Last November I delivered a paper at the Hamburg (Insecurity) Sessions conference, which was themed around "the slow cancellation of the future" - a thought-slogan associated with Mark Fisher.
Well, partly delivered - as often seems to happen with me, the allotted period of time ran out before I got anywhere near the end.
Here is the full text, tidied up, expanded here and there, and given a new title: (No) future music?
Cast of characters: Bifo Berardi, Fredric Jameson, J.G. Ballard, Alvin Toffler, Kodwo Eshun, Marc Acardipane, Phil Knight, Oswald Spengler.
Phil Knight sez:
ReplyDeleteMy thinking at the moment is that the 21st Century is the antithesis of the 20th Century. The very things that prospered in the 20th Century - mass media, progressive liberalism, transnationalist globalism - are the same things that are struggling or declining now.
I think that one of the reasons that the progressively-minded are finding the 21st Century so difficult to deal with is because their basic model of the future only allows tomorrow to be a more intensified version of today. So for them the 21st Century should be just like the 20th Century only more so. The possibility that key trends have gone into reverse is really anathema to them.
Also what is so discombobulating about 2020 in particular is that I think it is really the last year of the 20th Century, or at least it's the year when the last 20th Century ideals were finally killed off. This will be further underlined when Trump inevitably wins.
Anyway, this 20th/21st century disconnect is what my next blog will basically be about, if and when I get it together.
Phil Knight sez:
ReplyDeleteIt's a good job I don't give out horse racing tips!
haha! i was actually wondering how you felt about your prediction. i think you were right to the extent that Trumpism is with us for a good while, and in some ways, it's only his unique personal defects and strategic failings, combined with covid and the effects on the economy, that prevented him from being reelected. and he managed to get a record number of people voting for him, it's just that Biden managed to get an even bigger record number.
Deleteclearly that 70 million who voted for Trump despite all his disastrous management of covid and reality-denying and vileness, do have a bleak post-enlightenment worldview - although it's also intermingled with positive thinking / magical voluntarism / Law of Attraction superstition as well. i suppose it's an individual advancement positivism but a collective advancement negativism combo. the two not exactly unconnected of course
ReplyDeleteUltimately I think the USA is turning into the kind of unstable South/Central American country that the CIA used to intervene in, and Trump is the first harbinger of that. It has stopped being a "normal" Western democracy, and is on its way to being a jumble of bent elections, soft coups, hard coups, juntas, and quasi-dictatorships. The contintental American norm, really.
ReplyDelete2020 is a big inflection point in this process.