Description
Much of our discourse on the contemporary epoch – in academia, politics, popular culture and news media - is framed in terms of an urgent demand to act now in order to pre-empt otherwise imminent catastrophic events. As the doomsday clock inches forward to 90 seconds to midnight, climate reports increasingly indicate that we have reached a crucial tipping point. We start from the position that it is already too late: we are already living in and through an elongated tipping point. We start, therefore, by recognising that the event is already upon us, and what is required is a refusal of the usual temporalities of politics. We argue that it is necessary to refuse the humanist, affirmatory logics of hope and redemption that animate so much of our political discourse. If it is already too late we cannot defer politics into a future in which the ideal will be realised. This puts the progressive logic of modern politics – both governmental and revolutionary – into question. Rather we must focus on the potentialities of an elongated present. This requires us to focus on what Tsing has referred to as ‘life in capitalist ruins’. How are lives already being lived in the context of the precarity of the ruins of capitalism? If the catastrophe is already upon us, if the dreams of managed capitalist progress are ruined, how does life endure? Here we outline belated, improvised arts of living. These arts of living comprise the fugitive coalescing and dissipation of communities of sense. They are a refusal of the futural temporal logic that underpins ideas of progress and hope. They endure below the threshold of transformative change and yet make lives liveable. The question then, without valorising endurance, is how might we recognise such arts of living as opening new political terrains in an era when it is already too late to rescue modern dreams of progress.
