End of the End of History

I did not enjoy the encounter that this book offered with the ambient hum of nearly the past decade of my life, too many waking hours of which I spent on a website called Twitter, following a number of people broadly interested in left politics, history and media critique. Almost every sentence of it evoked a day or week's discourse: the monkey that looks like a Comment is Free headshot,a Repeater Book about Britpop being a psyop, John Harris, Justin Trudeau brownface; it's a little bit worse than the Zer0 Book I would have written if someone asked me in 2018 and it made me feel a bit ill.

I don't know if there's a word yet for the view of modernity that we derive from the work of Adam Curtis, and in his wake Mark Fisher, but as with Marx's writings these are less calls to action and more plug-and-play models to which any grad student can bring their own left-inflected cultural studies, their axioms being i) our political life is mired in imaginative inertia ii) popular culture is characterised by depressive pursuit of hedonism iii) public intellectuals of the Cold War-era have been edged out in favour of CIA members hawking identity politics, iv) this is all because history failed to turn in Germany in 1918, in the US in 1968, in Greece in 2015.

This book, and almost all the books I've bought over the years because their authors were promoted on Twitter, abide by this formula, e.g. 'Authentocrats' (didn't quite set the task it set out to, thought the author's previous book on football was better), Kill All Normies (bleh), Geohell (insane gibberish). These are negative books, whether for good (decrying reactionary journalists and politicians for shutting down all forms of debate which don't fit a very narrowly defined consensus, providing the reader with a handbook of left-Lacanian theory or an antidote to contemporary philistinism via an inventory of radical art from a time when it was more commonplace) or for ill (every form of activism is frivolous). The End of the End of History sits in the latter of these two categories. My own thesis fits this mould, drawing on Lukács to argue that capitalism radically attenuates the space available for the representation of social totality in all forms of literature, with uneven and combined effects across prose, poetry and drama.

The gap between what Twitter offered, as compared with its resonance in more conventional cultural forms is I think most pronounced in the sphere of the contemporary literary novel, which are so often humourless, skewing from spontaneity into self-consciousness and dependent on an arch cynicism that makes a game of a refusal to commit. Oyler, Lockwood, Mossfegh, Cohen, Lerner produces a list that indicates, to me at least, that posterity is going to be very kind to Sally Rooney. Though I wouldn't be hugely enthusiastic about her work her first two novels (the third I think is a very interesting failure that has me very curious about how her career will develop) have at their core an unguarded interest in human connection, in the place of a coy and mannered oscillation between liberalism, nihilism.

None of this has anything to do with the friendships Twitter has led me into over the past number of years, sustained over email, Discord or real life, with people who are, to varying extents, active on the left, involved in reading groups, or trying to get their own thing going. The website has given me some ability to publish in places about politics and culture, not something I've ever actually pursued, I prefer to write fiction.

This book though, has no time for anyone seeking to do anything. What is referred to as 'the politics of race/gender/sexuality' are dismissed, the only positive suggestion I can pinpoint is that Sanders and Corbyn didn't seek to engage the masses enough, which is so vague as to be meaningless. To be a little more sympathetic I understand where the authors are coming from, but on another level, I also understand where they're coming from; Nagle wrote this book years ago, we didn't need anyone else to.

Two thoughts to conclude whatever this comment is supposed to be:

Tomás Mac Síomóin is an author who has taken these features of the present moment and even though his conclusions are pessimistic, they are anchored in practical problems and I would recommend his book 'The Broken Harp' to anyone with an interest in seeing how you can bend the stick away from the macro scale for long enough to get a purchase on somethin real. I wish D.K. Wayne wrote a book.