End Time - Time of Silence

Progress—that most modern of all modern categories—has seen its own ethical, political and historical meanings turned upside down and inside out. Once, not too long ago, it had been the culminating synthesis of all the revolutionary aspirations of the French eighteenth century; but its ties to democratic reforms began to fray after the failed European revolution of 1848, and to disintegrate entirely with the expansion of colonial and postcolonial wars to the four corners of the world. For the socialisms of the nineteenth century, the real progress of industrial society came at too-high a human cost: its technological advances and economic splendor required the misery of millions of people who had been torn away from their historical environments and natural habitats and thrown into the industrial suburbs as proletarian masses, whose biological reproduction served the overriding purpose of capitalist production. In the twentieth century, progress became one of the most effective weapons of seduction, conquest and subordination that industrial and post-industrial imperialisms wielded against the postcolonial peoples and nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Faced with the ongoing horrors of the modern era—the rise of totalitarian systems; two successive world wars that effectively industrialized death and destruction; the holocausts of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; the expansion of colonial exploitation and human misery across the planet—the historical and revolutionary ideals of progress, and the actual construction of this progress in historical time, have collapsed into mere propaganda.

The intimate association of progress and poverty, of progress and totalitarian civilization, of progress and barbarism has spread across the globe, under the protection of the ideologies of the West and their modern imperial expression: a Cold War and an indefinite global war that have prolonged the self-destructive logos that began at Ground Zero Hiroshima in 1945 and culminated provisionally at Ground Zero Manhattan in 2001. Progress has taken on a variety of political forms and military strategies, depending on whether the nations were neocolonial or postcolonial, and depending on whether they were subjected to so-called liberal or totalitarian administrations. Under the aegis of these successive wars and increasing ecological catastrophes, the concept of progress could no longer be identified with any of the technological or epistemological aspects of postmodern life. Since the world wars of the last century, the historical progress of humanity has been defined as an endless continuum of devastated cities, destroyed natural landscapes, suppressed cultures, and annihilated gods and languages. Real historical progress today converges with a process of decadence, agony and extinction that encompasses climate, biology, political economy, culture and human intelligence itself.

Our civilization’s historical progress is self-contradictory. It legitimizes a post-industrial system that constitutes an indefinite process of regression. This explains, among many other things, the complete absence of any definition of progress that may enable us to confront the real dilemmas of our present predicament. What can the word progress possibly mean in an age that explicitly contemplates the future as a climatical, biological and intellectual limit whose meanings are all terminal, be they ecological and meteorological catastrophes, nuclear and biological warfare, or the electronic manipulation of millions of people reduced to masses? What can progress really mean in an historical age that negatively measures future time through a continuous growth of global temperature, which in itself entails the biological decline of the planet? Progress—the highest expression of the secularized values of capitalist civilization and of this civilization’s unilateral vision of universal history—has become in the twenty-first century a category devoid of any empirical references. An empty slogan.

We do not live in an era of progress. We live in an age of biological, ecological, political and spiritual decline. An end time.

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End time defines the historical time of progress but inverts it. It marks the transition from the ideal of revolutionary progress in the sense of social equality, freedom and harmony into its opposite: an arrested time, an eternal present in which human and lived time, as well as political and historical time, have all become frozen. A time without memory and without creativity. Time without past or future. Dead time.

But end time also means something else. Postmodern civilization is dominated by a destructive power that has grown to such proportions it now disrupts the essential balance of the biosphere itself. Our civilization drives the development of a growing scientific and rational capacity for chemical, biological and nuclear destruction of planet Earth. End time is a time administered by electronic systems of propaganda, surveillance and permanent punishment. This terminal time is run, throughout, by the logos of a total war that is financial, propagandistic, political and military. It brandishes mutual and universal self-annihilation as its ultimate legitimation. End time defines a process of indefinite involution, which is at once biological, political and spiritual.

Its quintessential expression is anguish. An existential and social anguish. Fear of violence, crime and civil destruction; a growing fear of the massive contamination of rivers and acquafiers, of the earth and the air; an insecurity in the face of the industrial devastation of the last rainforests, global warming, and the biological agony of species; a fear and trembling in the face of the angry fire of weapons and wars. Terror in the face of totalitarianism and tyrannies. Despair in the face of the self-extinction of the human race by means of the very same Promethean instruments that characterize this inverted progress. Anguish in the face of an end time.

Final Time is the age that presides over two oil paintings by Edvard Munch: Geschrei (Scream, 1893-94) and Angst (Anguish, 1894). Two representations halfway between the languages of European realism of the nineteenth century and the expressionism of the following century. Both works describe the same scene: a bridge that crosses the landscape of a fjord in the middle of a magical and infinite nature, which Munch emphasizes with dramatic carmines, yellows and violets, intense contrasts of light and turbulent strokes. In the background, the bright sky of dusk. On that bridge appears a crowd that has been frozen by fear, their faces completely de-individualized and emitting in unison a human cry of terror:

Ich fühlte das große Geschrei durch die Natur.

(I felt the great cry through nature)

Final Time is a time of silence. The silence that accompanies anguish and fear. Silence in the face of a terror that cannot be expressed in words. Akiya Utaka, a poet who survived the Hiroshima nuclear holocaust, wrote: “I only believe in those words that occupy silence, words that transmit risk.” Requiem auf Hiroshima, by composer Siegfried Behrend, musically describes agony and ecstasy with disconcerted and disjointed rhythms and phonemes, wrapped in silences… “To express extreme horror through silence” was the formula with which Adorno summed up Paul Celan’s poetry in the face of the Jewish Shoah… Silence has surrounded the massacres and genocides that have occurred indefinitely in the world since 1945.

A time of silence also defines an age of suppressions, exclusions and cancellations. It is the silence of gags and censorships, masked under the banners of neoliberalism and a mutilated notion of “Human Rights.” This silence coexists with a cacophony of mass-media slogans and an unrelenting bombardment of captivating images, and the resonant disorder of denunciations and desperation that accompanies them. In the empty spaces created by this silencing of human intelligence, prêt-à-porter jargons expand without any restrictions: While some hawk their politically correct discourses, others sell their fundamentalisms and demagoguery.

End time has been the age of the last concert, the last painting and the last book, proclaimed a thousand times in the streets and classrooms. It is the age of an agonizing art, literature and philosophy. Presided over by anti-aesthetics and anti-philosophy as its trophies and banners, the end time has been announced by the slogans of post-nature, post-history and post-politics. It’s crowing jewel? The internally broken, split and empty Titan that is the posthuman subject. The end time is a time without name and without spirit.

This silence is reconciled with the nightmares of the end of the world that have multiplied in recent decades. First of all, because he was a pioneer of postmodern historical consciousness and critical theory, we must mention Walter Benjamin and his Theses on the Philosophy of History, which provide a vision of progress as an indefinite accumulation of ruins. We can also mention the more recent Amerindian prophecy of the “falling of the sky” and of the end of life in Amazonia and throughout the entire world, formulated by the shaman Davi Yanomani. And there are plenty more examples that deserve to be mentioned, drawn from our bookstacks or from social movements, Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future among them.

Not a single discourse about our historical time fails either to announce or denounce this terminal time. In literature and the arts, we find countless testimonies that have given voice to this apocalyptic historical consciousness. A final time and a time of silence are described by the historical landscapes of Beckmann’s The Sinking of the Titanic, the dehumanized faces of fascist Berlin portrayed by Grosz, the moral decomposition narrated in hyperrealist terms in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange or Scott’s Blade Runner; it is also the temporality represented by the linguistic agony of Beckett’s clowns, to mention but a few notable testimonies.

In Tierschicksal Franz Mark exposed this final time with expressions of the fragility, bewilderment, and fear of deer trapped between two violently opposed forces in the center of the natural and historical landscape of modern Europe. Picasso’s Gernika and Jorge Castillo’s Palomares similarly expose a time of silence and a final time: two visions of the European military devastation by fascist armies and the global disasters of nuclear war respectively. Silent Time confronts us emotionally and spiritually with the limit of human history. In the final canticle of Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Gesangszene, Giraudoux’s words declaim: “Et c’est la fin du monde. Le monde disparaît. Le rideau tombe” (“It is the end of the world. The world disappears. The curtain falls.”)

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In the years of the European and American protests against nuclear energy corporations and their dangers, and in anticipation of their short- and long-term ecological consequences, and their military implications, back in the 1980s, I had the opportunity to talk with one of their intellectual leaders: Robert Jungk, the biographer of the first nuclear explosions at Los Alamos, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and author of Der Atom-Staat: Vom Fortschritt in die Unmenschlichkeit (“The Atomic State: Progress Towards Inhumanity”) – a reconstruction of the political strategies around nuclear energy, and of its technocentric and structurally totalitarian rationality. Jungk had just given a lecture whose political and ecological prediction were not exactly optimistic. Although they were not completely catastrophic either. During a dinner held in his honor, this intellectual added a comment that caught my attention. “If the history of humanity follows this increasingly violent and self-destructive path,” he said, “we can no longer count on much space and very little time to think, develop and put into practice the project of a humanized future. Yet, however limited and closely guarded this space for reflection and freedom may be, we must use it to its limits, always with the aim of presenting and developing both the critique of our historical time and our affirmative programs, objectives and projects necessarily associated with this critique. Lastly, it is our responsibility for the future to preserve and increase those intellectual and religious traditions that have sustained the free development of humanity…”