Baudrillard talks about how we won’t just accept history is at an end. Instead, we insist on still fighting for things (equality, universal income, reparations and so on) that really can’t be at stake anymore given where we are. In other words, it seems to be the case that we are virtually obliged to fuel our own end.
The predicament is that in still insisting on doing this good work at the very end when there is in fact no time and space for that good work, which remains nonetheless in appearance and local effects good work, we are actually just speeding up the worst forms of the end and going blindly, ever more blindly, into them.
History for Baudrillard becomes, in the moment of its end, revisionist and nostalgic and reparative by definition, when it might have been something else, objective and sad and free of hope for example.
‘Socialism’ is predictably a key example here. Perhaps it is even the name given to this mistake made at the end of history of accelerating the end of history by thinking there is still time to do certain things for which there is no longer time.
Rather than pressing forward and thinking a genuine lack of future, we prefer the retrospective apocalypse and a blanket Girdondism, which is to say the jouissance of relapse and robodenihilism on the addictogenic screen.
This is how being-on-the-TL feels in 2021; this will have been the meaning of what was once called ‘the world wide web’.
What Baudrillard called ‘revisionism’ we call ‘social justice’ or ‘cancel culture’ or (by now) ‘crypto’. What we call by these names he described as ‘entering an active age of ressentiment and repentance’. Gold may have been a name of Being for Pindar, but it is also a form of ‘physics envy’. Shakespeare, for example, knew this within the deeply ambiguous figure of Shylock and the envy-triads of the sonnets. An envy-orgy replaces the proper consideration of the present.
We will already have concurred on this point: if the left were a species, and culture obeyed the laws of natural selection, then the left would have disappeared long ago. Flirting with what irreversibly fuels the end, dying from a total contradiction between its critical thinking and its action, it is true to say, in every sense of the phrase, that nobody is capable of wanting to survive at any cost.
We fall asleep at the end of each day after all. Wisdom is whispered to us, and then blacked out.
So we have repentance instead of future-facing acceptance. We are bad winners instead of good losers. It is as if we had all the time left in a dying world to put the dying world to rights on social terms alone, these terms which are already infinite enough to be inexhaustible. We expend all the energy of our dissolution in resisting our own disintegration, which we can then neither enjoy nor be fully engulfed by. We confuse death and extinction forever.
All the energy spent at the end fighting for all our rights to be resolved at the end, in the end, by the time the end takes place, is just another way of wasting energy and fuelling that end, bringing it on, making those absolute rights more and more impossible and out of reach alongside our ever increasing efforts. This is neither a pill nor a drill. It is a question of clarity.
Baudrillard talks about renouncing all our rights instead of trying to claim them all, ‘a gigantic night of the fourth of August’. Instead of trying to claim them all before it is too late (equity), see to it that the fact the right to acknowledge this won’t happen in good time is thought about in good time.
And yes, it is a matter of color, at least in part. The white world repents and seeks absolution—it, too, the vast waste product of its own history—in a guilt that is excessive and opaque, and gets history nowhere. Black Americans are obliged to take over as moderators in leaked Clubhouse audios (‘If you’re not black, you have to go to the audience’), but this is piggy backs on the Titanic at best.
What we are ultimately talking about is the stupidity of the most intelligent people on earth. There are those who say, for example, that global risk management is the right thing to do moving forward, that extinction may be designed, but then the question presses: how many centuries do you think we have down the line?
Given a superhabitable earth, we might have seen a sextillion more generations. Since there is no need or time to give examples of all this, I won’t. Despite the decline of linear writing, reading itself remains a one-way carbon street. Part of what that means is that if you’re still reading this, and I know you are, it’s too late.