Future as a Projected Reimagined Past

A first version of this text was sent through 20 postcards from the city of Madison-Wisconsin on July 12th of 2025. The present version of the text is a rework of the original raw hand-written fragmented text, which was inspired by the neoclassical style of the Wisconsin State Capitol.

When one enters a capitol in the US (or some state building elsewhere), one finds the confrontation with the mythology of the most modern god: the State. As with any god, we praise Em with mysterious rites full of details and that we don’t always understand by which we hope Eir favor. In the case of the State: the bureaucratic procedure. We approach the bureaucrat’s desk and fill the forms with the same hope, non-understanding and detail-attention a Christian burns a candle and chants a prayer. Of course, there are differences, as the Christian god is supposed to be a personal forgiving god, while the State is nothing more than an impersonal machine-like unforgiving god.

However, I don’t aim to focus on the rite—on how we relate with the State—, but on the mythology of this god. As we enter these US capitols (and these other state building), i.e., the temples of this god, the images, forged in the feverish dream of the French Revolution, reach of eyes. Greek-Roman-like images showcase the promises of this new god (liberty, equality, justice, prosperity…) together with its ontology (government, legislation, treaties) and the saints (the national heroes). These symbols and images are twisted reimagining of those of Antiquity, they are not the Greek-Roman gods depicted but an abstracter more “universal” version of them. However, the question remains, why is this iconography chosen for the new god of the contemporary State?

Since its violent birth with the French Revolution, the contemporary State has brought back a re-imagination of the Greek-Roman symbols of the Athenian Democracy and the Roman Republic¹. In doing so, the religion of the State is not making an accurate re-imagination of these, but creating a fictitious past from which to re-imagine Western institutions not as commanded by God, but as commanded by the People. With this mythology, represented by a re-appropriation of all symbols from Antiquity, the State makes Itself not into a novelty, but a transcendental entity going back to the essence of the Western civilization.

Now, is the current State in any sense a Greek/Roman construct? Of course not! The Greek/Roman State is definitely not our State, lacking many institutions and guarantees that our contemporary State has—no matter how imperfect it is today. Then, why has the State, more concretely, the contemporary Western State, so much obsession in reclaiming the Western ruins of the past Athenian democracy and Roman Republic? It is only through this process: projecting Itself into the past that the State can justify Itself as transcendental and more importantly inevitable and natural. In front of the uncertainty of the future, the State gives us certainty by reimagining a past to which we are inevitably destined.

As the ego of the nation, the State needs to pick the naturally fragmented and multinarrated national identity and present it in a unified way in its mythology and stories—represented through the national symbols, the national buildings, the national stories and so on. The latter is precisely the same thing our ego does when we tell ourselves our story in order to answer the question of who we are. We conveniently retell, or even forget, events of our life to make the past—I consistent with the future-I that we aim to live. In other words, as we walk into an uncertain future, we are still unable to scape the past; to do so, we reimagine the past, building in this way a new past to not scape from.²

Can we indeed answer the question of who we are, and who we will be, without answer the question of who we were? To say who we are and who we will be, we need to say who we were. Fighting for the future requires fighting for the past. However, we can not do this alone, not even in the theoretical sense: we retell our stories about who we are inside a human tradition, so that we can finally be ourselves in the company of similars and not others. Even if these similars are theoretical humans of another time, they still make us feel inside a human community of similars.

Unfortunately, this fight for our past, this retelling of our stories, requires us to face the postmodern-I that we are: a fragmented self that cannot be fully described by an I. The postmodern-I is a multi-I, the only way we might have to resolve it might not be telling a unique story about ourselves, but telling a multistory capable of capturing the irresolved³ living contradictions we are. Now, what’s a multistory? I don’t know.

Multistories should be able to solve the postmodern problem in a way that preserves the coherence of the modern narratives while incorporating the irresolved contradictions of such narratives in a way that they are resolved. In this way, multistories should be the synthesis going beyond modernism and postmodernism, the milestone of postpostmodernism that makes that term obsolete as we have superated⁴ postmodernism⁵. However, from the myopia of today, we cannot visualize the conceptualizations that will shape our perception tomorrow. As stories have help to structure reality from the diverse individualities, even if they were abstract individuals, multistories will allow us to transcend the individual narrative into a collective multinarrative that will not only resolve the irresolved contradictions of our postmodern-I-s, but also the contradictions of our always-crashing collective postmodern-we-s. Multistories will give us a new way of projecting the past into the future.

As of today, many people tend to see the glory of Rome in its empire—something manifested through the now popular expressions “What’s your Roman Empire?” and “My Roman Empire is…”. However, the Roman Empire is the failure of the Roman Republic. While the republic was a somewhat democratic institution, the empire was nothing more than a military dictatorship. In this sense, the Roman Empire is nothing more than the failure of the Western democratic dreams symbolized by the Roman Republic. The question is not why the Roman Empire did fall, but why the Roman Republic turned into a military dictatorship! ↩
We should note that this “past projection trick”: reimagining the past to build a new past from which we won’t scape is not almost a universal trick. The family, our sexuality, our genders… are always reimagined in the past. Those who want to limit us and themselves reimagine a simple past of a fully traditional—where “traditional” always means whatever the the dominant values specify that is good—family with all roles clearly defined: things can only be one way. And those that seek to liberate us and themselves have to imagine the diversity of human organizations against the nuclear family, the hidden-in-plain-sight homosexual against the inexistent-homosexual, the woman-gatherer against the man-hunter, etc.: things can be many ways. ↩
This is an Spanishism: an English-ized Spanish word. In this case, the word is “irresulto/ta” which means “unsolved”. As a speaker or both English and Spanish, I fear that I do operate neither in Spanish nor in English, but in a mixture of these two languages in which all the terms are kept together and expressed only according to the aesthetics of the language. However, this is just a wild conjecture of my feelings of when I use these two languages. ↩
Another Spanishism, “superate” is an English-ized “superar”. This term should be understood as “overcome” or “surpass”. ↩
I always felt that postpostmodernism is kind of a sad term. It doesn’t indicate a new page after postmodernism, but more the point at which postmodernism has successfully criticized modernism. Unable to to return to the garden of coherence and big narratives of modernism, we are doomed to wander the world. A true superation of postmodernism cannot be postpostmodernism, because a sequence of (post)ⁿmodernism is not desirable. ↩