Political Weirding

The Dawn of the Age of Past and Future Contradictions

Stating with a slightly ominous tone that ‘Things are getting strange…’ or ‘Everything feels different right about now…’ is, as far as I’m concerned, a tautology of human experience. This is to say, if one suddenly is made aware of the present moment then, generally speaking, one realizes how odd existence is, and quickly offloads that feeling onto any current societal or political overhauls. With that said…things are getting strange. Or, more specifically, socio-political realities are starting to get weird.

In the realm of the environment and climate change, there is a play on the term global warming called ‘global weirding’. The term was coined by Hunter Lovins, a founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, it describes the consequences of the rise in average global temperatures, which are expected to amplify the abnormal: hotter heat spells, longer and sharper droughts, more violent storms, and more intense flooding [link]. More abstractly, then, when one thinks of global warming, one may think of a linear progression of warming wherein said cause (warming) has an equally linear progression upon its effects (the environment). However, ecology is anything but linear, and as we know that every action has an equal or opposite reaction, we can also understand that as the world linearly warms, the incremental effects of its warming will have equally and opposite non-linear effects of that which it warms, or, as the world warms, it weirds. Weirding, as defined by Wiktionary as various weather-related extremes, including both hot and cold weather, to become more intense. It is this process of weirding that I feel (as above, so below), is not restricted solely to the ecological sphere, as per general universal laws are spilling over into anything and everything, most notably, politics.

If we are to tweak that prior definition to various politics-related extremes, including both the left and the right, to become more intense, then I don’t imagine I would be stating anything we’re not all seeing. The pendulum of political history isn’t necessarily broken or stopped, but swinging so fast that human comprehension doesn’t appear to be able to keep up, leaving us with a multitude of eroded centers. At one and the same time we have the evident rise of multiple right-wing parties (AFD/Germany, Reform/UK, National Rally/France, Party for Freedom/Netherlands), the beginnings of applied Libertarianism (Libertarian Party/Argentina), and the continuation of various strains of left-wing politics both culturally and politically. This is all to say, there appears to be no center for the pendulum, and each is acting as its own island. Equally, we (speaking with regard to the UK) are witnessing the absolute decimation of an age-old party with the death of the Conservatives and the utter bastardization of another age-old party with the increasingly center-leaning stride of Labour. Conservatives have had nothing to do with conservation for decades, and Labour has had nothing to do with the labour of the working classes for decades. Nothing is what it is and everything is dying.

Anyone who listened to my most recent discussion with Todd McGowan (here) will note that McGowan, though just completing a book entitled Enjoyment: Left and Right, has come to the (possible) conclusion that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t exactly work anymore, and isn’t entirely sure what they point to. I followed this up by commenting that if they’re anything, each signifier points at most to a collection of individual policies that culminate into a rather flimsy, fashionable whole.

These collections are, however, not just strictly political policies, but overflow with cultural, national, and tribal coding, allowing one to align themselves with a political camp by way of individual agreements as opposed to a central principle. These collections have, in a time now passing by, become rather binary. What used to be the ‘left’ aligned themselves with a multitude of minority rights, climate change (agreement), pro-choice, pro-migration, and further emancipation. Whereas, what used to be the ‘right’ aligns itself with individual sovereignty, climate denial, pro-life, anti-migration, and further bordering. This is all rather rough, and such roughness is in passing. Such that, I feel, the days wherein intermingling the policies of either side would be an act of political alienation and heresy are over, and that at the process of political weirding accelerates we are going to have to come to terms with what once would have been considered the utmost contradiction. But if there is a single quote of the future to come it’s from Deleuze & Guattari, that is, Nothing ever died of contradictions (#Accelerate, intro).

For a long time we abided by singular isms, ologies, and center-held principles, such as Reactionaries, Conservatives, or Socialists. In time we might have labeled ourselves Burkean Conservatives, Individualist Libertarians, or Marxist-Leninists. And then, further down the line, we may have become Traditionalist-Reactionary-Catholic-Patchworkians, Marxist-Leninist-Post-Trotskyite-Acid-Corbynists, or Heraclitean-Centrists. Eventually, however, this ongoing process of accelerative political weirding began to overtake us and, much like with post-reformation Christianity, the process of fragmentation spiraled out of control. To paraphrase Nietzsche, once you begin to criticize the textual certainty of the Bible, it no longer matters, and, to paraphrase Rudolf Steiner, the future of humanity is one wherein each man is a denomination unto himself.

Attempting to put this succinctly, the age of what Lacan called the Master-Signifier is over. A master-signifer has no clear, defined, or determinate signified. What does it mean to be British? American? Liberal? Leftist? Rightist? We no longer have a chain of signifiers to go back to as for a core definition, the ongoing process of weirding has deconstructed anything to a pulp of eternally competing micro-policies, little tags and snippets and quips and quotes and tagline ideas one can hastily sew together to define what it is they think, without any such origin or foundation for justification.

The cause for concern for anyone who would argue that they do, in fact, have an -ism or -ology which they believe is the best for society is not so much the difficult defense of a master-signifier itself but the battle against weirding’s attachment to fashion. For once politics is reduced to a mere assemblage of archaicly coded policies, each titbit of political data fights for its life on the media junk circuit, not from a position of belief, sincerity, or agreement, but fashion. The weird, contradictory politics of the future is not so because of any generalized insanity or boredom, but because of the decay in attention spans. Political statements and ideas are whittled down to a tweet, article title, or meme, and it is this (and this alone) that competes for survival.

No one reads political manifestos, no one believes in the old edifice of politics, and all is at the whim of a second-to-second mimeticly driven fashion show taking place amidst the media. It doesn’t matter if your political party of cause has logical, thought-out, and evidence-backed policies and ideas, for the simple fact that they could all be irretrievably destroyed in a minute by a well-timed meme. Do you think that your 200-page, multi-year migration policy has a chance against the guy who posted a TikTok of him saying ‘Bruh!’ over and over again whilst he scrolls through it? Not a hope in hell.

As the pendulum of politics accelerated it transformed into a pendulum of fashion, which in time will be reduced to a pendulum of memes, and then eventually, like a honey bee, will move so fast that it appears to stand still, a hodge-podge of everything that will collapse under its own weight, giving way to some of the most obnoxiously safe, steady, and survivalistic politics the human race has ever seen. But this isn’t happening any time soon.

Put simply, try your best to enjoy the ride, as there is almost nothing left to hold onto. The center couldn’t hold. The anchors broke off. The ship is floating skyward. The captain is dead but still sailing. A party leaflet has just fallen through your letterbox, it says ‘Our Party is Bussin’ for Real, No Cap’ in big black letters, there is no other information. A man on the TV says things will get better in time, you have no idea what that means anymore, and neither does he.