May 10, 2009
cynically say the world is that way (chapter five excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
This loss of narrative has presented itself earlier, most evidently in songs that try and fail to make a story of the times. But of course the sense is everywhere in the music this book has considered: in the triumph over time; in the exstasis; in the absolute, empty domination of the present moment; in the inability to imagine what might come next, and the lack of an urgency to do so. We have scarcely had occasion to mention the best-loved song by British alternative pop act The Sundays: “Here’s Where the Story Ends.” The lyrics are opaque, as if the story already can’t quite be recalled. “It’s a little souvenir of a terrible year,” choruses Harriet Wheeler, hiding nothing and everything. The song is from 1990; we never discover what the “it” is.
Narrative failure, it scarcely needs to be said — the end of story — is another way of naming the thought which is “the end of history.” This is the very sense in which Fukuyama’s proposition deserves attention as something more than mere neoconservative wish fulfillment. It is the pop flipside, the form taken within the public imagination, of Guy Debord’s less catchy descriptions: “The spectacle, being the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time, is in effect a false consciousness of time.”
For Fukuyama this abandonment of any history founded in historical time is an overcoming; for Debord, what must be overcome. For both it is the situation. The question before us, finally, is not whether pop music understood this situation; by now this book’s opinion on the matter is obvious. Rather, the question is whether pop music was able to have more than a triumphal sense of how things stood around 1989, as the new conjuncture was coming into view and asserting its absolute quality.
How then can this conjuncture be described? At one reach we have mantras and codes; at another, theoretical conceptions. Between these, there are something like facts. These include the replacement of almost all Eastern European governments with bodies above all not Communist; the disintegration first of the Eastern bloc, and then of the Soviet Union; and then the turbid chaos of the Russian Federation, turning its shambling bulk toward the global market. In skewed parallel, the People’s Republic of China refashions itself from Deng Xiaoping’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” into a furnace of state capitalism. This all seems of a piece with the popular wisdom, the linear narrative in which the last actors rise up against the failed promise of socialism — against themselves if necessary — and in favor of the democracy of the market. This happens everywhere and at once.
What does the pop version get wrong? For one thing, the cycle of governmental conversion starts earlier, and is not as unidirectional as one might suppose; South Korean protests “finally brought down the authoritarian Cold War government in the “Great June Uprising” of 1987.” The deposed government in question was of course not communist but a military-corporatist state. This is comparatively minor example of the inconsistencies that vanish in the dust of the Wall’s demolition, but a suggestive one. The coherence of the global events in 1989 is in many ways a perspectival effect, a function of one’s aperture. Signal in Fukuyama’s vision is the need at claim at once an Archimedean stance overlooking all of history, and an aggressively framed reading of specific political changes in the latter portion of the twentieth century. The story of Chile, for example, indicates the crudity and misprision of his line of reasoning. Fukuyama declares, without inquiry, the three-stage sequence of the overthrow of Allende’s socialist government by Pinochet’s US-orchestrated military junta, in turn displaced by a “popularly elected government” in 1988, as simply another confirmation of the last remaining narrative. In so doing, he offers an elective blindness to the obvious fact that Allende was himself democratically elected; that there is no intrinsic contradiction between socialist policies and popular elections; and that the victory of the Concertatión party in 1988, as Fukuyama composed his account, took place within a narrative of fracture within, and in turn against, the Southern Cone neoliberalism exported and installed by he beacon of liberal deomocracy, the United States.
The gross inadequacies and factual embarrassments that come from the reduction of history to a single vector cannot, as already suggested, be laid on the stoop of that Fukuyama, that beautiful symptom. Nonetheless, the illusory coherence of the events of 1989 requires careful attention herein, in so far as pop both wrestled with that very illusion, and even purposed to draw out the incoherence and insufficiency of the monolithic official story.