While I was reading for the other paper I am doing
this semester, Time and the Moving Image, I came across the historian François Hartog and anthropologist
Marc Augé who both
explore the concept of “presentism”. The article, “Temporalities of Video” by
Christine Ross, related this concept to issues of time and temporality in video
art, but it immediately made me think of last week’s class about protocol and
cloud computing. Ross outlines how Augé
argues that architectural ruins allow you to experience a sense of the passage
of time, and that our current society is unable to produce ruins. Our buildings
and structures are made for the present, to be replaced. And Hartog argues that
“the prevailing regime of historicity characteristic of our times” (Ross, 85)
is presentism. Which is a turning of
the present into the most important value, at the expense of a connection with
the past and future.
Ross
herself mentioned “information technologies” in passing, referring to their “logic
of instantaneity and transparency” (85) as another form of blocking
ruin-making. And I feel like this relates closely to cloud computing, where
files, software, and even hardware is provided remotely, and only exactly when
the user needs it. In particular one of the cloud’s methods of delivery,
streaming, seems particularly redolent of “presentism”. You are not even
accessing one file at a time, but receiving it byte by byte, for it to
disappear again. Absolutely no ruins are left in this case, not even a single
file on some forgotten external hard-drive. Since I have jumped ship on my
previous essay topic, I’m hoping to explore this idea in my essay instead.