Introduction: Impasse, Interregnum, Transition

The current moment confronts us in two seemingly contradictory ways, two different forms of time. The first is intolerable stasis in the face of sharpening antagonisms. The second, its apparent opposite, is frantic overactivity, an intensification and repetition of familiar strategies that lead to bumping our collective heads against the same wall. How do we make sense of the way these seemingly opposite impulses shape our current sense of impasse? And how, within this contradictory temporal forcefield, do we recognize genuine opportunities for transition that lead out of this stalemate?

Stasis goes by many names: impasse (Berlant 2011: 4), crisis in historicity (Jameson 1991: 8), capitalist realism (Fisher 2009), the absolute present (Brouillette, Nilges, and Sauri 2017). Politically, stasis can provoke a reactionary response in its worst form: the return of bad old regimes of authoritarianism, hyper-exploitation, and exclusion. Stasis can also motivate a fetishization of a middle that cannot hold, when fear prevents one from releasing old passions to embrace new wants and desires (Bastani 2020). Stasis extends the era (the 1990s) when Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man (1992) infamously claimed the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy. Even if Fukuyama's triumphant pronouncement has been thoroughly discredited, cultural production still often suggests a fear of history's imagined end, with its inability to address intensifying social antagonisms around us. If, as Phillip Wegner writes, drawing on Jacques Lacan, the 1990s was an age “between two deaths,” this period of uncertainty can be characterized as one of monstrous possibilities, well-founded anxieties, and nevertheless the energetic identification of new avenues for hope. Ours is surely an age of multiple crises, one that must be recognized in all its valences, quite a different way of inhabiting a moment of transition than to assume the end of history.

On the other hand, we have the opposite of stasis—frenzied overactivity—which also appears in many forms. In economics, this ranges from the speedup of work to the intensification of monitoring and surveillance, in which more and more of our actions are monitored and analyzed in the service of capitalism and the state (Bloom 2019; Zuboff 2023). Even sleep itself will soon not be a realm free of direct intervention (Crary 2013). Yet another form of intensifying activity is what Fredric Jameson (1991: 18) calls the “well-nigh libidinal historicism” of cultural production, the intensifying mining of the past for its styles and forms to parade them as if untouched before our eyes, in all mediums. This tendency has since intensified, in what Jeff Nealon (2012, ix–xii) sees as the continued capitalist subsumption of culture so emblematic of postmodernism. On a more psychoanalytic register, overactivity brings to mind repetition and the death drive (Zupančič 2016), the presence of which Judith Butler (2019) sees in contemporary American politics.

It is important to notice how stasis and overactivity cannot be considered separately from one another, at least now: when one starts thinking about one of these terms, it doesn't take long before it starts resembling its opposite, in what seems like an arrested dialectic. For example, take the contemporary intensification of work, the way work speeds up and usurps more and more of our waking time. Such intensification or overactivity is here an effort to survive, to reproduce life on a very basic level. But if we consider it for a second longer, the effort itself seems to result in nothing but stasis: heightened activity simply reproduces more of the same, rather than winning more freedom. Examples of the opposite, namely, stasis turning out to be constant activity, are also not difficult to find. For example, one of the important lessons of Marxism—whether in standpoint theory or in explaining the crisis of realism—is that the contradictions that drive the development of capitalism are not equally visible from every subject position, or every part of the globe. The illusion of stability for certain classes is always necessarily bought at the price of ongoing social clashes elsewhere: from neocolonial exploitation to naked repressive violence, racism, and social neglect. What looks like stasis or stability, then, from capital-rich nodes might look like intensified violence, dispossession, and exploitation elsewhere.

And so one cannot consider stasis without the intensification of activity, and vice versa. How can the present be marked by two seemingly contradictory structures of feeling: stasis and overactivity? Here we would like to argue that the source of this apparent paradox is the mixing of multiple domains of reality. In what follows, we try to separate these out, distinguishing how transition is experienced in the cultural, political, and economic spheres. As we try to show, in each of these realms the relationship of stasis to overactivity can be conceptualized differently, with distinct causal and logical forms. This, hopefully, will help make better sense of the initial paradox.

More and More of the Same: Economic Standstill

Before we discuss the forms of time that emerge out of critical conceptualization of global capitalism, a quick comment on our economic experience is in order. To use filmic shorthand to capture our experience of the economic time today, we can use the arc that extends from Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) to Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Dielman excruciatingly follows a woman's housework—which extends casually to sex work—in real time, giving it a rhythm reminiscent of factory time. Until, memorably, a murder blows up the machine-like functioning. Everything is more attuned to our age of extreme speedup of worktime, as it centers frenzied activity around a Chinese American family's life. The incessant frenzy (formally heightened to a degree that challenges viewers’ ability to perceive everything happening on the screen at a given moment) is paired with a heroic journey to save the universe, perhaps capturing the gap between the reproductive demands on daily life today on the one hand, and the need to address global emergencies on the other. What connects both films—separated by fifty years—is the sense of an intensification of activity that is nonetheless somehow stuck in place, not moving, and from which a violent break is imminent. Our experience then, is one of extreme speedup, precarity and alienation, which seem to dominate the almost complete subsumption of life under capitalism, which today even threatens to invade our sleep and unconscious psychic processes (Crary 2013; Moutinho 2021).

But one is dealing with a different perception of time when one tries to think of capitalism on a global scale. Take, for example, Aaron Benanav's (2019) work on the global shedding of labor. For Benanav, building on the work of Robert Brenner, the “problem of declining labour demand [is] explained by . . . worsening industrial stagnation” (30), emerging as developing industrial capacity strains workers in once semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. Yet, as Benanav emphasizes, in response to the decline in demand for labor, one encounters not a break with the dependency on wage relation, but its intensification:

And so in response to a situation in which capitalism does not allow enough people to earn a subsistence wage, global economies continue to force workers (and capitalists) into the ever-worsening economic relations that have created the scarcity of wage labor in the first place.

Here, then, we encounter one peculiar combination of stasis and overactivity, an intensification of what exists, one that only exacerbates existing problems. Another example has to do with what is one of the only unprofitable economic motives that is given mainstream consideration today: the attempt to mitigate the ecological catastrophe already underway. Capitalist accumulation—and not human existence as such—is responsible for the deepening of the metabolic rift, as Kohei Saito (2017: 11–23) puts it, following Karl Marx. What is important for our purposes here is that economic mitigation measures debated in mainstream politics remain for the most part within the confines of capitalism: from selling carbon offsets to offering “green” products without changing the form of organizing their production. In other words, capitalism enforces a kind of sameness or stasis, considerably limiting the possibility of a green transition, even as the threat of severe climate change looms. Here, then, we encounter stasis yet again.

A quick turn to the political realm will make clear another point, namely, that good intentions are not enough to avoid this situation, in which we double down on upholding the existing mode of production. Some leftist scholars have pointed out a paradox: on the one hand, socialist policies are winning more political support than in the age of “the end of history.” But when socialists are elected, they are unable to create noncapitalist social forms or move economies away from their dependence on global capital, be it in Greece, Venezuela, or elsewhere (Gindin and Panich 2020; Žižek 2017). Thus economic stasis—the limiting of historical possibilities by existing conditions—sometimes seems to triumph even over radical transformative intentions.

And so both overactivity and stasis find their particular, interrelated economic forms. But here we can consider such a moment, as it were, from the outside, as part of the nonlinear sequences that necessarily dominate transformations in the mode of production (see Jodi Dean's essay in this volume for more on this topic). More particularly, what we have in mind is an adaptation of what Leon Trotsky called “uneven and combined development,” in his analysis of the economic conditions of the Bolshevik revolution. Central to Trotsky's argument is that the development of capitalism in Russia is different from that in the capitalist core of Western Europe. While in the latter one can speak of a gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism, the same does not hold in Russia, where capitalism develops later. Here Trotsky (2018: 3) observes all kinds of leaps and unevenness, the most striking of which is the continued existence (and even thriving) of serfdom next to the most advanced capitalist production.

The specific political and economic factors that, according to Trotsky, bring about this unevenness are less important for us here. Rather, two general points bear repeating. First, that such uneven development is a necessity, given the conditions under which it takes place: capitalist economic development could only take place unevenly, depending precisely on the persistence of the old in the new. It is this necessity that requires the “combined” in the phrase “combined and uneven development”: the combination of modes of organization is a necessary feature in such transitions, rather than an avoidable aberration. The second point is that such combined unevenness is the rule, rather than the exception, across the globe: the spread of capitalism never reproduces the same conditions. The work of dependency-theory scholars in Latin America (for example Dos Santos 1970; Marini 2022), or the work of Samir Amin (1977) on capitalist development in the Middle East and Africa are some of the well-known examples of the usefulness of Trotsky's term outside the context of Russia. For the Latin-American development theorists, for example, the intensification of noncapitalist agriculture was a necessary feature of the effort to industrialize. Since industrial fixed capital must be purchased on the world market, Latin American countries had to rely heavily on profits from the main export sectors, which were often agricultural. This, in turn, paradoxically, meant that noncapitalist organization of agriculture intensified and thrived, at least for a while, right before it disappeared—its very intensification signifying not its growing hold on the future, but a farewell.

The notion of combined and uneven development may appear hopelessly useless to us today. If the world is now wholly subsumed under capitalism, we have little use for a concept that allowed us to think the coexistence of capitalist and precapitalist social forms. But the ending of the last paragraph might provide a clue for the way it might still be useful to us. What if we can reimagine our current economic stasis as part of such combined unevenness? What if our economic stasis, the stubborn intensification of what exists, is a structural analogue to that persistence of old social forms, observed in uneven and combined development? Such questions then momentarily loosen the hold of stasis over us—they allow us to see that very stasis as historical.

To view economic stasis historically means that we start paying attention to what is at its periphery: all those social and economic forms that are currently marginalized, ones that are still nascent or emergent, to use Raymond Williams's (1977: 121–27) terminology. Here will find their place both utopian and dystopian tendencies, the staying power of which will be decided only by the future. One such example is recent thinking about the utopian dimensions of uncommodified care work, as capitalism tries its best to push the labor of care completely into the world of the commodity (Chatzidakis et al. 2020). One could even consider an expanded meaning of care, one that could include our metabolic relationship to the environment, and not only to other people. Yet as with all things truly utopian, contemporary care work is a deeply ambivalent thing. For the doubt persists that all our efforts, in the end, serve capitalism rather than its alternatives (Nakano Glenn 2012). Is caring for what exists, in fact, a conservative act, one that aims to preserve the current state of things? Or does the goal of reproducing life become immediately revolutionary, when capitalism seems to forsake it altogether?

Finally, neofeudalism or technofeudalism name some of the leading dystopian tendencies today, to draw on writing by Jodi Dean (2020) and Yannis Varoufakis (2023), among others. For Varoufakis, the difference between the new technofeudalism and capitalism is the movement from generating profit to extracting rent, a tendency usually exemplified in tech companies (and already pointed at in a much earlier essay by Michael Hardt (2010: 350). For Varoufakis (2023: 83), the exploited of technofeudalism are the “cloud proles”—those people working, for example, in Amazon warehouses. But also the serfs, those of us providing free labor to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, by uploading videos and pictures, posting comments, and so forth. Some of the overall tendencies that we mentioned earlier—such as the global shedding of labor—are linked by Varoufakis explicitly to the development of technofeudalism.

Is what we have been calling economic stasis the indirect mediator of a technofeudal future? Are the intensification of capitalist social relations in the examples above simply the necessary, if obsolete, midwife to a more complete technofeudalism? It is impossible to give a definitive answer to these questions, but we can pose them once we see the economic temporality of stasis as itself historically generated.

Going Backward? Stasis as a Political Phenomenon

Accompanying economic stasis is a sense of political deadlock caught between the collapse of a centrist liberal consensus and the worrying rise of various authoritarianisms, which seem to offer a politics of resentment and exclusion as compensation for a perceived loss of economic gain. In this short section, we suggest that stasis takes on a different form in the political sphere, one that at first glance seems like the return of so many social antagonisms thought to have been completely overcome—the rise of new authoritarianism is a case in point.

We are certainly not the first to live through such a moment. Antonio Gramsci, for example, seems to be responding to a similar situation, in which progressive and reactionary political factions freeze in a dangerous deadlock. For Gramsci (1972: 219), when “the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner,” the question becomes “whether in the dialectic ‘revolution/restoration’ it is revolution or restoration which predominates.” In other words, for Gramsci, everything hinges on which force prevails.

It is important to note that for Gramsci, it might get much worse before it gets better. In his oft-quoted analysis of the interregnum, from which we draw a portion of the title of this special issue, he describes a situation in which the ruling classes have lost hegemony, when they fail to persuade by recourse to values, ethics, ideology. In the absence of persuasion, the ruling classes resort to force, the openly repressive mechanisms that account for the “morbid symptoms” in his famous formulation: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (276). Authoritarianism, brutal police repression, surveillance, and violent force might indicate these symptoms. Significantly, though, Gramsci is concerned with morbid symptoms in thought, a prevailing cynicism. In an atmosphere of generalized distrust, of the discrediting of authority and an allergy to general principles, an emphasis on the narrowly economic emerges. With it, a politics that is not realistic but painfully cynical. Less often quoted is the way that Gramsci concludes this passage by rejecting this cynicism, with a relentless hope in the creation of new ideas, ones that hew closer to reality, what Gramsci calls a “new culture” (276).

What if, however, this hope is unwarranted? In an interview for New Left Review, Roberto Schwarz (2020) reflects on the 2018 electoral victory of Jair Bolsonaro and the 1964 coup in Brazil. Though in both cases a political program sympathetic to capital succeeded by mobilizing the “regressive depths” of Brazilian society, Schwarz indicates a troubling distinction between the two moments, one that should suspend our analysis in anxious pause: the first moment was a military takeover, the second was an election. In Schwarz's words, “It's hard to admit that defending the dictatorship and attacking successful social reforms can win votes—but it can” (25). This should demand that we significantly reframe our question about revolution or restoration: the question is not simply which will prevail, but also what might make this deadlock different from the ones that came before it?

Schwarz's response is disheartening. The analysis preceding it is relatively familiar by now, that leftist parties won the intervening elections by a promise to “redress” the inequities and repressions of the dictatorship. The marginalized and excluded would be included, minimum wages would be raised, social services increased and extended, a culture of solidarity would prevail. When funds necessary to support this program dried up, the tide turned, and this progressive hegemony crumbled. The newly embittered shifted their political loyalties to guard their gains, adopting an “everyone for themself” attitude—Gramsci's unrealistic cynicism. Though Schwarz expresses hope that such an attitude will be reversible, that an organized effort to build solidarity might change things, he also offers another bone-chilling possibility. Perhaps the values of Bolsanarismo are not archaic at all—prosperity theology, firearms, hatred of organized labor—perhaps these are emergent, though odious, trends. Not relics but thoroughly contemporary phenomena. In that event, now is not the time to rest on our own laurels, content to believe that history will confirm our ideas; such a passive stance poses the risk that “the relics will be us, the enlightened ones” (28). Rather, now might be the time to renew our commitment to collective organization, to question our own idées reçues, and to approach social reality with a commitment to producing new alternatives to a cynicism we cannot abide.

One may agree, as Alberto Toscano (2023) exhaustively argues in his recent book, that liberal capitalist society and fascism are not antagonists but complements. As Toscano succinctly puts it: “Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism” (158). Violent repression has always been the darker side of liberal capitalism (for example, in colonial and neocolonial situations, whose thinkers often linked it to fascism, as Toscano reminds us). Yet we must acknowledge the newness in the normalization of such violence where it was supposed to remain a hidden, repressed secret—and we must also acknowledge, with Schwarz, its possible staying power.

It is worth pointing out that each of these reflections on morbid political symptoms tends to conclude with the importance of culture. Both Gramsci and Schwarz begin with politics, their most pressing concern, and yet on analysis, politics during the interregnum functions like a vanishing term. It melts into so many cynical, selfish, and unrealistic economic impulses—in the case of reactionary forces; or it ends with a call for a culture of hope, as the urgent task for progressive thought. Nowhere is this more striking than in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment. The preface begins with the question of “why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (xiv). And yet, if one tracks the use of “new barbarism” in the text, a significant portion of the analysis is dedicated to the culture industry. The concern is how to preserve the autonomy of idiosyncratic, humanistic thought from the homogenizing force of economic demands. Here, as Schwarz does, the authors challenge the assumption that barbarism suggests a return of the archaic: The “barbarism of the culture industry” is not a result of “cultural lag,” of the backwardness of American consciousness in relation to the state of technology” (49). Instead, it is an extremely contemporary phenomenon. The archaic cultural institutions that protected culture from the direct influence of the market—universities, orchestras, theaters, museums—functioned as a residual bulwark. Barbarism prevails when these are subsumed under the direct influence of the market, and only then does the bad kind of equality prevail, the “degeneration of the equality of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals” (9). The urgency of an alarming politics, not archaic but wholly consistent with contemporary society, the rise of fascism, for Adorno, leads to reflection on culture.

It is not that Adorno and Horkheimer are particularly sanguine about culture. They famously describe a situation in which affirmative references to both science and its opposition have resulted in a “threadbare language” that tends toward complicity with “prevailing intellectual trends” (xv). At issue here is not a headlong rush to prescribe a particular cultural language or a quality of thought—an impulse that Adorno and Horkheimer warn us is actively dangerous under such conditions. What seems more important is that they think this institutionally; they are most concerned with the material preconditions that would allow negative thought—dissenting, unruly, not immediately monetizable—to survive in politically dangerous times. The current call to build institutions, including cultural ones, most notably in the writing of Anna Kornbluh (2019: 29) surely echoes Adorno here.

Thus in the political realm, a seeming temporality of returns characterizes stasis—but this barbarism is a contemporary tendency within capitalist liberal democracies. We cannot predict which forces will prevail, but we can insist on the problem itself: the appropriate response to such “returns” is to flip the temporality of the archaic—to persist viewing them as quite modern, as products of the newest forces shaping society. Politically, then, we must build the social institutions that will allow us to continue engaging with this problem.

The Cultural Moment: Imprisoned in the Present

The sphere of cultural production and criticism has its own vocabulary for naming the feeling of historical impasse, coupled with a panicked response of overproduction: the voracious pillaging of the past for its historical references and speculative tropes. This response, frantic citation in a situation of historical blockage, is known as the hallmark of postmodernism. As a periodization emerging in the middle of the twentieth century and stretching into the first decades of the twenty-first, postmodernism represents its own kind of impasse, a style whose forcefield art cannot seem to escape, a period that seems to intensify but never permits art to pass.

We have been trained, as scholars fluent in the stylistic signatures of postmodernism, to be wary of symptoms of what Fredric Jameson (1991: 18) named “well-nigh libidinal historicism.” Our critical eyes are sensitive to a set of aesthetic trademarks. Among them are the omnivorous pastiche of historical styles, past aesthetic modes captured with stylistic fidelity but without concrete social content, and the decline of subjective interiority compensated by a free-floating and impersonal affect. The received wisdom is that these aesthetic traits are symptoms of a crisis of historicity. Such a blockage of historical thought suggests an inability to imagine the present as part of a historical process, an inability to imagine a radically different future, and the closure of the present as a space open for collective intervention.

The thesis of a crisis in historicity functions no longer as a surprising critical argument. Jarring when it was first advanced in the 1970s and 1980s, it has become a rather commonplace argument today. Mark Fisher's (2009) formulation for capitalist realism marks this movement. By the author's own admission, capitalist realism can be situated under the rubric of postmodernism. And yet, as Fisher points out, postmodernism was conceived in historical and dialectical relationship to the attitude that preceded it, modernism. Capitalist realism, by contrast, describes a situation in which the processes underlying postmodernism have become “so aggravated and chronic that they have gone through a change in kind” (7). Capitalist realism, in other words, describes postmodernism without the dialectic. In capitalist realism, faith in stasis completely eclipses and replaces the faith in historical movement that is still echoed in the term postmodernism, so that “any positive state, any hope” represents “a dangerous illusion” (5).

But Fisher is just one example of the booming intellectual industry that has developed around the crisis of time, ranging from authors declaring that postmodernism is over, such as Jeffrey Nealon's (2012) Post-postmodernism, to those repeating and elaborating the very ideological crisis it names. Anna Kornbluh's (2024) more recent Immediacy also begins with the absence of time from our social form—these are just a couple of more examples of this now-common recognition, exhaustively documented in Mathias Nilges's (2021: 2–5) How to Read a Moment: it is now the working periodization of the most unlikely sources, from Don DeLillo to Peter Thiel to Will Ferrell. But one should note that the becoming-commonsensical of this realization reflects a deeper repositioning of the main problematic of postmodernism. For the eternal present or contemporaneity is invoked here not as a solution or a kind of happy end of history, but as a felt lack, almost as an absence of a perceiving faculty. Thus what was surely an anti-hegemonic view in the 1980s—that we have lost our ability to perceive the present as historical, against those celebrating the “death of metanarratives”—has now become an urgent, burning problem.

Nilges's (2015) own response to this transformation is an interesting one: he distinguishes (as others do) between postmodernity and postmodernism. As Nilges has it, seeing the latter as the early part of the former makes it possible to reconcile most positions. Postmodernism may be over, but its underlying problem—the crisis of our historical imagination—is only now, in later postmodernity, perceived as a problem. For Nilges (2021: 13), it is this problem that culture now must address: trying to invent historical time anew. Yet, that we suddenly see the need for perceiving the present historically does not mean we can do that. So we find ourselves in a situation that Lauren Berlant (2011: 4) would see as an impasse:

Perhaps, then, the way to approach how culture imagines time is negatively, in what contradicts or clashes. To explain what we mean by such a formulation, we present here two examples of the way culture becomes a site for reflecting on the absence of time itself. These are very short interventions; we explore the cultural moment in greater depth in our article in this special issue. Our first example is Kim Stanley Robinson's recent utopian novel, The Ministry for the Future (2020). At the center of the novel is humanity's attempt to mitigate climate catastrophe. While climate change is not an uncommon object of reflection in contemporary fiction, it is far more commonly dealt with in a dystopian mode than a utopian one. In fact, utopian novels in general are still uncommon today (even if utopian programs have proliferated in the last decade or so [Aronoff et al. 2019; Bastani 2018; Srnicek and Williams 2015]).

There is much to say about Ministry. Here we would just like to point at the ways the novel allows us to view the present historically, while simultaneously and paradoxically reflecting on the crisis of historical perception itself. The presence of such thinking does not inhere in this or that explicitly stated view of the present, as commentators on the utopian novel form often remind us (Jameson 2005: 180). Rather, it is in the novel's formal ability to capture the contradictions of the present, registering them negatively.

The articulation of contradictions is very clear in the novel, which sets itself the task of imagining how we can mitigate our ecological catastrophe. For example, one of the great contradictions of the novel is the one between revolution and reform: reform (or, policy) efforts are represented in the novel by the eponymous Ministry for the Future—an international organization whose purpose is to mitigate ecological disaster; while organizations like the Kali group (Robinson 2020: 59) stand for uncompromising violent resistance to the existing global order (resistance about which the novel is ambivalent: Is it part of a nationalist reaction? Or of a global alliance of the oppressed?). Other contradictions, such as the one between autonomous scientific inquiry and the monetization of everything, also stand out.

Even more crucial for us is the formal presence of contradictions. One example of which is the multiplicity of characters and storylines (some of which intersect momentarily but do not come together neatly), quite unique in the utopian genre (contrasted, for example, with Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia [1977]); also formally unique is that Robinson's utopia has as its background not our reality exactly, but one in which the ecological disasters taking place are quantitatively worse than the ones we are witnessing, straining our ability to see the novel's present as our own. Both of these, we suggest, can be seen as articulating an overarching formal contradiction between the totalizable and the nontotalizable—between what can be understood historically and what falls apart into the sheer randomness of “one thing after another.”

This formal tension is nowhere captured as clearly as in the novel's long lists (see, for example, Robinson 2020: 412). At one point, for example, the narrator goes on for a few pages, naming the different ecological organizations attending an international summit, from different countries. The list runs several pages long, undoubtedly calling our attention to its very nontotalizable nature. Each organization name remains a potentiality, a possible agent in the global drama. None can be discounted, but only a few can be taken into account. Thus it is here that the novel betrays its belonging to postmodernity, where it confesses the impossibility of the very task it sets itself: to try to isolate in thought, and make representable, the social contradictions governing our ecological catastrophe. Formally, the novel admits its inevitable failure to imagine history, through the very attempt to do just that.

Mati Diop's film Atlantics (2019) demonstrates a different approach to reflections on time. In the film, construction on a half-completed tower stalls over a labor dispute; workers confront the foreman about wage theft, and, feeling unsafe after the dispute, they attempt migration to Spain by sea but do not arrive. Instead, the workers return by hauntings; they inhabit the bodies of the young women left behind, some of them lovers racked by grief. The young women, inhabited by the spirits of the young men lost at sea, demand financial reparation and eventually succeed.

What is striking in the film is the coexistence of two temporalities in the same present. In one, the injustice is not redressed; it accumulates and compounds the pain and grief for Dakar's young people. The film exists in a liminal space, however, where the supernatural world intersects with the empirical one. In this space of haunting, the dead do not disappear, loss does not resolve, injustice is not forgotten, debts are called in, and history cannot be ceded to the moment's apparent victors.

The film develops an aesthetic language for thinking these two temporalities. The visual language of the day is filmed in gold, rose, and a warm umber. The aesthetic of night, when the dead return, is filmed in cool shadows, punctuated with electric blues and neon greens. Night scenes are often bisected by oblique angles. The dead are glimpsed when streams of thin green light cross the frame at a diagonal. They are also glimpsed through a mirror etched in a diamond pattern, so that slanted lines crisscross the frame. This other world, then, might enter obliquely. Still, it is nevertheless present, coexisting with the rose and gold day.

Sometimes the coexistence of the two temporalities is striking. Separated only by the etched mirror that bisects the frame, young women, haunted by loss, are visible on one side. The young men that return as spirits are visible on the other side. Two actors sit in the same posture, a reflection like a portal. At other times, the coexistence of these two possibilities is more subtle, yet no less potent. The film contains multiple shots of the ocean, shot in both color palettes, sometimes cool, nocturnal blues, sometimes warm pinks and yellows. At moments of transition, dawn or dusk, both color palettes dance on the waves, shifting with each second, more or less visible, depending on how the light touches the moving surface of the water.

Diop's film offers another model for thinking a moment of impasse, a cinematic language for thinking impasse differently. It is true that the tower at the beginning of the film remains half-completed, frozen in a process that stalled at an impasse. And yet Atlantics suggests that impasse does not imply static or homogenous time. It is not only that past catastrophes haunt the present, though this alone promises that the present can never gain complete victory over time. It is also that the present has a shadow, that the reminder that it can be otherwise limns what currently is. The world in which the dead return to call their debts inhabits the world in which the boss never pays. Cynical realism is haunted, possessed, visited—against its will—by the demand for justice.

Time emerges precisely at the sites where temporalities clash (Jameson 2009: 498); Atlantics demonstrates how the aesthetic can hold two opposite meanings, like the mirror that joins two worlds, or the ocean that scintillates with two color schemes. We may not know which temporalities are allegorized—we do not yet know which time it is. The allegorical encounter represents, perhaps, an attempt to restart a temporal imagination.

What these two brief examples demonstrate, we argue, is that culture today is trying to find new codes through which to make history appear, even as culture admits to the crisis in imagining time. This has less to do with prescribing this or that positive view of history than with allowing us to grasp its movement through making the very blockage of history, stasis itself, an object of reflection through its aesthetic formalization. This, then, is the minimal demand of freedom—as Nick Brown (2019: 181–82) would have it—that distinguishes art and culture from politics and the economy, in which we desperately and urgently need art's freedom to detach itself from what seems politically or economically expedient now in order to mark the place where it is possible to imagine otherwise.

Each of the articles collected in this volume approaches the problem of stasis, interregnum, and transition in a unique way, drawing on the temporal logic of one or more of the three social “levels” that we briefly tried to elaborate on in this introduction: economic, political, cultural. Some address the present situation directly; some use past transitions to illuminate our moment, implicitly or explicitly. They follow no single methodological or theoretical approach, but connections between them abound, both intentional and accidental. Such eclecticism in a moment of impasse is not irresponsibly playful but a very serious affair, as what is emergent can emerge only from a new coherence to be found, maybe accidentally, maybe purposefully, in the juxtaposition of, or encounter between, the fragments of the old.

References