The Voice Over

At the Door of a Notnew Age

In the Soviet cultural nomenclature, Evgeny Shvarts was labeled a writer of fairy tales, and that is how he, a friend and contemporary of prisoners and exiles, managed to survive—and not have his death assigned to him by someone else. Shvarts wrote plays about dragons and bears, and naked kings; they were popular and could make for light reading. But, in the cracks and openings of the text, you could catch not only subtle and sharp glimpses of the (ever-darkening) political reality of the time but the very darkness itself, still-hidden, lying in wait for the spectator. In 1940, he wrote a story that would later appear on every child’s bookshelf; it has a surprisingly Proustian title—“A Tale of Lost Time”—and a very simple plot. Evil sorcerers steal time from a group of children: the children turn into decrepit old men, while the sorcerers become kids again, a carefree life of ice-skating and skipping homework regained. In order to recover what was taken from them, our heroes have to turn back the hands of a clock seventy-seven cycles, back to a time when they were still children and the villains were old men.

The recent conservative turn has many different features, but if we had to choose a single face to represent it, it would be that of a sorcerer: preternaturally young, with dimples and golden curls, the face from a poster, the effigy of someone else’s fantasy about the future—as it once was, back when Shvarts was writing his tale, and Auden was looking from across the ocean at Europe, which had become one of the darkened lands of the Earth.

For a long time, it felt like we would not see that face again. The postwar world—and here there wasn’t much of a difference between the West and the Soviet Union, between Europe and America—set itself the task of working out its errors and putting in place a system that would safeguard it from the repetition of what had taken place. Generations of intellectuals, academic departments, and school classrooms, a powerful and intelligent machine of culture, all worked for decades on an effective strategy to “remember, know, beware.”

A year or two ago, I tried to figure out what was behind the processes taking place in Russia over the last few years—the changing societal sensibilities, which made all of that possible: the silent Putin majority, the war in Ukraine, the political trials that happen against the background of general festivity. I tried to single out the most important characteristics, imagining the Russian experience to be an extreme example that could not be repeated under other circumstances—and thus instructive. The set of traits seemed eclectic but also strangely consistent: those were the generic features of a society shaped by a traumatic course—a history of unceasing violence, which lasted for more than a hundred years. This special feature of the Russian situation—the fact that trauma is not limited to one extreme (or unthinkable) experience but persists and deepens what came before, becoming a kind of enfilade of ongoing pain—still seems to me one of a kind.

This makes it even stranger and more distressing to see similar patterns reproduced in the rhetoric and practice of countries that used to seem like, if not an example to be emulated, then at least one of many faces of the general norm: an existence held together by the invisible web of an ethical contract. What seemed like a rare disease turned out to be a kind of swine flu, with all cases exhibiting the same set of symptoms. One is the special kind of hybridity, the possibility to hold contradictory positions at once, to be inconsistent, to change one’s decisions and strategy, to twist facts in the name of common affect. And the dummy effect: the attempt to rely on precedents and traditions that never existed, that were just invented ad hoc, making phantoms an object of active nostalgia. And the appropriation of this and that, borrowed without any awareness of context or meaning, which turns cultural legacies into a master key for political doors and tasks. When you follow this logic, truth and lies, good and evil, black and white become nonexistent. They endlessly merge and spill over into one another for the sake of some kind of artistic effect. What’s important is that all of these truths and untruths use the language of yesterday.

And there, it seems, lies the difference between this turn and nationalist movements from a century or more ago. The key word in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is not great but again; the ideologues of the new political turn are not building a utopia but a shelter—places where one can hide from the summons of the present, shut the door, and not let anyone else in. The old kind of nationalism, that of Karl Lueger or Hitler, thought of itself as a first step toward realizing a utopian vision. This notion is entirely gone; today’s agenda contains not a fantasy of the future but a dream of the past.

We cannot locate this past in time and space, nor can we describe it—in part because it’s not history but a fantasy, whose main features are prosperity and permanence. Stasis is understood as an ideal state of government, and so it was the unspoken goal of Putin’s political project, which was oriented toward a vision of the great past and awkwardly tried to reproduce it. Until recently, it was difficult to imagine that this fascination with reenactment would have global potential. But the hope to restore a version of reality from, let’s say, 1913, is not as relevant in and of itself as the urge to insure oneself against any kind of change. There have never been so many anti-utopias and disaster movies as we have seen over the last twenty years. Their lessons have been soundly grasped: the future is always worse than the present, which means that it cannot be allowed to happen. We must resist it at all cost; or at least we must try to make it look just like the day before yesterday.

What’s interesting is that for this new sensibility, which lurks behind the right turn, greatness, prosperity, or safety cannot be a product of the future: you cannot inherit them or work toward them. They can only be imitated, simulated, a picture-perfect likeness of the real thing stripped of its most recent layers: the features of globalism and multiculturalism, anything that points toward a shared human experience, or the ability to collectively work to build a better life. The world hasn’t been as afraid and bewildered by the idea of change in a long time. The present should stop and linger not because it is all that fair, but because we do not trust what will follow; the past seems like the only solid ground, a territory of exact (or so it appears to us) knowledge and reliable models.

The resulting picture does not look at all like what happened in 1917 or 1933: it is not an attempt to redraw the world in a new image but to lock it up from the inside. The things happening today in America, Europe, not to mention Russia, have more to do with metaphysics than politics. What I’m watching with fascination, and what is changing the map of the world now, is the desperate attempt at a battle with time, with the inevitability of aging and decay. One of my favorite writers would say that this is an illness typical of secular societies, which take death way too seriously.

In a world that has fallen out of love with its own future, the very idea of progress, of a gradual movement toward betterment, seems useless. So is the idea of the new—not the newest model of a gadget but the unknown-new, the scary-new, which turns life into a zone of responsibility and courage. Rimbaud’s demand “to be absolutely modern” has been abolished by the new sensibility—or, even worse, has become a parody of itself—because it veers into the domain of fashion trends and Instagram hashtags.

And where are the Ciorans, the Mayakovskys, the D’Annunzios of today? Experience shows us that historical processes are accompanied and secured by cultural processes: the currency of ideas is easy to convert; texts turn into events. I cannot help thinking that even this is no longer true today: history and culture are refusing to cooperate, their trajectories move in opposite directions. The right turn does not require the help of culture to accomplish its tasks. And for culture it’s boring to inhabit the logic of passéism: it is so used to thinking of itself in a progressive paradigm, oriented toward a bettering of the world—as an open collective project, a factory building the new.

Here, however, I would offer a caveat. It seems to me that the mass game of “the past” has been partially shaped by the high culture of recent decades—that very cult of historical memory, whose task was not to let the past repeat itself. Nazism and communism thoroughly compromised the very idea of an optimistic project, utopias gave way to anti-utopias—the futurology of the postwar period began with 1984 and still continues in that spirit. The main task of culture was working on mistakes—and that implied a turn toward the past, possibly greater than what we could afford. I am also talking here about my own practice, which is not so singular: for so many today the past is the main point of interest, the optical instrument for examining the present, the language we use to talk about the future. Maybe this is what artists and cultural figures, who do not at all sympathize with Trump or the AfD, still have in common with people who do. The fear of the future, the fascination with the past, the distrust of the idea of collective labor—I believe this also describes us.

The framework of obligations that the Enlightenment put in place is becoming defunct before our eyes. The importance and value of knowledge and self-improvement, the need to apply the inventory acquired from them to the world and to one’s neighbor, no longer seem obvious and recede into the zone of lost time (along with the very concept of a good education, classics departments, and long hours of studying literature). The windmills of the Enlightenment are still turning, but in this changed air their blades spin in vain. There is still art of the new time, which perceives and examines itself in relationship to the Other. But the vectors are changing; if the new sensibility had poets like Pound, their slogan would be “make it old.”

In a culture that shuns the unfamiliar, the vacancy of the Other will be redundant, if not dangerous. The new central object to be described and understood will be the Own and the Our, a plaster cast gallery of copies and reflections, an infantry regiment of models and precedents that give an unexpected meaning to the postmodernist tool kit. The Other will become the Foreign, despised and cast out of sight in outer darkness.

In Shvarts’s tale, which was written on the eve of that which could not be undone, one detail stands out to us today: in order to regain the lost-and-stolen time, the hands of the clock must be wound back seventy-seven times against the current of history. It means that the sorcerers rushed time, chased it forward (making themselves younger and more vigorous, and pushing those around them into a fake old age). From our current vantage point of a premature, shameful old age, which has taken over America after Russia, and is whiling away time remembering better days, it often seems like we are advancing into the future way too fast. The main lesson of the notnew age may be that, in any case, there is nowhere to return to. If we turn the clock back seventy-seven years, the clock of humanity will show 1939 again. We would be wise to avoid this.

November 2016

Translated by Maria Vassileva