When a political, social, or economic vacuum has set in, its corresponding political, social, or economic revolution is not far away, and the more complete the vacuum, the more the various “partial” revolutions - as they simultaneously sharpen their tendencies - will converge in their struggle to become a single, all-encompassing revolution.
Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time (1950)
What to make of our present conditions? The post-Cold War era has passed, (hyper)globalization has peaked, the unipolar moment has finished, neoliberalism has perhaps entered its zombie phase. A time defined by what it is no longer, what is ‘not quite here, but yet at hand’. We search for a vantage point from which we can see clearly, yet at twilight this is not possible: some features standout, others are lost or blur together, what we are invariably left with is a sketchy and incomplete view. Still we fumble around for frames that are somehow meant to reveal what is hidden.
Continuing with Broch, he spoke of the conditions of decay that marked both the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the end of an epoch:
It was no longer the brittleness of Austria that was at stake, but the brittleness of the world, in which lurked the coming ruin, the coming human sorrow, and this brittleness was contingent in which the European - not only Austrian - philistine riffraff was vegetating. It was an unending net of untruths, an unending predicament of kitsch, incomprehensible as a whole because it consisted of a grid of seemingly isolated, thoroughly insignificant kitsch attitudes and kitsch actions…
Kitsch was both a reflection of - and contributing to - the brittleness of the era. Once again, we find ourselves surrounded by kitsch attitudes and kitsch actions. While we tend to associate kitsch with art and culture, it is important to recognise kitsch analysis and to identify this as a symptom of our present malady.
What does kitsch analysis look like? The most omnipresent version of this in geopolitics is speak of a new Cold War. Certainly such a frame might contain some truths, but it conceals and confuses as much as it might reveal. Yes, we are again in a world of great power competition and rivalry, yes, we again have the risk of systemic war, and yes, we also have somewhat competing political-economic forms. But to offer it up as a geopolitical sequel - Cold War 2 - a standoff between rival powers and rival systems is to lapse into kitsch.
Kitsch analysis profoundly underestimate vital changes and differences that demarcate our predicament. Of these, the most immediate and apparent are the deeply intertwined challenges of environmental change and energy demand. The underlying biophysical realities and the politics they are enducing strongly suggest emergent dynamics that might echo but do not easily fit with comfortable conceptual toolkits. If one takes seriously the recent published conclusions of James Hansen and his colleagues that ‘climate change is characterized by delayed response and amplifying feedbacks’, it suggests we are moving into a world in which risk and reaction are falling further out of sync, which bodes ill for us all.
Returning to Vienna, moving from Broch to Musil:
And so we arrive at the present day. The life that surrounds us is devoid of ordering concepts.
Robert Musil, ‘Helpless Europe: A Digressive Journey’ (1922)
In a world of devoid of ordering concepts, we are left with kitsch analysis. In this context, polycrisis certainly has its weaknesses, but one virtue is that it does attempt to grapple with the current moment on its own terms. As Thomas Homer-Dixon emphasises, polycrisis foregrounds the novelty of our conditions that comes from, ‘an unprecedented transformation in humanity’s circumstances — an explosive rise in human population, material consumption, connectivity, and global environmental impact beginning around 1950 that some scientists call the “great acceleration”.’ The speed with which all of these trends have returned and hastened after the brief interlude of the pandemic is indicative of how our patterns of living and consuming are marching mindlessly forward.
None of this is to deny the echoes and resonances of the present with the past. Certainly there are meaningful parallels with previous periods of societal weakness and fragmentation, great power competition and the fraying of international order. Yet it is possible for both of these conditions to hold: that there are cyclical and recognisable features to our predicament, and that there are genuinely novel features also present.
Polycrisis might be an imperfect attempt at making sense in real time, but it is effectively placing a wager on the necessity of understanding what it is different and distinctive to current conditions. That the concept does not clearly delimit what crises warrant consideration has made it overly useful, effectively becoming a way of sticking together disparate issues into any panel or report that needs a hook. And with the World Economic Forum claiming and thereby tainting the term, it probably does not have a glorious future ahead. Nonetheless, it represents an earnest attempt to grapple with the complexity and contingency of a warping, weirding world.
The information ecosystem we now inhabit is one that facilitates and rewards kitsch analysis. The academic environment is not greatly different. There is a need to resist the lure of comfortable frames and easy explanations, and instead to fully reckon with ‘the brittleness of the world’ and what potentialities might be present in these conditions.