Part one of an essay which utilises short fiction and music to reflect on the teleological determinism characteristic of historical Eurocentric theorising which aspired to a global universality. How can we think theory in the ruins of such meta-narratives? Does theory still retain an emancipatory function? Can global thought also mean an excavation of wreckages, or giving voice to revisiting spectres from the past? Can such ghosts meaningfully contest the “capitalist realism” which threatens the subsumption of futurity and utopian imagining today?
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I: Global Thought vs Global Theory
If, by “Global Thought,” we mean the philosophical project of positing a “Global Theory,” the “discovery” (or production) of transcendent ideas which structure (or tell an overarching story about) reality and unite one (human) world out of many worlds, we are right to feel hesitant and maintain critical distance. We could consider the production of such a world-encompassing theory the drive of pre-modern philosophers, if by “modern” we mean a renewed criticality and awareness of the historicity of thought, a scepticism about “grand narratives” and the application of a-priori conceptual categories to the past and its heterogeneous socio-cultural traditions. Whether it is Spinoza’s demonstration of a mono-substance, Kant’s “moral science” and teleology of the cosmopolitan ethical community, Hegel’s world-spirit progressing dialectically toward “absolute freedom,” or Marx’s science of history which culminates in the flower of socialism, “global thought” in a rationalist key posits a predetermined theory of history which is working itself out in space-time, requiring only empirical adjustment on the part of human societies in order to clear the way for a capitalized ‘Reason,’ ‘Nature,’ ‘History,’ or even God to incarnate itself. Often, in reading global theory of this sort, we are assured that “Reason ‘realises’ itself in human history,” and this theoretical optimism has constituted what today we understand as the hegemonic narrative of “Progress” within which all human history – its revolutions and its massacres, its genocides and its artistic-cultural achievements, the development of technology, capitalism and the forces of production, the barbarism of imperialism, colonialism and its promised rewards – are subsumed into a coherent Weltanschauung.
A global theory which posits a theoretically unified world is often predicated on the elimination of many other worlds. In Nick Hunt’s short story Loss Soup (2009), the protagonist sits down at a fictional banquet in a dining hall “located, it seems, in an abandoned subway tunnel… Lit by dim, recessed lights that give the room an atmosphere of twilight. Walls dustily cluttered with half-completed objects, broken bits of statuary that appear familiar at first glance, and at second glance unrecognisable.” As the hooded and anonymous diners sit, a ritualistic intonation of all the lost species, cultures, traditions, lifeways and worlds is monotonously recited in what can be read as an inversion of the Onondaga “Thanksgiving Address” (translated more accurately as “The Words That Come Before All Else”). This thanksgiving address is a long-form oratory which asserts the ontological equality of all other beings, acknowledges the world-creating processes of all forms of life, evoking a populous, diverse world of teachers and kin. Kimmerer comments that “part of its power rests in the length of time it takes to send greetings and thanks to so many. The listeners reciprocate… by putting their minds into the place where gathered minds meet”. Ideally, it is here where “gathered minds meet” that any theory could hope to arise which integrates the diverse ways of being and traditions of thought and practise, a theory truly “global” in its recognition and thanksgiving to all forms of non-human as well as human life. Contrastingly, in Loss Soup, as the exhaustive list of lost worlds is intoned, each recited extinction adding new material added to the “soup,” the protagonist hurries to write dow1n, journalistically, each species, culture, tradition, history, and world which is added to the cauldron. His anxiety builds:
“You halt your hopeless scribbling – already you have skipped dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds have not been committed to paper, you will never recall them now… They have no features, no identifying markings. They have reverted to a monotype. Ethnically, sexually and culturally dilute. It’s as if every race in the world has been boiled down to its component paste and stirred together into a beige-coloured blandness.”
Instead of these lost worlds adding a rich depth to the soup, it is instead a “sewer-stinking broth.” The protagonist is stunned: “Perhaps you imagined them swimming down there – shades of the Kipchaks, the wisents, the grebes, the canopies of long-extinct trees, intimations of dead Aboriginal tongues, the auroch and the Neanderthal, Homo floresiensis, the glaciers, megafauna…” Rather, what the protagonist encounters is the unaccountable loss that this solemn ritual, enacted amidst barren and unused artifacts in an underground hideaway, signifies but never grapples with experientially. The stinking broth figures as a theory of history within which all things are subsumed but never integrated; acknowledged but never experienced; footnotes to the present; a necessary digestive process so that today may be possible. There is no festival or celebration of past nor extinct lives; no penance or redemption; no pilgrimage or seeking for wisdom from the past. Rather, the rich, diverse, countless worlds that once existed have been reduced to a tasteless gruel solemnly acknowledged as the precondition for the present which can proclaim itself as the “end of history.” Within the dining hall, faced with collective loss, it becomes grotesque to assert world-unifying global theories, particularly those which proclaim Progress.
Both Castoriadis and Jameson, in their own language, characterise the postmodern age as one of “conformity,” an epoch “in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum”. While for Jameson this is a remark on aesthetic and cultural production, Castoriadis levels the charge equally at theorists and intellectual production: he remarks that “a grave concomitant and related symptom is the complete atrophy of political imagination… Eclecticism and the recombining and reprocessing of the achievements of the past have now gained pride of program… in philosophy, historical and textual commentary on and interpretation of past authors have become the substitute for thinking” (Castoriadis, 1997: 39, 41, 40). In this he means thinking in the strong sense – of theory. Their critical call for emphatic thinking – theoretical thinking – is in response to a shared perception of what Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism,” the globalising, seemingly impenetrable hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and its forms of production and consumption, socio-political relations, and attendant narratives (of which “Progress” is one of its central myths). He says that Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis “may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious”.
Conditions of capitalist realism renders “theory” understood in its etymological sense of theoria – “to see” – critically important. As Han says, theory “represents an essential decision that causes the world to appear wholly different – in a wholly different light”. Theory, as a primary decision, determines what matters and what doesn’t, what is or should be. Ultimately, theory is highly selective narration. As Han articulates, “theories and ceremonies (i.e rituals) share an origin. They confer form on the world” (Han, 50). Yet we know theory is dangerous for precisely this same quality: moral theories, theories of history, any theory which cites its origin from “authoritative” sources (whether the logos, God, “Nature,” “Reason,” logic, and so on) have paved the way for “just wars,” imperialism, colonialism, capitalist development, the formation of nation-states, and the reification of hierarchies and forms of discipline and control which, standing outside of Eurocentric theoretical traditions, appear not legitimate or justified, but insane.
The fictional ceremony of Loss Soup articulates that each dead tradition has lost their theoretical potentials; the many worlds have been reduced to a “monotype,” the waste-product of present reality which, whilst it “consumes” the dead, is not enriched, does not embody them or continue their histories in any fashion. They are tastelessly metabolised. We can, therefore, surmise two operative projects for ‘Global Thought’ by those who practise it within the hegemony: the responsibility of theory, art, culture and literature to reveal not only the form of the “reality principle” – what Castoriadis calls the social imaginary – but also to uncover the “Real,” which for Lacan is that which any “reality” (or social imaginary) must repress – such that encounter with this atopic Other can penetrate the hegemony of the reality principle and deliver that gift of alterity which allows the world to appear “in a wholly different light.”
Returning to Jameson, Castoriadis’ and Fisher’s critique – the sense of “malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new” (Fisher, 4) which has prompted a “recycling” of past forms, thoughts and cultures – we can perhaps salvage some value in this postmodern condition of global thought. As Fisher himself acknowledges, “one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us” (18) which entails a sensitive revisitation to the ruins, wreckages, and histories of the past to recover their fate as mere ingredient in the “loss soup.” This was Walter Benjamin’s strategy, who in his time described the “reality principle” as a “collective dream” which it was the critics task to awaken the population from, much as Hume’s theories awakened Kant from his “dogmatic slumber” into a critical, “modern” consciousness. As Benjamin recognised in his “anthropological approach” these “ruins” must be excavated and their energies released before they are blanketed over in a hegemony constantly attempting to self-repair and innovate itself into a state of perfection.
Whilst this past-facing thought is perhaps opposed to the anxious, future-oriented desire for emphatic theory to restructure and ‘re-story’ the world, it is the spectrality of the past which continues to haunt the hegemony of capitalism, which as a “monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolising and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact” (Fisher, 6) ultimately cannot eliminate its ghosts, which refuse ultimate metabolization: “a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back”. The ceaseless acceleration of Capital and its swift outmoding of old forms creates Gothic pasts behind it at every stride. Spectrality is growing in numbers and strength. The factories and ruins of its industrial period now haunt post-industrialism. The critiques and unrealised political futures of modernity have strewn haunted wreckage as they “crashed against the shores of neoliberal consensus” (Turl, 2015). The imperfect hegemonies which characterise postcolonial nations has left subaltern cultures and political forms which defy the blanket-bourgeois socio-political order which Capitalism is imagined to institute, largely giving rise to Subaltern Studies as introduced by Rahajit Guha. As Derrida points out: “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (Derrida, 37). The spectres of both the repressed present and the past linger on the outskirts of the shell of the reality principle, where both the critic and the artist create pathways and mediums for their expression such that their many-faced alterity can “awaken us from the dream” of the singularly imagined-Real, the hegemony of a “global theory.”
Featured image: Vision, Plate VIII from: Dans Le Rêve (In The Dream), 1879, Odilon Redon (1840 – 1916). Lithograph.