Idyllic Visions of the Past and/or the Death Drive? Right-Wing Responses to a Crisis of Futurity

Adam Dylan Hefty (bio)

A review of Nilges, Mathias. Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future. EPUB, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Something is different about time in late capitalism. Whatever this something is, it has intensified with the fall of 20^th century communism, the increasing financialization of capital, and the return of anti-systemic, sometimes anti-capitalist social movements. In the pauses between the flashes of these movements, cynicism and hopelessness abound in the intellectual space where a left should be. The canard, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” has become a common sense, world-weary truism, while environmental, health, political, and economic stability melt away into a series of crises that render something that feels like an end of the world ever easier to imagine. The last two decades have seen a rising tide of right-wing forces ranging from nationalist governments, fascist street movements, militias and stochastic terrorism to decentralized conspiracy theories. Our moment in history feels all at once sped up, wrung out, in a series of real and spectacular crises, rapidly changing, profoundly stuck.

In the last several years, a lively discussion has been taking place about the temporality of late capitalism in critical theory and radical political circles, beginning perhaps with Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep and Massimiliano Tomba’s Marx’s Temporalities. Some of this work, like Sami Khatib’s The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time, has also turned to the Frankfurt School, particularly Benjamin and Bloch. This problem of the temporality of capital is an ongoing theme of Mathias Nilges’s work in essays and in an edited volume, The Contemporaneity of Modernism. His 2019 book, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time without Future is a compelling contribution to this literature. Nilges straddles academic literary theory and a more popular engagement with the contemporary moment, theorizing the way our ability to imagine historical progress (or even a resolution of various quickening catastrophes) seems to be blocked.

Nilges’s work crosses disciplinary boundaries to engage discussions that have otherwise developed separately. The argument here crosses through Crary’s expansive notion of the drives of capitalism that seem to speed up and compress the experience of time, left debates about the “end of history” following on and in opposition to Fukuyama, the question of imagining an end of capitalism, and debates about the politics of nostalgia. This poses a framework that brings together seemingly disparate aspects of the experience and politics of time in late capitalism. Nilges’s conceptual map of late capitalist time and his unpacking of a Blochian mode of engagement with this moment are vital contributions of Right-Wing Culture.

Bloch and nonsynchronism

Nilges mobilizes Bloch to argue for an engagement with contemporary culture that understands fascist tendencies as coopting romantic, anti-capitalist instincts for a program that safeguards capitalism. Under different historical circumstances, these instincts could possibly turn in a different direction. Bloch is a somewhat underappreciated associate of the Frankfurt School; his work has seen neither the steady readership of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, nor a Benjamin-type “moment” – though interest has quickened enough that perhaps, the Bloch moment is happening now. Several of Bloch’s works have not been translated into English, and common glosses emphasize his intellectual distance from other Frankfurt School thinkers. Nilges emphasizes Bloch’s influence on and relationship with key aspects of Adorno’s thought, especially the critical nature of Bloch’s concept of utopia.

One of Nilges’s primary conceptual tools, unpacked in chapter 2, is Bloch’s concept of nonsynchronism. Bloch uses nonsynchronism to analyze a “temporal plurality of the present” in which people in different social locations can have radically different experiences of the same moment. Subjects rendered as consumers in the information age may feel that we are lagging behind a rapidly advancing now that somehow involves endless innovation without any possibility of structural change – the long now of late capitalism. Liberal intellectuals may feel a sense of crisis in futurity itself, in the ability to feel a sense of hope. Others, feeling left behind, may revive a “reactionary attachment to previous moments in history, either by way of nostalgic idealization or by turning toward remnants of prior social, economic, and political structures that continue to exist in the present.” Nilges understands this turning towards the past as the fundamental drive of right-wing thought. Workers whose skills have been rendered obsolete may experience an “objective nonsynchronism,” while personal refusal of the now, in various forms, would constitute “subjective nonsynchronism.” A dialectical understanding of nonsynchronism can also lead us to pay attention to “latent possibilities that lie dormant in the now,” seeing the past not as a time of loss to be redeemed but as a time of “the incomplete, the foreshortened, and the unfulfilled.” This last sense of nonsynchronism provides a critical space for hope in the midst of threats of fascism: the “not yet” (ch. 2).

The Long Now

Nilges frames nonsynchronism and shows some instances of it in the introduction / chapter 1, “All We Have is Now,” which uses the story of the 10,000 Year Clock, also called The Clock of the Long Now, to explain this peculiar working of late capitalist time. The Clock is a project, with several prototypes already in existence, to build a huge clock in west Texas designed to keep working for 10,000 years. The makers explain the concept in terms of the common worry, in business and political circles, that short-term thinking has become dominant in our culture; they want to prompt us to consider what it would mean to think long-term about the future, on the scale of a civilization. On the face of it, this may seem like an optimistic, well-intentioned ambition, but the project’s funders, such as Jeff Bezos (who also owns the land designated for the clock), are titans of late capitalism with a clear agenda for the future. Their vision, Nilges argues, is not really a future at all, but a long now stretching ahead indefinitely. It is full of technological innovation and maybe some tweaks to promote sustainability, but it is of a piece with the basic power structures of late capitalism; it is a way of thinking about the future that forecloses fundamental change.

Another example of this foreshortened futurism is an exhibition that appeared at several North American museums, “Massive Change.”

Massive Change markets a revolution, yet it is neither a revolution that will take place in the future nor one that requires our participation in order to be actualized. As it turns out, the revolutionary change that the exhibition showcases is not a matter of future possibility. Rather, it has already happened—and we somehow missed it. … We seem to be lagging behind our own now.(ch. 1)

We just have to get better at interacting with this changed present as consumers and participants in global civil society.

[T]he present is the time of a long now of free markets and of technological innovation, of a designed world that already contains all of the answers that we need to solve the world’s problems and that is ready to empower us. In such a time, we do not need to look ahead. We just need to catch up. (ch. 1)

Our recent generations have all experienced this crisis of futurity. Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 gloss of “the end of history” was optimistic about a post-historical, democratic, capitalist now; but the real pivotal moment since then was 2008, which wiped away neoliberal optimism but couldn’t find anything to replace it, placing us in what Peter Thompson identifies as a “Gramscian interregnum.” Another contributing factor here is a financialization of the economy in which risk, and the future itself, are rendered as commodities to be traded in the present, closing spaces for critical analysis and inquiry. Everything in our lives has the potential to be abstracted and monetized, including “leisure time” and intellectual and emotional aspects of our lives (ch. 2).

Nilges’s readings of cultural trends are often sharp, such as his interpretation of “metime” as a capitalist phenomenon that only seemingly contradicts late capitalism’s valorization of everything. Commentators have recently discovered the value of letting one’s mind wander freely – within certain confines. But “me-time” “is not the opposite of work time. It is the extension of it” (ch. 2) that allows the human participant in the system to recharge, do some rudimentary self-care and self-maintenance, and stay plugged in to techno-capitalism. Taking time for oneself in this fashion turns out to be something like corporate wellness trends – a way of making the social crises of intensified forms of exploitation, insecurity, and the valorization of everything into problems fit for privatized, individualized coping mechanisms.

Why the right, now? Romantic anti-capitalism

Nilges develops a Blochian reading of a central paradox of our times in chapter 4, asking “how we can make sense of the fact that a large-scale economic crisis that lays bare the inequality and exploitation on which capitalism rests gives rise more readily to a right-wing turn than to Left critique” (ch. 4). Central to the answer is the right’s ability to grip and exercise the politics of representation. Centrist liberalism (represented here by Francis Fukuyama’s recent work and by Justin Trudeau) takes its own identitarian turn in response, developing an ethos of “larger collectivities” as an answer to the ethno-state nationalism of the right; but this answer is unconvincing. Fascism, while superficially anti-capitalist, is developed as “a crucial aspect of the Right’s function as a safeguard for capitalism,” forming an alternative to a neoliberalism which has clearly lost much of its hegemonic force. Meanwhile, young people turn to fascism instead of Marxism, according to this account, because fascism represents them, even if its anti-capitalism is a cruel lie (ch. 4).

The right’s ability to dominate these representational debates despite the limited appeal of openly fascist politics is wrapped up in a broader “romantic anti-capitalism” which “rejects aspects of the capitalist present and advocates for the return to an idealized, better past” (ch. 4). (Perhaps we should add “romantic anti-neoliberalism and anti-globalism” as well, since many critiques of capitalism both on the right and on the liberal left criticize its neoliberal form, implying that we might turn or return to a more humane variant.) Bloch describes a program of “backward rejuvenation” floating around, which Nilges sees today in doomsday prepping and off-the-grid living narratives. These notions may seem barely political and mostly benign, but they often stir up notions of racial purity and male primacy. A later section develops the idea that the rise of finance capital has resulted in the full abstraction of (potentially) every sphere of life; nostalgic idealizations of a life that is concrete, in touch with nature, provide a counterpoint. The myths that accompany romantic anti-capitalism frequently provide the grist for reactionary nostalgia and fascist impulses. However, we should not reject myth altogether, for Bloch. Myths also contain what Bloch calls “the utopian light of comprehended futurity” (qtd. in Nilges, ch. 4) – a potentially subversive core that can be recovered.

Revitalizing the past and/or the death drive

Nilges develops his most detailed engagement with right-wing thought in chapter 3: the “new paternalism” of Jordan Peterson. Peterson is a good example for this kind of right-wing thought that looks to the past, whether to concrete norms of traditional masculinity or in more vague appeals to ancient wisdom and religious allegories (ch. 3). Nilges offers a persuasive interpretation of Peterson’s attack on postmodernism. Completely uninterested in the history of the concept, he instead “reduced it to ideas of pure relativism,” taking ideas like “pluralism, diversity, and play [as] mere code words for chaos and disorder.” Through a reading of postmodern literature, Nilges shows that what Peterson probably gets about postmodernism, at least intuitively, is that anti-paternalism and an abolition of the father narrative were central aspects of its project. Peterson’s central thrust, on the other hand, is to be a strong daddy figure for a generation of young men who feel lost and adrift. Peterson analyzes this loss and drift as a kind of temporal homelessness, encouraging nonsynchronism via a critique of the chaotic present. Nilges reads novels from the 1980s onward to ground this analysis of the new paternalism in a longstanding cultural narrative about a crisis of fathers and fatherhood.

This is a compelling reading of Peterson and of one strand of the new right. Nilges’s reading tends to sidestep current left debates over whether current far right forces should count as fascist; he is interested instead in some of the common reactionary moves in “mainstream” right-wing nationalist politicians, right-wing thinkers, and receptions of novels and cultural moves. His use of Bloch suggests that these moves do share something with historical fascism, though Nilges is careful not to overextend the parallel. However, because Nilges engages closely with Peterson and not with other right-wing thinkers, there’s an odd way in which Peterson seems to stand in for the entire cultural project of the right here. As I write this in late 2020, Peterson has been mostly missing for several months, after dealing with months of health problems involving extreme diet, prescription drug addiction, double pneumonia, and COVID-19; he is apparently under the supervision of his daughter in Serbia. Daddy’s not doing so well these days. His erstwhile spiritual sons continue bumbling off in different directions.

A gesture of recovering the past is common to most forms of right-wing thought; however, that aspect is in tension with others. For example, if we were to look at contemporary eco-fascism, we would find a strand of the right that sees the past as unrecoverable in the present – at least until we have gotten to the other side of a large-scale, in their view historically necessary genocide. This is, of course, an extreme example, but many forms of revanchism understand their own object as a “lost cause.” Many parts of the contemporary right are obsessed with death and destruction – the flip side, perhaps, of educated, liberal cynicism and “doomscrolling.” A current of Trump supporters know that Trump won’t be able to achieve his promises, whether they blame it on capitalism or on a deep state conspiracy; they just want to see him own the libs and fight for them. The emergence of stochastic terrorism has included lone incel-type shootings and the Boogaloo movement’s attempts to accelerate a civil war. There are many variations, but all these figures have to one extent or another given up on Jordan Peterson or at least on the hope of a conservative restoration that he represents. They’ve given up on the idea that straightening their room is going to lead to a more ordered life, or they’ve given up on getting a girlfriend, or they’ve given up on getting policy “wins”; to generalize, there is a desire to see the other suffer before it all ends.

Nilges perhaps missed an opportunity to discuss this aspect of the right in his discussion, at the end of chapter 4, of right-wing takes on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. The move to lionize traditional masculinity and some images of pre-industrial labor is certainly part of what is going on here – but this is something of a secondary gesture compared to the well-developed practices of blowing stuff up and fighting. Nilges says that fascists have misread Palahniuk’s novel as a celebration, as “frequent references to the making of soap out of the parts of the human body … should be easy giveaways of its critique” (ch. 4). I’m pretty sure the fascist guys who lionize Fight Club noticed the soap and thought it was cool. The smarter ones probably noticed that it might have been meant as a critique and didn’t care. The author is dead, after all, and daddy’s in a coma somewhere in Serbia.

These variations of the right that are more obsessed with death and destruction than they are with the past pose a problem for Nilges’s argument. There are ways that he could deal with it, and he mentions a couple of them in short asides. However, the general Blochian trajectory of his argument in almost every chapter is that fascism is obsessed with recovering an imaginary past that can’t be recovered; instead, we need to look at what is missing in the present, so that we can find these other incomplete hopes in the past. One can imagine how that might work with reference to a misty-eyed, mythical form of right wing thought that is obsessed with recovering the magical, paternalist past and that believes it is more or less possible. Meanwhile, sections of the right know that the paternalist past isn’t directly recoverable, at least on this side of some apocalyptic event, and some of them are gearing up for a Mad Max death drive, complete with the guns and muscle cars. Of course, this destructiveness can hardly be separated from the paternalism, because the vision of life for the few on the other side of the apocalypse is usually some kind of a small, paternalistic ethno-state with lots of old-timey labor, just as Nilges suggests. One could add a section that would analyze the parallels and differences between right-wing fascination with the apocalypse and the cynical liberal who takes pleasure in the horror of watching it unfold. Still, to the extent that parts of right-wing thought are animated by the death drive more than by hopes of redeeming their culture and manhood in the present, the Blochian move of salvaging something from the wreckage becomes trickier to imagine.

In addition to the death / destructive drive and the urge to recover the past, we should also consider the basic motivations of conspiracy theory, as QAnon and related formations have become an integral part of the right. Here again, the feeling seems to be that something has gone wrong in the present compared to a simpler, better past. But the drive is less to recover the past or dominate the future with destruction and accumulation by dispossession, more to investigate endlessly “what is really happening” in the present. A rationalist practice of uncovering truths might assume, rightly or wrongly, something about the character of a political change that would follow from knowing those truths. Some critics see QAnon as more akin to an immersive alternate reality game, the purpose of which is not to create change external to itself, but to propagate itself as a mode of living and thinking that uses pseudo-scientific “research” to divorce itself from testable reality. Again, while idyllic images of the past are present in this structure of feeling, they do not necessarily constitute its dominant drive.

Undoing right-wing thought from within

Nilges develops the utopian suggestion in Blochian thought in chapter 5, which considers how we might look at the past without nostalgia. His critique of intellectual cynicism was compelling, and I find myself quite sympathetic to the main idea. I wish that he would sketch out more examples of what it would look like to make these moves, not only in novels but in other cultural contexts or political movements. Conceptually, Nilges’s argument seems open to a couple of different interpretations. It might be that romantic anti-capitalism constitutes a broad form of cultural reaction to capitalism. Given certain conditions and stances, romantic anti-capitalism could develop in the direction of nostalgia, paternalism and fascism. A critical, utopian radical might be able to look at the past and find – within some of the same common resources of romantic anti-capitalism but also in different, suppressed sources – stories of resistance and lost dreams that could be revitalized, to different effect, in the now.

At times, Nilges suggests that Bloch would go a lot further. “There lies positive potential even in fascism [that] may be rescued and turned into a basis for progressive politics. … Blochian thought … seeks to undo fascist thought from within while simultaneously engaging in an examination of the limits and possibilities of Marxist thought and politics” (ch. 5). Nilges doesn’t really unpack what Bloch might have meant by this with respect to historical fascism. Most of his examples of engagement with the common, romantic anti-capitalist source material do not engage directly with right wing thought. Right-Wing Culture approaches the debate over whether we should “listen to Trump / Brexit voters” (and be empathetic towards those voters’ economic grievances rather than understanding these voters and racists and semi-fascists to be isolated and defeated) from something of a meta standpoint. Nilges’s general stance seems to be that we should understand the emotive core and historical resonance of the right-wing move. We should consider the economic grievances that constitute the core of objective nonsynchronism, while understanding the mythology of the right as an enveloping mode of thinking that is very seductive but that is also not historically necessary; it can be resisted culturally as well as politically. While many supporters of the right might be racists and semi-fascists, we need to understand the thinking that is pulling so many people into romantic anti-systemic thought that ultimately shores up capitalism, since racism and fascism are not so easily defeated by logic or electoral numbers.

This meta-take makes a real contribution to the discussion. However, there are a few places in the text where the argument tends in the direction of a first-order “listen to the economic grievances of Trump and Brexit voters” approach:

it is precisely because the Right knows to use the widespread rejection of the long now to its advantage that it is able to successfully poach disillusioned voters, including potentially Left-leaning voters who demand a politics that addresses the contradictions of contemporary capitalism and who believe to have been politically abandoned.(ch. 2)

These passing, foreshortened suggestions of first-order engagements with right-wing grievances feel underdeveloped, especially given the extensive literature criticizing left discourses that start with “listening” and end up taking right-wing starting points for granted. There are other things that “undoing fascist thought from within” might look like, but I am left wondering what they might be.

Indigenous speculative futurity and thinking with Nilges

One of the final sections of the book finds resonance for the Blochian, critical utopia in recent indigenous speculative fiction that makes use of non-linear temporalities; this is to me the most compelling of Nilges’s sections of literary analysis. As I write this in late 2020, much of California has been burning, for weeks, in a fire season that seems to have stretched out by several months. Indigenous land management techniques of learning how to live with fire and the forests, long subsumed or forgotten, are becoming lively subjects of inquiry with an eye to something like utopia or at least survival. This seems like an instance where the Blochian move feels promising – reaching into the past, to a way of living with the land that was not allowed to be, to learn what it has to say to the now about creating a future where we could live together.

Right-Wing Culture offers a conceptual map of temporality and political culture in late capitalism that invites the reader to think with it and consider additional factors beyond those Nilges analyzes. The post-2008 anti-capitalist left and anti-racist upsurges are largely absent from Nilges’s account. Nilges offers good critiques of centrist, liberal discourse. The animating spirit of the book is of course well left of that, and the Occupy movement gets a shout out in a section title, but radical left movements do not appear concretely. As a broad generality, the twenty-first century left has not generated many ambitious, utopian projects comparable to those of nineteenth and early twentieth century lefts; the left is still, now, like the left Bloch analyzes, better at offering a rational critique of society than at engaging with dreams of a better world. Nevertheless, recent social movements have used practices of demandlessness (Occupy) and have generated broad visions that are far beyond next-step proposals—movements, arguably, including Black Lives Matter, the Standing Rock community defense movement, and even Democratic Socialists of America. It would be interesting to examine how these movements engage with visionary, dream-like, immediately unachievable possibilities, and how new left visions of a future relate to defensive battles and piecemeal gains that often seem to be the immediate horizons of possibility.

Nilges says that the time of the long now of late capitalism generates a feeling that we are behind our own now and must catch up. How it does so may be very uneven, and this is a rich area for further analysis. Particularly, colonialism and post-colonialism have long generated feelings in their subject populations that they are behind and must catch up (or, in some instances, that they are behind and can never catch up). This dynamic can be found in the whole of modern colonialism, long predating finance capital and the speed-up of a technological innovation. It has taken on new dynamics in this era, as some postcolonial elites embrace the idea that a long now of innovation and capitalism potentially levels the geographic playing field while other populations seem more resolutely excluded than ever.

The conceptual map of Right-Wing Culture contains some coordinates that remain fuzzy and invite debate, but these do not detract from the rich and suggestive nature of the project. Nilges’s efforts to sketch out the moves of a Blochian critique for the current moment and his way of schematizing late capitalist temporality in relation to political and cultural practices are well worth thinking with. His call to recognize the “end times” feelings of our moment as perhaps in fact the death throes of capitalism and to find the lost threads of hope in the midst of reaction and the sense of being stuck are worth heeding.

Adam Dylan Hefty Adam Dylan Hefty is an Assistant Professor in the Core Curriculum program at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University (Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia). He holds a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Recent works include essays on right-wing responses to climate change and on the history of mood disorders. He is working on a manuscript that traces a genealogy of the connection between practices of managing work and mental health.