Again

Lately, as part of my continuing break with the Christian faith, I have been reading about the history of witchcraft, both ancient and modern. This has lead me to the works of Ronald Hutton, of which I am now reading Stations of the Sun, a study of the ritual year in Britain. The book was published in 1996, which makes it too old to be used for any serious academic research, but Hutton’s prose is charming, his knowledge of the sources that were available at the time seemingly exhaustive (though I am no judge, not being a historian or British), and his rigor is motivated by a love for the subject rather than a desire to belittle it. Hutton is still alive and publishing books, I should hasten to add, though presumably even he could not endorse his work of nearly thirty (!) years ago. His analysis is excedingly quaint, however: in closing the section of the history of Christmas, he points out that the form of the holiday that obtained in the early 1990s, which is of course entirely unrecognizable from our perspective, was in many ways a repetition of the Roman equivalent, the Kalendae:

At this point a sense of overpowering familiarity strikes a historian interested in the long-term development of the festival. It seems only right to agree with Daniel Miller’s recent [1993] emphasis on the essential continuity (or perhapse one should say, episodic re-creation) from pre-Christian times onward, and to close with a key passage from the fourth-century writer Libanius, describing the Roman New Year feast:

The feast of the Kalendae is honored as far as the Roman Empire stretches… Evewhere [there] is singing and feasting; the rich enjoy luxury but the the poor also set better food than usual upon their tables. The desire to spend money grips everybody… People are not merely bountiful to themselves but to their fellow humans. A stream of presents pours itself out on all sides… The Kalendae bring all work to a halt, and allow humans to surrender themselves to pure pleasure.

As of 2017 Daniel Miller was still advancing much the same point using the same passage from Libanius as a motivation (https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.3.027), but even that is suspect: it is now six years later, and the state of the world has transformed so utterly that it is impossible to make any meaningful comparison between then and now.

Have I mentioned yet that I am being sarcastic?

I know people who think this way: many intelligent people would nod earnestly along with these claims, especially once they learned that Hutton and Miller are both “Baby Boomers” (born 1953 and 1954, respectively): one could confidently assert the opposite of their claims based simply on their age and the ages of these texts. To paraphrase another person whose work is already too antiquated for any use other than mockery, Mark Fisher (1968-2017), under conditions of late modernity the flow of history is compressed into a series of present moments, each completely seperated from the next: there is only an endless succession of “nows” and no sense of historical continuity, nor of historical disjuncture. Everything changes so quickly that each moment completely overthrows everything that went previously, but not in a dialectical overcoming that integrates the overcome into the next phase but by completely effacing what went before and beginning again from a blank slate.

But he died before COVID, so what did he know? In other words, “it feels like we only go backwards/every part of me says go ahead/I got my hopes up again (oh no, not again).” But that song is from 2012, so their phenomenology is entirely distinct from ours. The world was entirely different then: Tik-Tok didn’t exist yet, nor did the transformer architecture for neural networks. Barack Obama was president of the United States of America, and I had just started the eighth grade.

The irony, I think (and here I enter the purely speculative), is that our sense of the endless present is the same as that of immediate obsolescence. Moreover, time in fact exists, and whether matter moves through time or we merely move along its fourth-dimensional extension, causation links the past to the present. In other words, just because we like to think that the present is completely detached from the past does not mean that it is so, quite the opposite: it merely serves as a convenient way to conceal the ways in which nothing changes.

Now I sound like a reactionary of former times: I have cited three old white British men, two of whom cited a Roman historian. Formally, this makes me a fascist. It is, strictly speaking, impossible not to be a fascist with such a positionality; it is almost tautological to say that old white British men who cite Roman historians are fascists, but that will not stop me from pointing it out. Never mind that Fisher and Miller are really rather critical of Capitalism: so were the fascists.