What was it like to grow up with this ideology, described here by Renata Salecl in On Anxiety (loc 643), particularly for those whose material conditions reflected this fantasy back to them? What are the implications of this for how the ruptures of the 2020s/2030s will play out for a generation who imbibed this message of post-antagonism in their formative years?
In the 1990s the dominant ideology in the West was that there is no social antagonism in society anymore, i.e. that there is no lack. There seemed to be nothing secret, and the logic of ‘showing everything’ at first appeared as a way of alleviating anxiety by exposing what might be horrifying for the subject. In this context, the fear of death also seemed to have taken a new course.
Will it mean that the anticipation of an overcoming of lack, a lack of lack, will linger on in their political psychology? If so, who will make the case for meeting this expectation and what will this entail in practice? Particularly if you combine this with the conservatising effects of the huge intergenerational transfer of wealth about to take place (as well as the likelyhood there will be at least some effort to mitigate it), I wonder if there’s something darkly reactionary lurking in the political psyche of seemingly progressive millennials, which will come to life under the right conditions?
Mark Carrigan 