We live in an age of amnesia, where what the American cultural theorist Fredric Jameson calls depthlessness is taken for exercise of virtue. The past is no longer a prelude to the present. Instead it serves up patterns for pasticheurs, constantly gesturing towards a meaning that never quite arrives.
The Middle East peace plan recently proposed by Donald Trump is a startling example of this bricolage. By some crude alchemy, the entire Arab-Israeli conflict – which exists as collective memory as much as anything else – is misremembered, flattened and commodified into cash and construction contracts. But without a sense of why and how a given conflict exists, any attempt at resolution is meaningless. The invasion of Iraq was another example of this historical deafness. It wasn’t so much that the Blair government didn’t do God but that neither it nor the Bush administration did history. Islamists – exemplary postmodernists that they are – pull the same trick. They don’t aestheticise as much as sacralise the past in the interests of an eternal, transcendental and narcissistic present.
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