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to do any longer), there tends
to
be a general, if good-humored, millennial
despair about such work that an10unts to a resigned dystopian shrug of the
shoulders. We, all of us, are at the same time undergoing both globalization
and fragmentation; the present is disintegrating into a future that
will
be
simultaneously tribalized and totalitarian. The comfortable, even cozy, stable
bipolar world of the Cold War has been replaced by a chaos of localistic
identities and loyal ties and uncountable, disorderly civil wars. The universal
totalitarianoid advance of the global market moves pseudopod by pseudopod
along wi th retribalized particularisms that are tantamount to general frag–
mentation. Culture and anarchy have miraculously become virtually the
same thing. Transnational corporations rule the roost, and while IBM,
McDonalds, and MTV provide the global substance or Jell-o that suffuses
our present totalistic culture, there persists within its spacious interstices the
spiced-up anarchy of warring fundamentalisms, localisms, sects, schisms, con–
venticles, and smaller intra-tribal platoons and squads. From this point of
view, the Cold War, with its reassuring coherence, seems like Happy Valley.
What appears for the moment to have been eclipsed is the power to
imagine, if not the will to contemplate, any possible Utopian future. There
is at present no theory of the future that allows for such an imagination,
unless one trusts that the market and its accompanying theoretical and
conceptual apparatuses constitute either Utopia or a movement toward it.
One of the questions that crops up at such a conjuncture is whether we
are better off without Utopian devisings to weigh against the sus tained
anxieties that the contingent possibility of human, social disaster always
entails. My own guess or intui tion in this matter is that the loss of Utopian
imaginative and theoretical capabili ties, like the loss of religious belief that
preceded them and was in fact both their precursor and precondition, has
or will bring in its train incalculable and almost certainly saddening con–
sequences. In any event it is, at the close of this century, a bereavement that
previous centuries of our culture did not incur-and one final considera–
tion that remains outstanding is whether the loss is a permanency, or
whether, like the Queen in
Through the Looking Glass,
we will be able to
recover, if not to recuperate, our memories of the things that happened the
week after next. If not, then it is possible that all we will come to is sim–
ple history-and somebody else's history at that-not the most
comforting of consolations at the end of this terrible century.
Igor Webb:
Thank you, Professor Marcus. Perhaps we should begin with
questions or comments from the panel before we go o·n to the £loor. Is
there anything that anyone
would
like to add or ask?
Denis Donoghue:
I an1 very interested in many things both Karen and
Steven said. I was touched and moved by Steven's use of word "bereavement."
