Atemporality

Because I'm ahead of schedule on my Cloud Nothings review (and I need to do some reference listening to Fugazi before I'm ready to finish my assessment), I've decided to write a brief piece on two cultural concepts which have been informing my understanding of Attack on Memory but are also integral to how time is constructed in art: atemporality and Italian Futurism. In recent years the theme of atemporality has been advanced in large part by two authors and intellectuals: Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. Of the two, William Gibson is the one I've spent some real time reading.

If you haven't read Neuromancer (1984), I heartily recommend you do so. It is Gibson's first novel and the beginning of the cyberpunk movement. I have read the accompanying trilogy and his short story collection, Burning Chrome (1986), which includes contributions from Sterling. Gibson is also featured in Sterling's Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986), which overlaps with Burning Chrome.

The notion of atemporality is expounded upon by Sterling in particular in articles and videos across the web like this. Note his mention of Gibson's Zero History, that novel and the preceding books in its trilogy deal intimately with the art and design implications of atemporality.

I have to admit that atemporality is still something I am struggling with but I'll do my best to offer a definition. Atemporality is a way of describing the present and it has a shelf-life. It describes a particular moment of post-modernity but it will be superseded. "Old" and "New" become fraught concepts and all temporal and historical narratives become treated with scepticism. Sterling gives the "Looking into the Past" photo pool on flickr as an example and illustration of atemporality. Looking at the photos of old photos physically superimposed over the present state of their subject matter, one starts to get a sense of the dissolution of historical and temporal narrative that Sterling is getting at.

Looking at the pictures my first thought was that the old photograph was juxtaposed with "the present" in a "contemporary" picture. Then I realised the social construct inherent in that reading--I was applying an arbitrary distinction of time, a blink of an eye in terms of the universe, to my construction of past and present. This distinction starts to become unglued when we think of the future. What Sterling seems to be getting at is a loss of glamour for the future. Development seems less a process transforming our society than a conveyor belt dropping new discrete developments onto the lap of the present. It is as if at some point in time the present extended beyond its horizon and encroached upon the territory of the future. At the same time our means of external memory like hard drives and cloud storage ensure that more and more of the present is being recorded for posterity in higher and higher data densities:this has the potential to challenge conventional notions of the past. "Living in the past" could take on new connotations and may already have.

One of the consequences is an abstraction of the future--Sterling discusses "futurity," and its application to dated paradigms. The prime example of this is Steam Punk, an idea which was introduced by Sterling and Gibson in their novel The Difference Engline (1990) and has had an up tick in popularity on the cosplay and goth circuits in recent years.

While I think I just about "get" atemporality and see it at work in my life I'm not completely satisfied with my understanding and assessment. That said, a monolithic present that cannot truly cast off entropy and like King Cnut fails to push back the advance of time (though he failed to persuade the tides to roll back on purpose) is certainly an interesting working hypothesis. The next blog post or two will pick up some discussion of this "nowness." I have one further recommendation to make when it comes to considerations of "reading," Jorge Luis Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."