Medieval 2021

The middle ages have always been point zero of nostalgia, and like a quasar they are likely to grow. While the Ancients, drooling on the marble ball gag of stille Einfalt, provided the (mostly) eurocentric mannequins of growing enlightenment, any retromania getting too close to 1111 AD would be sucked into an anomaly of reminiscence.

Romanticism knew it, and its romanticizing of the medieval past was always meant to provoke the absolute annihilation of material memory.

The first problem it contrived was that medieval artifacts and objects incorporate their own pastness and deterioration without being ruined. The cathartic ruin of empires had no place in the glistening mass of an age primarily marked by getting stuck between enlightenments. There was no time for it to end. Similarly, a dark hole has no real corona but sucks it all in. (Sure there might be an accretion disk, some gases shooting out of the gravitational spin like a cough; Parzival exits rather than it exists.) Then came the 14th century, right? It must have made it out of the middle ages on time, for sure?

(The medieval ruin was always built as one, but without the semiokitsch of the romantic simulacrum, a provisorium without any memory, in contrast to the tragically and accidentally ruined ancient ruin.)

The second problem posed the stupidity of mankind. It is now widely regared as an unpopular opinion that medieval people were stupid in general, but that does not change the collective desires. The submissive subject of the middle ages is not gagged by beautiful stasis, but rather soaked in a gibberish of almost-thoughts; stuttered sounds and halfbaked plots that float the Ursuppe of modern progress (hence the vague plural "middle ages"). By preserving it in the isolation of alterity, the Humanities failed to acknowledge that medieval people would have been the firsts to claim their own stupidity or: retardedness. There is something so uncannily ironical about just everything that made it out of the medieval time hole (alive), that for the sake of sanity we tend to disregard its addiction to dad jokes and non-wittiness altogether. Taking them into account, we can clearly see the self-loathing necessary to sustain the draconic punishments, pestilent environments and plagues. Medieval culture has been as much pop culture as a mock culture.

This stupidity is closely related to the supposed barbarity of the dark ages - MediEvil: a sort of kidding violence that consists primarily of a skeleton's reluctance to take itself seriously and of being grimly void of any nostalgia or memory.

"And the engine's failed again, all limits of disguise / The humor's not the same, coming from denial"
MGMT: Little Dark Age

The age of the internet has been in constant flirt with the middle ages, too. But while at first it provided the surrealism of the collective desires with the stunning success of the fantasy genre in video game and tv show nerdism - the Realism Switch off -, it attracted the interest of a more bewitched realism only around 2015, with Ishiguro's The Buried Giant (winning him the peak bourgeois prize) as some sort of literary omen.

It was this year when vaporwave and hauntology shifted their focus from 1980s and 1990s mall and office muzak to medieval instruments. Fatima Al Qadiri's pseudogregorian chorals in Vatican Vibes foreboded it, ToiToiToi's vaporized volksmusik on Im Hag (2017) and James Ferraro's Four Pieces for Mirai (2018) were particular interesting examples. The pandemically reinforced revival of the dungeon synth genre, like Umbrías amazing "The Entombed Wizard" is also part of this new aesthetical shift. Movies like The Favourite (2019) followed suit.

What makes these approaches so unique is their demeanour: Neither do they take the middle ages seriously nor do they feel the need to compensate it with particular irony or wit. Similarly to romanticism, they do not search for meaning, history, nostalgia by digging up the untapped resources of the medieval and fostering them, but they use it to produce an atmosphere of eerie detachment from being "on top of it" (history, intelligence etc), lacking any nonstupid consciousness. Or, to put it more cheesily: They uncover Retardisney within the dark hole of stupid and ruinless past rather than the other way around (as so many other adaptations have tried by either drowning everything and themselves in Shrek-ish ironies or in the toughness of Guy Ritchie action movies.) Just a slight pull on the Realism Switch, on the verge of creating a distance either by modernism or by realism. The realist aspect has to annihilate the alterity aspect just enough to create the surreal out of an internet age.

At the same time of course, the Medieval was meant to provide a Relevance Switch for artists that turn "middle-aged". MGMT always seemed keen on breaking off from their electropop success "Kids", but exactly by turning to the formless nostalgia of the "dark age" they institutionalized their only popular hit from university times as genuine formality. In retrospect, Ferraro's "Remnant"(2018) seems even more concerned with the naïvité of internet euphoria than the late-90s New York of Far Side Virtual (2011).

In Medieval 2021 two middle-ageings coincided. On the one hand the aggrandizement of suddenly pop culturally irrelevant but economically relevant artists using the embarassing retardedness of the dark age to hide their midlife crisis in the dungeons below surface nostalgia. On the other hand the middle-ageing of an internet coming to terms with a stupidity of the material that is deeply rooted in any mass culture of carnivalesque scale. In Big Tech Internet nothing is built to last, but nothing can be ruined as well. Where "vaporwave" still hinted at the effervescence of vaporized material floating in the ether, the oil-soaked layers of the deep-fried meme made material heavy and greasy without the weight of history.

Around 2015, a new kind of meme began to proliferate on Twitter. Its iterations were washed out, weirdly colored, and poorly filtered. Often, they featured pop culture images, like SpongeBob SquarePants. These so-called "deep fried memes" were comically over-processed. They look like they've been compressed, re-uploaded, and compressed again.

The "Little Dark Age" meme of 2021 is the most peculiar turn to middle age material. A sad meme face contemplates some wacky sort of deep history in fast-forward while MGMT on their synths are desperately trying to get rid of Kids. Who cares that the original "Little Dark Age France" has gotten deleted some days ago? There still are incel and colonial as well as christian versions. And a german one that should apparently create an artificial timeline because "The events that occured in the 1940s has over shadowed more than 2000 years of history."

Where deep fried memes and historical oil paintings are seamlessly intervowen, material memory is fully obliterated. In times of an endless economic depression the meme economy proved to be resistant to ruin. Everything is created provisionally, spreaded and consumed provisionally. There is no catharsis of deletion or destruction. The Big Tech Internet was never so aware that nothing would going to make it out of it alive.

2021 was certainly a plague year, but it might also have been the year when the Dark Age finally sucked up retromania.