodernist/Oddball writer and scholar Walter Benjamin took issue with Modernism’s overarching narratives across the span of History. Benjamin believed History maintained an illusion of “…the appearance of a chain of events…”, but was more accurately characterized as, “…one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble…”. [3]
In his view, History was not a stack of distinguishable eras and epochs with clearly defined borders. He recognized the haze, uncertainty, and limited scope inherent in the present moment & projected that —rather than a cohesive narrative—onto the fabric of History.
Marx, like many historians, was able to find an historical narrative that seemed to steamroll right into his own situation. His Present moment suddenly became the next inevitable chapter in a long, continuing historical narrative about social & political revolution.
This way of thinking divorces responsibility and agency from the members of the Present, as they are now simply carrying out the will of the Historical Zeitgeist. When an individual in the Present believes they are enacting the next inevitable step of Historical progress, dangerous and illogical things can happen.
One need only look to the historically & racially motivated propaganda of the Nazi Party’s Third Reich or the Manifest Destiny of Westward Expansion to see how historical thinking can shape & warp the Present’s philosophy into quasi-religious zealotry.
tension in time
History’s basic premise is to create an understandable & (ideally) objective recount of events that have transpired. The philosophical cracks are imbued within the premise.
The Present moment is comprised of everything happening everywhere experienced by everyone all at once. It is an ephemeral pastiche that ceaselessly collapses and appears. There is no comprehensive way to capture it in the moment all at once. From a Historian’s perspective, the Present must be discounted for its volatility & unknowability.
The reason historians look backward and attempt to reconstruct narratives from this mess is obvious: it’s hard to understand what’s going on right now.
When Historians attempt to piece all of these disparate experiences together, the fragmented narratives they create are built equally on facts and omissions. In weaving together their own narrative of History, the bias of Present Historians interacts with & further distorts the biases of all Past Historians.
Each new generation of Historians must wrestle, reconcile, and align historical writing from the past with—as Benjamin wrote, “the constellation in which [the historian’s] own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one.” [3] New Historical work is built on the questionable integrity of the combined works preceding it. It is akin to the text of the Christian Bible’s long strange journey of translation & revision through scores of interactions with living & dead scholars over millennia. There is no way to separate the inaccuracies at this point because they are so hopelessly intermeshed with the surviving documents.
From the unfortunate vantage of that pesky Present moment, historians are free to project cohesive narratives and hive-logic over loose collections of individual experiences in the Past. Once the recent Present reveals its shape & significance to historians, it is easily slotted into the Historical narrative like a puzzle piece. The irrelevant pieces that don’t fit the puzzle are discarded from the narrative and forgotten. As Walter Benjamin put it in his further criticisms of Historical representation, “To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.” [3]
The re-telling of History is ultimately a reshaping of History, regardless of the author’s intent. Unconscious bias and selective readings of events ultimately cause Historiography to be a kaleidoscope of distorted lenses, rather than the clear-cut linear narrative it pretends to be.
2 POST– HISTORY
The Present moment is a nakedly chaotic & confusing vacuum. Despite the presence of History’s framework, life is lived in its entirety inside of this vacuum.
History is Humanity’s attempt to catalogue & rationalize in the face of this endless fluctuating void. In a Postmodern world—inside of this Void of Present—without an historical narrative for the present to lean against, where are we?
Nobody lives beyond the scope of the Present. The Past is a persistent, illusory construct of a false collective memory. An example: A forty year-old man has not lived forty discrete or collective years. He has instead—more or less—lived a continuum of one day from morning until night thousands and thousands of times.
Time does not stack up in an additive collection of decades, but rather with the dripping by of endless ephemeral moments. It is the memory of time that distorts and confuses our ability to analyze the present. If the present moment is constantly filtered through the lens of what has already happened, History’s clutch remains tight.
When actions are decided based on pattern recognition in past events (e.g. This group of people will probably act this way because they have always been that way), dangerous precedents threaten free will in the Present.
Historians idolize & narrate the Past, compressing and simplifying History into a rose-tinted reference guide for navigating the Present. Studying History from a remove allows interpretation and exploration akin to art criticism & theory. It seems there is as much Historiography and Historical Theory as there is actual History.
The process of Historiography—the aforementioned kaleidoscope of distorted lenses—cements each layer of Historical narrative down beneath itself. When slews of new individual historical theories continue to reference & stabilize old individual historical theories, the Past’s grip on the story of Humanity tightens.
adrift in the future
It is the crest of the 21st century. The
Historical models of thinking
first waves of events are settling into
are becoming less useful as
the recent Past and beginning to set the
people recognize fewer and fewer
precedent for the next chapter in the
commonalities with their technologically
Historical narrative.
unequipped predecessors.
The Western 20th century has
Frameworks for decision making based
completely settled into The Past as a
on pattern-recognition in the Past begin
series of easily identifiable ten year
to fail as culture breaks new ground in
periods of fashion and culture. The
the digital multiverse.
lens of the 20th century and its discrete decades of back-and-forth cultural shifts will surely affect how thoughts and actions unfold in the coming future.
Now is an interesting moment for History. Technological advancements have abstracted so much of life, interaction, and experience. While exponential development has been the historical norm since the dawn of agriculture, the breakneck uptick in recent decades has been dramatic.
part two
where we are we
Abstraction & Identity
1 THE END
© The Sopranos, 1999–2007, HBO
History has collapsed.
We got here at the end of it. The world we live in bears no resemblance to the stories and mythic lands The Past has promised us.
Eons of action and reaction have accumulated into only rubble and confusion.
We stand atop this heap, seeing no further for it.
Our view is obfuscated by our own collective fantasy of progress and expansion.
concrete fixtures
Education has made history a subject of study akin to math & science. It has become a knowable fixture with concrete divisions and interrelations. Chapters mark and divide history into a commodity curriculum. Periods of history come to be recognized by a series of catchphrases, consumed during lecture & regurgitated during testing.
The complexities and diversities of entire time periods are condensed into simplified, knowable monuments that can be recognized from a distance. In education, these historical monuments are arranged in a neat line spanning backwards from the present moment into the yawning past. In this arrangement each monument is linked by the connective myth of historical narrative. Education constructs these monuments, arranges them, and ties them together with this mythic narrative link.
outrunning ourselves
But what do you do when you show up at the end? Where does the present moment fit into this model of understanding the world? When the world has been revealed to be a cold rock in empty space, what comfort are the fables of the naive past? What solace may we take in the lessons that precede the end of expansion? Where do we look to when we feel no connection to our ancestors?
Ours is a period of great transition.
Intense cycles of production & disposal are pursued for the sake of progress towards the techno-utopia we have been on the cusp of for the past three decades. Nothing in use now will last to even the near-future. Everything will be lost in the fires of obsolescence.
The cycle from “must-have product” to “unremembered garbage” has gotten shorter and shorter to the point of insanity. Our legacy is a world of landfills, piled high with short-lived high-cost devices.
2 FILTERED REALITY
Every experience in contemporary existence is filtered through layers and layers of abstraction.
Screen is the perfect synecdoche for our current technology. A physical screen filters out unwanted impurities from a solid mass. In the technological sense, screens convert raw data into understandable visual abstractions. They deliver us something we can understand by interpreting heaps of illegible code.
We are not yet in the age where screens are embedded into the environment, they are still bulky discrete objects. A computer is a physical monument and artifact.
The picture of our age is someone alone in a room hunched over in front of a glowing blue screen. The world remains physical and tangible but is increasingly filtered through screens. Each screen is another level of abstraction between the viewer and the physical world.
With enough filters, a person can
everyday lives. Every moment we do
become divorced from the physicality
not produce content for our personal
of reality, choosing instead a personal
brand is a wasted moment. We have
reality. Similarly, a person can
cured dull moments by filling them
selectively filter & share their life,
with other people’s exciting lives.
cultivating a “personal” “brand” in their curated version of reality.
Staring at photos and videos of curated lives through the lens of social
Social media has become a world-
media is a strange new behavior. We
building exercise for self-absorbed
live in a world of constant voyeurism
people. Platforms are filled with
and exhibitionism, but only to prove
people trying to be simultaneously
we have an interesting life worth
unique, trendy, and inoffensive
broadcasting to the world.
enough to become popular. Millions watch along in awe of how their paltry
The myth of celebrity has finally
non-curated life pitifully measures up
reached its tipping point in the age
against this aesthetic reality people
of social media. When every person
purport to live in.
on earth has access to the same level of exposure previously reserved for
We live in constant tension between
the rich & famous, the cheapness of
our exciting highly curated online
attention becomes apparent.
existences & our dull and hum-drum
soaking & saturating
The postmodern condition is one of total media saturation. We are bombarded with images. Friends, ads, brands, family, humor, news, important, unimportant. All swimming together in the undifferentiated soup of screens. In reaction to this mess, identity & individualism is formed by quilting a pastiche of media over the top of one’s personality. Distinguishing oneself from others is a matter of finding a unique combination of consumption.
Personality in the 21st century is largely carved in this manner: how do the brands & media that have successfully captured your attention and identity overlap with each other & interact with your personal disposition to form your identity? What Self can you divine from the mess of media you’ve been swimming in? What unique combination can you create out of this tangle? That’s you now. That’s the accumulation of experiences we carry around: memories of abstract interactions with screens.
3 MANIFESTO FOR POSTHISTORICAL IDENTITY
1
The arc of history no longer supports or propagates the current moment. Historical justification for present action is a dangerous misuse of history. The more we look to the past, the more we confuse the present for something we already understand.
2
History is a linear narrative fiction imposed onto chaotic static patterns of human behavior. History is more about omission for the sake of preserving a narrative.
3
Our screens are bulky well-designed artifacts that bend & hunch our bodies to their seductive will. We are the last to stoop over blue screens before the age of embedded ambient technology.
4
Contemporary identity is formed from a unique combination of overlapping media consumption habits. We are what we stare at. We are how those things interact and pull against the physical world we encounter. Our accumulated experiences are largely digital & therefore abstract from reality. Each act of consumption contributes to this pastiche. Be intentional with what you stare at.
5
Social media is a farcical attempt to uphold mythic individualism as a reaction to the noise of the Present. It is an imposition of retroactive narrative over the disjointed fabric of reality.
6
It is our responsibility to push forward through this transition. The remains of 20th century’s linear thinking must be refuted as we emerge into the chaos of a globally connected visual culture. Embrace the chaos as reality, realize how little of life snaps to a narrative. Use this as an impetus for creativity.
7
The illusion of history will eventually consume us all & serve us up in bite-sized catchphrases to future generations of primary students. We must act outside of history, we must make ourselves difficult to categorize to avoid the prison of linearity & systemization. We must smash the linear wherever we encounter it. It is a damaging lie that makes us feel inevitable and robbed of free will.
8
History is nipping at our heels and we must outrun & confuse it to reveal its weak & illusory nature.
History is an important educational tool for getting a summary of the eternal Present moment. It is interesting to study reactions of different groups of people in different settings across time. However, this thinking paints humanity as a race with a continuous story. From the perspective of education, there is a beginning, middle, and end of history. The end was yesterday, and today we are just dancing naked in the void until something sticks to the past that lines up with the most recent history. At the beginning of the 21st century, it is difficult to find kinship with the Modern thinkers and their predecessors. We are at the end of expansion, we have arrived in the age of necessary reductions. We have filled up the world with cheap junk and shit we don’t need, now we have to figure out what to do about it. There is no romantic beginning to this story, because we’ve arrived at the very messy end. And at the end, when the present continues on but the narrative doesn’t resolve, what are we to believe? What kind of story flames out into an eternal state of recovery from the beginning and middle?
The story becomes less of a linear progression and more of a loop of production & cleanup. The factors of identity that define previous generations do not apply to us. We are the media-saturated generation with broken brains. We weave pastiches of identity and individuality out of the strange intersection of the media we consume. The through-line & connective tissue of the disparate media we absorb comes to define our very being. As the exponential trend line of technology swings wildly, we are pushed further and further away from our kinship with the past. History is an illusion, but it’s a persistent one. Being aware of its shortcomings does not stop historians from converting the present into the past. The illusion chases us all down the corridors of time. Eventually we will either be ignored or simplified by the advancing “progression� of the linear narrative. We will become a footnote of transition between one era and another. Our legacy is a people who were just about to figure out what to do with this mess.
Move forward and outward in bold directions, embrace the strange pastiche of media that comprises your identity & use it to forge something difficult to label and categorize neatly.
Become something strange and hard to chase down.
Footnotes 1
Michael Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1972.
2
Pat Walker. Between Labor and Capital. 1979.
3
Walter Benjamin. Theses on the Philosophy of History from the collection Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. 1969.
Legal Disclaimer All imagery in this work, unless otherwise captioned, is royalty free from the public domain. Every image was modified by the author to create something new from something old. This work is intended as an educational exercise and was not created for any form of commercial distribution. Please don’t sue me, I’m just a student. All writing, unless otherwise cited or quoted, is copyright Jonathan Splitlog. This work may not be altered or redistributed in any fashion without explicit permission from the author. The bank of imagery in this work was pulled from the Internet Archive Book Images flickr pool. Visit their amazing project of distributing libraries full of public domain imagery at: flickr.com/photos/ internetarchivebookimages
Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1913–1926. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Print. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Print. Löwy, Michael. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2005. Print. Mahony, Deirdre. “Writing History after Postmodernism: Historiography in International Comparison.” Humanities and Social Sciences Online. H-Soz-u-Kul, Aug 2009. Web. Feb 2016. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev. php?id=28284. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress, 1859. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print. Walker, Pat, ed. Between Labor and Capital. Boston: South End, 1979. Print.
Jonathan Splitlog
where we are we
2016
Jonathan Splitlog is a designer
& writer in Atlanta, GA. www.jsplit.me hey@jsplit.me
2016