Intentionally or not, as the year ends, I’ve been engaging in some summative notes framed around ‘knowing the time’ (first note, second note). The plan is to finish working through some of these ideas before shōgatsu in Japan, a special time when this place goes quiet and stops for a few days.
And for whatever reason, it appears there has been a recent uptick in subscribers. For readers, new and old, thank you for taking the time to engage with my work. I hope some of what I present might act as a prompt for thought. It is meant as an open, incomplete and imperfect dialogue between writer and reader, the circle closes to be opened again. Any questions, proposals, or connections, please get in touch: info.hobson@gmail.com
Two questions I have been thinking with recently: ‘what time is it?’ and ‘where are we?’ In different ways, both speak to the demand and difficulty of understanding the conditions we collectively find ourselves in. The geist is there, one can feel it, sense it, but pinning it down, identifying and tagging it, that is the hard part, amorphous and elusive, it evades our grasp.
Previous notes have pointed to the ‘golden age of security’ prior to the Great War, and the subsequent process of reflection during the interwar period, as offering ways of helping to orient thinking about our present. From this, it is possible to try to get a sense of what living through a period of dissolution and reformation looks and feels like. Invoking again this depiction presented in Hannah Arendt’s review of The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch:
For the decline of the old, and the birth of the new, is not necessarily an affair of continuity; between the generations, between those who for some reason or other still belong to the old and those who either feel the catastrophe in their very bones or have already grown up with it, the chain is broken and an "empty space," a kind of historical no man's land, comes to the surface which can be described only in terms of "no longer and not yet."
Its relevance here is that it offers answers to the questions posed above: we are in an empty space, we stand between the times. The models, measures and maps that helped to orientate our thought and action now confuse and conceal as much as they reveal. The prevalence for kitsch analysis is partly to do with the type of people that are rewarded in our information environment, it also likely reflects a discomfort with these confusing conditions. Employing tropes like fascism, speaking of a new Cold War or the beginnings of World War 3, all offer a kind of odd intellectual refuge, an easy guide for identifying where we are. Yet if one recalls Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, one of her abiding insights was precisely that it represented a historically new formation. And so, we must be willing to reckon with some of what we are experiencing now might also be historically distinct, and certain frames might be actively unhelpful.
Present conditions are ones that are distinguished more by dissolution than transformation, more by entropy than metamorphosis. For all the talk of great powers and ‘up and to the right’, one can paint an equally detailed picture of weakness everywhere. Geopolitics transposed through Anna Karenina: each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way.
At the international level, the end of one order does not necessarily mean the advent of a new order, rather one is reminded that the opposite of order is simply disorder. The United States as failing and flailing hegemon resembles Tony Montana in the final stages of Scarface, with the shabby veneer of a ‘rules based order’ falling apart through malfeasance and malevolence. China effectively offers an order of ordering: they produce and we consume, and this occurs on their terms. If one wants to also speak of an ‘axis of resistance’ or perhaps more accurately an ‘axis of shitbirds’, one finds anger, ressentiment, and little more. One could keep going but the core point is easily understood: there are few positive signs or short-term possibilities of forward facing, inclusive order building. Plenty of power to disrupt and destroy but little willingness to listen, nor capacity to create. The trendlines are all firmly pointed towards further fragmentation and confrontation.
Across geopolitics and geoeconomics one can identify a massive wager being placed. On one side, the ‘West’ betting on more of the same, that prosperity along with economic and technological innovation will remain with them. On the other side, China and ‘the Rest’ betting on numbers and momentum, that there is a monumental geographical shift in power unfolding. Where does capital go and what does economic growth look like in these conditions? Too late for the old, and too early for the new, we stand in-between, place your bets. Increasingly, it seems like our ‘best’ collective hopes lie with some kind of militarised transition, whereby geopolitical competition and rivalry force states in directions that also happen to be good for people and the planet. How this could occur without tipping over into war or some other catastrophe, well, that would need to be discovered.
This is a rough formulation I sketched out on paper some months ago:
Escalation and entropy as defining forces of the present.
There are a number of areas in which it appears that what unfolds in the next 5-10 years might be pivotal. These are relatively straightforward and well-known:
Planet: You don’t need to be a member of the Andreas Malm fan club to acknowledge that it seems like we are collectively pressing down on the accelerator as we approach every warning point, limit and boundary related to planetary health.
Institutions: From politics to economics to society to culture, we are experiencing what Hermann Broch described as ‘the disintegration of values’. Wolfgang Streeck has described these as conditions in which, ‘a society can turn for a significant length of time into less than a society – a post-social society, or a society lite’.
Technology: With smartphones, social media and AI, a truly insane amount of power to shape our ways of thinking and being has been ceded to a very narrow group of people and companies with profoundly limited and impoverished conceptions of humanity and life.
It is tempting to abbreviate technology - institutions - planet to TIP, thereby conveying a sense of nonlinearity and the possibility of shifting from one regime into another. More appropriate, however, is PIT, as the term holds a number of relevant valances. Lets recall some meanings:
‘Something resembling a hole in darkness or depth; a situation from which it is difficult to escape, a trap; a low or wretched psychological state.’
‘To set in conflict or rivalry against another; to match, oppose.’
And ‘pit of the stomach’ being where people feel strong emotions like fear and nervousness.
Conflict, fear, difficulty of escape: yes, these resonances seem appropriate.
If any of the above analysis is directionally accurate, what is suggests is that it is understandable to feel confused and disorientated, as these are confusing and disorientating conditions. Faced with this, there is a demand - and a reward - to respond with clear, immediate and short answers. Dot points, sound bites, hot takes and AI summaries: this is the surface that we are encouraged to skim across. And so, the challenge is to avoid the comfort of the easy resolution, the immediate answer, the confident categorisation, and to stay open, to be open to thought and thinking in these in-between times.