A quarter of the way through the year, a quarter of the way through the century. On a recent visit to Australia, I had the opportunity for another in-person meeting with Pete Chambers. Previously we have tried to avoid focusing on the United States, conscious of how much of our collection attention it demands. For this discussion, we accept and acknowledge that especially in the present moment - for worse, better and much else - that country remains at the heart of the world’s predicament. US military power, USD dominance, English as the global language, and the centrality of US tech platforms all combine to give it a huge amount of structural power that makes it difficult to escape from. If the US is deciding that the global soup of neoliberal globalisation needs to be unmade, things are going to keep getting very messy.
With the non-stop flood of news and updates, everything feels immediate and of the moment. As Peter and myself have both explored, this generates powerful dynamics of reactivity, it works against thought. Recognising this, it was instructive listening to this conversation recorded a month ago and noting that it has not (yet) dated at all. Perhaps the immediacy need not be as immediate as we immediately feel it must be.
In the conversation, we explore the difficulty of defending the shabby status quo, disappointment and distaste with what ‘really existing’ unipolarity was, and the disorientation that comes with a world of 8 billion people in which much of what matters is now happening outside and beyond the US and the West. Interestingly, some of what we consider prefigures Perry Anderson’s new LRB piece, ‘Regime Change in the West?’.
Our conversation was a sincere effort to think through topics that at some points can be quite challenging or discomforting. That is the point and the practice. To earnestly engage in open thinking one must stay open, and doing so becomes more difficult - but more necessary - in conditions that encourage closure and reactivity.
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