Like any repression-reliant neurotic who still needs to pay her rent, I move through my days in a kind of cushioned, compartmentalised self-absorption. I worry about my own small world, plan my weeks, think about holidays, deadlines, or what to cook for dinner. And yet, every now and then, a kind of terror breaks through. Not dramatically, but enough to mobilise me to fill up my car or turn my search history into a loop of ‘why is this happening? What lead to this? What happens next?’ The collapse of it all has become a low, persistent buzzing noise that I sometimes realise is driving me mad.
At the same time, I find myself increasingly nostalgic for my university years, over a decade ago now, and the kinds of thing that consumed us back then. We debated the work-life balance as if it were a problem we could optimise. We spoke about feminism and racism in terms of raising awareness and exposing unconscious bias, as though the trajectory was obvious and broadly agreed upon. There was an underlying assumption that things were, more or less, moving forward. That the arc bent somewhere sensible.
And sure, we all pretended to read Hegel. We spoke of dialectics and Western ideals as colonial fantasies that we were clever enough to see through. There was no good and evil in our eyes, and we spoke of the media as akin to a marvel movie. We ‘got it’. But we felt so safe inside that world that I am not convinced we really understood anything at all. The idea that contradictions resolve and that things tend toward something better held us in the same way a parent waits for their kid outside a party, where the latter is telling everyone what an idiot the former is. It’s like, we were so unbelievably cushioned within that fantasy, it enabled us to think we were above it.
But now, it’s well and truly cracking. Sure, scientific advancements are a thing, and technology is moving in a direction, but watching figures like Donald Trump and his steady normalisation of things that once felt unthinkable, or the ongoing failure to meaningfully respond to climate collapse, makes our old Darwinism-turned-religious belief about our capacity to evolve feel so utterly child-like and naive.
Lacan’s reading of Descartes’ cogito keeps echoing in my mind when I try to think about what it means to watch the ideal of progress burn. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is supposed to ground certainty, but for Lacan it does the opposite. It splits it. There is an I that thinks and an I that is, the latter always trying to make sense out of the former. It is like something happens, a thought, an event, and we rush to make it ours. To stabilise it. To say: this is what this means, this is what is happening, this is who I am in relation to it. The ‘I am’ endlessly patching over the instability of the ‘I think’.
A friend told me recently that she is coping by laughing, by turning everything into something absurd, almost theatrical, because otherwise she would not be able to function at all. And while I had learned that absurdist and existentialist art emerged from the war, I suddenly understood it differently. It was not just that the war made people interested in those questions. It was that something had happened on a level of the meaning of a human’s life that demanded to be accounted for. Something had broken with the frameworks they had. And so, of course, the question of meaning emerged; the ‘I am’ scrambled to account for the ‘I think’.
And so, I suppose, if the twentieth century fractured the idea that life had any inherent meaning, this moment feels like it is cracking the belief that there is, underneath everything, some kind of inevitable direction. And if that fantasy is coming apart, what are we going to use to patch it over, to account for this ‘it thinks’ that no longer holds together?
Written by Molly Fitz