SUNSET OF THE AGE OF THE IMAGE
The pandemic, war and famine have perhaps accelerated the end of the age of globalisation and with it, degraded the image as its dominant language. We have always liked to pretend that seeing meant believing; now, not so much. As bots with their deep fakes take over, the deluge of images we face is bleaching the form of reliable meaning, while the digital economy – once hailed as the great democratiser – has transformed into a form of digital feudalism whose overlords are battling it out over space rockets and media hegemony. As empires – both supranational and corporate – fight, the material is reasserting its primacy over data. There are shortages of everything from cooking oil to microprocessors, from Germany to Japan. When it all gets a bit apocalyptic, bread tends to trump circuses.
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cool-hunters, image-makers, hype-merchants and influencers, perhaps the whole of the cultural economy, all have something to fear. That is not because, so far as we know, there is any particular concentration of such folks in Ukraine, but because as the Russian army rolled in, it pierced through the age of image and its illusions, alongside millions of innocent lives and national infrastructure. A new age, a new chapter of world history, is being written in tank tracks on Ukrainian mud.
Forgive me if this statement reeks of lazy Eurocentrism; of course, invading armies have been busy making history all over the world in recent decades. The US has been involved in some form of combat for around 215 of its 246 years of existence as a country. I don’t mean to say that the wars that devastated the lives of our Iraqi, Yemeni or Libyan brethren were not historic enough. In the case of the last, a few short years of Western intervention turned what was by some measure Africa’s richest nation per capita – with living standards that would be enviable even now for many European citizens – into a smashed society and a lawless wreck of a country home to warlords and their slave markets. That is no less historic.
Rather my intention here is to demonstrate the opposite of that. Ukraine is only part of an existing pattern, but its contribution is to make the pattern more discernible by showing it transposed over Europe. That’s why the European anxieties about it were met with cooler heads and less hysteria in the rest of the world. Many have commented that Europeans are moved because (as some politicians pointed out explicitly) these groups of refugees look more like “us”. In what we all hope is the aftermath of a dreadful worldwide pandemic, costing millions of lives, an awkward neologism, “the new normal”, has been doing the rounds. It’s dropped into conversation to acknowledge that something momentous has happened, while at the same time denying its impact in the long term; it’s a sort of wish fulfilment. The problem is that there was nothing normal or stable or sustainable about the state of the world just before the outbreak of Covid-19.
Like a departing tide, the pandemic simply demonstrated who was wearing pants and who wasn’t. Forces that have been in play since the 2008 crash – which some might indelicately call the slow-motion collapse of capitalism – merely continued. The events with which we have grappled ever since – from Occupy to Black Lives Matter, Brexit and Trump – are all manifestly rooted in that crash and the different ways the governments chose to respond to it.
Against this backdrop the position of high culture and high fashion in society has changed more over the past two years than in the previous 20, moving away from centrality and towards further marginality. For fashion, it’s not only because the location, the size and shape of its audience has changed, it’s bigger than that. Just as for culture, various forms of decentralisation of the cultural industries have helped further atomise and disperse what was once considered a global cultural network. Partly due to lockdowns and a massive reduction in the possibilities of travel, and partly because the mass adoption of Zoom meetings means that the demand for some products is reduced. No one is desperately seeking newness; the new finds it hard to be desirable when novelty is so accessible.
Fashion, like the idea of “cool”, is unspoken; it relies on charisma not language or reason. Cool just is. Today, we are witnessing the decline in the power of cool in selling anything from music to films, books and politicians. Why? When cool started its rule, the world wasn’t saturated with images. There were a few TV channels and few sources of visual stimuli in relatively small numbers of glossy magazines. Today we live in an age of visual saturation, which inevitably means that the image loses its charisma. Nothing so commonplace can retain such an allure for long. Cool is rapidly becoming the signature of the scoundrel and crook. Think Macron unbuttoning his shirt during the election.
Let cool rest in peace. Unfortunately, fashion, which we do care about, has hitched its wagon to cool. Fashion is also instinctive and relies on unreason; it is best when saying nothing and being enigmatic. The more it talks, the less it makes sense. Witness the ham-fisted way the industry has engaged with critiques about environmental concerns and identity politics, racism and colonialism. The performative championing of woke causes isn’t convincing too many folks other than the fashion people themselves. It is in the very nature of fashion that with scrutiny, the flower wilts and its perfume is destroyed. It can either hide in secret gardens or risk coming out into this new daylight and withering. Just as the politicisation of everything was the end of politics, so widespread hyper-visualisation has made mass communication with images impotent. TikTok is the perfect illustration of this shrunken circuit. Production, performance and consumption are sited in every user. Images have been naturalised as mere background noise.
It is a fundamental feature of the current version of extreme market economy to encourage consolidation at the top and atomisation at the base. Its perverse ideology is sold to us as a law of nature. “To the victor the spoils,” and so on. Too many people think what they learn from David Attenborough nature documentaries is applicable to man-made artifice such as economics, without pausing to consider that in that scenario, most of us are likely to be the impalas, not the lions.
Similarly, sport is often portrayed as a form of war in times of peace. On closer inspection, this is an illusion. Sport works because the opposing teams or players compete but also simultaneously collaborate (also known as the rules) to maintain an overall effect for themselves and the spectators. Football teams rarely find themselves confronting a rugby team on the pitch, yet this is exactly what happens in war. People participate in sports to exchange validation and get satisfaction. Wars, on the other hand, don’t often have referees, rarely spectators and are never fun. A veneer of legality is retained but, in reality, when war starts, decency departs. Even when rules of engagement are declared, they are ignored in the long run. Every army that ever went onto the field is eventually morally compromised.
The Geneva Conventions only cover formal declarations of war, are selectively applied and do not examine the legality of declarations, only the conduct of the fighting. So the US continues to operate its detention camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, disregarding even the rulings of the Supreme Court, while the Russian government cynically describes its invasion of Ukraine not as a war but as a “special operation”.
On the other hand when it comes to the economy, it’s hard to find too many in the mainstream who would admit that it’s conducted much like a war. A rare example was Warren Buffett who admitted in an interview in 2006: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” That was in halcyon days when he was merely worth $64B versus today’s $119B. Here, again, the pandemic has brought about intense acceleration of what was already insane and unsustainable to society and planet. According to the Financial Times, the richest have benefited most from government efforts to support the economy during Covid-19. In our new normal, billionaires have added 40% to their wealth, even though, as Thomas Piketty has pointed out, the old normal had already created levels of inequality not seen since the 14th century. Instead of loosening up capacity as the medieval plagues managed to do, Covid-19 has further constipated productive capital, which, locked up in fiscal paradises and only brought out for stock buybacks, is unable to flow through the economy. What might be potentially productive wealth is simply stagnating in empty real estate from Vancouver to London, bonded art warehouses and blockchain assets. An old world is dying, and a new world is struggling to be born; there are disturbing signs that the new one looks startlingly familiar from history. Power and wealth are more concentrated in fewer hands than they were before the French Revolution – and we know how that turned out. Masoud Golsorkhi