metropolis m

In Advocaat van de hanen (Lawyer to the Punks, 1990), unquestionably A. F. Th. van der Heijden’s best novel, the author describes the gatherings of young punks at a former prison complex in Amsterdam. The Mohican haircuts are none too happy about the fact that the years before the new millennium are dismissed as negligible remnants. They talk of a terrible ‘march to the zeros’. The longing for a new beginning and all the millennium hype have stomped the 1980s and 90s flatter than insects, to be cleared out of the way to make room for the third millennium. The very years that have to be put behind us as quickly as possible were the years of their youth. ‘Of course,’ says protagonist Albert Egberts, putting it into perspective, ‘man is a creature that runs on a decimal system.’Is that true? How great is the influence of the turning points in an arbitrary chronology of the course of the world and the lives of its inhabitants? If the years before 2000 are offered up to the march towards the zeros, what does that mean for the years after 2000, for the zero years – and what does it mean for the population of the earth who are now living their youth, who, for example, celebrated their 18th birthdays in the year 2000?These questions, and the comments of the punks in Advocaat van de hanen, certainly bear witness not only to a numerical fetish gone awry. There is more to be said. The last time that the condition in which the Western world lived, worked and thought – and most of all, was identified – on a grand and profoundly theorized scale was during the 1980s and 90s. The great march to the zeros was a giant race towards the realization of the theoretical premises of postmodernism: political activities as radical amusement, terror organized by a derailed world press, perpetual panic over health and environment, complete intermingling of high and low culture, acceptance of all imaginable artistic and cultural practices, taking the market mechanism wholly for granted, total globalization and disintegration of borders, and uncertainty about whatever standpoint or conviction whatsoever. The zero years, as a result, have no perspective at all. They are only living out a situation that had already been thought of and described before the year 2000. The first years of the new millennium are like the first grown-up years of the world. It is the old dream of an anthropomorphic world history: for 2000 years, mankind was able to indulge its ‘quirks’ unscrupulously to its heart’s content, but now it is finally adult, its history is over and nothing else needs to happen, as if it had come to rest in a reliable, settled life. The zero years, or the conditions that they bring with them, do not even need a name. Complete modernity: is this a symbol of wisdom, the start of a calm paradise? Or is it an illusory sign of lost control and desperation?When, precisely at the start of the millennium, I was a student of the history of 20th-century art and architecture, our professor spoke of the rupture – in his life and that of his generation – that postmodernism had caused. ‘It may seem hard to believe,’ he said, ‘but in the 1960s, we simply could not imagine that something like postmodernism was knocking at the door. It was a complete surprise!’ Why did I then, and do I still, have an urge to laugh at that unburdening of the heart? Is it because – of course – no one can ever see the future coming? Is it because I felt a touch of envy: he had at least been lucky enough to have experienced that? Is it because postmodernism was really nothing more than a theoretical glorification of modernism (the actual term was already being used in the 19th century!), because architectural postmodernism was so flamboyant and ugly, or was it because the names of the ages in the history of art and ideas are always only assigned on their death beds, never at their birth, as they are for people? The professor’s surprise was an historical construct, because no contemporary time has ever had the clarity and obviousness that it will later assume, in retrospect.And yet…. It is not because the writing of history passes judgment and assigns names that we are unable or unwilling to give it any helpful tips. In the modernist age, that happened by way of manifestoes, interest groups, programmed publications and pioneering exhibitions. Today, indicators of that kind are simply dismissed as ‘only commercially interesting’, or ‘contrived generalizations’ – and usually rightly so. It is, however, not because clear paradigms have become impossible, nor that a temporary truce cannot or must not be sought in a (probable) period of transition, such as the zero years. Minor truths have almost always been critical in character. They are a barrier to taking the contemporary world for granted. They are assertions, experiments, interpretations that are thought through as well as can be, ventured without inhibition, as attempts.The Next Village (1920), Frans Kafka’s famous short story of only a few lines, is often interpreted as a parallel for the project of the modern generation of the 20th century. ‘My grandfather used to say: “Life is astonishingly short. Now, in my memory, it is so compressed that I can hardly understand, for example, how a young person can decide to ride to the next village without being afraid that – apart from accidents – even the time allotted to a normal, happy life is far too short for such a journey.”’1 It is hard to live with the idea that we have reached the next village, that modernity has come full circle and history has completely come to an end. However slow and tedious the journey might meanwhile be, now and then, there must always be time, energy and space for a short sprint – not a great march, but an intense, lowly sprint. Spurts, along an endless, wide track whose chalk lines between the lanes have long since been worn away: this still remains the task of art, of thinking and writing.Christophe Van Gerrewey (b. 1982) is a publicist and critic, affiliated with the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Ghent. 1. Franz Kafka, A Country Doctor (Prague: Vitalis, 1998), p. 53.