In fifteen minutes everyone will be in the future.

Aaron Schuster
I am immortal and I long to die
The philosophy of modern times distinguishes itself as a philosophy of finitude. In contrast to its Greek and Christian predecessors, it makes finitude not a fault or metaphysical imperfection but the positive condition of human existence. The wealth of the subject’s relation to itself, the world and others is made possible precisely by its finite, mortal, limited nature. Along these lines, Edmund Husserl once remarked (the closest the notoriously dry philosopher ever got to an ironic quip) that if God can see, his “absolute” vision must submit to the same laws as human perception: there is no spatial intuition that escapes being delivered through multiple appearances that change in time according to perspective. Thus, if there is something like divine sight, it will be just as “myopic” (limited, partial) as mundane perception. Vision is what it is because of its inherent incompleteness—its gaps and blind spots. The basic lesson here is that for phenomenology, human perception is no longer considered a degraded form of some otherworldly gaze but is thought of instead according to its own finite structure.

This properly modern attitude—whereby finitude is placed above the infinite—now expresses itself most strongly in a changed relationship to immortality. Put simply, if classical thought proposed the desire for eternal life as the highest aspiration of mortal man, with modernity, this desire turns to its opposite. Immortality becomes pure horror, and death something “good,” a positive capacity to die delivering one from the hell of endless existence. Or else, the wish for immortality takes on an ironic cast, like when Jean Seberg asks the sunglassed romancier Parvulesco in Breathless (1960), “What is your greatest ambition?”

“To become immortal, and then to die.”

The only fate worse than death is never dying. There is, perhaps, no greater cinematic treatment of this theme than John Boorman’s eccentric science-fiction masterpiece Zardoz (1974). The year is 2293. Mankind has been devastated by an unknown calamity. Survivors are divided into the Brutals, living in the untamed Outlands, and the Eternals, sequestered in their idyllic self-contained commune, Vortex 4. The latter live beyond the cycle of generation and corruption, neither sleeping nor copulating (though they still need to eat and occasionally engage in a funky, collective mind-meld known as “level two meditation”). The Eternals are, in effect, the curators and guardians of the remnants of human civilization—custodians of the past for an unknown future. They live a dull, “museified” existence, and it is telling that in the Vortex’s central control room, one sees “Tate Gallery” stamped on the back of a canvas. Following the nihilistic tradition of the avant-garde, the eventual death of the Eternals will equally entail the destruction of that modern embalming factory, the museum.

The Eternals are discontent—not all of them, but some—and it is the unhappy ones who are the most insightful and ironic characters. As the character Friend says, “The gods died of boredom,” and when asked what he wants, he replies, “Sweet death, oblivion. An end to the human race.” The Eternals’ artistic genius is Arthur Frayn, alias Zardoz, a man with a flair for the theatrical. It is he who engineers the convoluted plot that will eventually lead to the twilight of the gods. The story has the structure of a circle or a serpent biting its own tail: Zed (Sean Connery), one of the Brutals, is genetically bred by Arthur Frayn to deliver the Vortex’s inhabitants—himself included—from their immortal ennui. He is the “slave who would free his masters,” the unwitting tool for the realization of their “devious and deep” death wish.

As we learn during the course of the film, Zardoz borrows its name from The Wizard of Oz: Frayn is the man behind the enormous flying head Zardoz, whom the Brutals worship as a god. Only Frayn is no ordinary mortal, and in the end he gets caught in the very tale he weaves. When Zed finally destroys the Tabernacle—the crystal that controls the Vortex—time is regained: death, sexuality and the natural cycle of reproduction return. His fellow Brutals descend on the Vortex only to find a horde of willing victims. We are witness to the bizarre spectacle of the Eternals begging to be murdered, like the brainwashed members of some suicide cult. “Please kill me.” “Kill me too!” “I want to die…”

Time must have a stop
Thirty years before the release of Zardoz, Aldous Huxley’s novel Time Must Have A Stop (1944) appeared. The title is taken from a passage of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1:

But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool,
And time that takes survey of all the world
Must have a stop.

These lines are uttered by the Earl of Northumberland’s son after being mortally wounded by Prince Henry; in vanquishing his rival, Henry seals his claim as the future King of England. An old, red, hardbound edition of Huxley’s novel sat in my father’s library, among classics by Ian Fleming and Winston Churchill. Fascinated by the title, I must have removed it from the shelf dozens of times and flipped through its worn pages. Somehow I never read it. I came to associate the phrase with the sixties musical Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, which I heard at a friend’s house whose parents were into that sort of thing. Both titles evoked the desire for a kind of impossible escape: Huxley’s in a tragic way, the other in a corny, light-hearted fashion. Time—the world—was like a merry-go-round, spinning out of control, repeatedly blaring the same tinny tune. How to make it stop? And into what unimaginable outside would one step once one had hopped off the ride?

In the section of the novel A Sentence From Shakespeare, reprinted separately in the superbly titled Huxley and God (1992), the author comments at length on the above passage. Within these two and a half lines, Huxley writes, are “casually summarize[d] a whole epistemology, a whole ethic, a whole theology.” First, “Thought’s the slave of life.” This expresses one of the major theoretical revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whereby reason and consciousness were debased in favor of unconscious drives and material forces.

And yet, adds Huxley, reason must also be something other than life’s obedient slave, if only due to its ability to reflect and recognize this very truth. Secondly, “Life’s time’s fool.” If reason finds itself debased before the forces of life, life is equally humbled before time; that is, the unpredictable twists of fate that lay our most well-made plans to waste. Thirdly, and most importantly, “Time must have a stop.” In Hotspur, the Earl of Northumberland’s son’s mouth, this would seem a pronouncement on human mortality: the jests of life with regard to thought and time. Life can only go on for so long; death finally puts an end to the play. But Huxley’s approach is much more metaphysical—even mystical. In After Many a Summer (1939), one of Boorman’s sources for Zardoz, Huxley satirized the American obsession with eternal youth, producing a story of the dark side of immortality. Here he lionizes the religious theme of eternity—our extra-temporal essence, which alone is able to “deliver thought from its slavery to life.”

More future in the future?
Apart from his notorious remark about sex (“The most exciting thing is not doing it”), Warhol’s most famous saying is, without a doubt, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” This is immortality with an expiration date—Parvulesco’s wish realized. Nowadays, with YouTube, reality television and the mainstreaming of celebrity culture (see the addictive, meta-TV E-Channel), this sixties prophecy has become spectacularly banal. Of course, it also speaks of the fickleness of fame and the democratization of mass-media access, as well as our harried relation to time. Its real significance, however, concerns less the likelihood of one-time superstardom than the fact that “fame” has now become a spontaneous mode of life: we increasingly live an exposed existence, parading our intimate thoughts and sundry personal details before an anonymous virtual audience, behaving like mini-superstars and paparazzi of ourselves.

Even in Warhol’s time, the line was an instant cliché—too true to be true, and so the robot artist subjected it to a number of derisory permutations: “In the future fifteen people will be famous” or “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.” As it happens, he never hit upon this possibility:

In fifteen minutes everyone will be in the future.

Here is a slogan appropriate for our time-addled millenarian moment, where what’s famous is THE FUTURE, not people. The present may be a vanishing “now,” but how long does the future last? And how do we know when we’ve arrived? It’s hard to say for certain, but it seems to be getting shorter, even as there is more and more of it. When the end of history meets future shock, when the eternal return takes on the air of Pilgrim’s Progress, when life is second and death a programmed design feature prefixed by an e- or an i-, then we will have entered the fifteen-minute future. Were it to go any faster, it would overtake the present and maybe even catch up with the past.

This text was written fifteen minutes ago, in the year 2006.