Higher culture’s remembered images point to a future that dissolves the present order.

Evidence

What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it. The great surrealist art and literature of the ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties has still recaptured them in their subversive and liberating function. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 290

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: nostalgia as actually-forward-looking — the claim that memory of pre-technological images pertains to the future, not the past, inverts the usual politics of nostalgia.
• XREF: connects to: The spectacular era is over; the medium dissolves into the real. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 110; Present cultural forms carry disengageable seeds of the future — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 190; Present experience re-encounters a past that was once a projected future. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 1068 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Present cultural forms carry disengageable seeds of the future #corroborates (0.95) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 190
• Present experience re-encounters a past that was once a projected future. #expands (0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1068
• Artists, thinkers, and dreamers supply the revolutionary possibilities of the present. #expands (0.78)
• History might be generated from the present’s own fantasy projections #expands (0.75)
• The present realizes what was essential in the past #qualifies (0.72)