[ visitors should sing Tino Sehgal’s “This Is So Contemporary!” in a loop, while reading the text ]
A morbid interest in backwards could only persist in a world obsessed with contemporaneity. To want to go backwards, you need to start from the present. But the presentness and presentism, the human fixation on and celebration of experience are obsolete, swiftly and solely kicking Brewers Bucket, regardless of Terry Smith’s religious belief in the continuation of its three-current life (2019). Fair dinkum, we got stuck in the contemporary after the dissipation of the postmodern, suspended in a futurelessness limbo, eco-distressed and enraged by the rise of fundamentalisms, while “almost every kind of past has returned to haunt the present, making it even stranger to itself” (Smith 2009: 255). But the periodlessness “being perpetually out of time […] in a state after or beyond history, a condition of being always and only in a present that is without either past or future” (245) has ended. Boris Groys’s infinite present (2009) is dead, the “chatter” is true: we’re post-contemporary. Alter- and contra-contemporary: we’re hooking up with the past, ghosting the present, and drunk-texting the future – all at once, while scrolling memes, waiting for the LLM to finish generating pseudo-intellectual punchlines like this one for our substacks. We’re deprioritizing the present, opposing the ontology of linear chronological time in a new, speculative temporality. A speculative structure in which “present as the primary category of human experience loses its priority in favor of what we could call a time-complex” (Avanessian and Malik 2016: 7). Where the past and the future are equally important, and “determinations of time can be established that don’t require the present as their basis” (23). We’re post-, and the present is in a speculative relationship to an exceeded past. Q: Do we still want to go backwards?
[ A glimpse of paragraphs to come: Does this mean that we’re allowing speculative backtracking from any node in the former time structure of the contemporary, inherited from Agamben (2009a), Osborne (2013), or Smith (2019)? Yes and no. This requires sufficient epistemological effort to earn the speculative time-complex both its ‘post-‘ and ‘pre-‘ decorations. Rewind. ]
A: Archaeology.
We’ve come a long way from Kierkegaard’s “what is past has no reality: to me; only the contemporary is reality to me. (…) And any human being can thus only become contemporary with the time in which he lives” (quoted in Ebeling 2016: 10), riding on a madeleine’s back, Proustian involuntarily reverse jumpcutting, through Benjamin’s Arcades, playing geologist with the simultaneity of the contemporary and its ruin, and then lingering for a while, mirror in hand, looking backwards for a present always already over, lamenting that “the contemporary is not present”, and fixating on retrospectiveness and reconstruction of past presences to gain access to the contemporary. Then the mirrors come down, and we grab trowels and brushes to dig up the untimely under Agamben’s supervision, who is convinced that “only archaeology allows an access to the present, for it retraces its course and its shadow, which the present casts on the past” (2009b). And so we follow his squinted gaze on contemporariness, seen as “a relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism” (Agamben 2009a), to discover the untimely as “a special kind of contemporary”: to be contemporary one must be simultaneously close and distant from their own time. But since we no longer have a linear time, since “there is no now”, no fixed present from which to dig backwards, as “time arrives from the future” (Avanessian and Malik 2016: 7), what use do we still have for this repeated archaeological predilection?
[ Oh, this is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary! ]
We could either try to establish the era of epistemologizing the contemporary as an object of archaeology in itself, and study, equipped with our old archaeological toolset, the “erosion of the primacy of the present” to “hybridize the discourses on contemporaneity and new materialisms”, as Ebeling suggests in his “Archaeology of Contemporaneity” (2016), or try to redefine the tools of archaeology to deal with the speculative time-complex.
Ebeling’s optimistic commitment to Benjamin and Agamben’s modus operandi might prove indeed appropriate for explaining John Rajchman’s import in the discourse on the contemporary of the stratigraphic time, Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille-Plateaux concept, modelling contemporaneity as a “collision of heterogeneous temporalities”. It might even go beyond explaining the simplistic layered presentism, and help understand Peter Osborne’s idea of contemporaneity as “a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times” (2013: 17), where “we do not just live or exist together ‘in time’ with our contemporaries – as if time itself is indifferent to this existing together – but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally ‘present’ temporalities or ‘times'” (17). No easy or unimportant task, since this seems to be the prevailing view on the contemporary, dibs being called every now and then, as in Terry Smith’s countereffort to define it as “a multiplicity of ways of being in time, at the same time as others, within a world condition in which multiple temporalities are in constant complex contingency, while no world picture, no matter how internally various, is able to operate as a totalization or as a last resort” (2019: 308).
[ “it’s the same grin on the loanshark! it’s the same goon in the sharkskin! it’s the same shark in the skin-game! it’s the same game! same same” (Fenton 1994). So contemporary! Just not post-contemporary. ]
But if the Jetztzeit is now trivialised, it is not only through repetition: the leaping is not just frequent, but in weird directions too, into and from the future. So what proved to be effective for Benjamin might not work with Nicolas Bourriaud’s altermodern: “the prefix alter- which may be regarded as pointing to the end of the culture of the post- is thus linked both to the notion of an alternative as well as to the notion of multiplicity. More precisely, it designates a different relationship with time: no longer the aftermath of a historical moment, but the infinite extension of the kaleidoscopic play of temporal loops in the service of a vision of history as a spiral, which advances while turning back upon itself” (2009: 186). Q: Should we remind the reader that the spiral is yet a too well-behaved structure for the profound dislocation of temporal experience of the post-contemporary?
[ Is the task of the post-contemporary against contemporaneity to change time? ]
A: “Every past was a future and every future will be a past”
“If we are post-contemporary, or post-postmodern, post-internet, or post-whatever – if we are now post-everything – it is because historically-given semantics don’t quite work anymore”.
How did we change time? What is our new temporal structure? The speculative, the pre-, captures “the relationship to the future”: “the present can no longer primarily be deduced from the past nor is it an act of a pure decisionism, but it’s shaped by the future” (think of minority-report preemption policies or recommender-systems feedback loops), while “the post- is a way in which we recognize the present itself to be speculative in relationship to the past. We are in a future that has surpassed the conditions and the terms of the past” (Avanessian and Malik 2016: 14).
How about the future, besides the preemption? In a way, we are still futureless – “the future is only the premise for uncertainty in the present”, but not Groys-futureless: we don’t have to “proscribe the possibility of the contentful plan or anthropogenic history. To the contrary, the speculative time-complex mandates that the future can be reset” (Malik 2019: 16). And this is why Groys’s Zeitgenössisch is not enough, and why Malik calls for Zukunftsgenossenschaft, “a Zeitgenossenschaft from the future”, instead of a comradeship of the present, or of the past: “we need to become comrades with and of the future and approach the present from that direction” (Avanessian and Malik 2016: 36). Q: So, how do we “understand and operationalize the present from outside of itself”? How do we organize and control the speculative time-complex?
A: $ git
Same, same, we are marching towards Ted Nelson’s Xanadu (1981): a digital world of transclusion and wormhole travels through bidirectional hyperlinks, where every node can simultaneously preserve its context, lineage, and connections, and be everything, everywhere, all at once. But there is no need for statistically absurd-run verse jumping. We’ve had enough conflicted copies and bradburian butterflies stuck on our soles to already know how to control the time-complex. It may not be the standard past-present-future structure, but we’re not floating in a temporal soup either. After all, the post-contemporary is mediated by the web; the digital is not just a symptom of post-contemporaneity, it is its ordering mechanism as well.
[ When there is no now nor then, go digital! Free digital archaeology for the post-contemporary: try version control! ]
As for the theory, while linear temporal logic is not expressive enough even for capturing Osborne’s disjoint unity of presents, we’ve always had computation tree logic to play with time branching. For modeling the time-complex and verifying version control, we offer you hybrid logics – our new modal logics with nominals. Just name a place in time where you want to go backwards and start over, and we’ll take care of the replication, archival, or merging of any traces you want!