From the second half of the seventeenth century, we witness a process of progressive decline, degeneration, and impoverishment of the ritualistic forms and carnivalesque attractions in popular culture… The distinct carnivalesque view of the world together with its universality, its brazenness, its utopian character and predilection for the future begins to transform itself into a mere festive mood. The festival has virtually ceased to be the second life of the people, its temporary renaissance and rebirth.
-Mikhail Bakhtin, L’oeuvre de Francois Rabelais
No one knows when it ended, when the world began to forget itself, and people lost their sense of the festive, the carnivalesque. Some say Time just stopped moving one day. I know, I know… time is a fabricated thing, an invention of farmers and agriculturalists, of star gazers and priests, magicians and shamans; time the great round, the swirling plover of the Great Bear chasing the tail of the Dragon; the sweet movement of the Milky Way pouring its light into the Big Dipper; Time, the Redeemer that Shelley once sang: “Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.”
No more. The river ran dry long ago, the cities of the plain sit idly in the shadows of a silent order, a realm of eternal NOW. Dust and emptiness stretching disconsolately to the edge of oblivion. The crumbling ruins of Time, the Redeemer decayed and broken, slipping away into ruin and chaos; falling away into that cold blank abyss where nothing returns, where rebirth and the hope of some hint of renaissance and festive carnivals no longer exist much less remember their calendric cycles. One critic voices pity that Bakhtin did not go into the subject of this ‘virtual’ end of the historical Carnival in greater depth.1 How can this be? Since the Enlightenment philosophers and politicians both have told us repeatedly that we are living in the progressive era, and that the older view of history as prophetic or millenarian end game or religious apocalypse gave way to a new future oriented history: one that not only promised us a secular Utopia that would bring history to a happy ending, but also the promise of steady improvement, an end to disease and pain, and a world based on egalitarian values and justice and economic emancipation; an endless future of technology and technics with no foreseeable end in sight.2 Promised a world of industry, health, and plenty we’ve come instead to a time of want, depletion, and degradation at the hands of the very machinic civilization that Instrumental Reason built. Instead of carnival and festivity we labor under austerity and want, death, fear, and the hothouse wars of terror and revolution everywhere. An age more grotesque and macabre, than sublime.
The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts 