Abandonware

The ruins of the internet: a landscape of dead ends, empty links, and obsolete bookmarks, salvaged only by the remnants cached with the Google spider. The past reappears. Only now, fragmented and broken from its original form. The logic is unwavering. Like the post-industrial ruins on the urban landscape which often become derelict due to the momentum of capitalism, the ruins and remains of abandoned websites materialize in the same way. Evicted, the sites are now neglected, their cache soon emptied.

Soon after, the archive: the ghostly shell of empty culture preserved for “posterity”. The archive shows us a different configuration of space, so allows us to follow its development and then decline into obscurity. Our nostalgia is pre-emptive. The velocity of ruins, their abundant flourishing, means time is compressed and things age quickly. We discover things forgotten, but not wholly destroyed. The nostalgia for the only partially fragmented past also means the memory of that virtual past is heightened.

Abandonware, software no longer supported, follows the post-industrial ruin: both are determined by a mixture of entropy, hoarding, and nostalgia. As software falls beneath attention, abandoned by its “owners,” the generation which grew up with that software – invariably a game – resuscitate it from virtual dormancy. In that salvaging, a vague temporal continuity is restored. Yet the continuity is displaced and uneasy.

The return to forgotten virtual spaces; hallways, imagined places, foreign expanses, creates an interesting tension: rediscovering virtual space, we rediscover the places in which those spaces were originally experienced. A double intentionality, framed by two separate consciousnesses, becomes peculiar to simulated space. A double life. One which was experienced in those hallways, the other in the space outside of that hallway.


From the present, both virtual and actual place appear empty and displaced. The nostalgia for simulated places, like the nostalgia for actual places, disproves our fixed memories. Both fall prey to an emptiness marked by radical discontinuity. The clean lines of sharp space, more blurred than we anticipated; the intensity of discovery, dulled. The claustrophobia felt in the return to old place is recaptured as virtual place mimics but never reflects the content of memory.

The unreality of unreal place is logical and necessary. When Rilke recalls his childhood home, he observes it being, “not a building, but quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor…thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me.” The estrangement of past space beckons its clarity. With that disbanding, memory gains distance from the fixed image until the scattering of place affirms the burial of its possession.

Still Life

I turn back to the ambiguous zone of motionless memory, intimate and sheltering. Away from destruction, there is a history of everyday memory which has not caught up with itself, so withdraws from narrative and becomes spectral. We are in the region of still place, of memories that have no place. There is a history, but it has not begun. The half-formed history belongs to memory. History has not begun.

In the absence of a historical framework, memory remains stranded; reduced to the category of “irresolute.” If trauma wrecks the emergence of memory, then what does the scattered remains of everyday – but lost – memory tell us? Yet the memory comes in fragments, even then, involuntarily. Unwilled memory. Memory which seizes us. It is a melancholy moment when we stand outside of ourselves, knowing that time and place are disrupted by the negations of consciousness.

As if it provided consolation, I returned to the spatial origin of memory, to the place where memory was grafted. Dead places: but only because they disprove the emplacement of memory. Bachelard’s remark continues to be my idée fixe: “Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.” In the land of non-history, we return, hoping to be reminded of a forgotten recognition. To recognize the past, out of the cloudy horizon of the present, would mean to bring about its representation. Memory, irretrievable, but simultaneously present. A search would begin, following in the traces of remains. Yet the mutable quality of memory means recollection falters. We recollect what was once remembered, only to have the “once” destroyed by the “now.”


Memory is dialectical. It suffers at the rejection of its own distance. Yet distance is its natural habitat. Memory traces. The ruins of memory. Phenomenologically, the contents of the ruins precede the counterpart from where those fragments have fallen from. Memory begins in the ruins and rubble. The resistance against oblivion takes place, literally, in the rise of and reconstruction of the ruin. A mistake. The fallout of the past is not united, but mocked up. The place of the “once,” ruined by the time of the “now.”

“Jetztzeit.” Benjamin occasionally writes enthusiastically about this term, meaning “now-time.” Less known is Schopenhauer’s criticism of it. Undoubtedly, the correlation is arbitrary. But surprisingly, Chapter XI, Volume 2 of Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena, for me extremely significant, contains a phenomenological reading of temporality, perhaps inherited from Hegel, which prefigures Husserl. Constant motion, “the taskmaster,” is Schopenhauer’s source of vanity. The “no longer” might well have never existed. Even the most “insignificant present” has a certain power of the full present, since it exists as the real. Yet the moment is gone: “Every evening we are poorer by a day.” This vanishing point does not dissuade us, however, from viewing the present as the final present, “as if the Now were the Now…the Now for whose production alone all previous Nows have existed.”

This is Schopenhauer’s reading of Jetztzeit. The term implies a temporal convergence. A continuous identity, flourishing, reaching a peak, and then falling into irreversible decline. Memory, it seems, falls under the same delusion. Conferring a presence on the un-recollected past, we take it that memory guides itself in the dark, navigating itself toward the terrain of remembrance. The motion of memory, instead, reveals itself to be going astray, neither motionless in Bachelard’s term, not progressive in the Hegelian sense. Going astray means it runs off, beneath the threshold of recollection.

Finally, “I don’t remember” becomes the rule of honesty. I don’t remember. I only observe the remnants of duration which continue to linger into the present. The ruins of time keep me close to a past which has become amorphous, existing somewhere in-between time and place, and whose traces have been uprooted from the landscape of the Jetztzeit.