I think if I had to define the era of “modernity”, having at best a very vague grasp of all the theoretical ink spilled on the question, I might say it was the period where men believed they could master history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it really seems that mankind was marking out points on the horizon and devoting millions of lives towards reaching them. We entered modernity when we looked around at our accumulated means of production and communication, and dared to suspect that so equipped we could finally determine our destinies.
This implies a definition of postmodernity, again wilfully uninformed of the “real” definitions of that heavily loaded word. Postmodernity is the collapse of that belief. The forces we unleashed could not bring us to the utopia we embarked towards before completely shaking apart our sense of shared reality. Or perhaps, we finally landed on the vast, grey beach at the end of history, and now we have nothing left to do but live there.
Isn’t it always the way that the chase is better than the catch? But even knowing this, we must always invest ourselves in wanting that next end. Becoming self-conscious of that Sisyphean pursuit, losing your ability to long for that next catch, is true depression. In this sense, I think it is fair to say that we are societally depressed.
In this state of depression, of crushing futurelessness, we long to long again. We want to want. The desperate fury with which people invest themselves in empty, cynical political movements makes more sense to me when I understand it this way - the passion is not for the ideas themselves, but for the feeling of having ideas to believe in again. We don’t want to interrogate our politics; we can’t bear to discover yet again the vision we have chased is another mirage, that we’re still standing on the beach. Perhaps when we imagine Sisyphus happy, we should picture him in a MAGA cap.
A socio-political vision should be a tangent vector to our moment in history. As its tail, it must clearly identify where we are; at its tip, it must point towards a place we can go together. It seems we cannot conjure either. We live in Limbo, a singular point-at-infinity - before we can set off towards utopias again, we must first reach a place where we can speak of any directions at all.