Petter Yxell: Post Progress

P E T T E R Y X E L L • P A I N T I N G & P R I N T M A K I N G

P o s t - P r o g r e s s

A D I S S E R T A T I O N O N T H E C U R R E N T S T A T E O F

T H E I D E A O F P R O G R E S S

G l a s g o w S c h o o l o f A r t

T u t o r : R o s s B i r r e l l

1 0 , 2 1 4 w o r d s • S u b m i t t e d 2 1 . 0 2 . 2 0 1 2

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S Y N O P S I S

This is a dissertation on the current state of the Idea of Progress. It takes its aim at the theory of a

general Progress of Mankind that reached its peak during the modernist period, and criticises this

from a postmodernist standpoint. The argument pivots on the conclusion that a dichotomic

conception of the relation between Human and Nature underlies this theory and asks whether

another kind of progress would be possible with a reassessment of these concepts.

In Chapter 1 the origins of the Idea of Progress are traced to the Enlightenment, and its dogmatic

character is described. Having thus characterised it as a modernist idea, in Chapter 2 this is posed

against the postmodernist writings of Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard

with a focus on the ‘End of History’ debate, and its modernist counterpart in the lineage of Hegel,

Kojève, Marx and Fukuyama. Chapter 3 deals with the perceived opposition between Nature and

Progress, bringing the debate up to date with Jameson’s and Lyotard’s later writings, and ideas such

as de-growth and anarcho-primitivism represented by Serge Latouche and John Zerzan. In the

conclusion, a few words on pessimism and the contemporary writings of John Gray lead the way to

an assessment of the very word progress.

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C O N T E N T S

I N T R O D U C T I O N ........................................................................................................ 1

C h a p t e r 1 : T H E I D E A O F P RO G R E S S ............................................................ 4

1 : 1 T h e C l a i m t o N e c e s s i t y ............................................................................ 6

............................................................................... 1 : 2 T h e C l a i m t o To t a l i t y 7

.................................................................................. 1 : 3 D e p e n d e n c e o n F a i t h 8

................................................................................. 1 : 4 T h e G o a l o f P r o g r e s s 9

C h a p t e r 2 : P R O G R E S S A N D H I S T O R Y ........................................... 1 1

............................................... 2 : 1 H e g e l ’ s C l o s e d S y s t e m o f P r o g r e s s 1 1

................................................................................... 2 : 2 T h e N e o - H e g e l i a n s 1 3

............................................................... 2 : 3 D e a t h o f t h e M e t a n a r r a t i v e 1 4

C h a p t e r 3 : P RO G R E S S A N D N A T U R E ......................................................... 1 8

................................................................................... 3 : 1 P r o g r e s s a s G r o w t h 1 9

.......................................................................... 3 : 2 Te c h n o l o g i c a l P r o g r e s s 2 2

....................... 3 : 3 M a n v s . N a t u r e a n d t h e Q u e s t i o n o f E s s e n c e 2 4

C h a p t e r 4 : C O N C L U S I O N ..................................................................................... 2 7

................................................................................. 4 : 1 R e s i s t i n g P e s s i m i s m 2 7

........................................................................... 4 : 2 E t y m o l o g y o f P r o g r e s s 2 9

B I B L I O G R A P H Y ....................................................................................................... 3 2

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

It is here we see that the mode of disappearance of the human [...] is precisely the product of an internal logic, of a built-

in obsolescence, of the human race's fulfilment of its most grandiose project, the Promethean project of mastering the universe, of acquiring exhaustive knowledge. We see, too, that it is this which precipitates it towards its disappearance,

much more quickly than animal species, by the acceleration it imparts to an evolution that no longer has anything natural

about it.1

Jean Baudrillard, 2009

In 2012, at the cusp of global crisis, economic and ecological, there is no shortage of doomsday

prophets and dystopic visions. But at the same time, among a large part of the populace, there is, if

not outright optimism, at least a refusal to believe in a substantial collapse. In politics and

economics, despite increasingly obvious limitations, a dogmatic focus on development and growth

perseveres. In most of the Western world an almost religious belief in the salvation of new

technology flourishes, whether it refers to solving energy and pollution crisis, or spreading

democracy and freedom. Even though in philosophy, postmodernism has questioned and

deconstructed the use of the metanarrative, the idea of a gradual advancement of civilisation still

seems lodged in the back of our minds as something reminiscent of a natural law. In short, the Idea

of a general Progress of mankind is still alive.

But what is this idea grounded on, and what does it actually entail? While the belief that a better

world is possible might be a necessary condition for human existence, and while the advancement of

thought – that is, the sense in which one thought simply could not have been thought before another

one, constitutes some sort of progress 2, it seems much less clear to me why this must be connected to

all the dogmatic assumptions of the modernist version of the Idea of Progress that our society still

nurtures. In this dissertation then, I’m taking a postmodernist position as I aim to dissect, criticise

and open up the concept of Progress to discussion. I’m doing so with a main focus on what I will

argue is one of its most fundamental cornerstones; an antagonistic relation between Man and

Nature, where Progress, in the modernist sense, equals subjugation and transcendence of our

natural surroundings.

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1 Jean Baudrillard, Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?, pp. 16-19

2 In this way, even postmodernism must be said to be progressive in some sense: the position from which we can question and deconstruct everything that has come before has to be thought of as an advanced position by its protagonists, no?

In Chapter 1 I expand on the definition of the Idea of Progress while also touching on the history of

the idea, as described in the works of J.B. Bury and Robert Nisbet. By placing the definite

emergence of the current version of the idea in the Age of the Enlightenment, and stressing its

metanarrative, universalist and dogmatic nature, I set up the parameters for what I will go on to

discuss. I also introduce the difference between a closed and an open system of Progress.

Chapter 2 starts to dissect the Idea of Progress by examining its reliance on a certain concept of

history, and the question if that history has or can come to an end. Following on from Chapter 1 I

start with describing the ‘modernist version’ of an End of History; i.e. a closed system of Progress

represented first and foremost by Hegel, but nourished right up to the 1990s by the lineage of Marx,

Kojève and Fukuyama. I then introduce the postmodernist ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’3

and the idea of an eternal present. Here I describe a spectrum from the pessimism of Jean

Baudrillard, via Derrida’s famous critique of Fukuyama, to the search for a new ‘progressivity’ of

Fredric Jameson, whose contention that most, if not all, of the perceived Ends actually are of a

geographical or spatial, rather than temporal, nature leads the way into Chapter 3.

Chapter 3 is where my main argument is formed; that to do with Progress in relation to Nature. It is

also where I continue on from the postmodernist writings of the late 20th century to more

contemporary debates. Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard are touchstones, but I also bring in less

canonised names like anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan and de-growth theorist Serge Latouche. The

opposition between modernist Progress and Nature is investigated in subchapters dealing with the

model of growth and the role of technology, which eventually lead to the question whether it is

possibly to re-evaluate the very essence of the concepts Human and Nature, and whether this might

open up a possibility for a new, truer form of progressivity.

In the Conclusion, the inevitable question is asked whether Post-Progress means the end of Progress

or a new, redefined form of it. While leaving the question relatively open, I do make some remarks

on the traces of modernism’s essentialism and totality-thinking that is to be found even in the

pessimistic denouncement of the Enlightenment project by political philosopher John Gray, and I

end on questioning the validity of the very word progress in comparison with the adjective

progressive and the more multifaceted concept of constant change.

The alert reader of this dissertation will notice that throughout the text I’m using capital letters in a

perhaps seemingly inconsistent way, not least when it comes to its central word; progress. This is,

hopefully, not as haphazard as it first may seem, but is my way of implying a distinction between the

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3 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge, p. xxiv

full theory of modernist Progress, which is my main subject, and a more empirically defined

progressive process. In other words, when referring to the Idea of Progress, I will use a capital P,

while when speaking of a development within a defined area, I will use only lower-case, such as for

example ‘technological progress’. The same attempt at distinction between ‘high concept’ and

everyday use is extended to words such as human, nature, time, end, and, perhaps most confusingly,

history; where History with a capital H refers to the universalist ‘grand theory’ of history in

modernism, while lower-case history is used for anything from natural, cosmic history to the history

of a certain subject, for example the history of the Idea of Progress. I’m fully aware that this

differentiation is problematic (the whole ‘End of History’ debate could for example be said to

revolve around the question whether there can really be different usages of the word history, or

whether, as Hegel would claim, that as soon as one leaves History with a capital H, one is really just

talking about Time, or process), and there are several instances in the text where I’ve hesitated on

the usage. Nevertheless, for the most parts I’ve found it necessary to at least try to make the

distinction and I hope it will prove helpful to the understanding of the text. For other problematic or

obscure words, definitions will be included in footnotes.

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C h a p t e r 1

T H E I D E A O F P R O G R E S S

Only process as a whole has meaning, never the precise fleeting now; but since this process is really no more than a simple

succession of now in terms of before and after, and the history of salvation has meanwhile become pure chronology, a semblance of meaning can be saved only by introducing the idea – albeit one lacking any rational foundation – of a

continuous, infinite progress. Under the influence of the natural sciences, ‘development’ and ‘progress’, which merely

translate the idea of a chronologically oriented process, become the guiding categories of historical knowledge.4

Giorgio Agamben, 1978

In this first chapter I shall try to lay down the parameters for the discussion to follow. That is; I will

try to define what the Idea of Progress is (or, maybe rather, was – at the height of modernism). To

do this I will rely heavily on two seminal works on the history of this idea: J. B. Bury’s The Idea of

Progress. An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth and Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress. I shall

draw from these works the explanations of three concepts integral to the Idea of Progress; the claim

to necessity, the claim to totality, and the dependence on faith. Before doing so however, I will try to

very quickly summarise their general content; i.e. the actual history of the idea.

My first objective in doing so is stressing the man-made and modern nature of the idea, and

breaking the illusion of naturalness it must still assume in a culture in which it is so embedded such

as ours. It is strikingly difficult to imagine, but easy to show evidence of, cultures where the belief in

decline, statism or cyclical time has been dominant rather than that of human advancement. It is

also striking, reading Bury and Nisbet, how essentially Eurocentric or ‘Western’ the idea seems to

be.5 Indeed, both make a chronological journey through an almost identical list of Western thinkers.

Starting in antiquity, with Plato, Lucretius and Seneca, then moving through the Middle Ages via St.

Augustine and Roger Bacon, and to the Renaissance of Machiavelli and Francis Bacon, the two

historians differ mainly on which kind of recognition they award these well-established names. Bury

quotes them mainly to show that they can not be said to have had any real conception of Progress,

while Nisbet sets out to repudiate Bury and show that there were indeed seeds of the idea

throughout this history of Western thought. Nisbet explains this difference with the emergence of a

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4 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 106

5 The notable exclusion of non-western philosophers in both works may of course also depend on negligence or a certain cultural blindness of the authors. The views of for example Eastern philosophies on Progress and History would be an interesting subject that would probably warrant a whole other dissertation.

‘great amount of specialised scholarship on classical and medieval thought that has appeared since

[Bury’s] book’6 but I think it can be argued that the disagreement should at least partly be attributed

to the different positions of the writers. Bury’s work, appearing at the beginning of the 20th century

can indeed be described as a ‘historically designed celebration of the idea, dealing with it so proudly

as a distinctively modern idea’7, while Nisbet’s, written during the latter half of the same century in

the midst of postmodernist critique and what he sees as an ‘intellectual-literary malaise’8 of

scepticism, can be understood more as a defence of the Idea of Progress, prompting him to adapt a

looser definition and try to show that the idea is more fundamental to our civilisation than Bury

might have thought.

It is however not my intention to try and judge or go further into that debate here. The more

interesting point for this dissertation is where Bury and Nisbet concur, namely in situating the

definite triumph of the Idea of Progress in the Age of the Enlightenment, seeing it gradually

brought to full fruition in the period of late 18th to early 19th century. Turgot formulated ‘the first

systematic, secular and naturalistic statement of the ‘modern’ idea of progress’9 in 1750, which his

friend Condorcet extrapolated while stating that:

Nature has set no term for the perfection of our human faculties, that the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite; and that the progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards independent of any power that might wish to halt it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us. This progress will never be reversed as long as the earth occupies its present place in the vast system of the whole universe.10

Kant added to this the idea of final causes in nature, and a ‘universal civil society’ as ‘the highest

problem for the human species’11, while Saint-Simon and Comte went on to try and find the laws by

which Progress is achieved and by which ‘political, moral and intellectual progress are inseparable

from material progress’12.

This birth of the full Idea of Progress during the Enlightenment and its later passing on into high

modernism is crucial to the argument put forth in this dissertation, as it coincides with the

formulation and cementation of a certain concept of the relation between Human and Nature

which is indeed integral to the Enlightenment project, and as I shall argue, to the modernist Idea of

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6 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, p. x

7 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, p. 299




11 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress. An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth, p. 133

12 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress. An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth, pp. 158-159

Progress. Suffice it now to state that, in addition to the general definition sketched below, the Idea of

Progress is, from the Enlightenment on, also intimately connected to the project of understanding,

subjugating and transcending Nature. In one of the founding texts of the Enlightenment, Descartes

described its aim to ‘thus render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature’13.

1 : 1

T H E C L A I M T O N E C E S S I T Y

The claim to necessity is what differentiates the Idea of Progress from the recognition that an

advancement is simply possible. Or in other words, it is the difference between Progress and change.

To accept that everything is in constant flux, and that some changes could be good is an insight that

most thinkers except the most ardently pessimistic would agree on, but to claim that the outcome of

historical change, in the longer run and in the bigger picture, is inevitably for the better is what

characterises the Idea of Progress; it is what makes it into a doctrine. It is also what Nisbet, in his

attempts to trace the idea as far back as possible, sometimes chooses to neglect, while Bury, being

the more stringent of the two, asserts:

Sporadic observations – such as man’s gradual rise from primitive and savage conditions to a certain level of civilisation by a series of inventions, or the possibility of some future additions to his knowledge of nature – which were inevitable at a certain stage of human reflection, do not amount to an anticipation of the idea [of progress]. 14

The theory would have little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in the future depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an external will. 15

Now, to assume such a necessity of Progress in the area of knowledge might, as I implied in my

Introduction, be somewhat easy to do (although it is by no means an absolute, logical necessity, as a

deconstructivist like Derrida would point out, since both knowledge and truth are contestable

concepts), and was indeed the first step in laying down the foundations of the doctrine. This feat is

accredited to Fontenelle, who in 1688 wrote:

A good cultivated mind contains, so to speak, all the minds of the preceding centuries; it is but a single identical mind which has been developing and improving itself all the time [...] and there will be no end to the growth and development of human wisdom.16

But the second step in the emergence of the modern Idea of Progress was, as exemplified earlier in

reference to Comte, to claim that such a progress of knowledge also translates into a progressive

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13 René Descartes, ‘Discourse on Method’, in Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, p. 74




transformation of the world; i.e. to extrapolate the Idea of Progress to include areas such as social,

cultural and technological progress. The necessity of such a direct causal relation might seem a lot

more questionable, but has nevertheless grown seemingly inseparable from the idea and can be seen

to be manifested in for example modernism’s idea of the avant-garde. Taken to extremity then it

could be said to be exemplified in the vulgar belief that anything new will automatically be better

than that which came before it.

1 : 2

T H E C L A I M T O T O T A L I T Y

With the claim to totality I mean the claim that the Idea of Progress has of explaining the entirety

of human history, or as Nisbet puts it: ‘the idea of progress holds that mankind has advanced in the

past [...], is now advancing, and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future’17. Bury, as

well, stresses how for the full Idea of Progress it does not suffice to describe a progress from one

point in time to another, but that it needs to explain the whole of the past and the whole of the

conceivable future. In other words, this is what makes the Idea of Progress into the quintessential

modernist metanarrative. That such a metanarrative describes a continuous progress stands in sharp

contrast to for example Plato’s conception of history as consisting of 72000-year cycles, in which the

first half represents a golden age and the second an outdrawn degradation18. But the claim to

totality also excludes less radical theories such as those of Lucretius, who would recognise a past

progress but was unwilling to extend it to the future, because of a conviction of imminent disaster19,

or in others, because of a simple resistance to have history deal with anything but the past. In

modern times, a similar resistance to the claim to totality is seen in historian Oswald Spengler who

held that progress (or, for that sake, regress) could only be measured from within a specific culture,

and could thus not be expanded to the whole of human history20. But it is exactly that humanity

shares a common history, and in that sense, a common culture, which is the claim of the Idea of

Progress.

Now, the claim to totality can in fact imply two different things. Either, following Bury, you have a

completely open-ended definition of history and thus assert that Progress must be destined to

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20 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, pp. 321-322

‘advance indefinitely’21 if it is to be compatible with the Idea of Progress. Or, there is an attainable

end-goal to Progress, which thus must become synonymous with History coming to an end – the

Idea of Progress still describes the entirety of human history, but as a closed system. This latter

alternative is most notably exemplified by Hegel, and heavily criticised by Bury for being

‘antagonistic to Progress as a practical doctrine’22, while the former alternative, according to Kojève,

can be traced back to Kant, since in him Absolute Knowledge is an ‘infinite task’23, and could be

criticised on the paradox of it positing an ideal that we are progressing towards, but excluding the

possibility of ever fully realising this ideal.

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D E P E N D E N C E O N F A I T H

This is one point on which Bury and Nisbet emphatically agree:

Enough has been said to show that the Progress of humanity belongs to the same order of ideas as Providence or personal immortality. It is true or it is false, and like them it cannot be proved either true or false. Belief in it is an act of faith.24

The point is that for these believers there was no more necessity for empirical proof of universal progress than there was for a geometrical proposition – or, if one was religious, for a commandment or other injunction in the Bible.25

In other words, while positing rather rigid rules for what the Idea of Progress is with the claim to

necessity and the claim to totality, both writers agree that the Idea of Progress can not be proven

right, logically or empirically. One that would perhaps disagree would be Hegel, whose closed

system of Progress is driven by strictly deduced logic, yet I think it can be argued that this too is

based upon one basic presupposition; the faith in Spirit, which Hegel means is not religious, but is

the belief in the Essence of Man, but in extension is also the belief in an Absolute Knowledge.

The relation between religion, or Providence, and Progress is an interesting side-note to this, where

Bury and Nisbet disagree. Bury argues that one of the main obstacles for the Idea of Progress to

overcome was the belief in Providence, which was fundamentally incongruous with it since Progress

‘must be the necessary outcome of the psychical and social nature of man; it must not be at the

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23 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 129

24J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress. An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth, p. 2


mercy of any external will’26. Nisbet on the other hand, holds that Progress is a natural continuation

of Providence, and goes so far as to deem the survival of Progress dependant on a ‘major religious

reformation’ and ends his book by stating that ‘only [...] in the context of a true culture in which the

core is a deep and wide sense of the sacred are we likely to regain the vital conditions of progress

itself and of faith in progress’27. Again, this can be compared to Hegel, in whose theory religion is

but a stage in the progressive revelation of Spirit in Man himself. Thus Bury and Hegel both

represent a position that I think is fundamental to modernism: the survival of a faith in Man as a

supra-natural being after the death of God. John Gray echoes this sentiment when he says that

‘humanism is not much more than secular Christianity’28, which has simply taken ‘Christianity’s

unhappiest myth – the separation of humans from the rest of the natural world – and stripped it of

the transcendental content that gave it meaning’29. This is something I will come back to when

introducing postmodernism into the equation, which in many regards can be said to represent the

sceptical position that questions the existence of Absolute Knowledge, and thus in extension Man’s

oppositional position to Nature.30

1 : 4

T H E G O A L O F P R O G R E S S

Let me end this chapter with a few notes on the subject and the perceived goal of Progress; i.e.

progress for whom, relative to what, and measured how? These are of course crucial questions, that

will underlie a lot of the critique against the doctrine, but here I will just quickly touch on the

somewhat sketchy answers that the Enlightenment and modernism give to these. First off, progress

in this view must be human31; and since it’s a modernist metanarrative we’re talking about here, it is

posing a universal claim, i.e. not progress on an individual level, but Progress of Mankind or at least

Civilisation. This is another side of its claim to totality, and while it can certainly be argued that

Western progress has had massively negative effects on other cultures, the idea is that it’s not

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28 John Gray, Heresies, p. 6


30 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 116

31 This is in fact not as self-evident as it sounds, since at least the progress of knowledge could theoretically be passed over to artificial intelligence in a post-human world, as I will touch on later in this work.

culturally specific but that Western progress equals, or at least will eventually equal, Progress for the

entire humanity.

But what does this Progress consist in exactly? Is it measured in general happiness? In emancipation,

freedom and equality? In some kind of cultural or civilisational achievements? While different

thinkers have focused on certain aspects and criticised others, I think it can be said that the idea

which eventually was adopted by modernism was based on a somewhat blurry assumption that these

all enforce each other in some way or another, so that one could speak of a ‘General Progress of

Mankind’32. While it is the viewpoint of several critical voices whom I shall quote that some types of

progress (such as for example technological progress) are actually detrimental to other types of

progress (social or emancipatory progress), a kind of saving grace for a believer in Bury’s and

Nisbet’s definition of Progress is exactly the paradox mentioned earlier: since it is the question of an

indefinite process, the actual relation between the progress in different areas, cannot be ascertained.

While, for a believer in a closed system of Progress, as we shall see in next chapter’s treatment of

Hegel, Kojève, Marx and Fukuyama, the end-goal, i.e. the parameters that progress is measured by,

must be defined.

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32 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, pp. 6-8 and J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress. An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth, p. 70

C h a p t e r 2

P R O G R E S S A N D H I S T O R Y

The present generation thinks it has found history, it thinks it is even overburdened with history. It moans about historicism

– lucus a non lucendo. Something is called history which is not history at all. According to the present, because everything is dissolved into history, one must attain the supra-historical again.33

Martin Heidegger, 1924

In this chapter I shall begin to criticise the Idea of Progress, by confronting it with the

postmodernist debate of the late 20th century. The main issue here is the temporal claims of the

Idea of Progress; in other words its relation to the concept of History, which will be posited against

the postmodernist theme of the End of History. Before doing so however, I will discuss what may be

termed a ‘modernist End of History’; which corresponds to that of a closed system of Progress.

While Fukuyama is the protagonist of such a theory contemporary with the postmodernists, I will

begin by following the traces back to Hegel, who will continue to be important to my argument in

the next chapter.

2 : 1

H E G E L ’ S C L O S E D S Y S T E M O F P R O G R E S S

Indeed Hegel could in many ways be argued to be the philosopher who made the Idea of Progress

truly modern. While his predecessors in the Enlightenment, of which he addresses directly Kant,

have been credited with expanding, spreading and adopting the faith in Progress, Hegel is the one

who goes furthest in defining its logic, and thereby also laying naked its problematic. He does this in

three main steps:

Firstly he comes up with a solution to the relation between Man and History. While the

Enlightenment thinkers established the important separation of Man and Nature, Hegel establishes

the unification of Man and Time. In other words, in Hegel, History is no longer something that Man

is placed into; instead Man is History. In an extremely over-simplified way, the argument goes as

follows: What distinguishes Man from Nature is his self-consciousness. This self-consciousness

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33 Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, p. 20E

emerges with a desire to something that is not; i.e. while a natural desire, like hunger, is directed

towards something that is, like food, Man, in his being aware of himself in relation to his

surroundings, has the capacity to desire something beyond what is. This desire moves him to action

that changes the essence of nature. And it is only this essential change, in the form of work or war,

that constitutes History, for without it change would remain cyclical in the manner of Nature and

the world would stay essentially the same34. At the same time, Man is also bound by his physical

existence as part of Nature, therefore, while changing (or in Hegel’s word; negating) the essence of

Nature, he is also changing himself. Thus Man is inseparable from, and synonymous with, History.

Secondly, Hegel comes up with a more totalising and progressive epochalisation35 of History than

any of his predecessors. Since Man is self-consciousness, and Man is synonymous with History,

History becomes a progressive revelation of self-consciousness to itself. This process then

encompasses and integrates the whole of religion, art and even philosophy as mere stages in the

progress of what Hegel calls Spirit. And even more importantly – as has already been mentioned – it

establishes an end-goal to this progress; which is the total understanding of History/Man by

himself; i.e. complete self-consciousness, or Absolute Knowledge. There is however, as we shall discuss

further on, no clear answer as to which extent such an end-goal belongs in the ideal or the

empirical/political world, or what the result of reaching this end-goal would be.

Thirdly, and perhaps most influentially, Hegel describes the method that this progressive movement

of History follows, namely dialectics. In this view, a thesis, or an abstract, is always accompanied by an

antithesis; a negation of the abstract, which together with the former makes a synthesis, also called a

concrete. This then, according to Hegel, is what constitutes all historical change, and in fact makes it

inevitable.

While these generalised fundaments of Hegel’s philosophy has quite rightfully owed him a

reputation as a teleological thinker of a closed system of Progress, what makes him a continuously

relevant thinker, both for contemporary philosophy and this dissertation, is the complexities,

contradictions and problematics inherent and expanded on in his theories. For example, the reading

of dialectics as a simple temporal causality of thesis > anti-thesis > synthesis, is, as Fredric Jameson

points out, a vulgar simplification ‘which scarcely does justice to Hegel's deeper appreciation of

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34 Giorgio Agamben expands on our way of thinking of Time in spatial images in his ‘Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’ where he shows that as long as the image of the circle was prevalent as symbol of Time (as in Antiquity), it equalled something natural, objective and essentially ahistorical (Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, p.102), while it is the modern concept of time as rectilinear, homogenous and irreversible that makes History and Progress possible (Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 105). Friedrich Nietzche, resuscitating Plato’s idea of identical cycles in his hypothesis of ‘eternal recurrence’ at the end of the 19th century, can thus be identified as one of the most radical challenges to modern historicism, and one that would overshadow the whole question of progress and the debate of the End of History, if I was to delve into it.

35 Epochalisation is a word seemingly made up and kept within a specific philosophic tradition, which in addition to Hegel has been used in reference to Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. Its meaning is simply a dividing up of History into epochs.

failure and contradiction and turns the historical movement of the dialectic into a banal and

uplifting saga of inevitable progress’36. While if one turns the causality on its head, or, as Hegel

insists on himself, accepts the three parts to always exist simultaneously, the dialectic turns into an

expansion and complication of every historical moment rather than a resolution. Another

problematic point, important for this dissertation, is the question of essence; the essence of Man and

essential change are difficult concepts with which a lot of the theory’s inevitability stands and falls.

But before turning to such criticism, I will exemplify the problems arising from a more traditional

reading of Hegel’s theory of history as that of a closed system.

2 : 2

T H E N E O - H E G E L I A N S

With his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève re-established the influence of Hegel in

the 20th century. But by focusing heavily on certain aspects of Hegel’s theory – the so called

Master/Slave-dialectic, Hegel’s idea of a universal state, and his admiration of Napoleon – he also

reinforced the idea of Hegel’s as a closed system, and was the one who popularised the term ‘End of

History’ in a first wave of such debates.

This concept of a universal state as the political end-goal of History was then taken up again and

further simplified by Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 article ‘The End of History?’ and the following

book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama here draws the conclusion that with the collapse

of the communist states, liberal democracy and global capitalism have proven to represent that

universal state which Kojève’s reading of Hegel predicted and that History has in fact come to an

end. While there is still an important problem of the ideal versus the empirical here (’Depending on

how it works to his advantage and serves his thesis, Fukuyama defines liberal democracy here as an

actual reality and there as a simple ideal.’37) it is clear that in this kind of reading of Hegel as a

closed system, the Idea of Progress is accentuated as political progress, with a goal defined in terms of

emancipation.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Marx used Hegel in a similar sense, although Marx also

altered and added to Hegel’s theory in a more independent and fundamental way than both

Fukuyama and Kojève (with the definition of History as a materialist process). While Marx’s History

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36 Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations, p. 20

37 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 78

is a similarly political and closed system with a defined end-goal (the universal communist state),

there are variations in how this Progress is defined, in terms of driving forces, and goal (with a

greater emphasis on social and economic equality in relation to freedom).

The example of the ‘Right Hegelians and the Left Hegelians’38 serves to show that the burden of a

closed system of Progress, that of defining the goal of Progress, is a tricky one, bound to an over-

estimation of the present. But the main argument against such a reading of History is not whether

the goal is ideal or empirical, capitalist or socialist, present or imminent – the real problematic

question is what happens after the end is reached. In a cutting remark on a famous footnote by

Kojève, where the latter ruminates on the differences between American and Japanese ‘post-

historicity’39, Jacques Derrida re-interprets him as saying that ‘Japan had gone further, so to speak, in

its race after the end of history’, and that ‘there is an even more final end of history’40. The point

Derrida is making, and which he also gives Kojève credit for having acknowledged, is that however

you envision the End of History there will be ‘an essential lack of specificity, an indetermination

that remains the ultimate mark of the future’41. In other words, we cannot really stop thinking of the

present as a ‘hinge’42 between the past and the future, and thus events will continue to have an

indeterminate impact and the so called End of History can only ever be the end of ‘a certain

determined concept of history’43 . Which, in a way, is the realisation that distinguishes the

postmodernist version of the End of History.

2 : 3

D E A T H O F T H E M E T A N A R R A T I V E

For if we accept Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’44,

the End of History from a postmodernist perspective means less an endpoint in a temporal process,

than a disqualification, or at least redefinition, of the word history as such. Or if we return to the

terminology used in this dissertation; the ‘claim to totality’ in the Idea of Progress is shot through by

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38 For this definition, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 51-74

39 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pp. 161-162

40 Jacques Derrida, The Spectres of Marx, p. 89


42 This expression is also borrowed from Derrida, in his continuous Shakespearean metaphor of time as ‘out of joint’ or ‘unhinged’


44 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge, p. xxiv

postmodernism’s program to ‘wage a war on totality’ and ‘activate the differences’45. By asking

whether the whole of humanity can really be said to have followed a continuous path from its very

origin, and whether there can really be a universally accepted goal to such a history, postmodernism

isn’t so much saying that this is definitely false (since the true/false-dichotomy is itself part of such a

modernist language), as it is pointing out that it is a scientifically useless, and even dangerous, pre-

conception. A generalising metanarrative tends to suppress both relative differences (be they

cultural, geographical or historical), and, as a consequence, the space and incentive for action, and

in its extremity it turns dangerous because: ‘desire for a unitary and totalizing truth lends itself to

the unitary and totalizing practice of the system's managers’46. In other words; a theory of totality

might lapse into a politics of totalitarianism, and, to cite Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,

the dialectic of the Enlightenment risks resulting in a new barbarism, rather than a liberation.47

If, then, the postmodernist End of History is a different one than the modernist version48 , the

dilemma it leads to is a similar one: What happens after the death of the metanarrative?

The whole problem of speaking about the end (particularly the end of history) is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending.49

Indeed, the writings of Jean Baudrillard could be read as the dark underside of the same coin that

Fukuyama flips. The prospect of any future progress is in both as unlikely as the rapid development

of the last century is unique and irreversible. But where Fukuyama sees in global capitalism the

triumph of liberal and democratic values, Baudrillard sees that

Capital has cannibalized all negativity, that of history and that of work in a – literally – sarcastic fashion: devouring the very substance of the human being to transform it into its essence as productive being. It has unceremoniously devoured the dialectic by parodistically taking the opposing terms upon itself, by parodistically going beyond its own contradictions.50

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45 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge, p. 82


47 Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, pp. xi, xvi - xvii

48 If, indeed, since the dissolution of the concept of History does after all happen at a specific time, and it is the very termination through self-consciousness of such a concept that signals Hegel’s ’End of History’ on its base level. Thus, again, the Ideal (or here, Conceptual) cannot be so easily separated from the Empirical (or Temporal), and I think it can be argued that many of the postmodernist theories do in fact bear resemblances to Hegel’s and Kojève’s ruminations on a post-historical world. Even Fukuyama does, to be fair, make the point that he is only proclaiming the end of ‘history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times. [my italics]’ (Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, p. xii), in other words, the end of the concept. Still, the point can be made that there is an important difference in that the postmodernist end of the concept represents a conscious dissolution in its proper sense, in contrast to the modernist idea of reaching some kind of homogenous, universal goal. In which case the postmodernists are more akin to what Kojève with scorn describes as sceptics (Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pp. 108-109, 116).

49 Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, p. 110


Where Fukuyama claims that ‘technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth’51,

Baudrillard describes a situation in which technology – and especially communication and media

technology – has emptied the event of any meaning, resulting in a world where ‘the cause-effect

relation and hence all historical continuity’ is ‘suppressed’52, and the present has turned into a

spectacle of endless recycling. Where Fukuyama sees the ‘universal state’ of globalisation as a

culmination of History, Baudrillard counters that ‘the universalization of facts, data, knowledge,

information is a precondition of their disappearance’53.

But while this particular postmodernist view of the End of History seems to be just as problematic,

and a few shades bleaker, than any of those of a modernist closed system of Progress, Baudrillard

also shares the conviction that ‘history itself has always, deep down, been an immense simulation

model’54 and even though he would certainly oppose any optimistic interpretation of this conclusion

I think that the very talk of an illusion of the End, must hint at a possible overcoming of this

dystopia. In other words, postmodernism’s rejection of a ‘certain concept of history’ points to the

challenge of leaving the totality and necessity of the metanarrative behind, but still retain the

possibility of positive change; i.e. being progressive, without believing in the Idea of Progress.

In fact, Derrida refuses to accept an End of History and instead proposes ‘another opening of

event-ness as historicity’55 , and in a similar mould of less pessimistic postmodernism, Fredric

Jameson searches for a way to reclaim utopia from totalitarianism and restart history. In his succinct

article ‘The End of History or the End of Art’ he proposes two ways of thinking about an end; ‘an end

which is a realization, which can be missed, and whose omission results in little more than a sorry

afterlife and second-best’56, and an end as a supersession of a system by another system. The

former, it seems to me, describes rather well Baudrillard’s vision when he speaks of ‘a thwarted end,

a homeopathic end, an end distilled into all the various metastases of the refusal of death’57, while

the latter is defined by Jameson himself as Hegelian. But as I understand him, this is Hegelian in an

open sense; in the sense that any system, even a critically postmodernist one, can always be

superseded (i.e. a progression; not as another step in the modernist Progress, but as a supersession of

that entire paradigm). What stops this supersession from happening then, is what Jameson calls ‘a

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51 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, p. xiv




55 Jacques Derrida, The Spectres of Marx, pp. 93-94

56 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn, p. 81


blockage of the historical imagination’58, which is partly due to an overestimation of the present, a

loss of genuine historicity to an endless recycling of simulacra59, or, in some sense, to the very

‘Illusion of the End’. But what Jameson notes, when directly addressing Fukuyama, and what will

constitute the link to the main argument in chapter 3, is that this current illusion of the end – this

‘eternal present’ that we imagine and therefore find ourselves trapped in – is in fact less to do with

Time than with Space. That is, in a globalised world, it is not only difficult to imagine a further

expansion of the system or an exterior alternative to it; there also arises a notion of the interior

unsustainability of the very methods that have driven this expansion, this particular concept of

history:

It seems to me particularly significant that the emergence of late capitalism [...], along with the consequent collapse of the communist systems in the East, coincided with a generalized and planetary ecological disaster. It is not particularly the rise of the ecological movements I have in mind here [...]; rather, it is the end of a Promethean conception of production that seems to me significant, in the way that it makes it difficult for people today to continue to imagine development as a conquest of nature.60

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59 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 18 and Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, p. 27


C h a p t e r 3

P R O G R E S S A N D N A T U R E

The striking thing about this metaphysics of development is that it needs no finality. Development is not attached to an

Idea, like that of the emancipation of reason and of human freedoms. It is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone. It assimilates risks, memorizes their informational value and uses this as a new

mediation necessary to its functioning. It has no necessity itself other than a cosmological chance.

It has thus no end, but it does have a limit, the expectation of the life of the sun. The anticipated explosion of this star is the only challenge objectively posed to development.61

Jean-François Lyotard, 1993

Lyotard’s introduction to his book The Inhuman can be read as a direct indictment of what I have in

this dissertation chosen to call an ‘open system’ of Progress. He proclaims that even if it does not set

up a specific end-goal for humanity, it must nevertheless come to an end; ultimately by the death of

the sun. While J. B. Bury acknowledges this fact early on in his treatise on the Idea of Progress, he

neglects to admit its full ramifications for the theory, since, to him, that limitation is distant enough

to still leave ‘a range vast enough to seem almost endless’62. But, the essential thing to note about the

explosion of the sun is not when it happens but how: that it is not an end defined and determined by

human will, but a limit posed by nature. As such I think it can also be read as a symbol of exactly that

which Jameson talks about when he says that ‘time has become space’63. It symbolises the gradual

realisation at the waning of modernity of the futility of the Enlightenment project: if Progress is

defined in terms of conquest and subjugation of nature, it will always ultimately fail, since there are

natural limits we cannot transcend. These limits are not so much a point in time – as the death of

the sun would suggest on a superficial reading – but rather limits to do with our being in space and

our relation to our surroundings (can there be truly human life without the sun?, is the question that

Lyotard goes on to elaborate). In quantum physics this interrelational problem is exemplified by the

discovery that there are things that simply can’t be measured; because of the very act of measuring

itself. On a broader and more influential scale it is manifest in the heightened awareness of our

simultaneous dependence on and destruction of natural resources and biological diversity. In this

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61 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 7


63 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, p. 21

chapter then, I will investigate the ways in which Progress, despite being in its heyday posited as

something of a natural law, seems to be at odds with, and ultimately limited by, that which we call

Nature.

3 : 1

P R O G R E S S A S G R O W T H

As a starting point for this investigation will serve the common and broadly accepted ecologist

observation that ‘exponential growth is incompatible with a finite world’64. This objection is of

course addressed foremost to the dogma of growth in late capitalism which Marx mockingly

described in the mid 1800s already:

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! [...] Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not

for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth.65

Marx goes on to describe in Capital the process of capital accumulation and defines the capitalist

system as a fundamentally expansive one. In other words, the notion of more or less unlimited

growth is integral to capitalism and it is also primarily to a capitalist globalisation that Jameson

refers when he speaks of that ‘moment when the market suffuses the world’66 which causes the

spatial blockage of imagination which concluded the last chapter. But as Serge Latouche, one of the

main theorists behind the concept of de-growth, points out, such ‘infinite growth’ is not solely

identified with capitalism:

A critique of the growth society implies a critique of capitalism, but the converse is not necessarily true. Capitalism, neo-liberal or otherwise, and productivist socialism are both variants on the same project for a growth society based upon the development of the productive forces, which will supposedly facilitate humanity's march in the direction of progress.67

Latouche then, wants to identify growth with the whole of modernity, and this is exactly the point I

want to make here; that in modernity, or in modernism, Progress has consistently been thought of

as synonymous with growth. Nisbet confirms this when he posits ‘acceptance of the worth of

economic and technological growth’68 as one of the five major premises for belief in Progress and

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64 Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth, p. 3

65 Karl Marx, Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy, p. 309




writes that ‘from the very beginning there has been close relationship between belief in the general

progress of mankind and belief in the necessity of economic growth’69. But this is not only true in

the realm of economics; rather, growth or accumulation is the modernist model par excellence for

all areas of Progress, down to its primordial idea of the advancement of thought/knowledge, which

Lyotard critically assesses when he writes ‘the notion of progress [...] represents nothing other than

the movement by which knowledge is presumed to accumulate [my italics]’70. The modernist motto of

‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ thus, is the motto of growth, accumulation and expansion on

every level of human history.

What, then, is so unnatural about growth? The question is apt, and can be answered by tracing a

natural analogy that has been used in the history of the Idea of Progress, by amongst others Bacon,

Pascal, Saint-Sorlin, Perrault and Hume: that of comparing the history of mankind to the life of a

single man, with youth, maturity and old age.71 With the advent of Enlightenment, these aphorisms

were beginning to be cut short of their less positive sounding latter parts – Fontenelle, resisting the

invocation of decay, declared that ‘Man will have no old age’72 – and were eventually scrapped

altogether. What we are left with then is the illusion of a growth without any negative counterpart;

with only gains and no losses; a linear expansion with no room for natural cycles. Which is of course

in practice translated into capitalism’s completely artificial, exponentially accelerating accumulation

which, as was mentioned at the start, is increasingly accepted to be on a collisional course with

natural limitations. Both on a banal level of for example a seemingly unsustainable population

growth, but also on a more subtle and complex level as in the implications of thermodynamics and

entropy73 on an economy based on energy transformation.74

What Lyotard does by comparing scientific knowledge to what he calls ‘narrative’ knowledge and

introducing paralogy75 as the principle of postmodern knowledge, is to question the basic model of

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71 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress. An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth, pp. 30, 59, 118


73 Entropy in its original definition is the amount of energy in a system that cannot be used for work. This energy is eventually dispersed, through heat, which makes it impossible to reverse an energy transformation. In its extended use, entropy can refer to any process of dispersal. Interestingly for this dissertation, entropy also has a direct relation to Time, in that entropy will always increase, to the point at which all the energy in the universe is so dispersed that movement is no longer possible (what is called heat death). Theoretically, time would then stop, or possibly go into reverse. The second law of thermodynamics thus seems to prove the progressive, inevitable movement towards an End, although not a process or end that’s desirable or even relatable to human life.

74 Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth, pp. 14-15

75 While paralogy – the antonym of homology – is most commonly used as a negative; describing a faulty logic, Lyotard provocatively reinterprets it as a positive term; borrowing more from its biological definition of a ‘divergence from a common point of origin’ and choosing its greek roots (there are many variations of their usages) as para = ‘contrary to, beyond’ and logos = ‘order, reasoned discourse’

knowledge as cumulative, and thereby disrupt the process discussed in Chapter 1 by which

progressive thought is assumed to automatically translate into an expansionist version of Progress in

all areas. And it is of course this disruption that Latouche takes advantage of when he claims that

‘the critique of modernity does not imply that we must simply reject it; it means, rather, that we

have to transcend it.’76 In other words, thinking in terms of an advancement of thought rather than an

accumulation of knowledge points towards the possibility of going beyond the simplistic formula of

growth in other areas as well; realising that to invite cycles and reduction can in some cases be more

progressive, in a truer sense of the word, than to accelerate accumulation.

The notion that progressive growth in certain areas is incompatible with a general Progress of

Mankind is of course, as both Bury and Nisbet points out, not a new one. Fontenelle himself could

conceive of no connection between his growth of knowledge and any progress in the social fields 77,

Rousseau famously denounced scientific and economic progress while retaining some hope in the

advancement of equality and democracy78, Malthus warned early on of the threat of population

growth to that of human happiness79, and Toynbee saw the worship of technology as a direct

obstacle to human progress80.

There is nevertheless a sense that today, this kind of critique has not only intensified, but also

changed character; from being predominantly based upon opinions and predictions, to arising from

directly observable and even logically or mathematically deduced limits to growth and expansion:

quantum physics discovery of the limits of measurability and scientific exactness, Marx’s proof of

the diminishing returns in capital growth being extrapolated with the addition of

thermoeconomics81, and last but not least; the improbability of further geographical expansion and

the concomitant realisation of the finiteness of natural resources such as for example the world’s oil

reserves. There seems to be ample reasons then to identify that ‘certain concept of history’ which

Derrida accepts might have come to an end as the history of uninhibited growth.

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80 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, pp. 6, 313

81 Thermoeconomics is a term developed by economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, to describe that which was hinted at earlier; the implications of the second law of thermodynamics; entropy and the irreversibility of energy-transformation, for our economic system. It is explained in detail in his book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen

3 : 2

T E C H N O L O G I C A L P R O G R E S S

In this segment I want to make the point that rather than just one more area in which the Idea of

Progress is made manifest, technology is located at the very root of the idea. Not only can it be

claimed that today’s rapid development of technology is the hub around which other areas of

progress – economic, social and political – circles, but in its wider definition of a method to shape and

control our surroundings, it is essential to the definition of the word Progress. That is to say, whatever the

goal of Progress is – emancipation, happiness, or mere survival – and whatever model is used to

achieve it – growth or otherwise – the modernist conception of Progress is nothing if it doesn’t

involve man-made efforts to shape the natural environment; i.e. technology. Modernism builds on

the separation of Nature and Culture, and technology is what turns the former into the latter.

Which is why the most far-reaching and difficult-to-resolve critique of the Idea of Progress focuses

on the question of technology. While Toynbee, as we have seen, saw in technological advancement

only moral decline82, and while Latouche states that ‘the technological and promethean fantasy that

we can create an artificial world is a way of rejecting both the world and being’83, there is a sense

that these objections are raised mainly against a society excessively based on technological production

and development (with a certain similarity to the common anti-capitalist critique that it is not the

market itself that is malevolent, but the system by which every facet of society becomes

subordinated to it), or, if you will, a certain kind of technology identified as industrialisation84 or

‘organization-dependent technology’85.

Anarcho-primitivists however, go further in their critique. Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the

UNA-bomber, argues in his manifesto that not only does modern technology lead to ‘environmental

degradation’ and ‘destruction of wild nature’86, but it is also fundamentally incompatible with true

human freedom. Philosopher John Zerzan concurs and takes the logic to its extreme when he traces

the problems with today’s concept of Progress back to the very first alienation of human from

nature with the advent of language and symbolic thought. His main quarrel however is with the

agricultural revolution and his stance is a fiercely anti-technologist one which in the vein of

Rousseau argues for a return to pre-historical conditions.

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84 Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World, p. 77

85 Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and its Future, p. 47

86 Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and its Future, p. 9

On the opposite side of the spectrum there are plenty of organisations with an environmentalist

profile, such as for example the Zeitgeist-movement, who, while being anti-capitalist and recognising

the problems of growth vs. scarcity, believe in new technology as the means to establish a ‘Resource-

Based Economic Model’87 and bring Progress into a more symbiotic relationship with nature.

There is thus, even after accepting certain basic natural limitations and fundamental flaws within

the modernist Idea of Progress, a question whether there exists a gradation of technology: between

good and bad technology, or between too little and too much technology. Anarcho-primitivists

would say no: any technological system necessarily involves an alienating function, which is the first

step in an inevitable chain reaction that is destined to circumscribe our freedom and lead to ‘the

crisis of inner nature, the prospect of complete dehumanization, linking up with the crisis of outer

nature, which is obviously ecological catastrophe’88. Others, such as Latouche, would argue that it is

the specifically Western combination with growth-ideology which renders technology aggressive and

detrimental. Yet others would claim that technology in itself is neutral and it is the ideology of

capitalism and profit extraction that is the real culprit.89

What seems to strengthen Zerzan’s argument (albeit not necessarily his proposed solution) is the old

Hegel teaching that in changing Nature, Man also changes himself. This is what is mirrored in

Zerzan’s fear of human cloning and other biogenetics, which he shares with Francis Fukuyama, who

in his book Our Posthuman Future, retracts his statement about the End of History on the account of

just this technological process.90 This problem of posthumanism is also the main subject of Lyotard

in The Inhuman, and Baudrillard furthermore comments on it:

A contradictory dual operation: man, alone of all species, is seeking to construct his immortal double, an unprecedented artificial species. He caps natural selection with an artificial super-selection, claiming the sole possession of a soul and a consciousness and, at the same time, he is putting an end to natural selection which entailed the death of each species in accordance with the law of evolution. In ending evolution (of all species including his own), he is contravening the symbolic rule and hence truly deserves to disappear. And this is without doubt the destiny he is preparing for himself, in a roundabout way, in that, in his arrogant desire to end evolution, man is ushering in involution and the revival of inhuman, biogenetic forms.91

In returning to the interrelational problem of Progress mentioned in the beginning of the chapter,

we are thus faced with the conclusion that if we were to side with the techno-optimists, we would

also have to accept that to the extent that technology can transcend the limits of nature, it will also

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87 The Zeitgeist Movement, ‘Mission Statement’

88 John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness, p. 47

89 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? p. 77

90 Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, p. xii


transcend the limits of human nature. Ultimately, as Lyotard shows, the concept of an open system of

technological progress then shifts its aim from human emancipation or well-being, to the mere

survival of intelligence or complexity.

There is of course a strand of posthumanism – transhumanism – which sees this technological

manipulation of humans in a more positive light, and in an openly declared Enlightenment

tradition actively promotes the creation of ‘posthumans’92. This could be said to be related to an old

idea, going back at least to Baron D’Holbach in 1770; that nothing springing from human

endeavours could be unnatural, since man was created by nature.93 So it is implied once more that

modernist Progress relies on the distinction between Man and Nature, which brings me to the last

segment before conclusion.

3 : 3

M A N V S . N A T U R E A N D T H E Q U E S T I O N O F E S S E N C E

The essence of enlightenment is the alternative whose ineradicability is that of domination. Men have always had to choose between their subjection to nature or the subjection of nature to the Self.94

If we accept this assertion by Adorno and Horkheimer, and to it add the perhaps dramatic, but

nevertheless pertinent lesson from the last sub-chapter that the latter of these two alternatives must

also in extension lead to the subjection of Self to technology, it becomes clearer how deep that

‘blockage of the historical imagination’ that is based on our relation to nature runs. If these are the

alternatives, they seem both to be leading to an annulment, not just of History, but to some extent of

Humanity. Because as Hegel (according to Kojève) maintains; if Man was to give up essential

negation of Nature (in other words, if he was to reject technology) and return to live in harmony

with it, ‘Man properly so-called’ would disappear95, while Lyotard argues that if technological

progress proceeds, humans would eventually be superseded by artificial intelligence (which, I think,

can also be related to Hegel in that with complete mastery of nature – or Absolute Knowledge –

‘Man properly so-called’ likewise disappears). We are thus back to the idea of the End of History,

and it seems to me that if we want to save progressivity, and some kind of new historicity, it is not

enough to question modernism’s temporal claims of necessity and totality; we must also attack the

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92 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, p. xiii


94 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 32

95 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pp. 158-159

idea of essences; the essence of Man; the essence of Nature, and the essential separation between the

two, but without reverting to the likewise dogmatic and deterministic idea of D’Holbach that

everything is natural and therefore meant to be.

It is this that Latouche grasps when he writes that ‘de-growth [...] is probably not a humanism’96,

not because it’s an anti-humanism, but rather because it’s moving towards a somewhat relativist ‘a-

humanism’97. He continues:

Between the extremes of the blind or dogmatic anthropocentrism of Western modernity and the animist worship of

nature, there is probably room for an eco-anthropocentrism.98

Lyotard likewise criticises dogmatic humanism in an ingenious way, by claiming that child and adult

represent two different human natures:

Shorn of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of its interest, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible. Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which calls on them to become more human.

But endowed with the means of knowing and making known, of doing and getting done, having interiorized the interests and values of civilization, the adult can pretend to full humanity in his or her turn, and to the effective realization of mind as consciousness, knowledge and will. That it always remains for the adult to free himself or herself from the obscure savageness of childhood by bringing about its promise — that is precisely the condition of humankind.99

This is perhaps comparable to Hegel’s division between Man as physical, biological being and Man

as Spirit, but what Lyotard wants to do is neither to posit one as more human than the other, nor to

resolve the dialectic with a synthesis of the two, but to say that ‘the name of human can and must

oscillate between native indetermination and instituted or self-instituting reason’100.

This type of argument can then be expanded, as postmodernism has done, to also question Hegel’s

assumption that there is a natural origin which stays in essence identical to itself in contrast to the

essential change brought about by Man. Lyotard, for example, also states:

Technology wasn't invented by us humans [...] Any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes inferences based on the regulating effect of behaviour, that is, if it intervenes on and impacts its environment so as to assure its perpetuation at least. 101

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99 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman, pp. 3-4



To be sure, this kind of postmodernist relativism doesn’t solve the crippling paradoxes that modernist

history found itself in, and has in fact been widely criticised for being the very obstacle we have to

overcome, for example by Zerzan who calls it ‘ethical and intellectual cowardice’102. Acknowledging

this problematic challenge to postmodernism, Jameson defines our relation to nature as one of the

fundamental antinomies – insoluble contradictions – of postmodernism:

While [ecology’s] rediscovery and reaffirmation of the limits of nature is postmodern to the degree to which it repudiates the modernism of modernization and of the productivist ethos that accompanied an earlier moment of capitalism, it must also equally refuse the implied Prometheanism of any conception of Nature itself, the Other of human history, as somehow humanly constructed. How antifoundationalism can thus coexist with the passionate ecological revival of a sense of Nature is the essential mystery at the heart of what I take to be a fundamental antinomy of the postmodern.103

But there is in Jameson a hope that this very focus on contradiction is the motor of change in an

open-ended and complex version of dialectics, and that ‘the acknowledgement of the antinomies of

postmodernism [...] is bound to have unconscious results, of which we can now guess little’104. This

of course also echoes Lyotard’s championing of paralogy as the principle of postmodern

knowledge, and his hope that ‘invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not

simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to

tolerate the incommensurable’105. In other words, if a new history is to open up, in anything that

can be described as a progressive (in the sense of advancing, rather than relating to the Idea of

Progress) step, it needs to challenge the very foundations of the ‘old’ modernist history, out of which

the absolute identity of Human and Nature is primordial to both necessity and totality.

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103 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, pp. 46-47


105 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge, p. xxv

C h a p t e r 4

C O N C L U S I O N

To work out a relationship to the modern which neither amounts to a nostalgic call to return to it nor an oedipal

denunciation of its repressive insufficiencies – this is a rich mission for our historicity, and success in it might help us to recover some sense of the future as well as of the possibilities of genuine change.106

Fredric Jameson, 1998

At the end of this survey of the Idea of Progress, the fundamental question to be answered remains

encapsulated in the dissertation’s title, and the way it emulates the ‘post-’ in postmodernism as

defining either of two possible things: a ‘sorry afterlife’ following the definite end of Progress, or a

new form, a redefinition, of Progress. In other words, with the disqualification of both totality and

necessity, together with the increasingly problematic use of distinctions between Human and

Nature; does progress come to a halt, or can we still talk of a forward movement based on a

different formula? The question of course also splits up into an empirical and an etymological

strand; i.e. are things actually improving or likely to improve (and as always the following question is

‘for whom?’), and if they are; is there any reason why we would use a tainted word like progress to

describe such a potential advancement?

4 : 1

R E S I S T I N G P E S S I M I S M

The former of those two sub-questions is of course impossible to answer in the scope of this

dissertation, but I think some notes can be made that will lead to a discussion of the latter

etymological question. The first is that it is of course a question of perspective. The fact is that a lot

of those movements that constituted modernist Progress – technological advances, accumulation of

capital, integration into a global system (with the notable exception, which has been mentioned, of

geographical expansion) – rather than abate or change direction, have actually kept on intensifying.

It is just that, as this dissertation has argued, most, if not all, of these rapid developments have been

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robbed of the predominantly positive value originally assigned to them. Rather than a literal regress

or a full stop then (although some would argue the current economic crisis to be the beginning of

such a change of direction) there is the sense in which traditional Progress might just not be

progressive beyond a certain point. In addition to this there is the postmodernist sensation that the

very speed that this development has gathered is making it more or less devour itself and leaves its

advances meaningless. Baudrillard speaks of a ‘short-circuit between cause and effect’107 that results

in ‘the centrifugation of facts’108 and ‘makes every event a black hole’109 – something that hasn’t

really happened. In a similar vein, Jameson identifies as another of postmodernism’s antinomies the

way that ‘absolute change equals stasis’110 in a society engrossed in ‘a steady stream of momentum

and variation that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless’111.

This idea that nothing really changes anymore is extended to the conclusion that nothing has ever

really changed in the writings of political philosopher John Gray, who sees history as an ‘unending

cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human needs’112 (this is in fact

nothing but a contemporary version of the beliefs Seneca held 2000 years earlier; that increases in

knowledge might be achieved, but human corruption would prevent it from achieving any

improvement of the world113). While recognising that such a position is nothing but the other side of

that essentialism which was criticised in the last chapter, it remains equally hard to argue that a

general advance of mankind is really being achieved in a world where, parallel to economic and

technological growth, natural resources are being rapidly exhausted (peak oil, for example, being

calculated by most to either already have been passed or bound to be so within the next ten

years 114), extinction rates are between a hundred and a thousand times higher than normal115 and

global warming is disrupting the climate around the world116. To revert to complete pessimism and

defeatism in the face of such grim backdrops seems to me however to not only neglect all the

myriads of positive changes that happen every day, but also to once again fall into that modernist

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114 The Oil Drum, ‘Peak Oil Update’, on The Oil Drum: Discussions About Energy and Our Future

115 University Of Texas, Austin. ‘Extinction Rate Across The Globe Reaches Historical Proportions.’ in ScienceDaily,

116 Goddard Institute for Space Studies, ’GISS Surface Temperature Analysis’ on NASA

trap of thinking in absolutes. No matter how persuasive Gray’s argument is that ‘the human animal

stays much the same’117 and that technology can never give us ‘a deliverance from the conditions

that make us human’118, I cannot see how to completely exclude the possibility of essential change is

that much more rational and logical than the unfounded faith in progress he describes as a

‘degenerate and unwitting version’119 of religious belief. In fact, if I was to allow myself to become

ever so slightly essentialist, I would argue that if there’s one thing that seems to run through human

nature it is that need to believe, not necessarily in an afterlife, or salvation through technology, but at

least in the possibility of an improvement. Even someone as profoundly disillusioned with civilisation

as John Zerzan is not ready to just accept doom, but instead proposes refusal and resistance, and

ultimately a view of a better society120. Or as artist Andrea Zittel in a seemingly prosaic, but quite

poignant way put it in an interview:

No one really wants perfection. We’re obsessed with perfection. We’re obsessed with innovation and moving forwards. But what we really want is the hope of some sort of new and improved or better tomorrow.121

What I think can be salvaged then is the belief in an advancement of thought122, that I touched

upon in the Introduction already, but an advancement that recognises that which is lost with

anything that is gained, that complements accumulation with diversification, that drives a change which

invites and includes contradiction and paradoxes rather than searches for any ultimate or universal

resolution. The hope is that such a change of mindset is an improvement in itself.

4 : 2

E T Y M O L O G Y O F P R O G R E S S

If we thus cannot give up the possibility of human-driven positive change, the question remains

whether the kind of advancement described above could still go under the name of Progress. Hegel

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121 Andrea Zittel on Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 1, Episode ‘Consumption’

122 This even though it is striking how often counterparts of modern or contemporary philosophical debates can be found in antiquity; Plato’s world cycles being recycled (pun intended) by Nietzche; Gray’s pessimism bearing semblances of Seneca; even the postmodernist deconstructionist and sceptic methods having their forebears in the Sophists. In view of these parallels it is sometimes tempting to embrace a reversal of John Gray’s conclusion: maybe it is the world that has changed, but human knowledge has remained on the same level of sophistication. Even this observation itself is mirrored in history; in the big ‘quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ in the 17th century, the champions of the former held that the old greeks had and would not be surpassed in wisdom. On closer inspection however, such belief in philosophical staticity or stagnation, reveals itself as the worst case of generalisation and false separation; completely ignoring important variations and the interaction between society and thought.

would undoubtedly reply in the negative, given that his entire philosophy of History and Progress –

despite Jameson’s demonstration of how his dialectics could be translated into a postmodern

historicity – is very much based on those pillars of Necessity, Totality and the separation of Man

from Nature that it has been this dissertation’s aim to criticise. John Zerzan furthermore would

concur with Hegel; his vision of a positive alternative to modernist Progress would, in his own words

which relate very strongly to the Hegelian ideas, ultimately be a ‘project of annulling time and

history’123. Amongst the postmodernist writers, the word progressive might be used in an independent

and positive way occasionally, but the word progress is almost uniformly used to allude to that

modernist historicity that is being criticised. The exception being Jacques Derrida, who has claimed

to be a ‘progressist’124 and uses the word in a way that could refer to a history beyond the modernist

moment.

Even though its literal meaning and etymological roots (to go forward from pro = ‘forth, before’ and

gradi = ‘to walk’) are neutral enough to make it a word suitable for any process with defined

parameters and goals, I am inclined to agree with those who find it unsuitable for describing any

kind of more general history, even if it’s not a metanarrative History with a capital H. It has been

tainted by that dogmatic modernist definition outlined in Chapter 1, but even when trying to wrestle

it loose from that theory, it retains, in itself, a certain one-dimensionality – forward understood as a

single, uninterrupted movement – which seems to conjure up all those problematic elements, not the

least of which is a linear time conception.125

In contrast to progress then, the word change is not only bendable to fit into other perceptions of

time, it also holds the capacity to describe a multifaceted process and jettisons any sense of necessity.

This is an important last point I want to make about Progress; that in its propensity to describe a

movement as necessary it balances, like all grand theories, precariously on the verge of determinism.

In other words, the belief in an unstoppable march towards an ultimate way of being on earth that

Progress inherited from Providence, as inspirational as Nisbet argues it to have been, also risks

reducing the need for the individual to take an active part. While if we delegate progress to the

adjective progressive, and insist on constant change as the only true way to characterise history, the

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123 John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal, p. 29

124 Jack Reynolds, Jonathan Roffe, Understanding Derrida, p. 27

125 The nature of Time is a problem that has been brewing under the surface of this dissertation from its beginning, but due to its vastness has not been allowed to break through. Let me now at the end just complement those two models of time which have popped up; the line and the circle (which in their very opposition describe a modernist dialectic; a totalist either/or). The first complement is the spiral, which Bury attributes to Vico (J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, p. 147), but which Jameson also suggests as a better way to understand a truly dialectical progression (Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations, p. 115). The second is Fernand Braudel’s reading of time spans as waves; shorter historical waves riding on top of longer tidal waves of slow change. They both seem to me to chime with this conclusion, in how they make room for an interaction and integration of natural limits and cycles with human history.

responsibility and power over which direction that change takes is resolutely brought back to the

human. This is why, ultimately, postmodernism represents an advancement to me; it demands of its

subjects to constantly think, re-evaluate and act, without falling back on any comfortable and

pacifying explanation-models or doctrines.

So in the end, even if an answer is not required of me, I would suggest that Post-Progress does

indeed mean an end of Progress, but that this does not automatically mean an end of progressive

thought or action. After all,

One cannot write without bearing witness to the abyss of time in its coming.126

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B I B L I O G R A P H Y

B O O K S

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Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984)

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W E B R E S O U R C E S

Goddard Institute for Space Studies, ’GISS Surface Temperature Analysis’, on NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

URL: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ (20/02/12)

The Oil Drum, ‘Peak Oil Update’, on The Oil Drum: Discussions About Energy and Our Future

URL: http://www.theoildrum.com/tag/update (20/02/12)

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T V

Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 1, Episode ‘Consumption’, PBS, 2001 (http://www.pbs.org/art21/)

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http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

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http://www.theoildrum.com/tag/update

http://www.primitivism.com/facets-myth.htm

http://www.primitivism.com/facets-myth.htm

http://www.primitivism.com/imposition.htm

http://www.primitivism.com/imposition.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/01/020109074801.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/01/020109074801.htm

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http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/mission-statement

http://www.pbs.org/art21/

http://www.pbs.org/art21/

Documents

Petter Yxell: Post Progress