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In George Orwell’s 1984, the lead character Winston Smith’s job consists of correcting and rewriting the past to make its image conform to the demands of Oceania’s totalitarian government. This operation evidently reiterates the procedures of damnatio memoriae and executio in effigie enacted by the so-called “actually existing socialist” regimes. The history of these practices is very ancient. We can already find it in the effacement of royal faces in Egyptian statuary or in the massive destruction described by Pliny the Younger after the assassination of the emperor Domitian in 96 AD; it was continued in the decapitations of saints and figures from biblical history in France’s churches, unleashed by the iconoclastic fury of the revolutionaries of 1789; it is also seen, almost as a nemesis, in the various demolitions of monuments celebrating Communist leaders, after the collapses of 1989-1991. Yet if idols continue to fall, the rewriting mechanism itself is more subtle. Between tearing down the past, making a tabula rasa of its signs and simulacra, and rewriting it along the edges of its erasures, there is still a difference, one which passes through the imagination. The most ingenuous and flagrant example of this mental disposition — one not content with vandalisation or the reduction to rubble of the symbols of a hated power — can be found in two official photographs of Mao Tse-Tung’s funeral. To tell the truth, only the first is a photograph, whereas the second, developed over the course of a few months, is a manipulation of it. In the first one, we see the Chinese Communist Party leaders arranged in a long line to pay their respects to the Great Helmsman’s body. But in the second, a gap has opened up in that continuous line, in the space previously filled by the bodies of the so-called Gang of Four, who have now fallen into disgrace: the first handcrafted attempt to radically alter the narrative of a guilty past, with an alienating operation, ambiguously suspended between the real and the symbolic, visible and invisible at the same time. Artificial Intelligence, which today enters the future to anticipate images of Trump’s arrest, or which projects the Pope into the parodistic dimension of fashion, could work miracles in the construction of all manner of “alternative truths” (and in the service of any cause): If only the very idea of truth — and to begin with, that of photographic truth, the object of outright persecution in Joan Fontcuberta’s theoretical reflections — had not been completely thwarted by the perfect crime (as Jean Baudrillard would call it) of digital technologies and their unconditional ability to produce ghosts or undecidable visions more than reality. The literary dystopias of the 20th century — from 1984 to Zamyatin’s We, from Solovyev’s Tale of the Anti-Christ to Huxley’s Brave New World — inexorably revolved around the Enlightenment myth of linear progress, projecting the contradictions of the present, and of that ideological present, whether it pivoted on political emancipation or the triumph of scientific rationality, into a degenerate future. In reality, in enunciating this future they sought to avert it, or indeed to avert it because they enunciated it (if I write it and depict it, their common exorcism goes, it will not happen, because its possibility will be consummated on the critical plane of fiction; as Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, philosophical monuments such as the “administered society” evoked by Frankfurt School thinkers operate none too differently, in the attempt to delay and hinder its establishment. Perhaps it should not be forgotten that, introducing the third French edition of a book now considered prophetic such as The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord wrote: Il faut lire ce livre en considérant qu’il a été sciemment écrit dans l’intention de nuire à la société spectaculaire, “one must read this book knowing that it was knowingly written with the intention of harming spectacular society”). In all these works, to which we could annex masterpieces of pessimistic science fiction such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the breaking of continuity with the past, the advent of a radical anthropological mutation, the construction of new worlds inhabited by a new humanity, almost always worse than the previous one, a more efficient but colder, more geometrically rational (in Zamyatin’s We, the society of the future takes on the aesthetic aspect of a sort of “constructivist nightmare”), less human one, constitutes the real stakes of a radical critique of modernity. It is a critique that reveals the negative side of progress, the poisoned seed of the future, showing its darkness (just as in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectics of the Enlightenment), thus also integrating and overturning the romantic projections pushed to the boundaries of the post-human by writers such as Mary Shelley (Frankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus) or Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (The Future Eve). But whether it is a mythical reference that feeds the millenarianism of apocalyptic visions in which the end returns to the beginning (as in Solovyev, whose explicit model is the biblical Apocalypse) or the object of a more existential and carnal nostalgia (as in Orwell and Bradbury), why the past? Because the past has both the advantage and the wrong of existing, of being immovable in reality (not even God, according to medieval philosophy, could turn time back on itself) but infinite in its interpretation. In its very irresolution lurks the exception to the overwhelming repression (in the psychological sense) that is glimpsed in the future — which, however, germinates in this present. This is the minimal, yet decisive, resistance which it puts up to “that storm we call progress”. The novelistic — or in any case, fictional — anticipation in reality delays, lingers, suspends time in the perplexed motion of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.
It is impossible to record the moment when, as Paul Virilio put it, art separated itself from bodies. But many indicators suggest that 20th century anticipatory literature (cor)responded to a profound figurative crisis that struck at the human in different forms, dispersing its singularity in an organic and massified collectivity — the Great Platonic animal to which Simone Weil often referred in her writings — modifying its biological and perceptive structure, removing its cultural and historical roots (a movement which Christopher Lasch would continue to describe in his anti-progressive polemics in the 1970s and 1980s). The body, the lived body in the sense of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, would often become the touchstone of the revolt against the dystopian future and the detachment from its disciplinary order. In Vladimir Solovyev’s The Tale of the Anti-Christ, recently resurrected on screen by Romanian director Cristi Puiu (Malmkrog, 2019), in a both rigorous and cerebral adaptation of the Russian thinker’s Three Conversations, the antichristic messiah who wants to unite the religions under his own power is unmasked by the Jewish idea of the sanctity of the body, at the moment when the Jews discover that this purported messiah is not even circumcised. In 1984, Winston’s disobedience coincides with the discovery of an erotic passion dissonant with the order of a society in which sexual desire has been relegated to the inferior universe of the so-called prolet. In Fahrenheit 451, a novel that nonchalantly anticipates phenomena such as televisual seriality and the reality show, it is the incorporation of memory that saves the monuments of human writing destined for burning. But perhaps the most uncompromising critic of all the progressive and magnificent fates of the modern is Joseph Roth, who in the hallucinatory pages of The Antichrist, considered one of his minor and less successful novels, sees in the cinema, that Modern Hades, the future domain of a universe of simulations: “And if we have succeeded in making shadows move on the screen of the cinema … these wonders of the screen signify that the reality that they so remarkably copy wasn’t difficult to recreate for the very reason that it wasn’t real. In fact, the real people, the living ones, had already become so shadowy that the screen shadows were bound to seem real”. The dystopia of a society of spectacular alienations thus re-enters the place from which it likely first emerged: in the cave of Plato’s Republic.
The exasperated geometrism; the intensification of luminosity that ends up dematerialising the object, and from Monet’s Haystacks transfers as a revelation into the young Kandinsky; the exaltation of the polished performance of bodies — in Rodchenko’s photographs or in Leni Riefensthal’s films — transformed into machines and united to the machine by a new consanguinity (notably in Futurism) or assimilated to the tendentially unlimited pliability of that super-marionette that populates Depero’s painted scenes, Oskar Schlemmer’s ballets, Edward Gordon Craig’s unrealised theatrical visions; the idea that the most unstable and volatile knowledge — that of literature — must be converted into an engineering of the soul. All these elements take turns and merge in the overwhelming movement of the modernist avant-gardes; it matters little whether the sign is anti-mimetic and non-objective, or figurative and neoclassical, whether it transgresses order or hastily reverts to an authority that no longer exists. In any case, an air of re-creation, variously understood, or of a necessary de-creation, breathes over the artistic revolutions of the 20th century, at once utopian and dystopian, exalted and terrified. But the results never conformed to the political letter of the revolutions that were in the meantime becoming regimes, and the paths of the historical avant-gardes produced their own counter-poison. In 1915, while celebrating the holocaust of the old world, Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero wrote their manifesto “for the futurist reconstruction of the universe”, but it was a handcrafted reconstruction that seemed aimed at rescuing from mass society and mass production the same creative values that had animated William Morris’s Arts and Crafts adventure. In those same years, the most radical of all radical artists, Kazimir Malevich, proclaimed that “Objects have vanished like smoke for a new culture of art, and art proceeds towards the autonomy of creation, towards domination over the forms of nature” (1916), and he painted the black square on a black background (1915) and the white square on a white background (1917), emblems of an anti-representation from which there seems to be no return. But when it came to exhibiting them, he could not fail to place them in the “beautiful corner” between the wall and the ceiling, hence the very same place that popular devotion reserves for the icon.
Is the practice of damnatio memoriae revived in the iconoclastic rites of so-called cancel cultureor in the biodegradable outrages against public monuments by groups who want to draw attention to the extinction threat facing a planet besieged by climate change? It is easy to think, with all these gestures of destruction, whether real or symbolic, that there is still a high degree of conflict with the past — and with the more recent past, whose cultural dominance is still active — that problematises it more than erases it. We are still, despite everything, in a struggle between interpretations and value judgements. Disfiguration is still an inherently figurative gesture, inseparable, like it or not, from a dialectic of recognition. The real dystopia in action is when the past is rewritten according to the imponderable dictates of the eternal present in which late modern (or post-modern) progressivism floats. It is when the good — to use the figure Walter Siti used in his pamphlet Contro l’impegno. Riflessioni sul bene in letteratura — descends like a gentle vulture on the words of a writer beloved by generations of children, Roald Dahl, and, by order of a multinational corporation, purifies them of the quotient of evil that still insists within them, to separate the wheat from the chaff of a linguistic mixture that has become embarrassing. Which definitively kills, en passant, the concept of the author, who has already been deposed by editing and the overbearing power of a publishing market for which an author is reduced to a brand. The real, lethal trap lurks in the production of television series that treat the past as an indiscriminately malleable material, disseminating it with anachronisms that empty it of its real conflicts in order to repopulate it with our own, to bring it into line with a present that no longer needs only to exist hic et nunc, in its open flagrancy, but goes so far as to wish that it had existed already. A total takeover of the imaginary that devalues any distance from reality, and with it any pathos, making materialise the risk repeatedly feared by historians such as Carlo Ginzburg: that even history is just one narrative among others, without any presumption of truth.
