Within the framework of a temporary regime which, characterized by the fanaticism of the economy, must be thought of as eternal, unamendable and, in short, as the End of History, there can be no room for the dimension of the future, for transformative praxis, for the ontological category of possibility and for the plane of historicity. For this reason, the current ideological logic that encapsulates the spirit of our time must continually demonize these four mutually interdependent determinations; so that the eternal present of imperfect but unamendable, ineluctable and historyless capital is imposed at the level of the imaginary and, therefore, understood not as the temporarily determined and always reprogrammable product of a way of doing, but as a natural-eternal condition from from which it is not licit to propose any exodus. End of History, the sensation of the iron necessity of the whole, omnipresent present and frustrating feeling of impotence constitute the outstanding features of the current ideological constellation. Having interpreted the requiem through dialectics, it was necessary to do the same through historicity, given the symbiotic relationship between the two.
The ordo oeconomicus of the present historical phase is characterized by its absolute-totalitarian nature, because it has saturated the world (totalizing it at both the real and symbolic levels) and thus achieved correspondence in actu with its own concept. Imaginative thinking and the capacity to project different futures have been annihilated. If in pre-modern societies the dimension of the past was hegemonic and in modern societies the future has dominated, the contemporary post-modern landscape is compressed onto the present, with the added destructuring of historicity as a real possibility of change and of becoming open to the expanses of the not-yet-become.
The galloping forced elimination of historicity seems to present itself, in this context, as the ideal ideological platform to naturalize capital as an irrevocable destiny: that is to say, to dilute historical determination, or if you will, to remove it from a future that, as such, could eventually lead it to decline, or even simply reactivate, in the collective imagination, the inconvenient thought of alternative futures. The transition to the current regime of temporality of the eternal present is, moreover, governed by the suppression of the dialectical elements that, in the preceding phase, made the conflict for an alternative tomorrow practicable.
The destructuring of proletarian class consciousness is configured, along with the removal of historicity, as a function of reference of the new framework of absolute-totalitarian capitalism, which is experienced by both the oppressed and the oppressors as an inevitable destiny and, furthermore, as a natural reality, removed from historical evolution and the sense of the possibility of change that distinguishes it.
The abandonment of historical meaning is a constant feature of contemporary reflection. The latter, in the form—to which we are already accustomed—of apparent multicentric and polyphonic pluralism, professes in the plural a single truth: that of the dominant single thought and that of its objective, the sanctification sub specie mentis of reality in its current state. It is found in a rich and uneven range of deeply differentiated, if not opposing, ideological formations. They range from postmodern thought (which neutralizes the sense of history by making it explode into a chaotic myriad of unrelated events and, therefore, like Babel, devoid of any meaning that goes beyond the rhapsody of pure happenings) to analytical philosophy (with its programmatic suppression of the “factor of history” in philosophical thought), systematically finding in the worn-out theorem of the end of history’s own implicit expressive function of reference.
Even the apparently most incompatible positions are revealed, if read with transparency, as secretly supportive in their anti-historical expressive function. Their common background continues to be what, with good reason, could be connoted in Nietzschean fashion as a transition from the eighteenth-century “historical illness”, which aspired to redirect everything to the terrain of a future deprived of its innocence by the burden of the chronosophical devices of the philosophies of history, to the contemporary “anti-historical illness”, which aims to settle accounts definitively with the dimension of historicity. On the other hand, it is evident that the axiom of the End of History carries an intrinsic ideological value and that, like the hackneyed formula “globalization”, it hides a prescriptive action under the varnish of an apparently anodyne description.
What makes this acceptable is the fact that, with Fukuyama’s slogan, it is not just a theoretical expression, nor above all, the effective prophylactic condition after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the last bastion—albeit at the level of the imagination—against market globalization (in this sense, the rapid reconfiguration, in the former German Democratic Republic, of the chairs of Hegel-Marx Xism in the teaching of analytical philosophy). On the contrary, the axiom of the End of History summarizes a program widely shared by contemporary culture in its most heterogeneous articulations. It could be condensed into the phrase “put an end to history once and for all”, so that peoples, societies and individuals are convinced that there is no other world besides the existing one: in other words, so that they are persuaded that reality exhausts possibility, that potentiality is coextensive with being, that the future cannot be other than the present projected into the regions of the “not-yet” of Blocchian memory.
In this sense, the theorem of the End of History plays a strategic role at times similar to that turning point played by the axiom of the “short century”, even beyond the intentions of its author. In both cases, we find ourselves in the presence of liberating formulas which, of course, are profoundly different, but which, in a convergent way, emphatically place the accent on the end of two realities: the nineteenth century and the historical dimension. Both give voice to the more or less unconscious desire to free ourselves once and for all from the weight of the numerous problems that the century of extremes has left us with unresolved (from inequality between classes, peoples and nations, to the dilemma of wars) and which, today more present than ever, can only find their eventual solution in a historical perspective open to the future, for which free collective action is still the only guarantee. As if with the end of the nineteenth century, brought forward to nothing less than the date-synecdoche of 1989, the contradictions that had run through it had been dispelled; or, in any case, as if these, even if present, were somehow declared physiological as insurmountable in the theater of a history that has now come to an end.
Despite the anything-but-idyllic experiences in which it has been embodied, the spectre of communism materialized in the 20th century has played a positive triple role that even its obscene crimes cannot diminish. To begin with, it has constituted the greatest historical attempt to overcome capitalist relations of production on a global scale, playing, with the lexicon of political theology, the role of Katechon, of “braking force” (Aufhalter)—as Schmitt would name it in The Nomos of the Earth—in the face of the immense power exercised by market negation. Likewise, it represented the most radical attempt by the subaltern classes, throughout the whole of Western history, to overthrow the established class power relations and assert their own political, economic and cultural dominance.
Finally, at the level of the imaginary, the nineteen-hundreds historical communism made possible that diarchic structure that accompanied a large part of the 20th century and that, for better or for worse, represented the possibility of and the thinkability of being different. Even with all its macroscopic limits, the presence of the Soviet Union—which also prolonged the reign of necessity and monopolized the name of socialism—signaled, albeit not without serious contradictions, that the capitalist cosmos was not an ineluctable destiny, nor the only possible world. It constituted an attempt at refutation, on the plane of ideas, both of available happiness and of the nature of the Western way of being and producing. It is no coincidence that the naturalization of capital manifested itself, in the most radical and vulgar form of capitalismus sive natura, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Once the internal dialectical opposition to the capitalist regime had been exhausted, the braking force of communism had failed, the bourgeois consciousness of unhappiness had been eclipsed and the revolutionary pathos of the wage slaves had been extinguished, capital, fully corresponding to its own concept, could be ubiquitously reflected in itself, with no residual forces to threaten its integral reproduction. It aspires no more than to remain eternally thus, preemptively demonizing the possibility of a different future through the two synergistic movements of the ideology of inexorable imperfection and the exorcism of all transformative tension, immediately dismissed as anti-democratic, totalitarian, and a restoration of the worst experiences of the 20th century. The triumphant “animal kingdom of the spirit” was thus able to assert itself according to the naturalistic model extolled in The End of History and impose itself as the-only-possible-world because it is naturally given. The End of History, apraxia and the desertification of the future are the quintessential expressions of the scenario set in motion in 1989.
All the main issues of our time seem to be reducible to a single general scheme, to an ideological framework that encompasses them all. It is condensed into the unthinking belief in the naturalization—and, therefore, in the symmetrical dehistoricization—of what exists, smuggled in as a natural-eternal given and, consequently, deprived of the traces of its own historical and social genesis. This naturalization proposes, as its coherent expressive function, the integral removal of that historical perspective that presented what exists as the temporarily mediated and always reprogrammable result of an act of doing.
By showing what exists as not historically determined and, therefore, as something natural and eternal, the omnipresent ideology of naturalization can whitewash as just and irredeemable the current alienated horizon of that universal reification that reduces everything to the one-dimensionality—both real and symbolic—of the exchange and production of commodities. Dehistoricization is revealed, therefore, as the secret premise of the ideological device of inexorable imperfection. Naturalizing the real is equivalent to idealizing it (reabsorbing the ought to be into the is and the possibility into reality) and responds to the ideological dream that, with increasing capillarity, tries to convince our minds that what exists cannot be different and that, furthermore, it coincides, if not with perfection as such, then with the maximum degree of perfection possible, with reality as it can only naturally be.
In line with this elimination of historical traces, which—naturalizing what is historical—presents capital as the natural way of being, thinking and producing, the very alienated condition in which humanity finds itself is surreptitiously naturalized in the sense already expressed above: man and his freedom are reduced to the consumerist ritual, to the free choice between diversified goods and differentiated lifestyles, without ever being given the power to choose between remaining in planetary alienation or overcoming it in order to opt for a state of affairs more in line with reason.
The case of Friedrich Hayek—to whom the neoliberal religion never ceases to pay homage—is exemplary, as he brings to fruition the naturalization of the historical by defining as kosmos the immutable, natural and spontaneous “order” of the market. The very fact that Friedrich Hayek proposes to describe the neoliberal program that revolves around the two focal points of “free growth” and “spontaneous development” as a “party of life” is consistent with the dogma of unamendable perfection. Identified tout court with life (in a not too dissimulated reduction of any other perspective to the dimension of death), neoliberalism is thus smuggled in as the only possible way of living in the world, finding its legitimacy not so much in its presumed intrinsic virtues, but rather in the denial of viable alternatives.
The polytheistic pluralism of lifestyles and existential possibilities always proliferates and only within the armored perimeters of the Max Weber “iron cage,” an absolute metaphor for capitalism transfigured into an inescapable destiny. Thus, the reduction of man to a commodity that circulates freely in the market (the “human capital”)—today increasingly scandalously ostentatious—and his restriction to thinking about the present and projecting his future in the sole limiting and reifying dimension of production and exchange erected as the only horizon, are hypostatized in natural-eternal forms.
To de-historicize the gaze—as if there could be, following the mad dream pursued by much of contemporary thought, a “gaze to nowhere”, not historically, politically and socially situated—is equivalent to reaffirming that prospective distortion, with a high adaptive index, which tends increasingly and with greater emphasis to impose the idea that this is the only way to live and think, to produce and inhabit social space: in in a word, that this thing is the inexorable horizon in which to remain indefinitely.
In this way, the possibility of thinking differently and, with it, of alternatively reprogramming the future, is deconstructed at its root. This is the secret of today’s hegemonic asymbolism, with its pathological tendency to recode anything to the plane of aprospective objectivity, detached from all culturality and excluded from historical fieri.
The fact that the nomos (order) of the economy tends more and more frequently to present itself as something given as natural and eternal, without beginning or end because it is removed from the norm of becoming, is proven by the fact that the laws of finance are valid today for men as a natural necessity and the very movements of the market, as unpredictable as earthquakes and tsunamis, fall upon society with the same inevitability as natural disasters natural catastrophes which—ineradicable, independent of our will and, moreover, inscribed in the order of things—must simply be suffered, recorded and contemplated with the icy pathos of distance.
The social world produced by human praxis has been fetishistically transformed into an autonomous natural reality, into a presence removed from becoming. In the objective reality before us, we are no longer able to identify the features of our crystallized praxis, that is to say, praxis made world and, for that very reason, always reprogrammable and never definitive. On the contrary, by virtue of the mortifying logic of reification that transforms everything that is historically and socially determined into a thing and, more specifically, into a natural and unchangeable object, we discover in the objective world the threatening and ungovernable presence of a nature that is hostile to us, independent and sovereign, which imposes on us the double rite of its conservation and its obsequious veneration.
The unpredictable increases in credit spreads, the uncontrollable laws of the economy, the stock market crashes, the wave-like movement of market securities, are all socially and historically produced objects, “sensibly supersensible” results—as Marx would have said—of human action that unravels in the theatre of historical temporality: and yet they are seen as if they were nature that has always been given, removed from our actions and, therefore, neither governable nor transformable. Its very existence is final: we cannot know where they come from or how they are possible.
Already from these impressionistic considerations, the alchemical intertwining of critique and historicity emerges. If the redirection of the historical-social element to the sphere of nature is equivalent to the annihilation of critical-transformative energy (and, furthermore, constitutes the secret of ideological logic), it follows that, conversely, the historicization of foresight is a condicio sine qua non for the exercise of the two reciprocally innervated instances of critical demythification and anti-adaptive praxis. The present day has sanctioned the defeat of critique in the very act with which it has deposed historicity.
Featured: Design 21, by Irakli Gamrekeli (before 1943).
