Chapter 01: A Nostomodern Manifesto? Or, A Question For Hobbes?
"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its supposed successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history via a mythic reading of Modernity itself.
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There are enough manifestos in the world.
Ancient Greek νόστος (nóstos) “to return home” + Late Latin modernus “now existing”
In the mid-to-late 20th Century, Modernism was abandoned by the post-war generation of philosophers, especially by those of Europe. The dying child of the Enlightenment—or the world at the end of time—promised a new rationalism to a Western world in the shadow of Cultural Leviathans.
The future was to be secular: its membership based upon a new and final historiography—the end of history itself. We only had to stomach what needed to be done, rearrange society via self-made plans and man-made engines, dismantle the past and reform the future; and utopia could be built tomorrow.
But we failed this new world early. We failed it with the novel terrors of the World Wars of 1914 and 1938, with the hypocrisy of the slave trade in the 1700s and with the race for colonies in the 1800s. We failed it on the streets of Paris in the 19th Century, with the starving peoples of the 20th; we failed it with the political assassinations in Africa and South America, the meddlements in the Middle East, and several disastrous land wars in Asia. Eventually, we had failed in the 1960s and the 1990s too.
And especially to the Moderns past the Second World War—to whom the contract of the Enlightenment had given no hope for utopia—this inheritance was too much.
It was soon the inheritance of a dying world, of a dying planet, which their children would inherit too. Its earth would be scorched, its rivers would be irradiated, its sky would be filled with ash. Redemption, or rejection, was necessary.
The grand theories had to be challenged; they had produced horror wars—the worst that mankind had ever seen. For this generation, the future did not lie with ambitious plans to rework society; instead, the future was irreversibly broken by the truth of the Second World War: human beings will likely destroy themselves—an ominous and final epiphany for the world at the end of time.
History was no longer likely to end with the rational ascension of mankind; it was more likely to perish with sounds of sirens and bombs. A single narrative would no longer suffice; it had shown itself to be anything but reliable. The world had become fractured by the great moral crises of the age: the sheer horror at the massacre of millions, the deathly promises of technology and the fragmentation of the world during the Cold War.
For the French thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, the new leaders of the so-called Continental tradition, it was necessary to reinvent or overturn the old order, but not in the same spirit in which the Modernists had had against the Renaissance. Instead of a new, super man, the image of the human was to be shattered into shades of history, relation and image—there must never be a second Holocaust.
There were no futures for one human race, no Whiggish conceptions for the inevitable; there were only the gradual movements of many peoples—each one tended in its own direction. The world was motioning towards nowhere in particular. This was the new world at the end of time.
We were now freed to move beyond the territory which had long oppressed and stifled the movements of peoples. Even if the world no longer moved as one, the path for humanity was at least broken from the pitfalls of national ideologies and utopian beliefs, which had caused the atrocities of decades before.
And to some Postmodernists, the more optimistic ones, this was the new age of history—their equivalent of a transition from the Renaissance to the Modern, from the Modern to now the Postmodern. To them, time had started again; a new world at the end of time.
To be Modern is to be…
We have changed since the Renaissance and the Early Modern. We were the first generations to observe the cycles of industrialisation and its consequences; the first in two thousand years to see the rise of republics and the downfall of kings.
We built up nations, redrew maps and created the Long Peace. We are now wealthier than ever, interconnected by a global network of international value chains and undersea cables and hovering satellites.
But where are the great theories now? They have become fragmented by nation, carved up via context and redrawn by necessity. By plain observation, the realities of one democracy have become different from another, the socialism of one nation is differently charged from the rest, and even common systems of capital and its regulation are disagreed upon by governments and international bodies.
The utopian ideal of the grand theoretician has emboldened no end to history, no end to progress, but instead fragmentation and wary discernment for underlying states of character between human beings and ideas—characters which have escaped both the national and the individual senses of the self.
Modernism was heralded by the future: the breaking of old moulds, the freshness of perpetual novelty and the promise of reason as the means to the future. And yet, we can still be surprised by the Modern Age. We now enter into our own created futures, our own sense of the world to come—dreams borne out of fragments of possible worlds of our own making. But is this still the Modern dream? Or have we woken into Postmodern futures?
We are standing at the dawn of new traditions, or the erosion of the old ones. We are christening new ships under the view of new stars; but do these ships not resemble our previous ones? The greatest of the Modern artists are still fresh in our minds, but have we escaped their legacies? Do we dream with our own images or with theirs?
The works of dead Modernists still speak to us now. The spirit of their age still beckons to our own; their lives are not yet so different from ours. Have we truly ceded from their Modern condition? Can we confidently say this is so?
The question is hence this: are we Postmodern or is Modernity still ongoing? Are their lives really so different from our own? Can we declare ourselves past them entirely? Are we past them at all?
Think of the Renaissance and then think of the Moderns. While it might be difficult to imagine the lives of Dante and Cervantes, it is not so difficult to imagine Picasso, Joyce and Wittgenstein living today. A painter then is not so unlike a painter now—likewise with the novelists and the philosophers. Are their Modern concerns really so different from our own? Are we really Postmodern?
A Modernism for all?
Consider the loose strings of postmodern theories and their subversions against the Modern—of attacking the metanarratives, presuppositions and hierarchies of Modernity and its great theories.
Some of us imagine ourselves to be on the cusp of freedom. We think the future will be more inspective, more careful in how it builds its structured spires of history—its ideologies, values and systems to be left behind and judged. We will surely loosen ourselves from the grip of unbalanced power and the shallow materialism of wanton capital. It is only a matter of time.
But is this, as Zhou Enlai was famously misquoted, still “too early to say”? The world is more than Europe, and surely it is more than America. For most of the world, there is still value in Modern dreams. Tomorrow can still exist. Their future are not endless spirals, filled by hauntology and pessimism. It will take time for their history to be penned. We ought to wait before making our final review.
To be Nostomodern is thus to be cautious of Modernity: we can still be shocked by something new. We have yet to see the world at the end of time.
It might be convenient to label it something else, to ascribe a new historiography to it. As we did with the Renaissance, we can retroactively label a lot of things. But when has something truly ended? Is it possible to tell while we are still in it? And be so assured of that judgement?
Nostomodern is a Return
Nostomodernism is a return—but only insofar as we believed in attempting a departure. This is to say, that in the recent past, an escape from Modernism must have been possible; or that we nonetheless tried to leave it. To be Nostomodern is to assume that this escape was not only unsuccessful, but that it is impossible—for now.
To be Nostomodern is to reset our expectations—to rescale the timeline of cultural progress. We are not Postmodern yet. If anything, we might be only halfway through.
And this is because we have yet to sublimate materially. And while technology has progressed past the First Industrial Revolution—and then the Second, the Third and now the Fourth—we still speak of Industrial Revolutions. We have no new names to call it by, no new conceptions to work with. It is still an ongoing process and we have yet to breakaway from this old world.
And some of us believe that Communism still exists. Some of us believe that Fascism is still here. We still talk of these things because they are still relevant to us now.
Ergo, we have yet to meet the future—we have only glimpsed at its promise. We have only dreamed of a Postmodern world: of a world in which technology, by means of reason, will save us from this planet. Or of a world in which Capitalism, by means of Communist revolution, will usher in a worker’s paradise. Those dreams, if they were to happen, would be closer to a Postmodern world than the one we live in now.
And lest we forget, the contemporary world is still the first child of post-war history—the great, newborn hope for an end to war after 1945—and we have yet to test it for the 21st Century, if it ever worked in the second half of the 20th.
But Nostomodernism is no escape either—we are still in Modern times and still there is no clear way out. Its concept has been shaken, but its subject remains the same. We have yet to be sublimated or destroyed by its consequences; we are still liable to be surprised.
And until a dramatic break is seen, such as by catastrophe, we must resist in declaring Modernism dead.
We should keep our lineages in mind. We have been upended so many times before; we have made so many mistakes along the way; we must not rush to declare a new state of things or dictate the world to a new and convenient teleology. Have we learnt nothing since 1945? We must declare that this is not the world at the end of time; the Modern Age can still surprise us.
This is not a manifesto.
But like Odysseus back to Ithaca or Heraclitus over his river, to return is to return differently—the world is no longer the same. And the world is larger than human beings; the Greeks understood this well. With what real authority can we speak about it—much less prophecie?
And yet we cannot go back to early Modernity; we cannot return to ignorance or forget what we have seen in the past three centuries. Even a regression to nationalistic statehood would be insufficient: we have seen too much, dreamt too much and enjoyed too many things. Our childhood dreams have vanished, but their structures still linger—their memories brandished into our later memories of culture. We are likely in the middle of things; and only now perhaps, are we slowly coming to the end.
In other words, the Modern dream cannot be forgotten; it informs all dreams hence—like a spiral expanding from a single point. But not everyone has the same dreams and not everyone has ended theirs—to declare so is arrogance and we simply cannot know yet. Modernity is larger than us all; in its final days, its Ragnarok is likely to sweep this cultural world.
This is not the beginning of history; this is not the end; perhaps it is still too early to say. Perhaps a sublimation by either the material or the technological—or an annihilation of the human—will change things forever. For now we are still Modern, so this is not a manifesto. This is a plea to let time do the work.
The Nostomodern is hence a remembrance of things not yet past. It is a perspective on a perspective, a catalogue of a long dream—a prelude perhaps to the Crises of the 21st Century and the last days of Modernity. This is the first project of The Nostomodern Review: a still Modern critique of the world at the end of time.
Nostomodernity has not ended
But if Modernity is to end, what ways is it likely to do so? To prophecie is one thing; to believe in one’s prophecies is another. The world will write its own histories, but it might be fun to bet on the dice, and more so to make our own myths too.
All myths have an end to their stories, and one story might go like this. There is one last Leviathan in the world at the end of time. It has swallowed up the rest of its brethren and has grown to an immense size.
As Hobbes writes in Leviathan (1651), “For by Art is created that great Leviathan called a Common-Wealth or State, (in latine Civitas) which is but an Artificiall Man”. For Hobbes, the Leviathan is an analogy for the commonwealth, as headed by a sovereign who, like the Biblical Leviathan, is “king over all proud beasts”.
Its scales are impenetrable, its size is colossal and its strength is absolute. It is an analogy for the Modern world except that the Leviathan is now sovereign over itself.
In the image of the Leviathan, the state is now the symbolic beast which has overcome both the natural world and world of humans too. By means of its domination of both animals and human beings—of all creatures of the earth—the Leviathan has conquered all First Leviathans before it, or the natural world itself.
Once ridden by human beings, the Leviathan is now a cultural superstructure gone rogue: its power no longer directed by human beings; its power now directed to the betterment of its own cause.
For the last few thousand years, humanity has been a habitat for symbolic megafauna. Each one has devoured the others until the last great body with organs—Capital, or the Inertial Leviathan now in the shape of Cultural Ouroboros—has taken hold of the Earth. It rests at the bottom of the Earth, immovable and self-devouring.
This is the new myth at the end of time; a mythic image for the final days of the Modern world. This is the second project of The Nostomodern Review: a now mythic critique of the world at the end of time.
The Nostomodern Myth
But why a myth and why a Leviathan? A myth has power: it has the power of being both origin and revelation. It is both the alpha and the omega—the beginning and the end. And the best way to know if a myth is true is to wait for the end of days.
The Inertial Leviathan here is an organism signifying the contemporary world. It is Neo-Hobbes-turned-prophecy: an envisioning of Capital as an artificial, yet somehow living, organism consisting of nation states and their cultural flows. Cultural Ouroboros has conquered the planet. In Hobbes I have simply found its equivalent myth.
Imagine if the first human cities were desiring machines. Imagine them as Leviathans made to kill other Leviathans, or the threats of nature itself. The tiger is a Leviathan, the lion is a Leviathan, the shark is a Leviathan; each has been conquered by the artificial Leviathans of man in Neo-Darwinian image.
Man again man; city against city; empire against empire; the Earth is now a battleground for mythic beasts. But the planet is straining under the weight; Medea will have her revenge.
A Prelude To Crisis
This is the task of The Nostomodern Review: to explain over a seven-chapter series the condition of Modernity and its possible futures in the 21st Century and beyond. I hope to rewrite these chapters into a full book someday.
But as in the tradition of William Blake, in the spirit of works such as America: A Prophecy and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, myths are the basis for this critique.
I believe that to speak about the future—even to merely hope for it—is to prophecie to some degree. After all, myths hold this power over us; their images are part of our dreams and they guide us into the future.
If we are to make prophecies, to give into this power, then we should use myths to make sense of them too. Modernity is still likely to surprise us. I hope you enjoyed this chapter.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2020. All rights reserved.
This was a very interesting read. The mythic aspect is also particularly interesting? Have you read Sorel? He seems to view myth in a somewhat similar way