By Luigi Russolo. Public Domain
The unfolding of time is nothing more than the erratic choreography of event and habit.
Habit regularizes, standardizes, and relegates to routine.
Event disrupts. It is the exception that becomes the example.
The contrapuntal forces of this dynamic are what engender velocity in human time, as displacement over time.
However when the force of habit greatly exceeds the disorienting impetus of the event, the dance slows.
Things crystallize and get stuck.
The new is the bridge between what is and what is not. What could be selects and picks something out of the miasma of the Nothing and renders it something that is, and it is new. This is poiesis, the act of creation.
Human creation is bound by our necessary finitiude. Thus anything that we create, anything that is new can only come about as a repetition. But repetition of what came before is not the same as what came before. It can properly be novel if it is a repetition that is not a redundancy.
The problem of the left-right political spectrum is that it reduces all to a one-dimensional line. It flattens and collapses.
Conventional right wing thought obstructs the advent of the new through an intransigent gatekeeping of either the status quo or some earlier form.
Conventional left wing thought purports to be in favor of the new but either merely recycles the standards of the old or advocates annihiliationism as the destiny of the new.
Thus emerges the primary question of any sort of striving toward the "new": if it can truly be said to have a vertical dimension?
If we spatialize a human state of affairs, we of course must ask ourselves, "with respect to what?"
What anchors the up and down, the ascent and decline?
The nihilism of the right presumes that the apex has been reached, or even passed. There is nothing new under the sun. There is nothing more to achieve. All you can do is strive to maintain what those before pioneered. Enjoy your middle class life, comfortably. Or fight to take it back if it has been taken from you. That is all there is.
The nihilism of the left either inverts the up-and-down of the vertical or questions its value altogether. For those who do not relegate it to the ring kissing of power, the critique of prior standards of up and down often leads to their dialectical flipping. What once was up is now down. But again since something can only be up and down with respect to something with its own orientation, the question becomes if that substratum is flipped as well? How many layers undergo the flip of critique is an open question and produces much of the left's in-fighting. The goals and programme of reassortment, deconstruction, or revolution for the left will remain inchoate until a hegemon should dominate the articulation and organon of the movement.
The nihilism of the centrist is predicated upon total agnosticism. One cannot know what is up and down. Thus consensus must be reached either around the median or the mean. Those who seek the greatest displacement from the horizontal plane of the status quo are the anathema. Centrism as the will-to-inertia. One can have no vision but merely adjudicate the voices of others.
What has been apparent for decades and becomes even more widely felt on a world-historical level now is that we have drifted into stagnation. The future is not quite bright. There is profound dissatisfaction paired with equally profound passivity.
The archipelago of the terminally online who are united digitally but isolated physically thirsts for cohesion. A lightning rod around which to coalesce and organize.
But the options which receive global visibility and sustained momentum seem merely to be recapitulations of the unidimensional left-right spectrum. We are moving sideways, at best.
There is no grandiose vision. Or dream, to make more of us than what we are, at a structural level.
The structure itself is either an endangered animal in need of utmost conservation or a vestigial edifice in need of restructuring to redistribute existing resources. But there is no vision for expanding the structure in a new dimension. To create something new, outside the categories that exist.
To escape the deadlock of one-dimensional thinking, we need new categories, new ideas, new vision.
The circus of rhetoric and critique and sound bites is happy to play duck duck goose until the sun dies out.
One must break the circle.
Futurism once understood this writ.
Grounded in youth and vitality and hope, futurism sought to accelerate the process. Not unto destruction, but unto new heights.
Velocity and speed and go go go bring a jolt of excitement, much like the automobile, its paired invention.
This is not to say the old must be destroyed, or even forgotten. But we cannot cling to it interminably.
We must be prepared to chart our own course.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Boomer generation is its success in enshrining its particular vision of the world and themes as the centerpiece of discourse.
Whether as something to regain, to conserve, to improve upon, or destroy.
It is this reduction of the ideal of America in particular to a remarkably brief epoch that fuels the fatalism of those who come after.
And constrains and paralyzes us. Preventing us from seeing beyond the particular blip of the postwar era that anchors ideological camps, either positively or negatively.
If this sounds incredibly vague and general, rest assured, I feel the same.
The point is not to answer the summons of futurism but to post its writ as an RFP.
How do we properly generate new categories or genera of ideas with critical attention to what came before, without lapsing into do-nothing cynicism?
It is the selection of these new criteria that we must pursue. Or perhaps the criteria will emerge only when the project has been identified.
We will see.