The Ministry for the Future

30

When thinking about the suspended years before the Great Turn, what some have called the Trembling Twenties, historians have speculated whether it was part of the Great Turn itself, or the last exhausted moments of the modern period, or some sort of poorly theorized interregnum between the two. Comparisons have been made to the period 1900–1914, when clearly the twentieth century had not yet properly begun and people were unaware of the stupendous catastrophe approaching. The calm before the storm. But there is nothing like consensus here.

Of course attempts are always made to divide the past into periods. This is always an act of imagination, which fixes on matters geological (ice ages and extinction events, etc.), technological (the stone age, the bronze age, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution), dynastic (the imperial sequences in China and India, the various rulers in Europe and elsewhere), hegemonic (the Roman empire, the Arab expansion, European colonialism, the post-colonial, the neo-colonial), economic (feudalism, capitalism), ideational (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernism), and so on. These are only a few of the periodizing schemes applied to the flux of recorded events. They are dubiously illuminative, perhaps, but as someone once wrote, “we cannot not periodize,” and as this appears to be true, the hunt is on to find out how we can best put this urge to use. Perhaps periodization makes it easier to remember that no matter how massively entrenched the order of things seems in your time, there is no chance at all that they are going to be the same as they are now after a century has passed, or even ten years. And if on the other hand things feel chaotic to the point of dissolution, it is also impossible that some kind of new order will not emerge eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.

“If things feel” like this or that: these feelings too are linked to periodization, because our feelings are not just biological, but also social and cultural and therefore historical. Raymond Williams called this cultural shaping a “structure of feeling,” and this is a very useful concept for trying to comprehend differences in cultures through time. Of course as mammals we feel emotions that are basic and constant: fear, anger, hope, love. But we comprehend these biological emotions by way of language, thereby organizing them into systems of emotions that are different in different cultures and over time. Thus for instance, famously, romantic love means different things in different cultures at different times; consider ancient Greece, China, medieval Europe, anywhere.

So how you feel about your time is partly or even largely a result of that time’s structure of feeling. When time passes and that structure changes, how you feel will also change—both in your body and in how you understand it as a meaning. Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.