A virus has presented us with the first authentic global posthistorical crisis. Political leadership (except in some countries with female leadership or non-western societies) proves being desynchronized with historical precedents of resolve in times of hardship. Politicians are focusing more on how this time will be remembered in future accounts than in its pressing reality—the burden of History weights upon them reaffirming already erratic reactions. There is a tendency of trying to erase History before its very conception, deflecting responsibility in a pseudo-pluralist fashion, disowning agency over history-writing; entire states receded into historical obfuscation.
Posthistorical protests contradicting the tradition of science show us disconnect is a disease that spreads from the top down. The greatest nemesis of a new global mind is the weight of historical entitlement. Groups miss the labor of others they exploited and relied upon.
However, appreciation flows towards long-overlooked sectors, I salute garbage collectors, respect enormously the Oxxo cashiers, and empathize with vagrants who cannot shelter in place. This story is a tragedy. Coincidentally, this crisis has removed the spectacular from the spotlight, making fame irrelevant. However shortlived this moment proves to be, it engenders grief and celebration in almost equal measures.
In economic terms, several statements that claim occurrences happening "for the first time in History..." populate the media daily as of late. This obsession with the appearance of a prime situation (in the Kluverian connotation linked to originality) is misguided; we cannot measure the current march of events with a historical yardstick. We are beyond History, so bafflement is the only response to trying to fit wild statistics into a new reality. The symbolism of oil achieving a negative monetary value –less than zero– reads like poetry. The present is all about the entropic prime, it is composed of never-before-seen situations. A new yardstick for measuring historical happenings has to emerge in simultaneity to the new world order.
Therefore, the atmosphere consists of disrupted tendencies; the veil of comfort in the predictability of events has been lifted. Seven years after the end of the Mayan Long Count, we taste forced sips of the posthistorical cool-aid. Millions of people, sheltering in place and in privilege, experience a detachment from the Calendar, that accepted abstract convention that makes us exploit ourselves and the planet's resources. Those millions find themselves anxious, unemployed, at-risk; or bored, disrupted, shut-in. Many have rediscovered cooking, baking, embracing boredom, eating with no rush for the first time in years. This frequently happens in communion with others, in a diffuse and endless holiday.
Walter Benjamin believed holidays operate outside the Calendar, becoming days of remembrance. He considered them “places of recollection left blank”1] in which “the man who loses his capacity for experiencing feels as though he is dropped from the Calendar. The big-city dweller knows this feeling on Sundays.”2] This feeling of a permanent Sunday by the halt to the economy permeates the lives of cities these days. By "dropping man from the Calendar and annihilating his historical consciousness,”3] remembrance becomes king.
After quoting Baudelaire, Benjamin concludes that
the bells, which once were part of holidays, have been dropped from the Calendar like the human beings. They are like the poor souls that wander restlessly, but outside of History. 4]
Being dropped from the Calendar and History might constitute a blessing in disguise. Millions experience the current everyday in a way more related to José Argüelles' concept of the Day Out of Time. That day at the end of every 364 day-long count, a day removed from all calendrical experience, a day of remembrance and non-action.
Wouldn't it have a sense of poetic justice to drop the Calendar now it has dropped us? Become the dumper, not the dumpee?
Flyer for the 2019 Day Out of Time celebration organized by the Foundation for the Law of Time.
https://lawoftime.org/
George Eastman, the man who founded Kodak and introduced photographic practice into the fabric of the everyday, believed the Gregorian Calendar did not work. By living and breathing what Vilém Flusser would call the "first posthistorical image," he became a protagonist of the conquering of the world by technical images. He knew photographs were going to disrupt historical-calendrical thinking, altering Benjamin's aforementioned historical consciousness irreversibly. Eastman supported a movement for Calendar reform actively, to the point of using the International Fixed Calendar in Kodak from 1928 to 1989. Eastman endorsed a campaign that claimed the Gregorian Calendar is a bad habit. According to the International Fixed Calendar League the Gregorian monthly structure is
a wholly irrational division of time. It has no relation to anything in astronomy, or human experience. It is an inaccurate and varying measure of time that is a constant annoyance in business and a misleading unit in science. It has no religious significance.
A month is nothing but just a bad habit. 5]
These past months have felt just like that.
Eastman went as far as to host the U.S. Office of the Fixed Calendar League in the same building as the Kodak headquarters, Posthistory Inc. Global HQ. We could assume Eastman had foreseen a posthistorical drift beginning during his lifetime, poised to continue beyond, and probably believed the irregular Gregorian Calendar would only widen our rift concerning the cycles of nature and their connection to human temporality.
Untitled, Rochester, NY. 2012.
Kodak stopped using the thirteen-moon Calendar in 1989, José Argüelles died in 2011 before the day he spent his entire life waiting. Kodak went into bankruptcy in 2012. All these lofty ideas became anecdote.
This past month, I have felt the Benjaminian drop from the Calendar. I have also felt the irregularity mentioned by the Fixed Calendar League, I struggle to remember which day I am living, or find the attempt to differentiate futile. I have witnessed the eclipsing of time –similar to the ending of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s film L’eclisse, quite popular in the fine-art photography scene– when commuting in a space where all activities end at dusk and the quiet golden hour is populated with dispersed urban ghosts looking for shelter from the approaching nighttime, just like in the old days.
The act of taking photographs and documenting the current urban atmosphere has felt like taking photographs on a permanent January 1. All the photographs I have taken during the quarantine have, just like us, been dropped from the Calendar and History. It is difficult to link them to a tradition, to a sequence, to History. They feel so new and so lost, they do not know what kind of document they are or how relevant they will possibly be, given we do not know what the everyday will look like after this. Photographs are, for the first time in History, pure time.
Untitled, Ciudad de México, 2020.
A kingly virus erected itself as an agent of change in the way we measure time, life, and the seasons. It demolished the habitual backdrop for human experience, placing the entire world, until further notice, within the darkness of an eclipsed History.
[1] Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations (p. 184). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations (p. 185). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
[5] Shall We Scrap Our Calendar? The Outlook, September 28, 1927, pp. 109-112.