Have all the melodies of world improvement been played? Does the possibility of the whole appear faint at best? Amidst it all, has the self grown weary of itself? Today, anyone claiming that all truths are relative and that nothing can be trusted is preaching to the converted. Yet the applause is hesitant because many nurture the silent hope that perhaps there is something to believe in after all. That a beginning is possible, despite the complexity of social relations in a world without limits.
Let us not be deceived: the public is watchful and informed enough to know the game of intellectual critique, in which good news about economic growth and job creation is turned into bad news about global warming and the burn-out of the workforce. People don’t turn a blind eye to contradictory developments in society and their ambiguous consequences for the individual. Yet intellectual cleverness is considered suspect when it leads to nothing. It appears we have reached the end of a period of perhaps thirty years that many well-known diagnoses of the present see as the grand finale to a longer process of decline. The end of capitalism has again become conceivable;1 we can imagine a global society that no longer revolves around Europe;2 and we cast about for metaphors for an Anthropocene3 that has no equivalent in the millions of years of Earth’s history. Yet outrage that the world as we know it has been allowed to self-destruct merely conceals fear about not knowing where to go next.
The mood of our situation can be defined by looking at two complexes. The first is rootless anti-capitalism. It can be found among skilled autoworkers with union membership cards,4 as well as engineers from R&D departments,5 among high-performing individualists from Eastern Europe, as well as established conservatives from the West,6 among ‘precariously affluent’ singleparent families, as well as two-breadwinner households from the world of high achievers with three or more children.7 At ‘my’ workplace, in ‘our’ family, among ‘us’ locals the world is in order – but outside, predatory capitalism rages, tearing everything to pieces and holding nothing sacred. We will probably be all right. But how our children will manage, heaven only knows.
Anti-capitalists of all classes and nations see the reason for the ubiquitous ‘imperialism of disorganization’ in the politically willed and driven transformation of what is now barefaced capitalism. Neoliberalism is the name for a cult of the strong self, one that demands the sacrifice of social community, care for the weak and the collective property of the welfare state. The ideological armies that came to power with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s replaced the ‘social market economy’ with the ‘ownership society’. Only when society served the economy, so the neoliberal credo goes, could the economy serve society. Although they knew the dangers, political majorities worldwide subscribed to this reversal of social relations.
The results are visible today. What is positive about the fact that income inequality in the United States has reverted to levels last seen a century ago?8 How can it be acceptable that, in a rich country like the United Kingdom, material hardship is increasing despite increasing economic strength? (According to a 2014 study, the proportion of UK households unable to properly heat their homes in winter rose from 14 to 33 per cent in three decades, while national economic performance doubled over the same period.)9 What explains the fact that, according to a long-term study of wealth and income over the last two centuries, the capital gains of the wealthy few have grown faster than the earned income of entire national economies?10 Having lost its counterpart after the collapse of socialism, capitalism now lacks all restraints. ‘Lunch is for losers’ is the motto of the capitalist ideal of relentless competition and wholesale social desolation. The conventions of the good life have been swept away by a regime of total mobilization. Sleep and you risk sleeping through what’s new, stay awake and optimize your presence through yoga. All just to turn money into more money.
We saw where this mania of extended and accelerated self-exploitation leads to in 2008. When capitalism finds its apotheosis in a financial industry compliant only with the profit demands of a class of monetary asset holders, then the floodgates are open for the financialization of the world.11 This rests on the notion that everything that exists and that we attach importance to can be assigned a market value.12 Money rules the world, not because it is a necessary means of satisfying our needs but because it is the sole and all-encompassing end that justifies all means. No longer are we the owners of labour power that we are obliged to sell to an employer, who rewards us for the passivity with which we submit to his demands. Rather, we have turned ourselves into asset individualists who exploit our own talents and potential for the purpose of total self-commercialization. We thought that, by astute calculations and rational investments, we could take control of our own future; however, we failed to notice that we had become the agents of a ‘privatized Keynesianism’,13 covering the risks of others who, relying on us to repay our debts, placed mad bets on an uncertain future.
When the miraculous process of money creation came to a halt, because suddenly the rumour went around that a million or so families in the United States who wanted to live in an area where they could confidently send their children to school could no longer service their mortgages, everyday asset individualists with their savings and pensions had to pay up so that banks ‘too big to fail’ could offload their toxic assets. In the 2008 crisis and the national debt crises from 2011 onwards, ordinary tax-paying citizens were ultimately held liable for crises that had got out of hand for others.
Whatever form of capitalism they hold responsible, be it turbo-capitalism, predatory capitalism, casino capitalism or finance capitalism, the conclusion of the helpless anti-capitalists is always that humanity has painted itself into a corner. Of course, with our pension funds and building society accounts, we too have become part of the system of self-commercialization that apparently can no longer manage its own risks. All the political class has to say, however, is that there is no alternative. The combined anti-capitalist front of ultra-liberals and residual communists, disillusioned social democrats and muted conservatives, alter-globalists and ethnonationalists is for democracy and the people but against banks, the media and party politicians.
But who speaks for those who would speak for themselves if only they knew what to say?
The anti-capitalism that sees itself as the ‘socialism of capital’14 cannot be compared to the organized anti-capitalism that defines itself in the confrontation between capital and labour. When the factory was the predominant form of socialization, you knew that the bosses sat upstairs while their stooges kept watch from the windowed offices. However, in the ‘factory without walls’, where the boundaries between life and work blur, the contradiction between wages and profit, between labour value and capital yields, has been shifted onto the individual. People no longer trust in their own collective strength and instead distrust and demonize the system. The society of distrust feels trapped in a closed system of ubiquitous dependency whose parts are individually animated by selfishness and arbitrariness, rather than somehow combining to produce a rational whole. The terrifying instability of the world elicits a universal indignation triggered by one thing one moment and something else the next. It is the expression of an unease in the world unable to decide whether to reject the world or to affirm it.
The opposite of the outraged anti-capitalists are the relaxed system fatalists. They have long since abandoned the idea of a rational whole with honest merchants, socially responsible entrepreneurs and strong popular parties. They respond to the neurotic anti-capitalists with their hopeless fixation on traditional certainties by pointing to new opportunities, hidden gains and unexpected hybrids. Like it or not, systems are based on the arbitrary will of individuals and the randomness of effects; only these produce the brilliant ideas and daring projects that guarantee the ability of the system as a whole to react to changing circumstances and unpredictable domino effects. Looking back in anger only distorts the view of the future, which you need in order to survive. Overall, relaxed fatalists make a more civilized, versatile and intelligent impression than rootless anti-capitalists, with their suppressed anger, allconsuming hatred and craving for approval.
Relaxed fatalists prefer to sit back and watch than to fret the whole time that things aren’t as one might wish. For them, it is more important to survey the field than to improve the world. This allows you to identify your options and be on the ready for the next opportunity. When developments appear to have come to a dead end, then it is simply because of the self-reflexivity of processes with no aim or logic. Because everything could be different, I can change nearly nothing, as the systems theorist Niklas Luhmann put it in the early 1970s in a prescient essay on the risks of truth and the perfection of critique.15
In their assessment of the situation, both sides may actually concur: today’s younger generation is growing up in a world of uncertain career prospects, increasing income inequality, global political instability and deepening ecological crisis. As the debate on intergenerational equity proves, these facts have become a predominant issue between the generations. The only difference is that fatalists both young and old prefer to scale back their expectations in an attitude of imperturbability, rather than to exhaust themselves through inward or outward resistance.
To make life easier, if nothing else, system fatalists are less pessimistic when it comes to capitalism. It is merely a matter of perspective. After all, 1989 was a hiatus in two senses.16 The fall of the Berlin Wall marked a historic watershed in the development of worldwide inequality in that, after the collapse of socialist or even communist alternatives caused by economic growth in the newly industrialized countries, the process of divergence between the industrialized countries of the global North and the developing countries of the global South, underway for the past two centuries, went into reverse. The success of China, India, Brazil, Vietnam and South Africa in incorporating and developing the technologies, organizational models and financial practices of the core capitalist nations enabled them to make enormous leaps in growth and to significantly reduce the disparity in living standards between nations. This economic growth steadily diminished the proportion of the poor in the global population. Whether, given population growth as a whole, the relative decrease in global poverty has been sufficient to prevent its increase in absolute terms is an open question. However, one thing is certain: for the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, economic progress is outpacing population growth.
Simultaneously, however, intra-societal inequalities in living standards, both in the growing economies of the South as well as the once dominant economies of the North, have grown significantly. Everywhere, the social gulf between high earners, median earners and low earners within individual countries has deepened and become more intractable. Things in the world have thus got better and worse at the same time, the system fatalists note wryly. What they don’t say, however, is whether they support an attitude of escapism or engagement.
On the overheated property markets of London, Paris and Milan, rich Russians, Indians and Chinese are driving the local middle classes out of the respectable central districts. In Infernetto in Rome, in Neukölln in Berlin or in Bradford in northern England, sub-proletarian survival camps have emerged for people from all over the world; they form a permanent poor population lacking any significant prospects. In the OECD countries, the middle class is splitting into a wealthy upper segment and a precarious lower segment that chafes under the increasing cost of educating its offspring, expensive health insurance – particularly for family members needing care – and rising housing costs in the better locations. In opaque social landscapes like this, it seems prudent, particularly to those not fortunate enough to have inherited or acquired rank, to be cautious, to hold back and to avoid breaking cover, rather than to protest, to stick their necks out and to speak up. In a rapidly changing world, people increasingly wonder whether they feel as at home in society as their parents’ and above all their grandparents’ generations did during the long post-war era.
Neither the anti-capitalist nor the fatalist position is based on a developed interpretation of the world that one might submit to counter-argument, proof of inconsistency or factual correction. Both are attitudes towards the world corresponding to a particular mood in the world. The mood is the ground from which the figures of the ‘rootless anti-capitalist’ and ‘relaxed fatalist’ stand out. Only in light of this figure–ground relationship is the reason for the relentless antagonism between the two comprehensible. Mood raises the question that prompts the one or other response. It is a question that calls into question how we live and why we live.
Moods are ways of being in the world. A mood of empathy assails us when, on holiday, we drive through a village and come across a funeral procession; a dramatic mood overcomes us during a thunderstorm amidst a landscape; after dreaming about one’s childhood, one wakes up in a wistful mood; after a long day, I try to put myself in another mood by listening to a John Coltrane album or a string quartet by Franz Schubert. Just as it is impossible, according to Paul Watzlawick, not to communicate, since silence is also eloquent and ignoring someone is a way of paying attention to them, it is also impossible, according to Martin Heidegger, not to be in this or that mood because contentment is a mood no less than depression, pensiveness a mood no less than exuberance, lassitude a mood no less than agitation.17
For Heidegger, mood determines ‘how one is, and how one is faring’ (wie einem ist und wird):18 how reality becomes accessible to us; what feelings, memories and thoughts suggest themselves and what are excluded from the outset; what kinds of behaviour are deemed appropriate and what are rejected as inappropriate; and, above all, how the world represents itself to us as a whole. However, moods should not be understood as purely private conditions and merely personal feelings. On the contrary, they form the basic tone or general coloration of the understanding and experience of an objectivity that challenges the self to become itself. In mood, the self in a sense becomes aware of itself, and it cannot make excuses for itself through something else that it has nothing to do with.
In Heidegger’s deliberately stilted formulation, which on first reading seems impenetrable: ‘In having a mood, Dasein is always disclosed moodwise as that entity to which it has been delivered over in its Being; and in this way it has been delivered over to the Being which, in existing, it has to be.’19
But where does the mood come from that leaves me, when driving past a funeral procession, caught outdoors during a storm, waking up in the morning or listening to music in the evening, feeling this way or that? Mood emerges from the situation I am in, with the impressions, demands and modes of connectivity that it directs at me, and asks me what I understand to be the purpose of my existence and the kind of life I want to lead.
In biographical terms, that may make sense on the basis that a succession of formative moments occurs in the course of one’s life,20 such as starting school, the crisis of puberty and severance from one’s parents, the transition from education to work, the decision to enter a permanent relationship or the birth of one’s first child. But how can we understand the process whereby mood is determined through a social-historical situation?
Here, Heidegger offers a methodology of ‘world disclosure’ (Welterschließung) that, as Karl Jaspers puts it,21 asks how the world as a whole discloses itself within time.22 Do I understand the world in terms of its vulnerability or in terms of its mutability, futility or meagreness? The mood that currently predominates, or that is covertly signalling its arrival, can thus be traced.
Uniting the rootless anti-capitalists and the relaxed system fatalists in their contentious co-dependency is a mood of fundamental tension, one that oscillates between negation of the world and affirmation of it, between escapism and engagement. Just as the anti-capitalists are capable only of pathos, so the fatalists can only do bathos. It is as if the one needs the other as an excuse to start a fight. While the anti-capitalists rage against a politics without alternatives, against ‘fake news’ and ‘dumbing down’, the system fatalists celebrate everyday compromise, mass-media self-reference and the relativity of truths. Both positions are so entrenched that dialogue between them about the essence of politics, the production of the public sphere or the meaning of truth seems almost impossible. The certitude of the raging anti-capitalists provokes the arrogant insouciance of the system fatalists – and vice versa: the glass bead game of the serene voyeurs provokes the angry engagement of the world improvers. The one group shuts itself off from the other and withdraws into a bubble of self-semblance.
The general mood of tension underlies the sudden rise of social movements like PEGIDA in Germany and the Tea Party in the United States. Under the banner of anti-politics, distrust and self-empowerment, the worried, the neglected and the aggrieved join forces to voice en masse the constitutive power of the people. ‘We are the people!’ has been the slogan of all the recent protest movements. Those who feel ignored, downgraded and hard-done-by seek mutual resonance and strength by rising up as a group from a levelled-out middle class.23
Publicly, the adherents of refined social observation deplore these campaigns for the restoration of self-respect.24 As pedagogues of relaxed fatalism, all that they can see in them are the futile exercises of social groups that have not yet understood the lessons of postmodernity. Neither violence nor idealism can change the fact that the age of collective self-determination is past. This unwillingness to accept universal co-dependence in complex systems is seen by the other side as the root condition of grievance, ill will and xenophobia. In terms of its public manifestation, the controversy between rootless anti-capitalism and relaxed fatalism thus becomes the struggle over the minimum of indifference and non-engagement necessary for civilization.
It can’t be denied that we find ourselves at the end of a strange period of thirty years, beginning in 1989, during which global social conditions have been getting simultaneously better and worse. For all of us, the world has expanded, opening up new questions of self-realization and new opportunities for self-revelation and re-combination. Unmistakable, at any rate, is the return of the long-ignored Romantic motif of the poeticization of the world, of arrival from the periphery and the reconstruction of disparate fragments.
This underlying mood first reveals itself in a break with the phobic dispositions of the previous era. There is a sense of wanting to free oneself from negative attachments that make one narrow, obstinate and rigid. Just as neoliberalism recoils in panic from anything to do with the state and society, so postmodernity is defined by its fear of the truth.
Thinking about neoliberalism’s early days in the late 1970s, what comes to mind is its liberating blow against social sclerosis,25 against the mentality of vested interests26 and diagnoses of ungovernability in ‘late’ capitalism.27 The ‘dream of eternal prosperity’28 was suddenly shown to be a short-lived and irreversibly defunct ideal, dependent on unique circumstances. However, as the years passed, the energy of mental liberation itself became a structure of intellectual enslavement. Both neoliberals and their critics are driven by a furore trapped in what feels like the automatisms of abhorrence.
Similarly, the postmodernist credo according to which all knowledge and understanding is socially constructed, and hence the ethos of recognizing the manifold ways of knowing and understanding, was originally a huge liberation of the intellect from narrow-minded methodologies and provincial cosmologies. In what at the time felt like a fresh and optimistic mode of thought, postmodernists argued that if we can understand the conventional status of our knowledge and methodologies, then – crucially both for the politics of science and for everyday morality – we will come to see that it is we and not reality who are responsible for what we know.29
However, what began as an assertion of openness became in time a doctrine of closure. If the relativity and limitedness of knowledge and understanding are clear from the outset, then what is left to make us want to try to know and to experience the joy at being able to understand? ‘Fear of knowledge’30 came to be an albatross around the necks of a younger generation of researchers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals.
But where are the signs of the emergence of a new mood? One clue can be found in the debate in the visual arts.
Postmodern irony, which once resisted modernist enthusiasm for progress, utopia, functionalism and purism, has lost its appeal here. The combination of nihilism, sarcasm and distrust of grand narratives about the ‘irreducible individual’ and suchlike has been discarded as stale and empty. One no longer wants merely to endlessly defer the end, to demonstrate the impossibility of narrating the world, to denounce the whole as untrue, but to begin something, to try something, to assemble something. People seek an art of engagement,31 assembly32 and vitality.33 The new claim is: ‘Engagement not exhibitionism, hope not melancholy’.
CEOs and politicians, architects and artists alike are formulating anew a narrative of longing structured by and conditioned on a belief (‘yes we can’, ‘change we can believe in’) that was long repressed, for a possibility (‘a better future’) that was long forgotten. Indeed, if, simplistically put, the modern outlook vis-à-vis idealism and ideals could be characterized as fanatic and/or naive, and the postmodern mindset as apathetic and/or skeptic, the current generation’s attitude – for it is, and very much so, an attitude tied to a generation – can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism.34
A very different indicator of change in the general mood, this time pertaining to the global situation, can be found in Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason, first published in 2013. The book analyses the inherent connection between racism and capitalism, showing how the racial subject was concocted on the plantations of colonialism in the shadow of the bourgeois subject, appearing to the hysterical white ruler as an object that was both threatening and seductive. The term ‘negro’ was invented as an expression of exclusion, condemnation and humiliation, marking a difference in skin colour that to this day continues to be invoked and detested. Like Frantz Fanon, Mbembe stresses that the colonized person can experience his or her life only as the permanent struggle against a death that is atmospherically ubiquitous. Hence, for the person degraded to a racial subject, the urge for revenge is irresistible, and emancipatory violence is inevitable. The book shows that we continue to live in a racist world where, for the colonized, it is a question of giving meaning not to one’s life but to one’s death.
Nelson Mandela, who unlike Ruben Um Nyobé, Patrice Lumumba, Amílcar Cabral, Martin Luther King and the rest escaped murder, thought differently. Meditating endlessly in his cell, he arrived at the idea of ontological semblance and proximity between human beings, despite the best efforts of his guards to convince him otherwise. Achille Mbembe comes to a similar conclusion in his epilogue, entitled ‘There is only one world’. Given the irreversible intermingling and interweaving of cultures, peoples and nations in this one world, he writes, only a process of reassembling amputated parts, of repairing broken links and of relaunching forms of reciprocity can guarantee progress for humanity and offer a politics for the future.35