August 16, 2009
what it means, how it feels (introduction excerpt)
sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September
This is not a history book. How could it be, when history famously ended in the year in which the book is largely set? Perversely, the events which magnetize this present study — the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War for which the fall is absolute metonymy — are the very events said to have secured the end of history.
This, with a terminal but convictionless question mark (“The End of History?”) is the title of Frances Fukuyama’s essay published first in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, wherein is declared “the triumph of the West, of the Western idea.” If there was any doubt at that moment, while the Wall still stood and the border remained closed, it would not survive through the bestselling volume that followed, The End of History and the Last Man. In this account, the line from the French Revolution to the end of communism is the line from Hegel to Fukuyama himself. Hegel’s vision of the Grande Armee’s victory at Jena in 1806 as heralding “a new era of the spirit,” is realized in 1989’s global apotheosis of liberal democracy — after which, per Fukuyama, “we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.”
That history didn’t end is by now not worth remarking. There is nonetheless a specter of actuality in Fukuyama’s analaysis, and it wants reckoning as something more than a straw man. We have trouble imagining. The participle is everything. For if we understand Fukuyama to have been making the more modest if still tragic claim that 1989 witnessed the end of historical thought, that the public imagination of the West has abandoned a conception of ongoing historical process, of alternative arrangements of daily life — then his suggestion is considerably less laughable. If Fukuyama’s description is fixed not to historical truth but to a condition of consciousness arising in a new situation, it swiftly reveals itself as worthy of discussion.
Implicit in this is the significance of popular culture: the great marketplace of the public imagination, and indeed the place where market and imagination struggle over consciousness, over what’s thought and what’s thinkable. “Pop music” is always at least two facts: the cultural artifact of the song and all that it communicates; and its popularity, its having been claimed by enough people to enter into mass culture. A song may communicate historical experience — including the experience of the end of history — in several different ways. But pop’s thinking is always also the thought of the audience, the choice of some songs over others, of selecting this and not that by way of trying to grab hold of the moment: what it means, how it feels.