Everything was Forever until Everything Kept on Being Forever
Foreverism, the Dawn of the Nugget, the End of the Affair
Molly & Frizzle in the *iconic* Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)
“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all” [a]
“Sometimes, everything has to change in order for everything to stay the same” [b]
“Everything that grew took its time in growing and everything that was destroyed took a long time to be forgotten. And everything that had once existed left its traces so that in those days people lived on memories, just as now they live by the capacity to forget quickly and completely” [c]
These three quotes, spoken by Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Bridesehead Revisited (1945) [a], the resigned Prince Tancredi Falconeri in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gatorpardo (1958) [b], and by the ironic omniscient narrator of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932) [c], have now each been rather worn down by over-quotation, their edges softened like the reliquaries in pilgrimage spots. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve encountered each of them when editing texts that try to clamp their incisors upon some facet of The Now. We almost whistle these decadent jingles as we read them for the nth time.
What do these quotes still have to tell us about our attitude to the past? About our longings (for its return; for its overcoming)? Why do we encounter them so often? Why can’t we seem to forget them?
Chinese police destroyinh a copycat terracotta army at a bogus resort near the *iconic* mausoleum of Qinshihuang.
Each of these signature “foreverist” licks emerges from a context of decadence, of decay, of particular forms of social and political stagnation. Brideshead, The Leopard, and Radetzky are all in a sense novels from “between the acts.” These are words spoken by people transitioning between worlds, characters that lived and laughed and loved and tried to make sense of their lives in interregnum. Ryder, Tancredi, and the Trotta family in Roth’s novel were all living through the death or ruination of particular social orders to which they were ambivalently attached, but for whose stable endurance they nevertheless yearned. Unlike the more radical, or programmatic, declarations on modernisation as a process (think of Marx’s “all that is solid melts into air” or Stephan Dedalus’s “history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to wake up”) these are the laconic expressions of those who tried to catch the coattails of history as it flew on by, to somehow arrest its progress, but found themselves instead coughing in its dust-cloud, surrounded by the stubborn persistence of things that ought to have been forgotten and the weird re-emergence of things that had once been declared destroyed forever. In this sense, these refrains can be seen to embody the slightly hyperbolic contemporary affliction of nostalgia.
“Everything” has to change, the traces of “everything” that once existed are remembered or forgotten, there is “no room” for the present. Though we consider it innocuous enough today, nostalgia was once pathologised by the emergent psychiatric order of the nineteenth century as a dangerous perversion—presenting as it did a threat to positivist discourses of progress. A fairly reasonable response to the ceaseless metabolic churn of modernity in its (heroic) “mass demolition of neighborhoods and churches” phase, nostalgia nevertheless seemed to demand a cure or some form of treatment. In Karl Jasper’s 1909 doctoral dissertation on Heimweh und Verbrechen (“Homesickness and crime”) he recounted endless grisly stories of misty-eyed criminal nostalgists, such at the maid who burned down her place of work so she could finally return home.1
There is a growing sense, though, as our IP crisis tightens, that the once-dangerous affect of nostalgia isn’t actually what lies behind the endless reboots, reunions, and hologram tours. Foreverism is the name Grafton Tanner has instead given to the process through which nothing ever ends, or nothing is allowed to ever end any more, in which everything is kept accessible, within reach, to be continued or completed, downloaded from cloud storage and embellished within our fantasy lives.2 For him this is an almost disciplinary condition engineered to actually prevent us from ever longing for, craving, or missing anything at all. Which is to say it is just the continuation of older counter-nostalgic strategies/treatments by other means.
Now everything can be brought back, dusted off, forgotten, “finished”, only to then continue indefinitely. A digital correspondence with an ex-lover, a prematurely axed but since critically valorised series from the mid-Noughties, a former prime minister returned in the garb of a foreign secretary, the Fab Four’s final demos, a discontinued time-sensitive promotional crisp flavour. All are instantly retrievable and updatable. This isn’t mere persistence, or reconstruction, but foreverism (a term Grafton sequesters from the market researchers). As he clarifies “To foreverize something is not merely to preserve or restore it but to reanimate it in the present and ensure its future survival, for ever. It is the rejuvenation or rebooting of things lost, the breathing of new life into mouldering corpses.”3 It is opening the Radio Times over the Christmas holidays and surveying the mortuary of greatest hits tours: Kaiser Chiefs, Keane, Echo & the Bunnymen, texas (supported by K T Tunstall), the Lightening Seeds. They shall not grow old. Together with its corollary—“Nowism”—Grafton claims that, whatever its orientation toward the past, foreverism functions only to further enmesh us in the present: “If foreverism works to keep things from disappearing into the past (and thus prevents the first step towards feeling nostalgic), nowism tries to preclude us from feeling nostalgic for an older thing by replacing it with something new.”4
Jonathan Meades once coruscated a similar state of indefinite prolongation and hyperbolic nowness in his famous attack on “iconic” as the “adjective of our age”:5
Iconic albino, iconic assassin, iconic baby lotion, iconic brand, iconic bridge, iconic bucket, iconic building, iconic button fly, iconic camper van, iconic car, iconic cassoulet, iconic CCTV camera, iconic celebration, iconic chainsaw, iconic chair, iconic chef, iconic chimpanzee, iconic children’s entertainer, iconic clock, iconic cocktail, iconic comb, iconic combover, iconic comedy, iconic cooling tower, iconic Coventry City football shirt, iconic cricket bat, iconic crisps, iconic diaper, iconic doll, iconic dreadlocks, iconic drinker, iconic earthmover, iconic episode of “Emmerdale”, iconic escalator, iconic enema, iconic field armour, iconic film star, iconic fishing reel, iconic flat cap, iconic garden, iconic goggles, iconic gorilla, iconic grocery, iconic guitarist, iconic hairstyle, iconic halo, iconic hand cream, iconic handshake, iconic hanging laundry, iconic hazard, iconic helmet, iconic high heels, iconic hitman, iconic house, iconic ice cream, iconic icon, iconic injury, iconic injury-time winner, iconic itinerary, iconic jihad target, iconic jigsaw, iconic jingle, iconic jockey, iconic joke, iconic kitchen utensil, iconic knife, iconic knowledge, iconic lawnmower, iconic leprechaun, iconic light fitting, iconic lion, iconic lip balm, iconic mascara, iconic milkshake, iconic mittens, iconic moment, iconic moustache, iconic mouthwash, iconic movie, iconic murder, iconic noose, iconic ointment, iconic orangutan, iconic palace, iconic panda, iconic penis, iconic perfume, iconic philosophy, iconic photograph, iconic pig, iconic pimp, iconic piston, iconic playwright, iconic plumber, iconic pub, iconic pylon, iconic radiator, iconic relationship, iconic restaurant, iconic retail mall, iconic robot, iconic rodent, iconic saddle, iconic sandwich, iconic sausage, iconic shampoo, iconic shoe, iconic shoehorn, iconic shop, iconic silhouette, iconic snack food, iconic soft drink, iconic sound system, iconic steeplejack, iconic stethoscope, iconic submachinegun, iconic sunglasses, iconic surgeon, iconic taxi, iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic toby jug, iconic toilet paper, iconic toilet seat, iconic tracksuit, iconic tractor, iconic treehouse, iconic trenchcoat, iconic typeface, iconic vending machine, iconic vindaloo, iconic wedding dress, iconic welder, iconic wheelchair, iconic wig, iconic wine, iconic yak, iconic yogurt, iconic zip hoodie.
We live in an era of incontinent celebration and exponential hyperbole. No one has given a mere 100% in years: 120% is normal and 150% far from exceptional. Everything is world-class. An innings which might once have been described as good is today awesome. Any rock band that survives narcotic depredation and managerial peculation to re-form in wizened middle age is legendary.
On the plane from Shenzhen to Bangkok recently, my in-flight movie was a foreverized reboot of the iconic Smurfs, rendered in innocuous, spoopy iconic YouTube CGI. The film was silent, so we all read it through the iconic Cantonese or English subtitles—a gesture that somehow elevated the dialogue to an iconic stature it would have otherwise been denied. In the Smurfs reboot, the iconic little creatures Smurf more or less as once they Smurfed, but are also sufficiently brought right up to date for market capture. At one point, after hypnotising a large bear, the iconic Smurf here called “Brainy” (was he always so called? The foreverized product leads us to doubt our own recollections of the original franchise) commanded the grizzly to do the iconic Hokey-Cokey, and the bear willingly obliged. Tick for the boomers in the audience. Shrugs from anyone younger than 35 presumably (the Hokey-Cokey was last revitalized as a dance through one-hit-wonders The Snowmen in 1981). Brainy then commanded the hypnotised bear to “Smurf it out” and the bear began a perfect, indeed an iconic, Fortnite flossing dance.
Karl Jaspers, “Heimweh und Verbrechen,” Gesammelte Schriften zur Psychopathologie (1963), pp 1–84, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-62027-0_1.
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism, Polity Books, 2023.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid. p. 53.
Jonathan Meades, “Iconic: The Adjective of Our Age,” Intelligent Life, 2009: https://deluxehoarder.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/iconic-the-adjective-of-the-age/.