Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism

Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future

Mathias Nilges

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350074088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Kritische Theorie

Commentators across the political spectrum have argued that the future has been absorbed by an ever-expanding present to which we cannot imagine alternatives. The notion that we have lost the ability to imagine change-culturally, socially, and politically-has become one of the defining problems of our time. But what is the difference between the populist narratives of those who promise to solve this problem by returning us to a glorious past and those who promise to lead us into a glorious future? Often, this book argues, not very much at all. Revealing neo-authoritarianism and capitalist hyper-innovation as two sides of the same coin, Mathias Nilges shows that today's reactionaries and futurists both harness and profit from the same temporal crises of our present. Looking to design, popular culture, literature, and recent theoretical and political discussions, Nilges offers ways of understanding the re-emergence of familiar and disturbing forms of right-wing politics and culture (authoritarianism, paternalism, fascism) not as historical repetition but as dangerous consequences of the contradictions of capitalism today. Using critical theory, in particular the work of Ernst Bloch, this book recovers a politics and culture of hope, which it locates beyond a future that is colonized by capitalism and a past that becomes the mystical playground for the new Right: in that which was never allowed to be and thus demands realization.

1

Introduction: All We Have Is Now

A group of people, comprising engineers, designers, artists, and ultra-wealthy businessmen, is putting a big clock inside a mountain in the west of Texas. “It is a huge Clock,” the group says in its description of the clock on the companion website for its project, “hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years.”¹ The clock also has a name. Two, in fact. It is The 10,000 Year Clock, to which the group also refers as The Clock of the Long Now. Its designers think of The 10,000 Year Clock as a millennial clock, as the first of several similar clocks that they wish to build and install in a variety of places around the world. The site for a second clock, they announce, is already being prepared in a mountain in eastern Nevada that the group has purchased. The clock’s name indicates its underlying purpose and the reason why a group of people would build a big clock and put it deep inside a mountain. A highly ambitious and immensely intricate and complex design, The Clock of the Long Now is engineered to keep ticking for ten millennia, its chimes sounding across a long stretch of time in order to draw our attention to a different way of understanding both time and our relation to it. Ordinarily, and especially in our moment in history, the group argues, our conception of time is aimed at the short term. That is, we relate to time largely through the temporality of the everyday, the here and now, and we aim our actions or policies at spans of time usually no longer than a few years (strategic plans, election cycles, and so on). As a result, we struggle to consider our actions in relation to the long term.

However, the clock’s makers ask, what if we adopted a long-term view of time and of our existence? Since “ten thousand years is about the age of civilization,” they reason, “a 10K-year Clock would measure out a future of civilization equal to its past.” This in turn assumes, they continue, that “we are in the middle of whatever journey we are on,” and this, they conclude, is “an implicit statement of optimism.” The optimism of the project lies for the group in the fact that the long-term view of time that the Clock seeks to foster stands opposed to the short-termism of contemporary life and thought. If we aimed our actions in the present at the continued life of civilization, at those who come several thousand years after us, how might our understanding of, say, our relation to nature and the environment change? In a present that is so often marked by the threat of endings and moments of exhaustion, the big clock in the mountain seems to offer us a different way to tell time, a different way to evaluate the temporality of our existence and the stakes of our actions. “If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years,” the group asks, “what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well?” In a moment in history that, as this book shows in some detail, is centrally defined by an erosion of trust in the long term and by our apparent inability to imagine profound, substantive, positive change and alternatives to our present, it seems at first blush that The 10,000 Year Clock provides us with a direly needed attempt at reenergizing utopian thought. But does this clock truly tell the time of a better future and of a different understanding of temporality and of the time of our lives?

The first step in the group’s project was the construction of an 8-foot-tall prototype of the clock, which was completed in time to ring in the new millennium. The clock sounded twice to announce the year 2000, its makers explain, “in front of a small crowd at its temporary home in the Presidio, San Francisco.” This prototype of the Clock is now on display at the London Science Museum, and more recent prototypes can be visited at The Long Now Museum & Store at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The idea of the Clock and the plans for a nonprofit foundation that would support its development were conceived by Danny Hills, whom the website of The Long Now Foundation describes as “a polymath inventor, computer engineer, and designer, inventor and prime genius of the Clock,” and by Stewart Brand, “a cultural pioneer and trained biologist.” A substantial portion of the project has been bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, who also owns the land and the mountain in which the clock will be installed. Musician Brian Eno joined the effort and developed the title “The Long Now” in order to “indicate the expanded sense of time the Clock provokes.” The group subsequently adopted this title as the name of their foundation, as it describes the work in which they seek to engage: “to stretch out what people consider as now.”

Everyone with at least cursory knowledge of the standard tropes and plot points of popular culture knows that it is worth taking a closer look at any project that involves ultra-wealthy individuals building large things inside of mountains. But James Bond-esque storylines aside, there is something about the logic of the project and of the idea of a long now as a way to facilitate long-term thinking that must strike us as decidedly strange. What exactly is this time that the project brought to us by Jeff Bezos and his partners wishes to usher in? What time does the Clock actually tell? If the project is aimed at fostering long-term thinking, then, one might wonder, why is the long term understood as a long version of the now and not in the way we might more readily expect, namely as the future? Why is the Clock bound up with an idea of time that seeks to stretch out the present as opposed to a view of the present that is formulated with an eye on the future? The standardized version of the relation between present and future, reiterated ad nauseam by marketers and advertisers, is that the future is the time for whose arrival we excitedly long. Advertisers love to dress up their latest products in a costume of precisely this temporal desire whenever they tell us that the commodity that we should excitedly embrace (finally!) marks the arrival of the future and thus tells the time for which we have all hoped. The regularity and predictability of the future’s arrival thus conceived is an idea of time that is created through and that in turn helps maintain the temporal logic of commodification and innovation. The time of capitalism, a time told by each exciting commodity whose logic reveals the structural core of a system that does not reach for the future as much as it constructs alternate presents dressed in futuristic garb, is now. The idea of a long now, the seemingly paradoxical notion of a form of time that brings about the future by stretching out the present, therefore lays bare the inherent contradictions of the temporal imagination that underlies and that stabilizes capitalism. But if this is so, what are the social and political consequences of confining our imagination of time and of the future to the idea of a long now? And why, some will surely ask, especially in a moment when we are confronted with a number of pressing social, political, and environmental issues that demand solutions, should we be interested in a topic as seemingly ephemeral as time and futurity?

Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Michael Chabon writes in an essay on The 10,000 Year Clock that “the point of the Clock is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future, to get us thinking about the Future again, to the degree if not in quite the way same way that we used to do.”² This project, he argues, is particularly pressing, since “the Sex Pistols strictly speaking, were right: there is no future, for you or for me.” But Chabon’s point is not simply an expression of the well-known problem that the future does not really seem to exist, since it is “always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario.” More strikingly, Chabon argues that the future is a story that used to be central to our lives but without which we have been living for a while now. The latter suggestion is important here, and it echoes, as the pages that follow show, one of the standard narratives about our moment in history: we live in a time without future. This, in turn, means that it is not just the intended diachronic function of the clock (the long-term time it seeks to tell) that matters. Rather, and possibly even more significantly, we must consider its synchronic function, its place and significance in our own moment in history that seems to be defined by a crisis of futurity, by our seeming inability to imagine the future as difference and as the time of substantive alternatives to our present. The latter tension also finds expression in the title of Chabon’s essay, which expresses the peculiar relation between the idea of a long now and the future: “The Future Will Have to Wait.” The tone of Chabon’s essay is often mournful. Certainly, Chabon is genuinely enthusiastic about the ideas that the Clock raises, and he strongly agrees with value of trying to imagining a time far in the future and to “extend the horizon of [our] expectations for our world” beyond “the lifetime of [our] own children.” To Chabon, the Clock expresses an optimistic belief in the survival of human civilization. Throughout his essay, Chabon returns time and again to the same problem: it is important to be able to develop optimistic, long-term imaginaries of our world—and yet we seem unable to do just that. For Chabon, the ideas that underwrite the Clock’s project indicate a tragic form of optimism and a sense of loss, for the Clock tells a time that is unimaginable in our present.

For Chabon, the Clock indicates what he understands to be the very paradox that “lies at the heart of our loss of belief or interest in the Future,” of “a collective cultural failure to imagine … any Future beyond the time of a couple of centuries.” Reflecting on the way in which his own son relates to the world that surrounds him and how he imagines the future fills Chabon with great sorrow. “If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future,” Chabon explains,

he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now.

To be sure, he notes, his child’s life is not devoid of optimism. But growing up in our historical moment has restricted his optimism to the short term only. “The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday,” Chabon notes. And yet, “the world a hundred years on … leaves his hopes a blank.” The blankness of his son’s hopes for the future stands tragically opposed to an imagination that is preoccupied with loss or destruction, since, Chabon notes, his son “seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted.” And it is in this aspect of its logical design that Chabon locates the tragic function of the Clock. The Clock seeks to restore our gaze on the long term and asks us to consider the future. It asks us, therefore, to do the very thing that, Chabon notes, seems to be impossible for us and for our children. By presenting us with the idea of a long now, the Clock ultimately further compounds the very problem that fills Chabon with great sorrow when reflecting on the fact that his son understands himself as existing in a long now, in a present that we can at best prolong but beyond which there is no tomorrow: “he sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book.”

The time of the new millennium that the Clock announced is thus a profoundly troubled one. The tension between present and future and the disruption of our ability to imagine positive change that gives rise to the strange, conflicting temporality of the idea of the long now that Chabon’s essay expresses are also reflected in engagements with the category of change itself. At the same time that Chabon composed and published his essay, an exhibition called “Massive Change” was hosted at museums and galleries across North America, including the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Massive Change is a collaborative effort of Bruce Mau, Bruce Mau Design, and the Institute Without Boundaries, which showcases recent achievements in “global design” that draw upon fields including urban planning, architecture, technology, and politics in order to address some of the most pressing problems of our time—and to imagine the massive change that is possible in the world in which we live, which, Massive Change argues, is a “designed world.” In the companion book to the exhibit with the same title, coauthors Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard describe the project of the Institute Without Boundaries as aimed at the production of “a new breed of designer who is, in the words of R. Buckminster Fuller, a ‘synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist’.”³ Massive Change features multimedia installations addressing eleven categories: urban, information, transportation, energy, images, markets, materials, manufacturing, military, health, wealth, and politics. The exhibition blends technological inventions, photography, and sets of catchphrases and statistics that advertise a global politico-philosophical and economic revolution. It shows us what change looks like. One of the most interesting characteristics of the exhibition, however, is its strange temporality. Massive Change markets a revolution, yet it is neither a revolution that will take place in the future nor one that requires our participation in order to be actualized. As it turns out, the revolutionary change that the exhibition showcases is not a matter of future possibility. Rather, it has already happened—and we somehow missed it. Massive Change strives to educate us on our present, and, as a result, it leaves us with the peculiar impression that, somehow, we are not very contemporary subjects. We seem to be lagging behind our own now. But how is this possible? After all, is living in the moment, in the now, not one of the easiest things to do? Ordinarily, living in the now is the signal phrase for an absolution from excessive thought, from worrying about the future. It denotes a comfortable sense of presence that we experience whenever we permit ourselves to drift effortlessly in time. But even this previously effortless nontask of living in the now appears to become much more complicated when, as in Massive Change, the future is indeed now.

Massive Change is the project of a vanguard group that does not intend to lead us into the future but into the present. The exhibit’s argument is not that we can radically change the world but that a change has already taken place. Grammatically and ideologically, the “present perfect” tense dominates the narrative pieces of the companion book that outlines to us the kind of subjects we should be (or should have become by now). One example of the kind of subjectivity that would constitute an adequate and timely way of relating to the present is the “Prosumer.” “With the proliferation of digital networks the world over,” the authors explain, “the electronic marketplace has gone from empowering the consumer to supporting a global civic society. Power to the people.”⁴ The project of Massive Change is appealing in its simplicity. We do not have to do a lot apart from getting on board with the way the world already is—which means to participate in the electronic marketplace. As a result, the slogan “power to the people” is emptied of the exhausting component of agency that made it so inconvenient throughout history. In the past, the slogan implied that “the people” had to seize power through revolutionary means. Luckily, or so the reconstruction of the slogan in the context of Massive Change implies, in the present context we already possess the power that we have been trying to obtain for such a long time. We simply have to get better at exercising it through consumption and other forms of participation in the possibilities that the changed present contains. Massive Change urges us to embrace new technologies and forms of communication, the possibilities offered by globalized free markets, and what the exhibition understands as the possibilities for the empowerment of the people inherent in mass participation in knowledge production. The future is the present, Massive Change argues, and the present is the time of a long now of free markets and of technological innovation, of a designed world that already contains all of the answers that we need to solve the world’s problems and that is ready to empower us. In such a time, we do not need to look ahead. We just need to catch up. After all, who needs a future when all the change we need is already contained in the now?

What we begin to see here, in other words, is that the long now is the time of capitalism extended infinitely, containing all possible futures within itself. The horizon for change in the long now is the limit of capitalism. Thus, for all of its grand and often well-intentioned aspirations, the project of The Long Now Foundation not surprisingly also contains offshoots that reveal the connection to market thinking to which the idea of the long now remains connected and as a result of which its conception of the long term remains limited to the long now of capital. One of the other main projects of The Long Now Foundation, paralleling its work on The 10,000 Year Clock, is called “Long Bets.” Long Bets seeks to “improve long term thinking” by making “enjoyably competitive predictions … with philanthropic money at stake.”⁵ Featuring bets on the outcome of large-scale, long-term developments in our economy, society, technology, and politics, Long Bets transforms both history and the future into a playground for the wealthy. Substantial problems and questions regarding the future of humanity are reduced to bets, to a game whose callous cynicism is only thinly veiled by its claim to be a philanthropic project—all proceeds will go to good causes. And, of course, if future change is restricted to a choice between two options, such as that between Warren Buffet and Protégé Partners, LLC (who are engaged in a bet worth two million dollars), then it is no wonder that the idea of the future is contracted into a long now of capitalism. In keeping with this logic, The Long Now Foundation offers its version of long-term thinking also as “guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution.” To create such an institution, the site argues, it is necessary to “leverage longevity.” This corporate-speak version of the idea of long-term thinking contains one of the crucial logical components of the long now. In spite of its initially declared goals, the idea of a long now is not a matter of addressing the possibilities of a radically different, distant future. It is instead about extending the now of capitalism into the future, defending the logic of capitalism by leveraging longevity, which is to say by turning the long term into a capitalist asset.

The logic of the long now, the absorption of all forms of futurity into capitalist presentism, the chapters that follow show, has become one of the defining aspects of our moment. In addition to shaping academic and popular dialogue, this problem is also mediated by recent art and culture. Novels like Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) to which I shall return in some detail in Chapter 4, for instance, grapple with the effects of the crash of the future into a long capitalist present. Odds is a novel about a brilliant, young mathematician and budding futurist who offers risk-assessment services to large corporations and soon begins to realize the true work of futurists: futurists are “asked to keep the future from happening.”⁶ The novel’s protagonist struggles with a world in which the future collapses into the present and with his ensuing confusion about the time of our now and the long term. Either “the long term was now upon them,”⁷ he reasons, or “the short term was all that mattered,” in which case “there would be no long term.”⁸ The choice between a short now and a long now, the novel argues, leaves us with a single conclusion, namely that the present is a time without future and possibly without time itself. In late 2014 and early 2015, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City hosted an exhibition titled “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World.” The unifying concept of the exhibition is that of a-temporality, which it borrows from novelist William Gibson. The Forever Now presents the work of artists whose work, the curators explain, “reflect a singular approach that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: All We Have Is Now
• 2 Looking Backward: Nonsynchronism in the Long Now of Capitalism
• 3 The New Paternalism: Anti-Capitalism and Right-Wing Nostalgia
• 4 Mystifications or Lumberjacks without Forests
• 5 Completing the Thought of the Past: Literature as Utopian Method
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint