ANALYSIS
The
age of humanism is ending
Achille Mbembe 22
Dec 2016 00:00
There is no sign
that 2017 will be much different from 2016.
Under Israeli
occupation for decades, Gaza will still be the biggest open prison on
Earth.
In the United
States, the killing of black people at the hands of the police will
proceed unabated and hundreds of thousands more will join those
already housed in the prison-industrial complex that came on the
heels of plantation slavery and Jim Crow laws.
Europe will continue
its slow descent into liberal authoritarianism or what cultural
theorist Stuart Hall called authoritarian populism. Despite complex
agreements reached at international forums, the ecological
destruction of the Earth will continue and the war on terror will
increasingly morph into a war of extermination between various forms
of nihilism.
Inequalities will
keep growing worldwide. But far from fuelling a renewed cycle of
class struggles, social conflicts will increasingly take the form of
racism, ultra nationalism, sexism, ethnic and religious rivalries,
xenophobia, homophobia and other deadly passions.
The denigration of
virtues such as care, compassion and kindness will go hand in hand
with the belief, especially among the poor, that winning is all that
matters and who wins — by whatever means necessary — is
ultimately right.
With the triumph of
this neo-Darwinian approach to history-making, apartheid under
various guises will be restored as the new old norm. Its restoration
will pave the way to new separatist impulses, the erection of more
walls, the militarisation of more borders, deadly forms of policing,
more asymmetrical wars, splitting alliances and countless internal
divisions including in established democracies.
None of the above is
accidental. If anything, it is a symptom of structural shifts, which
will become ever more apparent as the new century unfolds. The world
as we knew it since the end of World War II, the long years of
decolonisation, the Cold War and the defeat of communism has ended.
Another long and
deadlier game has started. The main clash of the first half of the
21st century will not oppose religions or civilisations. It will
oppose liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism, the rule of
finance and the rule of the people, humanism and nihilism.
Capitalism and
liberal democracy triumphed over fascism in 1945 and over communism
in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed. With the
dissolution of the Soviet Union and the advent of globalisation,
their fates were disentangled. The widening bifurcation of demo-cracy
and capital is the new threat to civilisation.
Abetted by
technological and military might, finance capital has achieved its
hegemony over the world by annexing the core of human desires and, in
the process, by turning itself into the first global secular
theology. Fusing the attributes of a technology and a religion, it
relied on uncontested dogmas modern forms of capitalism had
reluctantly shared with democracy since the post-war period —
individual liberty, market competition and the rule of the commodity
and of property, the cult of science, technology and reason.
Each of these
articles of faith is under threat. At its core, liberal democracy is
not compatible with the inner logic of finance capitalism. The clash
between these two ideas and principles is likely to be the most
signifying event of the first half of a 21st-century political
landscape — a landscape shaped less by the rule of reason than by
the general release of passions, emotions and affect.
In this new
landscape, knowledge will be defined as knowledge for the market. The
market itself will be re-imagined as the primary mechanism for the
validation of truth.
As markets
themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic structures and
technologies, the only useful knowledge will be algorithmic.
Instead of people
with body, history and flesh, statistical inferences will be all that
count. Statistics and other big data will mostly be derived from
computation.
As a result of the
conflation of knowledge, technology and markets, contempt will be
extended to anyone who has nothing to sell.
The humanistic and
Enlightenment notion of the rational subject capable of deliberation
and choice will be replaced by the consciously deliberating and
choosing consumer.
Already in the
making, a new kind of human will triumph. This will not be the
liberal individual who, not so long ago, we believed could be the
subject of democracy. The new human being will be constituted through
and within digital technologies and computational media.
The computational
age — the age of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — is dominated by
the idea that there are clean slates in the unconscious. New media
forms have not only lifted the lid previous cultural eras had put on
the unconscious. They have become the new infrastructures of the
unconscious.
Yesterday, human
sociality consisted of keeping tabs on the unconscious. For the
social to thrive meant exercising vigilance on ourselves, or
delegating to specific authorities the right to enforce such
vigilance.
This was called
repression.
Repression’s main
function was to set the conditions for sublimation. Not all desires
could be fulfilled. Not everything could be said or enacted. The
capacity to limit oneself was the essence of one’s freedom and the
freedom of all.
Partly thanks to new
media forms and the post-repressive era it has unleashed, the
unconscious can now roam free. Sublimation is no longer necessary.
Language has been
dislocated. The content is in the form and the form is beyond, or in
excess of, the content.
We are now led to
believe that mediation is no longer necessary.
This explains the
growing anti-humanist stance that now goes hand in hand with a
general contempt for democracy. Calling this phase of our history
fascist might be misleading unless by fascism we mean the
normalisation of a social state of warfare.
Such a state would
in itself be a paradox because, if anything, warfare leads to the
dissolution of the social. And yet under conditions of neoliberal
capitalism, politics will become a barely sublimated warfare. This
will be a class warfare that denies its very nature — a war against
the poor, a race war against minorities, a gender war against women,
a religious war against Muslims, a war against the disabled.
Neoliberal
capitalism has left in its wake a multitude of destroyed subjects,
many of whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be
one of continuous exposure to violence and existential threat.
They genuinely long
for a return to some sense of certainty, the sacred, hierarchy,
religion and tradition. They believe that nations have become akin to
swamps that need to be drained and the world as it is should be
brought to an end. For this to happen, everything should be cleansed
off. They are convinced that they can only be saved in a violent
struggle to restore their masculinity, the loss of which they
attribute to the weaker among them, the weak they do not want to
become.
In this context, the
most successful political entrepreneurs will be those who
convincingly speak to the losers, to the destroyed men and women of
globalisation and to their ruined identities.
In the street fight
politics will become, reason will not matter. Nor will facts.
Politics will revert into brutal survivalism in an ultracompetitive
environment.
Under such
conditions, the future of progressive and future-oriented mass
politics of the left is very uncertain.
In a world set on
objectifying everybody and every living thing in the name of profit,
the erasure of the political by capital is the real threat. The
transformation of the political into business raises the risk of the
elimination of the very possibility of politics.
Whether civilisation
can give rise at all to any form of political life is the problem of
the 21st century.
Achille Mbembe is
based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. His new
book, The Politics of Enmity, will be published by Duke University
Press in 2017.
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