You're right. I don't know why people keep bumping this one instead of the Hauntology thread, which OP describes the phenomenon much better. This is not about social or individual experience of time, the physical reality, or only partly about how we experience that in different cultural contexts.
It is definitely not about the "end of history," as new and in many ways unprecedented events keep coming.
It is about the exhaustion of a specific culture (the one we are participating in just by being here), and possibly about the ways in which cultures exhaust over time, generally if not uniformly.
In my opinion it is definitely about the unprecedented way in which this exhaustion currently is happening concurrently with the impact of blanket recording on cultures generally. The exponential growth and variety of recorded media is definitely a new factor of the last 150 years.
The idea that references to past fashion and culture exclude evolution in those arenas is inherently false. All the old evolutions are built upon the past. The new exists only in reference (and sometimes reverence) to the old.
True, but conditional. Obviously some things are invented or emergent for there to be something building upon them. The enactment of a variation excludes some of the originality of the next version, which can still combine other material into something new. At some point diminishing returns do set in. You can only sack Rome so many times, you know?
I would argue there really is an artistic cycle that goes from a moment of creation (determined by timing and environment usually more than inspiration or genius) that prefigures and evolves to a peak, followed by variations and complexifications and recyclings and retros and new subcurrents. In this baroques and post-moderns or neo-classicals and examples of new archaics that don't reach fruition can last many times longer than all archaic-to-classical peak periods put together.
The perception of socially observable time having stopped is quite possibly just a symptom of being out of the loop from the part of culture where it continues to change, i.e. getting old. I would bet large sums that any random 15-year-old in any given nation/location in this wide world of ours would disagree that socially observable time has stopped and have better examples than I as to its continued observable momentum.
oh absolutely! Why this discussion must distinguish between real experience (insofar as it can be known), subjective impression, and cultural development.
I do think the exponential accumulation of recorded material and its instantaneous availability via a single media network spanning from the ocean floor to the mountaintops and the space stations is a factor that accelerates the effects of diminishing return and deja vu that impact all subjectivities over time.
And if they don't die, everyone who's fifteen is soon enough thirty and then forty-five, sixty and seventy-five, and thus subject to both the effects of getting old as well as the present-era effects that come from the multiplication and constant, repeated consumption/playthrough/systematization of recorded cultural artifacts in which the 90s seem to be as accessible as the 10s or to an extent everything from the 60s to the 80s, with the 20s through the 50s also plentifully accessible.
(This is not a universal, of course -- I hear there are people living almost entirely outside the medium-world. But I will guarantee you that this incredible survey finding of the 1980s, that the number of people in India who had no knowledge of the existence of the United States exceeded the then-population of the latter, is far from the case today. Some nth-degree of global media-audience convergence has happened and continues. Fucking Avengers opens simultaneously in 17 time zones, etc.)
As far as film, the question is ripe. I wrote a reply and deleted it to hopefully consider a more accurate reply at a future date. Short answer: it has evolved more quickly than prior forms and has room to grow more, in ways we haven't yet imagined. It is possible we are now stagnating and awaiting that next break. To consider this question fully, I will need to re-immerse myself in McLuhan, or the socially-observable evolution of his thought.
Or watch some movies. There's such a variety of stuff and ways to approach and categorize that theoretically there will never be a shortage of things to say, including many opposite things that are both true. Thus I really appreciated dada's comments, especially the second one below:
dada wrote:I have been a fan of this and that, I remember what it's like. My obsessive categorizing tendencies have abated greatly. Last year during my studies I decided to read up on the obsessive categorizing that is the art of Ramon Llull. I found it disappointing, a dead end for me. Systematization processes just aren't grabbing me like they used to.
All also true of me. And yet they used to grab me, and apparently you too. And for me, and I think for most, this is a satisfying enactment of a power process however vicarious or fantasy-oriented. I don't really control the world (or a fictional universe that I didn't even author myself) but get the pleasurable/satisfying feeling that I do by sorting it and mapping it, in effect re-creating it. However inconsequential that generally is.
I think the best take away from that line of inquiry for me was something John Scotus Erigena wrote, about how the arrangement and order of categories belongs in the mind of the contemplator. The person engaged in contemplation can therefore vary the number and order of categories to suit the theories that they are building upon them.
Exactly what I was thinking. Pure positivism is fallacious and knowledge really is produced. And that's a power process that gives satisfaction, until it starts to give less and eventually doesn't, since it's also subject to
been-there-done-that,
seen someone else do it better,
enjoyed their version more,
done it but the returns diminish,
did it but a more insistent reality falsified it,
did it and passed it on to those who kept doing it,
did it and didn't pass it on,
realized I wasn't the same person who did it then
and no one was or ever was the same constant entity,
getting old and more willing to just accept
things unfold with or without you,
achievement is overrated or actually not the point,
or it's overrated as individual accomplishment,
there is greater satisfaction in peace,
so it goes
etc.
Peace.
