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Consider, for example, at what cost one may declare that history is dead. Or, what does it mean to say that we now live In the realm of hyperspace? In the dissolution of things (where subjects and objects dissolve Into a space beyond measure) what is the use of history and what might be the status of documentation?
Approaching it from the other side, what shall we say of the ever Increasing jabbering of a history intent on proliferating a new order of truth, spoken, and hence re-inscribed in the present? Everywhere there is noise, ceaseless chatter and unending reproductions of surfaces. The age, so perfunctorily characterised by the persistence of its own mechanical reproduction, occupies that same space of vertiginous technological spiralling familiar to anyone even mildly engaged with the media. How easy it is to fall into the arms of all-night television, to reel at the continual procession of sounds from the radio; to peer, however ungraciously, at the steady stream of printed words, of matter, of texts. The social endlessly produces its fruit and the labourers· sagacious consumption does not go without saying. Indeed, in the realm of culture (proper and improper), the final word is never pronounced by either the work itself or its meeting with the one who consumes it. Neither viewer nor work are all-consumed. Both can only attempt to leave the residue of their perfectly manipulated collision on display.
Here is the impossibility though, for in displaying the leftovers of cultural work, any body of artefacts, there emerges the nownimponderable. Impenetrable face of history. Impenetrable if only because in looking deep into the eyes of the past we see nothing but our own... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline