The Voice Over

It’s interesting, however, that this project of redoing the present is entirely blind to the future, that its entire pathos is retrospective. There’s a reason why one of the main figures of the summer of 2014 was Girkin-Strelkov,⁷ an intellectual turned reenactor, who easily moves from historical fantasy to actual death. In this zone of turbulence, everyone is restoring something of their own, gluing it together from whatever’s at hand: for some it’s Makhno’s huliaipole,⁸ camouflage costumes, pictures with severed heads (“We used to join the Cossacks / And now we join the bandits”⁹); for some it’s the Soviet Union with the gilded Friendship of Nations Fountain and an exhibit of its accomplishments; for some it’s tsarist Russia with its 1913 borders—and all of this is reconstruction, а replica, a costumed game of survival. The versions of the future that are being offered here are all a kind of revanchist ready-made object; none of them contain new elements. Meanwhile, the great distances that separate all these versions give us a sense of the size of the crater into which our present is ready to crash.

The weird optical phenomenon of our strange time resembles a sudden onset of nearsightedness: 2034 is not merely indiscernible, it’s of no interest to anyone—especially compared to 1914. In our everyday life there is no room for futurology, either optimistic (which would be hard to come by) or pessimistic (which scares us with its realistic forecast); nothing induces more anguish and anxiety than the fantasy of what will be. The future is something like yet another version of the iPhone, which is being met with obvious reluctance and distrust: “It was much better when Jobs was still in charge.” And that might be the main issue—the thing that prevents any perspective from becoming a way forward and won’t let analogies get back on their own feet. The twentieth century—by which we measure ourselves, to which we set our watches—was built in the name of tomorrow, using modernist utopia as its template, and in spite of the dark forebodings and bloody sunsets, the expectation of the new, unseen, and of the complete redoing of everything, was the motor that kept the century moving forward. The new—a multifaceted, multiocular utopia, progressive, technocratic, this and that, “we will build a new world,”¹⁰ “our country will be great,” “don’t turn the pages—resurrect,”¹¹ was a kind of slope along which time hurtled along, changing and spurring itself to go faster. The absence of a yearning for the future or a will toward it is almost more frightening to me than the collages of antique mustaches and slogans with which the present is preoccupied.

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