Here’s a working thesis on the present global moment:
1. For many people around the world, life has always been precarious. But for a certain class — the global middle class (and up) — the world had felt more or less secure and comfortable, as long as one knew how to navigate it: play by the rules, stick to a job, don’t get involved in violent crime or too addicted to illicit substances, etc. Environmentalists, religious millenarians, and others may have known or suspected all along that this world of comfort and security was a facade or a temporary and ultimately unsustainable foothold in a more precarious universe, but for the most part those doubts could be ignored, with the secure and comfortable world lying within reach. All of that has now changed: the world of “business as usual” may remain an option, an available leap of faith, but it is clearly not the only one, and it requires effort to sustain. The world of “not going back to business as usual” is now also a very viable option. The future, for many who had previously felt themselves immune to such a prospect, has become uncertain. In this sense, the “feeling of the world” has changed.
2. The Covid pandemic is the most obvious global correlate for this change in affective circumstances. But there are others: for some Americans there is the George Floyd murder, Black Lives Matter, and the racial reckoning that has followed, and of course there was the election of Donald Trump, with its continuous drip of unbelievability; for Britons, there was Brexit; and for others there are various populist ground quakes, conspiratorial emergences, and the like. And in the background, there is the looming prospect of climate change, which has become incontrovertible for a great many people. All of these things contribute to the sense of a sea-change in the feeling of the world, and that there may be no going back. Underlying this sense is the premonition of trauma: the sense that the ground beneath our feet has shaken, shifted, or become radically unstable.
3. For cultural scholars, it’s important to locate this sense in its particulars. Who is feeling what? How is this sense class-based, and how does it elude a class analysis? What are the ruptures that have opened up and how are some people following (or falling into) those ruptures? For instance, how is the global anti-vaccination movement offering an alternative to those who feel disaffected by politics-as-usual, and who are the people attracted to it? What is happening to religion in the midst of these shifts? What are the elements of any emerging counter-hegemonies-in-the-making that might challenge the narrative of a return to business-as-usual, and how are they interacting with each other? Populist and “illiberal” counter-hegemonies have been reaching out to each other for some time now, but what are the possibilities for eco-egalitarian alliances (to use William Connolly’s phrase) emerging?
That’s where I see global cultural studies making some key contributions in the coming years.
