Half way though Factory #2, Derek Raymond. Have to say, so far: thoroughly disappointing. Don't know if the second half will redeem it or not, but the writing is very patchy. Perhaps it's the weight of expectation since the other three are books I'm really fond of for their strange mixture of grittiness and gentleness. But this one is just thick on sordid details and quite forgettable.
I suppose we're always looking to time to get us out of the hole, imagining a single moment or turn could bring something to fruition, or reverse a trend.
Perhaps we're coming to the end of a stage of thinking. For two centuries or so the idea of a linear progression of time has dominated, replacing older notions of cyclical time, bound to agriculture as a mode of production and culture, but also-if there is such a thing as a history of time-to older, mythical notions still of eternal return (Eliade).
With linear time nothing is repeatable and a terrible anxiety can set in if you think there's no going back, a point of no return; on the flip-side, though, the adventurousness and creativity of modernity wouldn't be possible without this ability to tear up and jettison the past: the thrill and the fear of uncharted territory.
But in this latest stage, the wheels have come off. No more forward dreaming, no more linear narratives and no more redemption of time in the distant future. Technologies and capitalism are leading to the valorization of the present, the brief moment that is not only destined to pass away in the blink of an eye, but that is a "pure" moment in that it isn't related to the past or the future. So, what late modernity is about, in many significant and various ways, is the break-up of duration, narrative structures, continuity, coherence. All that counts is the 'now' ( a fake kind of mysticism is really a mystification at the end of the day). Perhaps that is to be expected when the presiding sensibility of our times is precisely that we are nearing the end of the day ('It's later than you think..and maybe too late to think).
A sign of the times we're living in is that there are no more signs. Instead, today we're encouraged to believe that for the last man (and woman) there is only the pathless path. With a sense of exhaustion and a feeling that it's hard to imagine anything new really emerging-despite the supposed frenetic pace of technological innovation the human condition and political ideas remain static-it seems as if the only thing left to do is either wait or serve time. A strange sentence, that.
I suppose we're always looking to time to get us out of the hole, imagining a single moment or turn could bring something to fruition, or reverse a trend.
Perhaps we're coming to the end of a stage of thinking. For two centuries or so the idea of a linear progression of time has dominated, replacing older notions of cyclical time, bound to agriculture as a mode of production and culture, but also-if there is such a thing as a history of time-to older, mythical notions still of eternal return (Eliade).
With linear time nothing is repeatable and a terrible anxiety can set in if you think there's no going back, a point of no return; on the flip-side, though, the adventurousness and creativity of modernity wouldn't be possible without this ability to tear up and jettison the past: the thrill and the fear of uncharted territory.
But in this latest stage, the wheels have come off. No more forward dreaming, no more linear narratives and no more redemption of time in the distant future. Technologies and capitalism are leading to the valorization of the present, the brief moment that is not only destined to pass away in the blink of an eye, but that is a "pure" moment in that it isn't related to the past or the future. So, what late modernity is about, in many significant and various ways, is the break-up of duration, narrative structures, continuity, coherence. All that counts is the 'now' ( a fake kind of mysticism is really a mystification at the end of the day). Perhaps that is to be expected when the presiding sensibility of our times is precisely that we are nearing the end of the day ('It's later than you think..and maybe too late to think).
A sign of the times we're living in is that there are no more signs. Instead, today we're encouraged to believe that for the last man (and woman) there is only the pathless path. With a sense of exhaustion and a feeling that it's hard to imagine anything new really emerging-despite the supposed frenetic pace of technological innovation the human condition and political ideas remain static-it seems as if the only thing left to do is either wait or serve time. A strange sentence, that.
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