Coming to Stockholm for the first time, what I was first shocked by was how new everything felt. Stockholm seems to be a city without ghosts. It is almost difficult to believe that the city existed before the 1970s. Even the quarters of the city most obviously ‘old’ appear to have their history built in. Just like the creationists claim that the world was created by God 4,000 years ago with a 6 billion year history, Stockholm seems to have been built by the Social Democrats in the 1970s as a city with an imaginary history.
The ways in which a society organizes its space are perhaps the best indicators of the society’s priorities. Architecture and urban planning, as inherently public undertakings, allow even the most transient visitor to catch a glimpse into the essence of a given society. ‘Architecture is the spirit of an age conceived in spatial terms’ indeed, but unfortunately, as Mies van der Rohe’s own work shows, the spirit of this age is revealed as the logic of capital and most urban planning and architecture is often insipid at best and utterly dehumanizing at worst.
The French anthropologist Marc Augé claims that contemporary society is producing what he calls ‘non-places’ at a tremendous speed. ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity’, then a non-place can be defined negatively as the reverse. ‘The non-place is the opposite of utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society’.
Modernity interwove the old and the new. Church spires exist alongside factory chimneys. The contemporary era maintains the past but only as past. History is not integrated into the new environment; rather merely preserved or referenced and can only be glimpsed from afar as spectacle.
But how could one actively live with history? Is it only by having the old live alongside the new? History should not be confined to the museum but how should it be integrated into the present?
Or perhaps the problem is that history as such has vanished. If history is like a marathon, this is the age of the treadmill. Endless exertion while remaining at a standstill.
The present state feels as though it could continue for eternity because it is constructed as being eternal. When there is no trace of the past, it is difficult to imagine any future significantly different from the present. Is the destruction of the past a structural, systemic necessity for the continuation of this particular present?
Is the present’s distance from the past even an unwelcome development? Freed from the past we are emancipated from the weight of tradition and are free to invent ourselves in a way never before possible. The past has been adequately catalogued and we can take from it when so inclined. It is recorded in books, museums, plaques, archives, etc. and is easily accessible without being oppressive.
Maybe everything hinges on what history is. Lukács writes that ‘history is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man’. As such it is the consciousness of our successes and failures, events we’re proud to remember and those we wish we could forget. It is what makes us what we are without dictating what we must become. Still, history, indispensable and dangerous, will always be a site of constant discord in which, as Walter Benjamin wrote, every generation has to begin the struggle anew to wrestle tradition away from the conformism that is about to overpower it.
Guy Debord theorized that ‘spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical knowledge in general… In France, it is some ten years now since a president of the republic, long ago forgotten but at the time still basking on the spectacle’s surface, naively expressed his delight at ‘knowing that henceforth we will live in a world without memory, where images flow and merge, like reflections on the water’’. What’s left is an ‘eternity of noisy insignificance’; an eternal present – the past eradicated, the future unimaginable. Nevertheless, the journey is as important as ever. Even if we’ve stumbled upon a treadmill, the treadmill will eventually break down. All we can hope for is that when it does, we’ll be able to find once again, or maybe for the first time, the solid ground beneath our feet.
Marc Augé, Non-Places. Verso, 2000, p. 111-2.
Guy Debord, Comments on Society of the Spectacle, Verso, 1990, p. 14.