This isn't a Virus, it's a Time Machine
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Seymour, Benedict. 2020. This isn't a Virus, it's a Time Machine. Mute Magazine, ISSN 1356-7748 [Article]
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Online essay written early in the covid pandemic on accelerated social reproductive retrogression and 'confusionist' biopolitics. "In a 2015 London Review of Books essay Fredric Jameson briefly imagines the Bolshevik Party as a kind of time machine. The party is a device by means of which Leninist revolutionaries effect a collective leap into the future:
'[H.G.] Wells’s formal innovation … lay in his shifting of the reader’s attention to a technological substitute for the missing historical transition, namely the time machine. (We might argue that the party was Lenin’s analogous innovation in the realm of political strategy).'[1]
If the party staged interruptions in the linear, empty time of industrial capitalism, or at least put the conveyor belt into fast forward, these would be temporal events of acceleration freeing us from the old, breaking us from the feudal past, opening up a future of self-determination.
Today in the UK (and beyond), we are undergoing first Brexit and now Covid as contemporary time machines that really do produce temporal leaps – even if their temporality, which comes on punctual (‘Take back control!’), ends up leaving behind it an endless smear of bureaucracy and technocracy (‘Get it done’, chapters 1 to n). But these time machines are regressive, not progressive: they effect a rapid leap backward – even if this retrogression is absolutely novel.[2] In political and social-reproductive terms these two successive shocks have been coups for a reactionary movement, not least where they have most emphasised their focus on the future. Wherever Tories invoke the ‘state of the art’, for example behavioural (pseudo-) science, in which the hypothesis of ‘herd immunity’ serves to return us to racist eugenics, they always set the controls for the heart of darkness, neo-reaction, cutting edge disaster. Brexit was a kind of far-right coup or contemporary ‘Reichstag fire’ that delivered a fast forward into the past, politically, laying out a new set of terms for the ruling class and the ruled. It managed potential anti-capitalist sentiment in a racialised and technocratic direction, turning righteous hatred of Blairites and Tories alike into something toxic and regressive and so containing and inverting its implicit threat to the system. The Brexit ‘choice’ congealed anger into anti-migrant, late colonialist resentment, an elegant ideological device to suppress a burgeoning sense of class hatred, by pitting proles against each other along lines of age and race. So, the embittered white ‘boomer’ male booms on about the migrants, the woke, the snowflakes and red tape, NOT the bosses, the borders, the Blairites’ attack on social reproduction over decades of cuts to services, subsidies, benefits, etc."
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38508 |
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28 Feb 2025 11:08 |
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28 Feb 2025 11:08 |
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