Notes on an unhappy age without philosophy
explicating some intuitions on the spatial and temporal debounding (that globalisation actually created)
Refrain: I share an intuition that the time from which I write does not yet have a set of ordering concepts capable of encapsulating its permutations; this intuition intimates, instead, that this conjuncture has a definite smell, something like carpet wet by receding sewage, in the footwells of a car left in a flood-swollen creek, having been joy ridden into it under cover of night, carpet left in the sunshine after flash flood waters have receded. It was a Volkswagen Passat R36 wagon I came across, in Kororoit Creek in October 2022, whose eventual smell, after its wreck was removed from the turbid eddies, might have given the signature of the age in which we’re now living.
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What could those among our still resonant big concepts still tell us about this mess of process we’re only barely capable of experiencing from, or overwhelmed by? And what could we say about the recent past with the following précis of one or two recent ‘big ideas’ that now no longer seem to say so much, or say, instead, that their time has past without saying (instead) what clearly should replace them?
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Fifty years after 1973, we now appear to be living in a world which longer makes sense using the existing armature of ordering concepts dominant during this half century. We are no longer living in the end of history, or the unambiguous age of globalisation and/as neoliberalism – or if we now try to say we are, the fewer who still do so, now hesitate.
What is the name of the time in which we live? Can the ‘time of now’ be named; has this zeit a geist? Are there a set of ordering concepts, a few metaphors that could help us make do with a way of conceptualising some aspect of ‘our time in thought’, or even just a provisional label that will do for a while, that is not as bad as acceding to the dada of world as it can now appear?
Wittgenstein quipped:
“[o]ne age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 98e).
Have we not just lived through a very protracted, very petty age, that half century long age of Anglocapitalist hegemony by default – default in the double sense? As for the cheap work of that easy theory called labelling, has there not always been a hubris attending the enterprise of developing concepts that can neatly label any protracted, messy, complex process?
To compress the frame some more, taking ‘space and time over the past fifty years to now’, what did transpire to become truly global, actually? For if, hypothetically, we have ‘just’ been through some kind of ‘age of globalisation’, what was globalisation about? Did we just experience globalisation; what did we just experience?
I would point to two sets of tendencies: the first about space, the second, time; both are about de-bounding, both are from Ulrich Beck.
Space and boundaries: spatial de-bounding as ‘global risk one’
Firstly, in terms of space, we would do well to think about the transformations of borders and boundaries in our thinking. I’m less (and less) interested in the pithy shibboleths1 of early 21C border theory; it can be said that border is method, but I think that if, by now, we can notice that border theory is chasing its own tail, then in part this is also because of the polysemy of borders that Balibar noticed a long time ago. Ulrich Beck’s reflections on boundaries, from 2001-2, get us closer to a close enough shorthand for our needs here.
We have been living through a time of emergent global risk marked by spatial de-bounding (hereforth: debounding). That is, if we have been living through an age in which space has become almost synonymous with conflict, to the point where ‘global space’ means threat-security, race-competition, economics-scarcity.
Beck – here – suggested this has been because we have been living through a time where groups asserting authority over populations are oriented toward ‘feigning control over the uncontrollable’ (41). It is perhaps too pithy and punny to reduce it so much and in this way (though Beck might have approved or succumbed), but over the past 150 years we seem to have moved from reigning to feigning, while in the past fifty, we have become increasingly fixated on control. We co-experience this feigning-controlfixation as structural dependence on technically advanced systems (which work superbly), which we use to scroll and post about (eg) conspiracy theories (which make no sense, except to those for whom the whole world is meaningfully explained by them). Technical perfection meets substantive nonsense in the maw of the content monster.
In Beck’s model, this feigning of control, and its fixation effects, transpire because of the spatial debounding – of risk. Spatially, “we see ourselves confronted with risks that do not take nation-state boundaries, or any other boundaries for that matter, into account: climate change, air pollution and the ozone hole affect everyone (if not all in the same way)” (41). Of course, add in covid here, and the uneven, uneasy community of fate it creates, even (and especially) as we tip into the dystopian possibilities of an uncontrollable society of disaffected individuals.
Beck’s noticing links productively to William Gibson’s appealing observation, ‘the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’. This phrase was used by Frase, to think about the recombination of four futures, like rentism (hierarchy and abundance).
Combining, then, (i) the feigning of control with (ii) the de-bounding of spatial risk and (iii) the uneven distribution of suffering it generates, in a future that is always-already-unevenly here: what does it mean (eg, per g) that cocaine is available for 400 dollars a gram in Melbourne, in a community of fate in which climate change is already setting the Great Dividing Range ablaze (in 2019-20), before moving to a two year La Nina whose rain patterns contributed to the many flooded creeks, including the one that – suddenly, all too late – confronted that driver, joyriding until that moment, in Kororoit Creek? Were they high, were they high among friends, were they driven to their joy by two years of lockdowns, those politically chosen responses to the spatially debounded risk that covid also was, during those selfsame years?
We find ourselves in a community of fate, with little in common: not quite Stiegler’s ‘panic’, but not quite a good common or a functional community. This is among the things that globalisation actually means, as the lived effects of spatial debounding.
Time and boundaries: temporal debounding as global risk two
As for time and de-bounding, Beck points to “the long latency period of dangers” as risks like climate change and nuclear waste escape “the prevailing procedures used when dealing with industrial dangers”(41). The temporal debounding that marks global risk means that neither occupational health and safety, nor state-level regulation is capable of having its measure; it exceeds, it escapes, it happens too quickly, it takes too long, and so we are also perennially chasing it, and can never catch up.
Indicatively, even if humanity manages to arrest its carbon dioxide emissions within the remainder of the decade from 2023, sea levels will continue to rise over the coming centuries, such that by the end of this century (which is unlikely to be close to the end of the centuries-long rising), they will have risen between 50cm-2m ‘or so’, an ‘or so’ that stands in for a set of scenarios between the re-floating the jetties of deep waterfronts, to storm surges that inundate and destroy the infrastructure and dwellings of cities where twenty million people live.
The jetty can be moved, but can the city be re-moved?
I now move to two points that, I hope, productively complicate the probable yet unpredictable effects of such temporal deboundings.
Firstly, we need to complicate our thinking about the long latency period of global risks (like sea level rise and the sunk cost of coastal cities) by co-noticing how these ‘slow boomerangs’ and ‘fast glaciers’ take place in a societal time of accelerating institutional entropy and its horizon of societal disintegration and our reactive bare coping (just getting by, feeling almost paralysed with overwhelm, doing what little we can when it’s not enough, trying to save what we still have although we know a portion of it will be destroyed in some way beyond our knowing or control).
As I see it, these inherent complications – co-complications, co-implications – presented by debounding tend to be co-caused by layerings, interpenetrations and cascadings (whose arrangements have to be specified in each empirical case), such that temporal de-bounding as I’m trying to think about it here bears upon the interaction of catastrophic ecological events and declining social resources, as well as institutional corruption, &c &c.
This burdens theoretical thinking with substantive work of redescription: which eats words, takes time, and taxes attention, yet in conditions when the world gallops away harder.
As often with global risk, these interactive processes tend to ramify with effects whose recursive, nonlinear dynamics have with further implications, including for how we can know them. Looking at temporal debounding in a 20C way won’t work, doesn’t capture the dynamics, is actively misleading. Following Beck, we will find a less insufficient observer position by opening our minds to “the reality of de-nationalization, transnationalization and ‘re-ethnification’” (53). We may not wish to sign on for Beck’s (very 2000s!) normative cosmopolitanism, but his intuition that the complex interactions of the world produce a ‘hazy power space’ for our politics, whose ethics have to reckon with ambiguous and indeterminate norms, is correct enough.
How can we at least try to think clearly enough about ‘all of the above’?
On first approach, the ‘de-, trans-, re-’ of the world as it may be now is best apprehended by looking for ‘the pattern that connects’ (Bateson). Lester Freamon’s injunction to ‘follow the money’ serves well here, as does continually replying critically to our own assertions and evidence with a ‘yes… and…’ structure. So then: some systems theory, some Wire, and some theatre sports. And as the societal resources and institutional corruption remain variables over which ‘we’ still have some degree of agency and can contend with politically somehow – even in an ecological community of fate where we find ourselves ‘just reacting’ to whatever is coming down the pipes – contestation over resources and institutional cultures will become a sight for analytic probing and spelling out the most relevant normative questioning.
We should have modest hopes and seek after clear glimpses of complex perspectives.
We still do not have the measure of the moment, but we must try.
The second point complicating the temporal de-bounding of global risks moves from the general to the personal, from the socio-cultural to the socio-subjective: time is out of joint – and is experienced as such, in ways we struggle with, intersubjectively, intrasubjectively. We are homeless, living in an unhappy age without a philosophy* (interpolating2 Lukacs, Theory of the Novel, 29).
This transforms ‘experience as such’ to the point where, for untimely Benjamin by the First World War, and for many people now, ‘experience’ becomes unthinkable: except by the flash of shock, or more and more by virtue of the imposed complexity and vertiginous terror it inflicts on the everyday patterns of our uneven, surreal lives.
A world of global risk, a world of spatial and temporal debounding, is not a world of welcome (or even that Lonely Planet of the OECD 1990s), where the “starry sky is the map of all possible paths… illuminated by the light of the stars… new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet (its) own” (Lukacs, 36). For good reason, the ramifications of debounding leave increasing numbers of us feeling close to overwhelm, unable to experience, sleepwalking, anxious, lonely, depressed: fully acknowledging our own anxiety, alienation, and the disintegration of our environs and institutions, with the co-knowing that we do not have control or agency enough to fix or remedy this.
This is the galling intrasubjective knowledge aroused by debounding: we are fucked and we know it, yet we cannot escape or overcome this, and must, somehow, continue.
This apprehension of the world now leads many of us to withdraw and dissociate, or induces some among us to engage in escalatory or avoidant coping tactics, and paralyses increasing numbers of us with depression-anxiety. In the 2010s, as in the 1890s, some of us trade this fight-flight-freeze richochet for the lure of the conspiracy theory’s false concreteness and the comforts of phone, the recurrent promise of ‘the whole world’ transformed ‘back into’ a redemptive story with a fully coinciding map-territory, peopled by heroes and villains, imaginatively bounded as follows:
((Us: all good) (Them: all bad)).
The deep appeal of such black-white good-evil stories and meanings is easy to clock, for the certainty they yield means not having to face living out-of-joint, without an existential home to belong to, without a salvational narrative to believe in, without a map and a territory, in hungry, horny, ageing, meaning-seeking, story-building bodies (still trying to make it to work in a flooded coastal city, still trying to make rent on an apartment that wages can never afford, still trying to finance a retirement that may not turn out), where we nonetheless have to confront the whole world now as one that is both out-of-joint for everyone.
In such debounded scenes (so banal and so unevenly distributed), the future is also hurtling toward us all at once and all too quickly, and we have nothing but one another, nothing but our groups and institutions, however weakened and disintegrating, to carry us through. Who would not feel at least a little anxious and frightened in such a world?
Taken together as the space and time of global risk society, metaphors I intuitively reach for are swerve, eddy, and feint: we are no longer dealing with the linearity of progress through a grid (although I am writing this, line by line, left to right, from a coastal grid city developed as one of the crown jewels of 19C Victorian Imperialism); and we can no longer conceive of society in the simple cybernetic terms of the ring* (1850s, ringstrasse, first Von Foerster) and circulation* (1950s, Heinz von Foerster). I say this although many people, hundreds of millions perhaps, still navigate the world according to these and other nineteenth-twentieth century European categories, notably: progress and evolution, race and nationalism, freedom and individuals; war, law, crime.
The border is not a line…. the border is not what/where you think it is… the border is a method, from Balibar to Jenna Loyd and Alison Mount to Mezzadra and Neilson (but never Thomas Nail).
“That is why philosophy, as a form of life or as that which determines the form and supplies the content of literary creation, is always a symptom of the rift between 'inside' and 'outside', a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed. That is why the happy ages have no philosophy, or why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy” (29).