No Future, Except…
Socialism or Barbarism: the slogan presents itself as if it were describing a moment of decision, a fork in the road. The decision cannot be deferred any longer, the slogan insists: it must be taken immediately. But nothing seems easier to believe than that there is now no choice: barbarism is what is, to an already frightening and intensifying degree, and it is even more what is to come. We have gone too far down that road, impelled along it by all that seems most intransigent, most unalterable, about our “nature” or our “condition”. Once it seems that the moment has passed when things might have turned out otherwise, does not the slogan lose its cogency?
A while back, Jodi was asking: “what if the world has already ended and we are persisting in its degrading memory?”. By “the world” here is meant literally everything that is the case: not just some particular “social formation”, but the tiniest micro-formations of matter, the most transient slivers of anecdotage. The collapse of a world does not only affect the most visible features of that world: its taint spreads from the highest to the lowest degrees of appearance. The madness of Lady Macbeth is exemplary here: the violent disorder and imminent overthrow of the Macbeth regime (so to speak) manifest themselves in her as a narcissistic blot, a dermatological condition.
The conventional form of the urgent call to action, in the face of some existential menace, is “no future, unless…”. Unless we reduce our emissions, eradicate global poverty and disease (good liberal conscience version); unless we do something about the massing barbarian hordes (bad hysterical racist version). But at least one plausible model of climate change asserts that all the emissions needed to change the climate irrevocably have already been emitted, and the effects of this change are even now ineluctibly unfolding: we pass from tipping-point to tipping-point. HIV/AIDS has already killed millions across the world, making orphans of millions more. None of this can be undone, and there is no possible future world unmarked by these catastrophes. The future designated by the “unless”, the future hoped for by the Western environmentalists and NGO workers of the 80s and 90s, cannot now come to pass. It “has already ended, and we are persisting in its degrading memory” – how many of the narcissistic disorders of our culture can be attributed to this awareness?
We should acknowledge that our world is doomed, that it has no future; but also that it is not the only possible world, that other worlds have been and will be. The world that is to come is not the future of our world; it is not the world we intended for our children, who arrive, as all children must, at the edge of the void. Barbarism, yes: the present barbarism, the barbarism of the ages, limitlessly cunning and polymorphous and yet always ultimately the servant of the same intransigent stupidity and imaginative incapacity. Barbarism and then socialism? It remains to be seen.
January 5th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
‘It’s after the end of the world- don’t you know that yet?’ as Sun Ra asked once….
Excellent post. My inadequate attempt at optimism:
Of course the phrase is Rosa Luxemburg’s, who got her answer pretty quick, not only in 1914, but more finally 5 years later when her ex-comrades in the SPD had the Freikorps throw her in the Spree.
There’s an argument to be made that the choice for barbarism was made in 1914 as much as it has been in the last 30 years (AIDS and Climate Change are undeniably catastrophes, but so was the First World War, the Shoah…) but there were attempts to go the other way subsequently to both (1917-33, 45-79 etc etc) and that could-could happen again. Note that both the examples I mentioned are after the barbaric catastrophe. And obviously that both ended in failure…
Having said that it’s incredible how all the worst possible policies and economic ideas keep being used, keep persistently making the situation ever worse, as if there is genuinely a collective decision that there’s nothing we can do anymore so sit back look Ken Russell’s on Celebrity Big Brother and so forth. But also cf Buckminster Fuller, ‘mankind has a tendency to try all the stupid ideas first before hitting on the right one’ or something like that…(heh see how tenuously I’m trying to be optimistic here)
January 5th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
I like that – Bucky’s law – certainly true in the software industry…
January 15th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
July 22nd, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Im pessimistic, so, I believe that the human race, not the world, will die at some moment in the (near) future because that is its destiny.
For humans is more important a brief moment of satisfaction that their entire lives, so, catastrophe is a must.
February 28th, 2009 at 2:43 am
Humanity will ’survive’ – there’ll just be a lot less of us, with much less influence and probably shaped a whole lot differently.
Look in the sky and you can see dinosaurs with feathers, no?