this was tomorrow, #5

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time, #52

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” - Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

this was tomorrow, #4

deja lu

A New York Times Bookends dialogue: James Parker and Pankaj Mishra ask "Why Do We Keep Resurrecting the Same Literary Literary Characters?", in reference to Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Hercule Poirot, Doctor Who.

Parker: "Are we caught in a diminishing loop of derivative creativity, some kind of stranglehold of the secondhand? Have we wandered deeper into Eliot’s Waste Land — the fragmented panoramas, the “heap of broken images,” only now with more zombies — than the poet himself could have foreseen? Can it be that our highest form of cultural expression is the YouTube mash-up?"  He recognises the likes of  J.J. Abrams and Steven Moffat (Doctor Who since 2009, the Benedict Cumberbatch-Martin Freeman Sherlock Holmes)  as  "zanily gifted reorganizers and rewirers of material" but says that "the material, for the most part, is not theirs. They work in tropes, memes, brands, jingles, known quantities, canned reactions, market-tested flavors, whatever you want to call them."  

Mishra, after explaining what Sherlock and Bond signified in their original era in terms of British social-political consciousness, argues that "shorn of their historical context, sequels and remakes today seem no more than rebranding exercises in an age of socioeconomic crisis, widespread uncertainty and creative stasis. Unlike most novelists, those refurbishing James Bond or Philip Marlowe can count on a ready-made store of readerly understanding and good will....  Such tickling of the mass unconscious can be remunerativet too: Unfocused nostalgia has a powerful lure in postindustrial cultures that seem to have a recurrent present but few clear traces of the past nor an avid anticipation of the future."

They might have mentioned The Secret Life of Walter Shitty too, as much an inside-out travesty of the original as those terrible Sherlock Holmes movies. (The TV series is enjoyable enough).

deja entendu

Pitchfork's  Jeremy D. Larson on "Aural Déjà Vu: How Oneohtrix Point Never and Colin Stetson Create Music Unstuck in Time":

"In the early days of scientific studies of déjà vu, a psychiatrist named Vernon Neppe defined it concisely as "any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past."...  What is actually new sensory information... is being processed as old sensory information....   It may be mistakenly filed into the lobe that handles long-term memory, or there may be a delay in the visual signal getting sent to the brain. The sensation is a fantastic moment of confusion, where we can’t tell if we’re being nostalgic or prescient. And like just waking up from a dream, we try desperately to hang on to that disorienting feeling and figure it out, right up until it slips away from us and the lobes reconnect. I’ve found that my favorite 21st century music does this: confuses the lobes, confounds what is present and what is past into an "inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present with an undefined past." It creates something strikingly unfamiliar." 

Of Lopatin with his Ecco jams and R Plus Seven, Stetson with New History Warfare, and Dawn of Midi with Dysnomia, Larson asserts:  "by taking little sections of history and spinning them around, a little wobbly like a basketball on the finger, there is a hypnotic and incoherent sense of living in both the present and the past, unstuck in time "

Question: what happens when this approach itself becomes a cliche? (Vaporwave, yes I'm talking about you). When this zone builds up its own history behind it?  (Five years since hypnagogic O.1 stirred into being, and hard to believe but we're only year or two from it being a decade since hauntology kicked off!) When time-out-of-joint-iness becomes banalised through repetition and redundancy, to the point where "strikingly unfamiliar" itself becomes a new kind of familiarity?   Can this approach go forward, or is "forward" an obsolete concept, an inadmissible desire, in the new conditions?