BYUNG-CHUL HAN/THE SEARCH FOR NOVELTY
The dominant cultural trend of our time is stagnation;
nostalgia, and a halt in the emergence of novelty.
From the psychosis of curated identity to the collapse of collective meta-narrative, today's cultural symptoms point toward a larger culprit: the beginning of the end of what was once a unipolar socio-economic order. The dollar trembles as empires clash for cash, while the social structures that once meant stability now scramble for relevant symbols. Culture drowns in the vacuous repetition of myth and imagery.
The recuperation of subculture, which once represented a triumph of capital's machinery, has now depleted its means of sustenance¹. There is nothing left to eat. The future evokes little more than environmental apocalypse or techno-feudalist nightmares. Conveniently, the conservative dream remains the marketable political commodity: a return to glory, Valium for the chronically anxious. A post-ideological schism where ideology is both unknowingly endorsed as virtue and zealously chastised.
The only avenue left is the present. The fragmented, nonsensical, and never-ending present.
The Machine Consumes Itself
The condition for the machine's self-perpetuation is having enough metaphorical meat to throw to the wolves, bread and entertainment. This has been empire's ethos for thousands of years. But what happens when it consumes the gladiators at a rate where no one's left to enter the arena? What now? We've seen it all, and multiple times; superman, rock 'n' roll, tantric yoga, counterculture spanning from decadence to self-denial. Dissent has been packaged, sanitized, and turned into a passive signifier of identity¹. Simulacra and Simulation. The Society of the Spectacle. The internet, once fertile counter-space, has now been assimilated. Where can I find the anarchists? Nice try, FBI! Suspicion and cynicism are the operating norm.
Collectif Némésis and raw milk, Sydney Sweeney discourse and homo-nationalism, an outrage economy with infographics as civic duty². Inevitably, repetition can only work so many times before it collapses. Nothing's ever happening. Nothing ever happens. It's difficult to arrive at radical imagination when seductive reactionary narratives abound, despair erases the necessity of social progress. The system manufactures the socio-economic insecurity on which it thrives.
The promise of technology as change is the machinery of the 1800s; a change of scenery within the same economic structure. Collective foundations have been deconstructed and replaced by hyper individualistic models of consumption. The post-9/11 generation lacks the unifying myths that secure belonging and purpose (Harvard survey). Trad-core, vintage, conservatism...cultural hand-me-downs from a time when novelty still had ground to exist, before the hegemonic domination of capital.
The cultural market is saturated, empty, and divisive. It can no longer fill the fundamental gap left by the erasure of the collective narrative³. Capitalist Realism. The present exists in loops of the past, an immaculately designed prison, from which the only escape is the radical imagination of a novel future⁴. The stagnating story must break into narration.
Psychological disorders are symptoms of a blocked story. The healing consists in the liberation of the patient from this narrative block, in bringing what cannot be narrated to linguistic expression. The patient is cured the moment she narrates herself free.
Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration, 2023
Saturation leads to existential stasis, and existential stasis can never last long before novelty reemerges.
The Paradox of Sameness and Change
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, 1958.
Lampedusa, a right-wing aristocrat exposes the conservative strategy; in order for nobility to remain in power, it must morph from aristocracy to bourgeoisie-to whatever illusion of change satisfies popular demand for reform.
Just as cultural forms collapse into repetition, so too do the justifications of power.
The face of empire has shifted over time. It began under the religious pretext of Christian missionaries in the Americas and Africa. Then, a post-enlightenment western world, offering civilisation and infrastructure, an end to barbarism under the banner of rationale. Finally, the humanitarian mission, liberating nations from dictatorships though regime change. Enforcing international law and preventing the construction of "weapons of mass destruction".
The motive however, remains the same; geopolitical interest, the consolidation of power, and obscene economic gain.
The genocide in Gaza has been key in unmasking the lawless nature of empire, the masquerade is over. The ICJ, ICC, and UN Security Council hold no enforcing power when the aggressor defends the interests of American empire. (ICJ Gaza ruling, ICC Arrest Warrant Rejected).
A grotesque misstep of such catastrophic scale cannot go unnoticed on the world stage. Symbolic deterioration comes hand in hand with economic decline, and the loss of credibility is also the loss of material control. No wonder nations are beginning to realign, it has become obvious. The moment the illusion collapses, it is bound to change.
If we are to flip Lampedusa's dictum, the condition for change becomes sameness, or perpetuity. Power wears many masks, and if it were rightfully identified, it would quickly be targeted and toppled.
"Power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms."
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 1976
The mask of capitalist hegemony has fallen, change is underway. Multipolarity has long been brewing, and domestically, the system can no longer conceal its own decline⁵ ⁶ ⁷.
What now?
May you live in interesting times.
Apocryphal Chinese saying.
For better or worse, these are particularly interesting times. A moment in history when the cultural myths of old no longer sustain collective meaning, and crumbling hegemonic empires face real loss of command on the global stage. Power is being renegotiated in material terms, while meaning itself faces a crisis that demands new forms of narration.
The fragmentation and skepticism of postmodernism, which could only thrive under neoliberal hegemony, have reached saturation. Meta-narratives capable of acknowledging the collective have become an existential necessity. As maps are redrawn into a new iteration of the world, culture and meaning will inevitably arrive at novelty. Its form cannot be guaranteed. Yet, as Han reminds, liberation lies in daring to take part in narration itself, in remembering that the story must move forward.
The impulse of the future is the only way to overcome the despair of the present, the only force capable of breaking the stagnation that defines our time.
Culture is what has endured across millennia: the striving for beauty, truth, and justice. The belief in something greater than the individual. The ability to imagine the world otherwise, and the unending search for novelty.
Notes & Further Reading
¹ Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979).
² Yochanan E. Bigman et al., "Algorithmic discrimination causes less moral outrage than human discrimination," Nature Human Behaviour 6 (2022): 157–164.
³ Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).
⁴ Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92.
⁵ Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
⁶ Nicholas Kitchen and Michael Cox, "Power, Structural Power, and American Decline," Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32, no. 6 (2019): 719–740.
⁷ "The New World Dis-Order in the Complexity of Multipolarity," Journal of Political Science Research 17, no. 2 (2020).