"The End of the End of History"

In which I begin to toss up some old seminar/conference papers that are unpublishable for a number of reasons but might benefit from being put out into the world

Below is a conference paper I gave in Ireland back in 2018. I swear to God I called this “The End of the End of History” before Alex Hochuli and others wrote a book for Zer0 with the same title in 2021. This should have been an object lesson in getting my writing out there into the world rather than sitting on it for fear of it not being good enough or my general aversion to second drafts, but I guess you have to learn the hard way sometimes. If you are familiar with my twitter feed you will realize my thinking on these concepts has evolved quite a bit; perhaps it will be interesting to see where I was during an earlier stage of conceptual development.

But the main reason I’m publishing it here is because, honestly, why would you bother putting in the effort to revise an old paper for a publication that will only be read by the two people who approve and edit it for publication, resigning it to the dustbin of history alongside the entire University in a few years? On top of all that, nobody wants to read another journal article or magazine piece on Children of Men, especially not when it would sit in peer review hell until 2030 when Greenland becomes the 50th state following Florida’s submersion into the Atlantic Ocean. So fuck it. You’re getting a Histories of the Present special.

I’ve given this piece just the lightest bit of editing so as to make it more readable in printed rather than spoken form. Unfortunately I don’t have the correct citations as this was meant to be presented rather than published, and I have no idea where some of these books are with half my shit in storage right now. Also I don’t really care enough to put in the effort. But I’d love to hear your thoughts, even if I don’t know what to do with them, or this article.

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The End of the End of History

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, pitching his most recent book, “Enlightenment Now,” offered the following on his theory of historical progress:

“If history is about all the wars, all the disasters, you’re missing all this incremental improvement that can only be ascertained through data…I would say that it’s appreciating the progress that gives us the courage and conviction to try to strive for more progress. History tells us that attempts to make the world better tend to succeed. We’ll never achieve a utopia, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make things a little bit better.”

In one sense, this quote neatly sums up Pinker’s recent turn from his work as a cognitive and evolutionary psychologist to public intellectual, a self-made airport book therapist for our confused times. More troublingly, Pinker’s is a project the title of which seeks not to universalize enlightenment values as an ethic but as nature, the inevitable outcome not merely of biology, but also a trans-historical project connecting an ‘us’ back in time to a First Day, separated only by a linear telos in between. To admit anything else would be to admit said project might have been bunk to begin with. To Pinker, progress functions as both cause and effect, a tautology that comes to define what he sees as the very condition of history itself. One must appreciate progress, because history is progressing, which we know today because we have progressed. Paradoxically, this puts Pinker in roughly the same boat as liberal democracy’s other great apologist, Francis Fukuyama, who since the mid-90s has been man-behind-the-curtain’ing his famous End of History thesis through discursive turns to human nature and identification undergirding the contemporary liberal world order, as well as to controversial Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, who seeks to combat the so-called decline of the West by uncovering the ‘rules’ which govern humanity’s true nature. Of course ask a neanderthal who had the ability to create fire if they thought it was kosher to eat uncooked red meat and you’d have the clearest argument against the idea of inevitable progress one could imagine, but I have to keep writing, so let’s keep going here.

Despite any doctrinal or political disagreements these three men may have with one another, what they share is a firmly-held belief in progress either a meta-historical inevitability of human history and nature, or the crowning achievement of modernity on the other, that which is paradoxically under attack by evil forces seeking to undermine civilization itself. In these accounts, progress is either that which the long durée of history evinces, despite the latest headlines speaking of famine here and bombing there, or the actualization of what was meant to be all along, and what still will be, rather than what could.

Leaving aside the politics of the role of the public intellectual, it seems telling these concerns with progress emerge as they do in roughly the same period, something we might call the ‘neoliberal now,” following Linnie Blake, or the global imaginary emerging in the wake of capitalism’s final victory following the end of the Cold War. What is compelling here is not the emergence of a politics of historical progress, per se, which emerged out of Enlightenment-era philosophies of history running from Comte to Kant, or with the establishment of history as a specifically modern academic discipline in the 19^th century. My question, however, is different: why is it precisely following the so-called victory of Enlightenment-era liberal democracy and capitalism in 1989 that its decline becomes thinkable, not merely in response to emergent crises and changing conditions but rather to the fact that such progress can be identified as an object of knowledge for itself? Why is it that in the absence of a structural threat such as state communism, dominant theories of progress need such rigorous defense against spectral events that emerge out of chaos instead of undermining liberalism’s first principles, such as the chaos of climate change or the unpredictability of war? And crucially, why do two seemingly incompatible theories of history—that of the linear development of “all mankind” throughout “all history” to the defense of modernity as a historicizable project—end up making precisely the same argument about futurity within this period, the argument that it is progress itself which is either inevitable or naturalized and reified?

Versions of these questions have appeared in a number of ways since the end of the Cold War, and have evolved alongside the historical events which have followed therein. On the left, one could point to Derrida’s hauntology of Marx emerging after the fall of the Soviet Union, or to Jameson’s conceptions of a contradictory postmodern ‘cultural logic’ governing the period we might now call neoliberal capitalism. Recently, critiques following the work of Sylvia Wynter and Edward Saïd have proposed a project that strives for an assault on these epistemologies emerging from so-called modernity, which they see as a conscious rejection of the strictures the West outlines for itself and imposes upon the rest of the world not merely through physical violence but also thought itself. But these critiques are not limited to the left. On the center and right, one could move from Fukuyama to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” which sought to reinscribe the Muslim “other” as an emerging post-Soviet threat to the West. What none of these accounts address, however, are the ways in which critiques of Enlightenment-era notions of progress also seem to emerge precisely after the moment of progress’ total victory over the political imaginary in the wake of the Cold War. Are they symptoms of capitalism without an ideological alternative? Or is something else afoot?

One account of this trajectory might be seen as an intensification of the logics of 1989 as the contradictions of the postwar order and a transforming global capitalist economy unfold further and further. The left’s version of this argument might follow Derrida’s “spectre” of Marx, here gaining historical form once again with the rise of socialist political projects in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the crises of the 2010s. And on the right, we see a return to nativist revanchism in the contemporary GOP, which almost serves as a reifying mechanism for Huntington’s theory of civilizational clashes, a reactionary approach which seemingly never fully bought into the neoliberal promise of an open and free borderless society governed by the global market. But while one could view these intensifications as part of a much deeper history, I would instead like to suggest these earlier struggles were frozen if not in practice, then in popular discourse: frozen at precisely the moment at which Western notions of history and progress began to undergo a crucial shift as one world system gave way to another.

Perhaps what changes with capitalism’s ‘final’ victory in 1989 is precisely the definition and temporality of what stands in the way of the project of progress, from one in which so-called ‘civilization’s continued existence is threatened by the battles fought by an opposing ideological state project or the immediate threat of irrational individual agents with the ability to wipe out all life on earth with the pressing of a button, to one in which progress is threatened by the slow decay of deep history itself, outside human control. Here we are threatened not by new ideas but by simmering political tensions resulting from the structural failure of neoliberal capitalism as a stable economic regime, or the already-too-late warnings of climate change and decaying political institutions across the globe. If this is indeed the case, I would like to argue this epistemic shift can be seen precisely as a crisis within liberalism itself, one in which the very grounds of the liberal project become impossible due to the changing nature of how history and ‘progress’ are theorized in the wake of events that undermine its conception of the world and nature itself.

What I describe here might be seen as a move away from what Jameson called the ‘perpetual present’ of the post-Cold War neoliberal order towards something which looks more like Benjamin’s Angel of History, who can only look backwards while being forced into an unseeable future, this time without a commitment to fulfilling unfinished revolutions throughout history leading up to our present moment. In this account, the paradoxical union between those theorists of progress who tell a story about all of human history on the one hand and those who seek to protect the West against whoever is most conveniently threatening civilization at any given moment seems much less paradoxical. They ground ‘progress’ itself as that which must be defended rather than completed, on both the right and the left, waving its flag above the post-industrial battlefield in an attempt to conserve capitalism against the evolving challenges to its hegemony.

But can such an account even be called “progress” after these qualifications? At what point does liberalism’s theory of history break down in the attempts to make sense of an unfolding present that transforms its promise of inevitability (that it accuses communism for having!) towards a contingency that may solve the contradictions threatening its hegemony but which undermine its philosophical foundations?

In what remains, I would like to attempt to read this epistemic shift, following Jameson, as a kind of changing cultural logic in the wake of postmodernity through two moving-image texts that appear on either side of Fukuyama’s so-called End of History. First, Mick Jackson’s Threads, a 1984 BBC telefilm depicting the impact of global thermonuclear war on a small industrial town in Northern England, and second, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 high-budget studio thriller Children of Men, which imagines the collapse of liberal capitalism and any hope of a better future into a totalitarian fascism by the means of a metaphor of an unexplained fertility crisis. Here, I read Threads and Children of Men as films that foreground these two historicizable challenges to the historical notion of progress, each constituted within their own pre-and-post-Cold War historical epistemologies and discrete historical filmic and televisual forms. I will argue these films can be read as markers which bookend this epistemological rupture occurring sometime around the end of the Cold War, a rupture in which the notion of futurity as a political question shifts its temporality from the immediate to the gradual, or if we prefer, the return of History itself.

The crucial difference in what Threads and Children of Men thematize are as follows. First is precisely what kinds of threats to civilization the films depict: from global thermonuclear war and its impact on the environment to the slow decay of a political system wrought by the failure of a society to reproduce itself at the level of biology and social totality. These discrete but overlapping narrative threats, I argue, possess their own temporalities, indicating the changing nature of the way in which historical time and challenges to ‘progress’ are figured on either side of this proposed rupture; from the immediacy of nuclear war (which returns civilization backwards to into an earlier stage of a distant past), to Children of Men’s slow decay of deeper and overdetermined crises, which does not auger a “return” to a prior moment but instead descends deeper and deeper into an indeterminate future.

Second, both films situate their conception of temporality, progress, and time through the narrative devices of childbirth. This is an impulse, I argue, that illustrates the difficulty of conceiving of history and futurity outside the realm of a linear progression wthat sees biological reproduction as the ultimate driver of historical temporality (nature) rather than the development of society as such. Time’s passage here becomes unthinkable outside something like the ‘progression’ of the entire human race itself, which threatens to end all of time, even for the non human, once the last of ‘us’ passes on.

Threads

Threads is a curious film, one which outlines the fallout from global thermonuclear war entirely set in the rural, post-industrial steel town of Sheffield. From the outset, this narrative choice immediately turns the question of nuclear war into one of epistemology. The film’s protagonist, a young woman named Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher), has recently learned she is pregnant. In the film’s early moments, we see Ruth undergoing all the banal things a young person does in planning their future—renting an apartment, discussing finances with her partner, and so on—all while cryptic broadcasts of escalating tensions between the United States and the USSR over a Soviet occupation of Iran play out on televisions in bars she frequents or car radios as she argues with her boyfriend Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale). The disconnect between Ruth’s daily life and the unknowable totality of the global crisis is played out in sharp detail during the first half of the film. A television update on the situation is quickly turned off lest it upset the patrons of a local pub, Ruth and her boyfriend included. A trip to the corner grocer takes Ruth past an anti-nuclear protest in which a woman shouts, “You cannot win a nuclear war!” – Ruth just needs a loaf of bread.

Suddenly, in the middle of the day, the bomb drops. In the irradiated wake, Ruth manages to survive while watching her family, child’s father, and community either evaporate in the cloud or slowly succumb to its effects. She eventually gives birth to a daughter, Jane, during a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter in which Britain has been turned into a hollowed-out, grey island of mud. The on-screen text tells us diseases are rife, either from fallout or through the UV radiation bleeding through the depleted ozone layer, and life has given way to localized subsistence farming in order to ensure human survival; what the film describes as a return to medieval Britain. As the film reaches its conclusion, its narrative jumps ahead decades in time back to a perpetual present of misery as the memory of the bomb begins to give way to a state of nature in which violence over resources and sexual reproduction migrate from the realm of State control to survival of the fittest. But while this effectively shows the future for Ruth’s child, Jane, to be little different than the immediate post-bomb nightmare that fell so many years ago, it suggests that temporal development and enlightenment era progress will only fail to materialize through a backsliding into a familiar prior stage in history, a future state shot backwards and frozen in time in direct contrast to the rapid speed of the technological modernity leading up to the dropping of the bomb that makes it possible.

As Sean O’Sullivan notes in an edited collection on British cinema of the 1980s, Threads’ vision of this future post-apocalyptic society echoes in a perverse way Margaret Thatcher’s vision for Britain, one which “rejects the general (society) in favor of the specific (individual men and women, and families), eschewing collectivism in favor of the personal.” Whether or not this vision can be mapped onto the philosophical effects of Thatcher’s neoliberal vision for a world in which “there is no such thing as society,” I argue the film narrates precisely the immediate rupture of the bomb into history as a temporal figuration that instantly completes the project of privatization that neoliberalism took years to accomplish. Here the crisis emerges not merely in mass death, but rather by returning civilization “back” to a prior stage of development that inverts modernization theory and reinforces the structure of liberalism’s concept of historical progress as inevitable in either direction. The only possible hope for narrative continuity, then, emerges in Threads through the logics of biological reproduction, which comes to stand in the film’s narrative for progress—or its failure—itself.

The film’s horrifying final image—a denied reverse shot of Jane’s child (conceived through rape) possibly succumbing to radiation during childbirth—suggests the real problem is all the progress lost: damning human civilization to pick up the pieces and start over again in a world that while miserable, nevertheless still echoes the logics of capitalism and further entrapping History in a determined cycle of development that determines the future. Here liberalism faces its ultimate contradiction, one which resists Marxism’s account of structural causality with an insistence that nature is contingent, but one which arrives at this conclusion based on its own eschatological proposition of progress as the inevitable horizon of history.

Children of Men

Children of Men features something like the inverse of this plot. Set also in Britain but in the future of 2027, the film figures a world in which childbirth inexplicably becomes impossible in the narrative’s past (we are made unaware of its causes), depicting the collapsing world caught in the fallout of extinction and the social and epistemic crisis arising in the its wake. Unlike the immediacy of the bomb, which suggests a sharp break in history’s temporal progression, Children of Men outlines a world in which slow decay threatens to undo civilization into an unknowable future.

As Slavoj Žižek has argued, the film’s infertility metaphor serves as a canvas upon which to paint any number of current-global crises as they play out to their possible endpoint, and the film does, in its narrative logic, follow those crises to their logical, but by no means inevitable, conclusions: rising xenophobia and border logics in response to migration, the consolidation of State power to control the racialized makeup and flow of populations, the retreat of the wealthy into guarded enclaves, even the rise of armed Schmittian partisan groups in the vacuum of the State’s monopoly on violence. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis described the film as a “nervously plausible future” in a 2006 review, and in a piece revisiting the film in the wake of Brexit and the Trump election, J. Hoberman argues it feels like the present day, “only moreso.”

To Mark Fisher, Children of Men is a dystopia particular to late capitalism, a decaying perpetual present in which the future is not imagined by new aesthetic forms, but rather extrapolated from our own. As he writes,

“The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn't end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart…it is evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new?”

Fisher continues this analysis echoing Jameson’s observations from his famous text on Postmodernism: that is, the manner by which what we today might call neoliberal capitalism evacuates historicity from its cultural forms through pastiche’s endless recycling or prior forms rather than modernity’s aesthetic insistence on the new. What Children of Men exposes is our entrapment within a vestigial culture, doomed to infinitely recycle the old in the face of the new’s impossibility—both in our aesthetic representations and in the political realities we attempt to call into being.

But despite Fisher and Žižek’s insistence that the sterility theme be read as mere metaphor, the film and novel upon which it is loosely based both conceive of futurity precisely as a kind of birthing emerging out of reproduction’s absence, suggesting that the ‘new’s “inability to be borne” is less about the undoing of a current order than the absent cause of progress itself.

As Jayna Brown has argued, Children of Men’s figuring of the re-emergence of fertility in the body of a working class Black British woman named Kee, standing in for “all of humanity,” refigures a kind of liberal humanism that treats representations of Blackness as a narrative device which so often only serves to lead white protagonists’ narrative journey to self-discovery. “Kee’s value is defined by her bio-logical worth and sexual function,” Brown notes, “that is, her ability to reproduce. By natural inclination Kee is the biological force to counteract the sterilizing effect of a contaminated world. Kee operates within a familiar primitivist notion of black femininity, as the link to both the past and the rejuvenated future. She is, by tired cliché, ‘Africa, mother of civilization.” But as Brown notes, the film nevertheless offers a “salient political critique of globalization, and specifically, anti-immigrant xenophobia.” What it depicts is a world in which “old tactics are dead; resistance movements must admit that the new horizon is not centered in British or Western hegemony, or its powers of reform, but in a radical transformation of the world system.”

Why then, I ask, must such a critique only become representable through this very same temporal notion of progressive history, albeit one with a functionally different relationship to the past than that of Threads? This is not to say Children of Men need inherently be read as ‘about’ reproduction per se, but the question emerges as to why the imagined end of ‘progress’ as a historical project must be what prefigures the collapse of the film’s retrenched Britain, why the borders close when the children literally stop coming, why capitalism buckles under its own contradictions only when it can no longer literally produce something new: as if these aren’t already underway as we speak today. In short: are the crises these films depict epistemological or material contradictions? And can the answer to this question help us understand anything the ways in which liberalism is facing up go its unfolding crisis of legitimacy in our present moment?

But where Threads offers up its post-apocalyptic “return” to the dark ages through the logics of television coverage—placing its subjects within a world that looks like the past, spatially mediated through shot/reverse shot (or its refusal)—Children of Men instead figures its world through the aesthetic of the long take. The long take is a cinematic style that Bruce Isaacs places within a film-theoretical lineage of Bazinian realism, a kind of punctum in which reality “breaks through” the frame through the art-cinema logics of an auteur like Cuarón on the global art cinema market in opposition to Hollywood’s continuity system, structured as it is by an imperative to unify time and space in the mind of the spectator rather than in a given reality itself. In other words—the crisis is merely epistemological.

This, perhaps, is where the film gets interesting. Rather than reading Children of Men’s long takes either as the culmination of Bazin’s neorealist dream or as borrowing documentary aesthetics from handheld cellphone footage on the nightly news, I want to argue, following Isaacs, that the long takes in the film can be read as offering a more complex relationship to temporality and history itself in conscious opposition to Hollywood continuity’s modernist construction of a rigid and linear temporality structured by coherence and design. This is a “progress” seen not merely at the level of narrative but out of liberalism’s theory of history itself, one which collapses in the wake of contingency as the camera moves free from design to pick up what happens to run in front of it, unplanned, swerving the narrative in a new direction. In short: a challenge to the inevitability of progress liberalism demands in its theory of history.

To the realist film theorist, Children of Men’s long takes might offer something like the shock of reality breaking through the construction of the film’s diegesis, a rupture in time here cutting off not so much a past from a future but from a predetermined outcome scripted either by a screenwriter or a liberal political theorist casting the present into the future. But taken alongside the film’s own contradictory account of the trajectory of History, it might be possible to read these long takes not through the immediacy of the violence they depict but rather within the notion of historicity itself as something which cannot be stopped or embedded in a deeper temporality, the suddenness of the ‘event’ always already at work in the banality of the moments which occur from the violent imposition of blood on the lens, to the unthinkable crises in offers as accidents amidst seeming inevitability.

Take for instance the surprise coffee shop bombing in the film’s opening scene, ir the shocking death of Julianne Moore’s character in the film’s famed car sequence. Above I screenshotted the famous splattering of blood on the lens resulting from a misfired squib during the film’s final sequence, suggesting an indexical “mark” of the real (even though it was all Hollywood trickery). Shocking as these moments may be, they are formally embedded in the film’s temporal flow alongside moments of banality: Clive Owen’s Theo ordering a coffee, an intimate conversation in the car reminiscing about the past, or everything around the corner not in the direct contact of the battle marching down the street which comes to stand in for every street across the global capitalist totality. Here the violence depicted in the film is both historical and contingent—a resolving of this precise contradiction within liberalism itself, and one which can only be figured within a much deeper temporality that has always already begun before a bomb or fertility crisis is even triggered.

Children of Men, then, stages its horror not as something which sends progress back to a prior stage, but through a slow progression into a decay countered by moments of possibility. The film offers a critique to liberalism’s epistemology of progress by presenting to us a temporality that provides no ultimate end in sight, but one which can be interrupted through chance and error akin to Benjamin’s notion of the “narrow gate through which the Messiah might enter.” While the film seems to fit what I argue is the shift in the narrative of progress occurring sometime around 1989, this insistence on history—history as that which is simultaneously in the past and yet tangibly still surrounding us—suggests a possible way out of liberalism’s epistemological double bind if we can only scale this metaphor up to our own understandings of our place within the “diegesis” of history itself.

Conclusion

To conclude, what I have suggested above is an attempt to point towards a shift in aesthetic representations of historical progress opened up on either side of the Cold War as expressed in films such as Threads and Children of Men. I argued this period produced the discursive and ideological conditions upon which our current political situation finds itself able to critique historical progress in a new way. I suggested that what changes with capitalism’s “final” victory in 1989 is the definition of “progress” as conceived of in the West’s cultural and political imaginary from one in which civilization’s continued existence is threatened by irrational individual agents through the logics of total nuclear war, to one which sees the emergence of an inescapable structural failure of global neoliberal capitalism when the ‘crisis’ comes home to roost. This shift, I argued illustrates the epistemological failures of the project of liberalism to deal with the unfolding crises of capitalism.

What is left for us, then, is the question of to which ends these notion of ‘progress’ are mobilized within our current crises, and to which projects such an understanding can serve in an era mostly governed by the temporality of algorithmically designed social media timelines, television miniseries, and streaming libraries (there is clearly further work to do here). Most importantly, I pointed towards the possibility of building a political project grounded on a different notion of futurity, one grounded not in untenable notions of progress but rather a reclamation of the past, asking what this might offer for our own precarious interregnum, caught as it is between an unknowable future and symptomatic returns to a past the contradictions of which have already proven irresolvable.