Myths of the near present
In the early days of lockdown, I was puzzled by photos on Twitter of empty major cities, circulated as if to say that everything had changed at last. Partially this was down to the fallacy demonstrated by photos of empty bike lanes - streets need only have no-one in shot for the length of an exposure to be positive evidence of absence - but more crucially because in my neighbourhood, in northwest Birmingham, even after the ominous SMSes of 24th March, there was still constant road traffic and enough bodies outside to make a continual 2-metre distance a practical impossibility. That there was still a large ‘essential’ workforce compelled by the threat of penury to head out everyday was the obvious (and at this point, when cops hassle on their commutes the same NHS workers they claim are “colleagues”, rather banal) disavowal that made the odes to quiet possible (“yes, I know that, but still…”). What remained puzzling about them was the draw they still exercised despite their obvious partiality and constructedness.
Their residues of truth lay in the (ideological) feeling such figures of emptiness provoke or amplify. That modernity has been accompanied at almost every point by narratives or fantasies of its own ruin is the kind of obvious observation irresistible to Zero Books (version 2.0) authors. The images’ antecedents lay in the depopulated LA of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), with its lone survivor barricaded in a safe house with his pick of the world’s remaining commodities, or the opening pages of Stephen King’s The Stand (1979). Such narratives provide a chance to participate imaginatively, but at one remove, in the world that late capitalism has itself secreted “as spiders secrete their webs” as Jameson put it: shops, streets, cars, showrooms, galleries all survive but changed by the disappearance of its patrons and maintenance force, drained of the “everyday life” they constituted the field for. It’s not unlike the common fantasy of being present at your own funeral, except that, as Freud notes, in whatever form imagination gives your death the fact that you’re actually dead isn’t really present, you’re still alive and hanging around but only as a spectator. The crumbling Greek temple or ruined abbey posited a relationship between the past’s builders and the present spectator, in which the antiquarian is the survivor of the civilisation that’s succumbed to time’s disaster. The Renaissance could only claim the mantle of Greece and Rome because all that was left of them was their chipped relics. In one sense, thinking of our present in ruins is an imagined way to understand ourselves, to place ourselves in a historical structure, even if it’s one as utterly unreal as the alt-right’s narrative of decline. This fantasy only confirms, or constructs, the onlooker in the role of the subject, the protagonist of reality, beaming out onto the object-world: everything is different, but at another level everything is the same.
And yet, why is it we persist in imagining a world transformed, precisely when, as theorists never tire of reminding us, we can’t imagine any serious, irreversible break with the existing arrangement of global social production? Christopher Woodward comes out and says it in the first pages of In Ruins: “When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future.” This isn’t only a prediction of collapse, imperial hubris coming home - as in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, whose by-now cliché “shattered trunk” is supposed to figure the future of the emerging world powers of the early 19th century - but an imagining of this temporary interruption as a permanent state. This subtext to all of the most moronic posts about how “we are the virus” takes its lineage from Romanticism, for which the ruin was a reproach to the strictures of Enlightenment and the built environment that modern rationality had gestated. The quiet and incompleteness of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, that “impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion”, exists at the periphery of a centre defined by burgeoning industrial production, “‘mid the din / Of towns and cities”. They form an apparent exception, a gap, in the homogeneity of capitalist development that, as Brian Dillon notes, nowadays at least, allows an aestheticisation of the present: “Ruins show us again—just like the kitsch object—a world in which beauty (or sublimity) is sealed off, its derangement safely framed and endlessly repeatable.” The violent or indeed genocidal assumptions that make such imagination possible have been endlessly noted in criticisms of “ruin porn”: the decaying factories of Detroit or the abandoned crofts of the Highlands require large-scale dispossession and death to act as reminders of transience for influencers. For the cities to be as quiet as they now are permanently would necessitate a long and deadly corona peak - or, somewhere on the far side of thought, an utterly different social infrastructure.
A final contemporary ruin suggests the spark that resides at the bottom of these images’ fascination. Early in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the camera shows us the remains of cities destroyed by nuclear war - still images that Marker in fact claimed from press photos of European bombsites. A veteran of World War III, who has strong memories of the pre-apocalyptic world, is subjected to experiments through which he’s sent back to 1962, as a prelude to sending him to the far future, when humanity has reconstituted itself, to acquire the technology to repair the biosphere. He sees the world of the present - “A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves” - overlaid with the knowledge of its future life as ruins, a depopulated territory in which everyone lives confined underground. The horror of mass extinction has to be integrated into consciousness to save a future he won’t get to participate in, a notion we’re increasingly familiar with in the Anthropocene, as Thom van Dooren notes in his recent book on mourning and species loss. The ruins become the emblem of a narrative subject that ceases to be itself, bounded and secure - as suggested by the visual rhyme of a statue’s broken head and the face of the time-traveller, seated in the machine - that breaks out of a linear historical flow. Inextricable from the empty images of emptiness is the possibility of a different kind of image, untethered from spectatorial self-mastery - the “something missing” that Bloch and Adorno identify in the present as utopia.