Notes on the eternity we have left
"For our machines we are what a bee is for the flower, the reproductive organs of a species that is not ours."
Greenspan & S. Livingston
Crossing that rapid hikikomorisation gradient that was the 2020 pandemic, I often found myself thinking about immortality, time and the efforts that our species has made to eliminate oblivion. Locked up in the house with blood-swollen eyes glued to the statistical flight of global fever, I have often thought of the placidity of a time that is deeper than that shared by everyday commitments. I have asked myself several times if this dense time could share something with eternity, with that time granted to the dead, of course, but also objects that can be replicated more or less effortlessly.
In the wake of my manic drift, I was very struck by a comment that François J. Bonnet throws a bit on the side in his After death, a book entirely dedicated to the murder of death at the hands of the eternal present of late capitalism. According to the French theorist, there is a germ of eternity in every technical object and in every human artifact, especially in those apparatuses that order and stem time and reduce it to a human scale. Bonnet, in fact, in a rather marginal note, underlines how the calendar, an essential object for dominating the catastrophic flow of moments, shares the same etymological root as the verb to call, the word to which we have entrusted the task of describing the action of calling a oneself with the breath or sighs the objects and people no longer present in front of us. In indexing the asymmetrical sliding of days, months and years with the accuracy of decimal language, the calendric domain performs the necromantic function of recalling from the pit what should lie rigid. The calendar from a simple empirical time diagram becomes a portal to an empty time in which everything happens in unison. The dates, these machinic appendages, save what time would naturally disperse and allow us to access an empty time in which everything is produced at the same instant.
This salvific and transcendental function of the technical apparatuses is also confirmed by two of the most attentive contemporary cultural critics, Agnès Gayraud, of whom Claudio Kulesko spoke to us in unsuspecting times. Gayraud dedicates one of the most moving and dense chapters of his Dialectic of pop to technical immortality, to this necromantic "call" of human artifacts; a decadent chapter, entirely dedicated to the empathy that one feels towards useless objects and which embody totally past periods. Quoting Paul McCartney's Junk, Gayraud argues, following Walter Benjamin, that the human artifact - especially the pop song, with its bewitching power and its mnestic apex predator power to stick to our memory - has the power to save time from itself, to freeze it and return it to a chronological eternity that greatly exceeds us and that overflows into a sort of transcendental but totally material time, present in every moment and productive background of every instant, but always deeper and colder of every moment lived. Just as Samuel Butler's Erehwon machines use humanity as a sexual organ to reproduce, so the pop songs of Gayraud live there, rewinding the hands of the clock, giving us back a few minutes of secular eternity in their permanence. Quoting Gayraud: «Turning the magic of a hit into a pure listener's reverie is probably a way to escape the de-humanization that is promoted by the advanced rationalization of the song from the charts, but it is also a way to migrate to the side of the subject a promise that should be described as a purely objective fact: that promise of reconciliation in which the union of our enjoyment and our astonishment would not be a sign of propaganda manipulation, but the experience of a universal aesthetic community, the realization of 'utopia of popularity', of an absolute Outside, but produced, involuntarily, by a human hand and by the asexual reproduction of this artifact. As R.E. Templeton: "On the outside, in the place where time really works, that part of you that you feel like your own has nothing in common with who you really are."