Don't worry folks, we can make things better, and that's exactly what
we are doing and what we're going to do! And don't fret about those ideas
floating around in the air, they never happened! We can have it all, we can be
modern and anti-modern all the same. No contradiction there, no siree!
What year is this?!
It's the 80's newsroom blue of the set of the McLaughlin Group, a design that miraculously manages to be more anti-contemporary than had it literally been a room lifted from any previous era.
And oh my god Pat Buchanan is still alive! Will somebody please put his head in a blender already?
It's the artifice of the expansively empty parking lots, business parks, shopping plazas and other indistinct identi-nulls1; replicated a hundred billion times over across every small town, oppressing all with the weight of their crushing sameness. It's the Tetra Pak – a box of Swedish design made to hold liquid; paper that carries water – shabby and unsatisfactory, made of penurious materials and consisting of shocking insubstantiality. The Tetra Pak as the building model: modular, stackable, paper-thin, endlessly replicable; as homes, as office, as public space.
And we can do it
with people too!
It's the cubicle: four walls and a meagre opening not fit to serve as a sty for a pig but more than adequate for humanoids. Of course the pigs don't fare any better –
don't worry – we've got it in for them too!
The compartmentalized, individuated, atomized, workplace –
for the
atomic worker!
– has the effect of compressing one's brain into a tuna can. The knowledge industry needs brains! Not humans mind you – no one knows what those are anyway – just the squishy stuff, all inputs and outputs to be plugged in, used up, thrown out. It's the banality of an a-historical present that is both allergic and immune to any manifestation of the new. It's the humdrum idiocy of church worship in a musty former hotel meeting room with PVC chairs for pews. There's no context here!
Context? What do you mean context?
It's the morning line-up at the Tim Horton's drive-thru, a line that extends well into the street and threatens to block the intersection so benumbed worker drones can guzzle down simulated coffee in simulated cups. It's the brown carpeted floors and the egg-cream walls, the dry mushiness of the breakfast buffet scrambled eggs, the buzzing electro-hum of... something, always out of sight. It's the janitor's closet that has been converted into the professor's office, the kitchen pantry converted into a bedroom. It's the suburbs. Most of all it's the unending and unyielding sameness, the sense that there's nowhere to go –
Go? Where would you want to go? And why would you?
– and the slow relentless psychic collapse one experiences as the grid forcibly pervades, insinuates, and saturates every last substrate, not stopping until the mind has been pierced and divided, Pinhead-like, and suitably scarred.
It is the world of a diluted infrastructure made from the dregs of high modernism, a world devoid of any regenerative spirit, a world running on fumes.
Don't worry, we've got plenty of fumes!
Ancient modernity refers to a modernism that has grown old and decrepit, a modernism that has become frozen in place, one that, because it was never intended to last but designed to be replaced, has turned to ruin and ash.
The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.
(Arendt, 1998, pp. 95-96)
'Dissolving everything that is solid' has been the innate and defining characteristic of the modern form of life from the outset; but today, unlike yesterday, the dissolved forms are not to be replaced, and nor are they replaced, by other solid forms – deemed 'improved' in the sense of being even more solid and 'permanent' than those that came before them, and so even more resistant to melting. In the place of the melting, and so impermanent, forms come others, no less – if not more – susceptible to melting and therefore equally impermanent.
(Bauman, 2011, pp. 11-12)
For Marshall Berman, modernity is characterized by simultaneous thrill and dread. The thrill of the possibility opened up by the liberating forces of modernization and the dread at what might come, the fear of the gaping abyss that may lie in waiting for us, the persistent thought that we are not ready for such freedoms (Berman, 1998). But the present moment no longer contains this dialectic, in fact there is nothing dialectical about it at all. Rather it is a moment where all has been reduced to dread; the thrill has been expunged, extinguished, effaced.
What most characterizes the perpetual present is what Fredric Jameson notes as the totalization of modernization (Jameson, 1991). Awakening in a lebenswelt that is fully modernized, we take modernization as a "natural" condition, no longer experiencing the transitions that characterized earlier moderns. For Berman, destabilization is a hallmark of modernity, and this destabilization, while terrifying, awakens one to possibility.
Berman was able to accept the terrorizing destructive forces of modernization by recognizing its counterpart in the unleashing of creative forces; the opportunity afforded to each generation to make everything – art, architecture, society – anew and for itself.
Berman grew up in New York, and draws upon his own experiences and those of the other great cities of modernity to weave his narrative of a dynamic and expansive modernism. But this looks over all the places that modernism leaves behind, what it hollows out in order to build the new. For the vast majority of the terrain of the developed world, the legacy of modernity with the onset of neoliberalism2 has been that of depletion – a siphoning off of resources, talent, autonomy and purpose. In its wake it leaves behind tracts of trailer parks, drug addiction, and pervasive depression3.
While Berman called for modernism to reconnect with modernisms of the past so as to rediscover a vision that could continue to propel it forward (Berman, 1998), this has not occurred, the world has stirred on aimlessly under the only principles and values it has left – those embodied in capitalism.
This lack of regeneration has not led to a new or even restored sense of solidity. Berman's formulation of modernity as process-oriented exists in a world where the "dead" permanence of a common world has already long been destroyed4. The ideals of homo faber: stability, permanence and durability, have given way to those of animal laborans, and a society of laborers seeks not to make that which will last, but only to satisfy the immediate demands of the life-process (Arendt, 1998). When a halting motion comes to that process, as has been the case under the dark shroud of neoliberalism, the world is exposed as a barren wasteland where everything has been deemed worthless.
The global power elite of the day has nothing to say about the desirable shape of the human condition and has grown uninterested and hostile to long-term planning (Bauman, 2011). The consequence of this willful shortsightedness has been the loss of humanity or humans as subjects of history. Only impersonal systems are any more afforded such privilege.
Modernity has sacrificed everything on the altar of progress, and now the process is consuming itself, so that nothing remains but a general abandonment of the world and a resignation to a state of nothingness.
Footnotes
1 So-called 'non-places' by anthropologist Marc Augé, as introduced in his book of the same name.↩
2 Mark Fisher rather succinctly and correctly identifies neoliberalism as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites (Fisher, 2009). In these regards it has been astonishingly successful.↩
3 Is it any wonder that visions of the future have become supersaturated with post-apocalyptic wastelands? For the generations that have grown up under neoliberalism, all they know is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, so that any other future becomes unthinkable. It is not fear of an existential threat that drives these narratives – they are not about stopping the apocalypse – but a coming to terms with how to live in the waste land.↩
4 Hannah Arendt traces a loss of faith in the permanence of the common back to the fall of the Roman Empire (Arendt, 1998) with earlier notions of eternity in the Christian tradition and later reckless faith in ceaseless process coming to substitute for the lack of solidity in the world.↩
References
Arendt, H. and Canovan, M. (introduction), (1998) The Human Condition: Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published 1958.
Bauman, Z. (2011) Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Translated by Bauman, L. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Berman, M. (1998) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Toronto: Penguin Books. Originally published by Simon & Schuster, 1982.
Fisher, M.
(2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative. Winchester: Zero Books.Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
(2014) Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.
