stupid, stubborn, surreal
intimations and apprehensions of the 2024 zeitgeist, part one
To each time its geist; we clock this1.
Zeitgeist is a vexing thing to try to grasp; we glimpse a glint, a slippery subjective apprehension of it.
Zeitgeist is the great collective instance of the elusive obvious.
Seldom does even a great artist comprehend and convey it – when it lands, it is a rare, fleeting, precious anomaly2. The moment most of us try, the zeitgeist slides between our grasp, like smoke through our fingers, leaving only a smell of smoke.
Even as it cloys, zeitgeist billows dissipating; we get a whiff of it in passing –
chem sweet tang
vapist an e-scooter
through a crowd blastly
In a sense, this was the protracted difficulty Herman Broch gave himself as his Task in literature. If ‘critical theory is its time comprehended in thought’, as Butler once said Hegel once said, with The Sleepwalkers, what Broch attempted was nothing less than a critical theory of the disintegration of values, the literary pursuit of entropy’s shifting, elusive geist in the Germanophone world, 1888–1918. How did that world sleepwalk through that three-decade disintegration between the unlikely-unfortunate reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II (15 June 1888) and Armistice Day (11 November 1918)? What a monumental question; how could the zeitgeist, comprehended in literary thought, respond?
Broch gave it a RHG.
There are sublime moments in The Sleepwalkers where the zeitgeist clicks in for me. Broch did attain, at his best, the rare power of conveying the elusive obvious of his vanishing culture’s time in thought. Wow.
Without attempting a ‘break me’ monument to the moment like The Sleepwalkers, I think more of us should try to grasp the zeitgeist: seek and give glimpses of its scent, its smoke, its vapour, its light and lighting, its set and setting, its shadows and backlots.
Beyond its elusiveness, beneath its obviousness, the zeitgeist has crucial things to say.
So let me try to say what seems from what I smell in this now.
2024: it is stupid, it is stubborn, it is surreal.
2024 = 3S. This is my claim. This is where we are.
– perhaps I should sensibly end the post there. As my wobble path cognitive mapping of a putative totality, everything from here is likely to be a betrayal of the impression left by the 3Ss’ scent – if it sticks to your fingers, if you could smell anything on them. Three words: capacious enough it may work for some of you, a juste astrology reading.
From the species perspective of only one of more than eight point something billion of us (and given that each of us is already several and that we contain multitudes), who’s to say how something as ineffable as planetary experience might be captured in a small crowd of concepts?
Would’st thou capture gravity with a butterfly net?
‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?’
Yet discourse cheers neologisms and hooky take downs of leviathans, like time loves a hero: globalisation, polycrisis, disruption, singularity, or phrases like Cold War and Clash of Civiliszations and End of History… apparently this not only makes sense but also makes sense.
In fact, such gisming is encouraged, in discourse. ‘The internet is a self atomising machine’. We are so encouraged to make assertions online: reddit aside, the contemporary internet is a space void of questions, allusions and ellipses. ‘…’
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, and everything is a broadside, a missive, a hot take, a takedown, someone ‘owning’ someone. Discourse enjoins us to make careers by blasting hot takes in which we just assert neologisms repeatedly; maybe substack will turn the algo hose upon our words; give us this day or daily bump. The numbers up, we approach wholeness; the numbers down, we witness our own crack back to disintegrating parts in pieces. But woe betide they who parse a neo-logos beyond its gism, woe betide critical theory, its time comprehended in thought. Too lofty to luft. We need more data; we need more assertion; we need another hot take. But do we, but do we, but do we?
So – against the gisms and the assertiveness everywhere, which is another surreal stubborn stupidity – I don’t wish to abandon this giving of perspective I’m intent on pursuing, in the spirit of not knowing just yet or perfectly, in the spirit of wondering and guessing, of trying to think without feeling like I’ve got this. Just my subjective experience: a data point of one (PC, n=1), prima facie valid as nothing more than that, but, I hope, conveying something – unevenly distributed to be sure (like the future, like appreciation for a William Gibson reference) – that resonates from here between us now, something that besmirches our lives right now with smudges of stupidity, patinas of stubbornness, haloes of surreality. I don’t mean to suggest we should wipe our phones more often (though we should): wipe your screen, then wipe your hard drive; do it. Wipe yourself off, wipe yourself out.
No. I’m actually saying this to connect with you, like an ironic Alanis lyric:
don’t you think – there’s something very stupid, very stubborn, very surreal about 2024? Isn’t it moronic?
– don’t you think?
Pardon the pun-fun. To sum this overture intro before opening onto-into the 3S sections, then. It’s not so much that I think that I’m onto something (and that I wish you to affirm me in my skewering prescience, so I can blast my assertion into a set of hot takes and launch my career as a blasted blasting opinion that can own your enemies). Rather, two things, which push a little against cultural proclivities and reward structures, push me to my pursuit.
Firstly, I’ve been attuning more to my right brain’s reality3. When I do, and I thinkfeel4 the world as it may be right now, the whole of me really feels we are in something – like this 3S something – together, right now. This has been an attempt to go a bit further than I did with Chris on a podcast episode, and an earlier post, where we talked about the smell of the now, and how covid mucked with our sense of the smell, which (ironically) was how that time smelled.
Also… I have a co-apprehension that many of us are induced to betray what our good holistic sense intimates about it all, when we thinkfeel it. We know (very well) it’s like this... and yet5 we persist in kinda colluding with the 3Ss, intimating a dynamic we then become an implicated contributor part of, then spiral with. In ignoring the surreal stubborn stupidity of it all, we fall into it, become a dancer of its dance.
This ‘niggling accompanying’ also tells me – when I let myself listen to it, and this really does take some letting – that is something really wrong with how all this stupidly, stubbornly, surreally is. Something here is really morally wrong, politically wrong, and very trapping, in ways that are perpetuating-and-entrenching the doom loop (as Vogl does well to remind us).
‘This is wrong... ’
(so) we need to snap out of this;
(so) we need to stop doing this;
(so) we need to notice that the Atlantic Current may be stalling, which is a prollycatastrophe6 we resist knowing we know, not polycrisis we argue we’re in.
Right now, most of us seem to be dodging such ‘so’ moments; we evade the entailment. We do not face the present we ‘do not understand’, partly because we do have a sense of how it is, actually. This is in fact one powerful way in which we choose not to know what we know. Partly for good reason: of course we don’t want to face the collective death intoned by the slowing of the Atlantic Current. Partly for the (still on) presidential race and the (so long) Olympics: of course they’re just so much more entertaining.
But (again!) as we collude with this dynamic, so it ramps and entrenches its hold on our collective agency (again: huge point from Vogl, please read him carefully, please listen).
What I’m left with, then, is something hard to know with words and reason and evidence (the left brain’s beloved tools), but that, my right brain’s whole sense thinkfeels back to me, tells me really matters, and so is worth risking being wrong about ‘in public’ (or online… or whatever this is, aside from a self atomising machine).
So I maintain: if there is an all and we are in ‘it’ together now, then
it is stupid,
it is stubborn,
it is surreal.
Over the following few weeks, I will take each in turn.
Consider Flava Flav – and his clocks.
Re-reading Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, she is really impressed by how Shakespeare and Austen managed to be wholly themselves and fully give exactly and totally what they had to give, which is 100% in their own voice and 100% of its moment.
And I know he kinda ‘got tooken’ (as my youngest says) by the alt right (and the ep that odd Kermit-sounding Canadian psychometrist-Jungian did with him was weirdly deferential), but McGilchrist’s Master and Emissary started nudging me here; but I preferred Siegel’s synthesis of brain-mind-interaction.
We need a better neologism, to be sure. I don’t want it to be truthiness though.
Aping Zizek’s aping of Sloterdijk’s formula of fetishist disavowal (from Critique of Cynical Reason): I know very well… and yet…
There’s another semi-marketable neologism: cue the prollycatastrophe critique of all polycrisis tropes.