I’m slightly haunted by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s description on loc 1414 of their End Times Fascism:
Now that we are here, it doesn’t feel quite like a sudden crash; in relatively safe parts of the world only occasionally is there a ball of fire. More often it feels like a slow diminishment, as if we are living less manageable lives on pieces of earth that are themselves less alive. Yet the potential for a dramatic acceleration of this decline exists on multiple fronts.
They have talked about the eeriness which accompanies this slow diminishment: the sense of being dislocated from what we have known by changing seasons and a changing climate. The inability to go back to what once felt like home. They suggest at loc 1,402 that there is a basic reality to of human existence under contemporary conditions which we all now confront:
These trends point to another factor in the rise of messianism, one too often overlooked. It is the simple reality that our world, like the one Columbus inhabited, has become significantly more unstable, delivering major shock after major shock. We all, not just the aspiring theocrats among us, know this. The reason is as simple as it is immense: our economic system is built on limitless growth, and on limitless wealth for the winners. Our economy is also built on a story—that we can grow and consume like this forever, and there is no such thing as enough. That story has slammed into a wall and evidence of that collision is all around, measured in the extinction of species, sea-level rise, resource wars, wealth hoarding, supply-chain upheavals, cost-of-living spikes, mass displacement, and natural disasters that are increasing in frequency, intensity, and cost.
This could be described in Ulrich Beck’s terms as a recurrent state of anthropological shock. Noortje Marres has used the term post-normal (which honestly I hate rhetorically) in a description which I think is deeply insightful even if I dislike the terminology. As she puts it, “everyday life is defined by growing precarity and unpredictability and this in marked contrast with a previous era of perceived wealth and relative predictability” (pg 4). Later in the essay she gets to the heart of the matter in a way that I think is deeply helpful. From pg 7:
A defining schema of 20th century social theory framed disruption as a generative event, which occurs against the background of a relatively stable environment (Bogusz, 2021). Think of Martin Heidegger’s ‘broken hammer’, John Dewey’s ‘problematic situation’ or Harold Garfinkel’s ‘breaching experiment.’ Each of these concepts frame the suspension of the taken-for-granted as a productive and ultimately beneficial occasion, one that grows awareness, invites problem-solving and compels the testing of assumptions against reality (learning). However, looking back, it seems that these pragmatist theories of disruption all assumed that unsettlement occurred against a relatively stable background, a familiar setting in which people could in principle rely on dependable routines. Under postnormal conditions, however, such a stable environment precisely cannot be assumed: disruption has become generalised and itself constitutes a background condition of everyday life. As Anna Tsing (2015) put it, we live in a time of endless trouble.
In a postnormal society, accidents, failures or breakdowns does not necessarily trigger a pragmatist dynamic of problem articulation, solution seeking and restabilization. As indicated above, the reasons for this are multi-faceted and range from the hollowing out of public services to the privatization of utilities and the escalation of dynamics of environmental degradation
As she puts it on pg 9, “Under postnormal conditions, disruption does not necessarily trigger a quest of exploration, discussion and examination to establish the nature of the disruption: here, disturbance is not – as a matter of course – engaged and tamed through naming and knowing”. If this is right (which I think it is in the broad brush strokes it’s offered) then I think it has crucial implications for h we conceptual agency and its role in responding to, let alone reversing, the slow diminishment of life on a dying planet.
Mark Carrigan 