After the Orgy by Dominic Pettman
published by State University of New York (SUNY)
more about author and work
Foreword

We currently find ourselves in the strange position of living in the future itself. Since Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick combined to make the quintessential science fiction movie, 2001 has signified “the future” for several generations, and it is now a matter of some significance that we have passed this date. To what extent our present moment resembles the 2001 of 1969 is best left to the specialists in astrophysics, artificial intelligence, xeno-theology and interior design. My interest in this temporal telescoping is the phenomenon of cultural exhaustion that Clarke and Kubrick worked so hard to counter (through the millenarian figure of transcendence). We have passed the year 2001, and no monolith has visited us to help guide us to the next evolutionary upgrade. We experienced the inevitable anticlimax of the “unofficial” millennium of 2000, and barely noticed the “technical” changeover a year later.

Such cultural malaise, of course, is not new: certain Western European minds felt they were living “after the orgy” over one hundred years ago, as I explore below. Fatigue, I would argue – like boredom and disappointment – is one of the fundamental responses to modernity, and yet is often dismissed as out of kilter with the exigencies of progress. (“Get with the program.”) That such fatigue is directly linked to the notion of progress, along with all the technological leaps and bounds it demands, is somehow often lost in the translation to languages designed specifically to facilitate this progress (bureaucratic, instrumental, scientific). The assumption is that cultural exhaustion may have an impact (via such figures as “future shock” and “screen fatigue”), but that somehow humanity has limitless resources to counter the entropic aspects of the postmodern, postindustrial world. Hence the current emphasis on human resources in the public sector, whereby the “standing reserve” of each generation of graduates represents the equivalent of a new major oil find. And technology itself provides the tools to counter the ennervation that technology produces. (“Sick and tired of the urban grind? Take these slow-release immune-boosting pills.”)

This book argues that the phenomenon of cultural exhaustion has shadowed the perceived progress of modernity itself since its staggered inception, and that the set of symptoms often designated as “postmodern” signal the eventual (and qualified) acknowledgement of this symbiosis. The fact that the second half of the twentieth century was always semi-conscious of the imminent millennium only served to redeploy those discourses stemming from millenarianism itself, including apocalyptic anticipation, salvation, redemption, renovation, and revenge.

If, for the West, the human race was an Olympian marathon race mapped out by the Ancient Greeks, then the twentieth century often saw itself as staggering exhausted towards the finish line. Paradoxically and simultaneously, however, it was attempting to turn society into a perpetual-motion machine. The triumph of the technological drive underscored and underwrote the teleological project of modernity, prompting a variety of reactions based on the recuperation of organic innocence. In this sense Marinetti and McLuhan are the logical dance-partners of the Luddites and Rousseau, for they all recognize the irreversibility of technology. Cultural exhaustion moves center stage the moment dialectical or cyclical solutions become untenable. A “revaluation of all values,” therefore, confronts the core narratives of the West the very moment these narratives are allegedly dissolving in the harsh light of relativism, pluralism and an ethically precarious will-to-knowledge.

One symptom of this temporal crisis is the “psychology of belatedness” so explicitly rendered by the nineteenth-century decadents: the sense that while society flourished around us, we – as world-historical subjects – were somehow left behind by the acceleration of history. Such a perspective maintained that in our race to reach the millennium, something crucial was overlooked, so that the human-race has become simply the after-effect of an Event we would never even comprehend, let alone witness. “History is the shockwave of eschatology,” says Terence McKenna, capturing the proleptic logic of millenarianism, and the inbuilt obsolescence that it smuggles inside its narratives of salvation and revelation.

Another more meticulous scholar, however – namely, Giorgio Agamben – provides us with a metaphysical model for the “before-during-after” economy of our relationship to duration and endings, both immanent and imminent. Incorporating both the insights of Martin Heidegger and the Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, Agamben introduces the notion of post festum (“after the celebration”), “which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done” (1999, 125). This post festum speaks of a kind of ontological belatedness “which is always late with respect to itself,” and probably needs little historical prompting before showing its melancholy face. Certain epochs may encourage the sense of missing the party more than others (in a collective reverence for the achievements of past ages designated “golden”) but there may be something even more fundamental which nurtures such historical rubbernecking (see, for instance, Walter Benjamin’s angelus novalis).

Such a state of mind is difficult to endure, since in order to navigate linear time we need something to look forward to. Here we have the essentially anti festum outlook of the utopian and the schizophrenic; a “temporality [which] corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation” (ibid. 126). The paradox of such a proleptic orientation is that “it always risks missing itself and not being present at it’s own ‘celebration’” (ibid.). Agamben goes on to say that:

One might expect the temporal dimension of intra festum to correspond to a point . . . . in which human beings would finally gain access to a full self-presence, finding their dies festus. But it is not so . . . . [As witnessed by epilepsy] the point in which the “I” is about to adhere to itself in the supreme moment of celebration, the epileptic crisis confirms consciousness’ incapacity to tolerate presence, to participate at its own celebration. (ibid. 126-27)

The orgiastic “farewell to flesh” that is carnival always already contains this paradoxical economy, an economy which I view as chiefly libidinal.

Post-2001, we wake up with a historical hangover and ringing ears, but have no recollection of being at the party. A new dawn seems somehow less symbolic through bloodshot eyes. It then becomes significant how we answer Baudrillard’s question: “what are you doing after the orgy?” Do we start by cleaning up the deflated balloons and tattered streamers? Or does “cleaning up” lead to the sinister logic that turned the twentieth-century into a global museum of horrors. Do we tentatively act on our new year’s resolutions to flush our systems, discipline our bodies, renounce our addictions, and sharpen our minds? Or do we succumb to the historical urge deeply rooted in linear conceptions of time, and start planning another party? Do we look forward to a time when things will be better (again).

In such retroactive and repetitive compulsions does the neurotic history of the present produce – and reproduce – the future.

The future, then, is the unexplored territory of potentiality. However, if we look too far into the future, there is no future (at least not for us, as the punks affirmed so noisily). The nervous exhaustion of being too late, and waiting for something that may have already left the building (Elvis, Godot, God) informs each passing moment, for the very reason that they are registered as passing. (“It is impossible to pass from linear to spatial consciousness, since passage is a linear concept” [David Odell, 126].) It is this kind of fractured thinking – along with technological “advances” such as nuclear power – that led to books with titles like Looking Back at the End of the World.

And it is deep within this exhaustion that I glimpse the outline of a politics which barely resembles the movements which have historically been associated with such a category. This book does not claim to identify and deploy concepts on which we would somehow “build” such a politics, but rather follows the contours and exchanges of an economy which created the conditions for imagining “an otherwise,” uncompromised by the ransom demands of Hegelian time. Such a politics recognizes the fundamental flaw with contemporary utopian agendas, precisely that they presume we have the energy and will to try to realize them; a more than dubious premise these days. In order to unravel such a conceptual blockage, we must examine how we got here in the first place. And to do this, we must follow the red thread of libidinal millenarianism.

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