[The Verge, Nov 7, 2020, 11:28am EST
Headline reads “President Trump is defeated: the timeline is restored.” These words are accompanied by a Getty Images photograph of stooped and masked Trump boarding Air Force One. He is met by his own likeness in tinted glass and a reflection-twisted burnt sunset.]

“Timeline” suggests we are watching ourselves, our little blue dot, advance along the algorithmically updated fastest route. It suggests one image taking the place of another in an indistinguishable interlace. It suggests film reels saturated with narrative-information, marking time at precise, measured intervals. As one mimetic apparatus replaces another, it extracts a particular temporality out of the past it overwrites. Timeline logic figures the present in the image of the past, and figures the past as that which could only ever have led to this: the only possible present. Like a diamond, the timeline is forever.

In collecting together the ephemera of the past, the archive may seem to concretize the timeline, to render it heavy, real and immovable. But as an assembly of mere things, archival memory is always already primed to speak otherwise, to make a different sense, or to cease making sense at all. On a shelf in the archive the reel of film coils tightly around itself, a dense spiral, canned for preservation and stacked among others like it. As the reel ages, the cellulose chain forming the film base comes undone, combining with water to form acetic acid. The smell of vinegar pervades the air. Film base and emulsion retract from one another. Plasticizers separate out and leach from the film's surface, forming crystaline deposits and liquid filled bubbles. Seeld in, the time-image turns on itself, set in motion by its own rotting material substrate.

This process of reel disintegration, and what it evokes in us, is suppressed in the timeline’s fantasy of continuous progression. How is this near fermentation of our spool of images, this spoiling of last century’s format—which still haunts us precisely as a format, even while the base that it lays claim to enters a new biochemical phase—not our binding image, borrowed from the motion picture apparatus, for the experience of time as accumulation, as living precisely because it goes to seed?

The figure of the timeline, and the fantasy of restoration that is supposed to inhere in it, is perfectly suited to neoliberalism. Just as the archive purports to collect its convoluted materials under one coherent aegis, the timeline functions as a corporealization of our era. Disintegration and restoration in time is the new depiction of the social body—a Leviathan, who has come to resemble Kronos more than the giant-bodied sovereign in Hobbes’ frontispiece. Looking carefully at this frontispiece, however, one is tempted to say that the representational logic of the top of the engraved plate, which famously depicts the individual citizens as the constituent parts of the body of the ruler, has been superseded by the representational logic of the bottom of the plate. Here, like scenes gathered from the cutting room floor of aggressively edited celluloid, the weaponry, architecture, and juridical stage enter into fragmentary equivalence. 

This lower half does not form an argument, as does the visual rhetoric of part-to-whole relations in the upper half of the frontispiece. As a sequence of images it is presented as fate. The fatedness of the timeline does not allow anything to accumulate, to resonate, to warp. It simply presses any phenomenon, any current (electrical or sartorial) into its service. Here even the color of the dot, or time-marker, as a little blue simulated gem, functions as a figure for the state par excellence. The timeline, by refusing to acknowledge the recent past as an accumulation of catastrophes, also refuses to acknowledge what will continue under the next head of state: bailouts for multinational corporations to boost the mountain range time-lines that trace their stock price, the bezier curve of falling wages, the connected points on a map of pre-planned armed conflict in the blind pursuit of material resources.

Let us embrace the film reel suffering from vinegar syndrome as our own anticipatory image: it shows the life and death of material objects themselves, which points to the potential transience of the social relations that govern them. May the timeline rot.