앤트러사이트

Grafton Tanner, in his book Foreverism—introduced domestically in 2024—demonstrated his excellence as a pop culture critic by illuminating the symptoms of the culture industry through the lens of history and time, specifically nostalgia and foreverism. Meanwhile, in his earlier 2016 publication, Babbling Corpse, Tanner had already stepped into the intersection of history.

The two pillars that constitute culture are humans and time. Culture is a human product, and as the future becomes the culture of the present, the culture that was once the present flows into the past. In Babbling Corpse, Tanner diagnoses the ills of Western culture by focusing on the shifts that occurred within these two pillars—humanity and temporality—during the 2010s.

First, humans are being erased everywhere. This phenomenon of "erasing the human" manifests across multiple dimensions: in industrial workplaces becoming mechanized, in internet spaces becoming anonymized, and in climate and international politics heading toward human extinction. In short, the world is becoming non-human. On the other hand, faith in the future—the belief that the future will inevitably arrive looking different from the present—has failed. The possibility of imagining and creating a present that differs from what we have now has been exhausted. That is to say, the very concept of the future has failed. To understand this "babbling corpse" and imagine an outside to it, Grafton Tanner chooses hauntology (rather than postmodernism) and the vaporwave genre (rather than mainstream pop culture).