Idyllic Visions of the Past and/or the Death Drive? Right-Wing Responses to a Crisis of Futurity: A review of Mathias Nilges, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future

Abstract

Idyllic Visions of the Past and/or the Death Drive? Right-Wing Responses to a Crisis of FuturityA review of Mathias Nilges, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future Adam Dylan Hefty (bio) 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 20th 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...