And Another Thing…
Everything worthwhile has already been said. How often have I happened upon a novel thought only for weeks, months, years later to be flicking through Adorno, Nietzsche -- even Rousseau, to find that very idea spelled out in dried ink. Only, it was expressed better, and -- surely not, Teddy?
The theorist who intervenes in practical controversies nowadays discovers on a regular basis and to his shame that whatever ideas he might contribute were expressed long ago -- and usually better the first time around.
Our culture is indeed in a rut, and what's worse is it isn't anyone's fault (and I'd just love somebody to blame). The problem resides with a moment. Late modernity, late capitalism, latter-day climate stability or what-have-you: it is widely appreciated that we are at the end of something, but on the cusp of what, exactly? We stand at an abyss, an impenetrable storm, where every heuristic and analytical tool appears suspect. Where Nietzsche ushered in the death of God, we face something less grand (if just as bloody): the passing of ideology.
Postmodern discourse pre-empted this death notice decades ago - of course! - but the media and social sciences remained committed to the old ways, like an overly loyal spouse. Adam Tooze has spoken about how the Marxian notion of an “Interregnum” is itself too optimistic, containing the implication that after a “time of monsters” things will return to a recognisable order, fully comprehensible to a 19th century mind. But what if what awaits us, occluded and rising up in our very atoms, is a world that is that most devastating of things: something entirely new.
Here it is helpful to consider Michel Foucault, whose The Order of Things charts the theoretical twists and turns in the West over the last few centuries. We are here talking about the dramatic breaks which saw science of Life (previously unrealized), biology, replacing natural history; or of philology, over and above general grammar, becoming the site of language studies. Each new "episteme" brings with it new knowable objects, as well as concepts and methods, that are simply beyond the cognition of one in a previous regime of thought. Within a culture these episteme are placed atop one another, grid-like, and it is anyone's guess what, once flourishing below, will adapt productively or be irretrievably lost topside.
What might this mean “at the brink”: Will we see a totally redrawn political spectrum, one where former doctrinaire Marxists and MAGA toadies share a pole, Rousseauian primitives another and techno-feudal blonde beasts another yet? Could the bile-fleckled conjecture of some shadowy extremist become the official tongue of tomorrow's diplomatic class? -- Will there even be diplomats, or will every community adopt the Andaman method of pelting approaching well-wishers with bark and flint? And there, in the beyond, will you even be you?
There is little point speculating, it seems, hoping for a head start, when so little is linear. Climate change is not just one factor, but a multifarious mega-poly-clusterfuck which ensures that. All the same: the new world, of black forests, black oceans and of blackened hearts will, a convincing madman may proffer, be one where we all are “the Indians”.
…
“The end of History,” the least prescient of nineteenth century thinkers would have us believe, is the location of Utopia. Foucault:
Finitude, with its truth, is posited in time; and time is therefore finite. The great dream of an end to History is the Utopia of causal systems of thought, just as the dream of the world's beginnings was the Utopia of the classifying systems of thought.
But history - lowercase h - does not have an end outside of the heat death of the universe (a cessation of all willing, certainly for some an utopian prospect). It does however lull. Lull and then forcefully demand that one (who? certainly not “Man”) reassess and orient oneself along new battle lines. The fickle beast that is the self may not even acknowledge this is happening: within the time it takes to blink friends will become life-long enemies, tyrants will become liberators, and your vapid co-worker may adopt the lineaments of a great religious prophet. Things will be better -- there will be something new to say! and also worse, and people will forget the hymns of today and tell their grandchildren, “don’t go expecting too much from the world’s end.” All is flux and well, yes, vanity too; and in that nothing will be different.
