The Limits of Culture

We don't really know where we are

Me and my overalls, my hushpuppies and the fringes around my ears.

It is all I can bear not to laugh at myself, at the five year old version of me innocently looking off camera.

“A prisoner of his time,” I often think when I look at the photo of which I speak, snapped in 1979, a year when you could still catch a bellbottom here and there flapping in the breeze at the Woolworth’s on 82nd Street in Jackson Heights, Queens. The strangeness of these cuts, of these lines, “what were they thinking.” Seeing yourself in that period piece, laughter makes total sense.

I remember that photo shoot!

I have a memory of waking out of some dissociative fugue, the kind that happens every other second when you are five years old (it is one of the main features of childhood consciousness, this ability to slip in and out of ecstatic cloud nines).

All of a sudden, I am sitting with a strange light pointing in my direction, a cold, beastly, metallic black box with a circle in front also pointing straight at me and, off to the side pulling my gaze, some smallish Kermit is bobbing in the air, his jaw just about careening off its hinge from opening and closing. I do not notice the photographer’s hand, introduced to the back of Kermit’s skull, which has taken possession of the little frog’s inert body, animating it with the appearance of sentience. Nor do I catch his other hand as it snaps the fateful photo. The glimmer in my eyes and the rictus that is about to crash into a peal of laughter, these treasures from the shoot my mother engineered for posterity, evinces little Kermit’s charismatic, albeit momentary, grip on my attention.

Nibbling at this madeleine, my precious photo from so long ago, brings me not just to the corresponding memory but to a recognition of a humbling fact, that all the petty narratives and hatreds and causes of a half century—which together, like a carefully assembled script, make up the story I like to tell of myself—are easily washed away by the minor earthquake of an old memory, a little tremor that nonetheless causes a rushing tsunami, making debris out of all those fixtures in my brain. They all uproot with the fierce tide and, as it sweeps them down the current, these items in my narrative infrastructure become mere flotsam coming apart in the water.

That which in adult life seems to be the most important thing, the synchronous autobiography in the head, with its tendency to flex the political muscle, appears now as the silliest, most frivolous appurtenance of some virtual reality I make up as I go along. I am a human who once believed Kermit was in front of me in the flesh and I had a 1970s shag at the same time to boot. That is all. In the face of that truth, which survives forty-five years on, almost everything else is minuscule.

I don’t want to sound like a solipsist. It must be admitted that the momentary flickers we call our lives are like so many stars in the sky, little pinpricks dotting a firmament that engulfs them all many orders of magnitude over. There were the Hittites and the Romans and the Vikings and the Florentines and the Chinese and the Mongols and the Aztecs and the Maori and they all came before me—yes, of course. I am only one man. Finding something much larger to believe in, acknowledging you are part of history, something that is bigger than you, older than you (whatever that looks like to you), these are imperative.

I am only saying that sometimes what appears even smaller than the already tiny amount of time I am spending right now renting this body is the vain belief structure inside my head and inside my heart which accompanies the rental. And this accompaniment need not remain some cold, logical narrative. No, the virtual reality which is supposed to guide me, these hot coals of opinion and ideology that I keep burning in the furnace inside of me, can get truly scalding.

Sometimes, like when I think of my pal Kermit from 45 years ago, those coals hiss and steam, they sizzle in the rather humbling deluge of sobering water called “context.”

Like the bald spots on my head or the little hill under my pecs or, more gravely, like some unwanted diagnosis, ancient memories reveal mortality, descry limits, limits which I most of the time turn away from.

Every time I sit for a haircut it seems I discover one more line on my face. And now my body is like some used car I bought on the fly, the carburetor breaking down just after I’ve fixed the brakes. I can’t keep up and I feel I’m coming up onto that threshold past which used to mean death but, after the industrial revolution, means I should learn to be interested in something called “wellness.”

All of this annoys the autobiographical goblin, with his strident grandiosity. I think this might be the most painful thing about aging, the retributive cruelty of this harrying little monster constantly writing my memoir inside my head, who will never admit defeat, who will never relent to the force of gravity, even as defeat and gravity are as nonnegotiable as the proverbial death and taxes.

Acknowledging this invites reprisal.

He makes me pay for thinking thoughts like these, writing down words like these. He repels the Heraclitean flux of change. He is a hard Platonist, only cares for “the Forms,” not for the “pale copy” that is actually the me in this life.

He insults me as I try to reason with him, to get through to him, tell him that things are always changing, and soon neither of us will be here anyway. I tell him better to understand that we’re all just trying to get by, as they say for a good reason.

But he wants none of it.

It’s a relationship, I suppose.

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I have been through roughly three or four costume changes in this life so far.

My first was the 1970s, the second the ‘80s, the third the ‘90s—and I’m not sure if I wish to throw in the 2000s because that’s when we start getting into Mark Fisher’s “slow cancelation of the future” wherein culture seems to pause its century long morphological fidgetiness and suits and ties and dresses and haircuts no longer seem to bear the signature of whichever decade you happen to be in, such that it really is rather hard to speak of a quintessential, say, 2010s look (the death of the monoculture is another way to put all this).

And yet, despite the distinctiveness of these early costume changes, it is so very hard for me to think back to when I was five, or when I was ten, or even when I was fifteen, and —sincerely—recall walking around amidst a group of people who dressed like they were out of the set for a movie taking place in the 1980s.

Retro Instagram accounts and TikToks of old super 8s on the street reveal a roving set of cars which you never see anymore. The footage shows people turning around at the camera, back when the sight of a camera on the street was still a phenomenon worthy of curiosity.

Even 9/11 looks old (though, as with Fisher, that is probably the last of our “period pieces”).

“I knew what it was like to be alive then,” is what I always say whenever I see a movie or Netflix show about, say, Reagan or Bernard Goetz; and still, despite all this, for the life of me, I can not summon the lived memory of witness over all of those Members Only jackets and pegged pants.

I was there. But, they were all just plain reality back then and nothing more.

This either says that the commodity form has so infiltrated our consciousness that it has now appropriated our actual memories of what commerce calls “the past” or it says something about the limits of culture, about the epistemic horizon of our own self-awareness: for it might very well be the case that at this very moment I am bearing witness to some shape or form which, in thirty years, will have taken as sturdy a definition as “the 1980s” currently do (it will be called “the 2020s”), but which I am powerless at this very moment, standing as I am at the nexus of—what?—presence?consciousness?, to truly see in any meaningful way.

Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

Maybe something is happening right now and I won’t have any memory of it in the future because of this zombifying character of unyielding spectacle and image that characterizes this—fingers crossed—final stage of capitalism.

And maybe it’s also the other thing, that I am bearing witness at the present moment only to reality, only to the ever moving, ever shifting, contours of becoming, and it is only later (much later) that this will appear as a “something” that is culturally defined.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

I think of this now as it seems like we really are hingeing on precisely such a pivot from one cultural moment to the next (what the kids like to call a “vibe shift,” but now on a totalizing scale).

I have to say I am a little bit sad about this. Something is dying (call it the Obama coalition, the neoliberal era, the long 20th Century) and some new thing, as yet undefined, unknown, is taking its place.

And it is not just in the spheres of the political and the economic, but in the cultural, as well.

Some shock, whose initial payload occurred in 2008, has at long last stopped ricocheting. We are now here, in the new thing, after the avalanche has settled, errant boulders here and there tumbling furtively to their final points of rest. There is a new era and a new culture. New haircuts, new styles of auto bodies, new hem lines, to follow.

Or perhaps the century of ten year shifts, how we define culture’s temporality as “the 1940s,” “the 1950s,” etc. is itself over. Maybe the registration of cultural evolution in this “metamodern” era can not obey the law of the ten year span. Maybe it needs longer. It’s not like we haven’t experienced it before: can anyone tell the difference between the clothing style of a medieval peasant in 1156 from her counterpart in, say, 1289?

At any rate, something tells me that, later on, we will indeed be calling something “the 2020s,” and the day’s commentariat may refer to it as “the Final Beginning of the 21st Century,” and it is then that we will definitely “see” it, packaged with a bow.

Right now I’m too dizzy in reality to really know.

Happy Thanksgiving!