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.