A phrase I used last time to indicate what used to be, and what used to be better. My sometime intellectual hero Guy Debord used it however to signify a world that had to be surpassed and done away with, a world beyond the spectacle where we would see face to face, transparently. (Incidentally also the utopia of St Paul in 1 Corinthians). Phrases such as "the old world of spectacle and memories" or "the old world of hierarchy and alienated labour." abound in his writings.
So it is a futile gesture to see in the traces of that old world something suggestive of the new? I don't think so. It's not only in the arts that a return to the past for inspiration often proves fruitful. I will continue to muse on this. I will think of the correspondences between, say, cathedrals and great railway termini. There are clues in those traces of the past.
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