FIGURES OF THE END OF THE WORLD

Don't worry, sooner or later the end will come

A man records a video with his mobile phone of rockets being fired from Gaza City toward Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images

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Below, an essay about the end of world, and the new cultures emerging out of it.

And a reminder: today, January 21, 2024, is the 100th anniversary of Lenin's death -  a date to be remembered by all of us

Apropos the topic of the end of the world that pervades our media, Alenka Zupančič ironically noted that one should not expect too much from the end of the world – it may disappoint us... To this, I would only add a similar variation on the worry about a catastrophic end of the world: don't worry, sooner or later the end will come. This variation brings out the underlying assumption of our fear about the end of the world: we silently presume that, if we talk and worry enough about it, it may not happen. So what if the true end of time is not a mega-catastrophe but the endless repetition of the same epitomized by the standard conclusion of the end of an episode in a TV-series which indicates what awaits as next week - to quote Alessandro Sbordoni: “As the end gets nearer, more is yet to come.”[1] So maybe we already live (in) the end of the world. Is there a country today in which daily life already functions in a post-historical way?

Alexandre Kojeve, the great interpreter of Hegel from the 1930s to the 1950s, saw the moment of the “end of history,” the highest form of social order, first in Stalinist Russia and then in contemporary Japan. My Korean friend Alex Taek-Gwang Lee told me that, if Kojeve were to be alive today, he would have chosen South Korea – why? Entanglement is at the heart of quantum physics and future quantum technologies. Like other aspects of quantum science, the phenomenon of entanglement reveals itself at very tiny, subatomic scales. When two particles, such as a pair of photons or electrons, become entangled, they remain connected even when separated by vast distances: if one gives a particle, say, an upwards spin, the other will enact a downward spin.[2] Are South and North Korea not entangled in a similar way, do they not function like a couple of entangled particles – as such, they embody our global world reduced to its two extremes?

South Korea is arguably THE country of free choice – not in the political sense, but in the sense of daily life, especially among the younger depoliticized generation. The choice we are talking about is the indifferent choice of moderate daily pleasures, the choice among options which don't really matter: what one listens to and reads, how one dresses, how one socializes and eats, to which foreign country one goes for a holiday... This new generation mostly doesn't care about big issues like human rights and freedoms or the threat of war – while the world still notices the aggressive pronouncements of the North Korean regime accompanied by nuclear threats, the large majority in South Korea just ignores these threats. Since the standard of living for the large majority is relatively high, one comfortably lives in a bubble. North Korea is the opposite: a permanent mobilization and emergency state, no free choices, life focused on how to confront the Enemy...

One should note here that, at a different level, North Korea is nonetheless now moving in the same direction as the South: the regime publicly announced that it is renouncing the reunification with the South which was the very pillar of its politics for decades. South Korea was considered a part of the country occupied by a foreign country – the US -, and the goal was »liberate« it. Now, the North Korean elite is openly admitting that it is interested only in its own survival as the ruling clique. The basic opposition between the North and the South, of course, remains intact: mobilization against the Enemy versus relaxed indifference. However, both extremes live in their own bubble: what they both exclude is a genuine politicization, an engagement to cope with global causes that threaten our survival.  

The ultimate example of literature which fits the depoliticized lifestyle of younger generations is a unique form of literature, the so-called “web soseol” (웹소설), “the novel on the web,” that has been exploding in South Korea in the last decade - now they turn around gigantic sums of money, more than Samsung, the largest South Korean corporation. Web novels are all produced, distributed, and consumed on the Web, and this has brought a big change to the existing publishing industry: the process of producing, distributing, and consuming web novels takes place almost simultaneously. Also, as digital payment methods are now easier, readers can enjoy web novels at a very low price (around 100 won - 0,07 Euros - per episode), and since around 10 companies are sharing the field, competition prevents centralized control. In contrast to printed books, web novels involve serialization (a new chapter per week), genre predominance (romances, detective novels, fantasies and science fiction), plus interaction with readers through comments: in the process of producing web novels, the author can check the comments and views to distinguish between what readers enjoy and what readers show a low interest in. Although such interaction can put a lot of pressure on the writer and lead to undermining the author's creativity, it has brought about a new change in the relationship between writing and readers, which has been fixed in the past, and has brought new possibilities for literature. One should also note that 64% of web novels are romances, and 95% of romance readers are women. This movement is gradually spreading also elsewhere, especially in China and the US.

Perhaps it is all too easy to dismiss “web soseol” as the end of culture proper, as the form of culture that perfectly fits depoliticized generations, as well as the direct interaction between producers and consumers under the auspices of big corporations. Do web novels not contain also an unexpected emancipatory potential? Do many of their features not indicate the rise of a new Communist art form? A mostly anonymous crowd forms spontaneous networks in which readers and writers intermix and the production process is potentially collectivized – the figure of individual genius creator disappears, art loses its elitism and becomes a popular collective process. At a different level, a similar case of the undoubtedly progressive effect of the new media is provided by the Palestinians from Gaza who are documenting the war for millions on social media. They are not journalists risking their lives to report the oppressed truth – they are themselves potential victims who report on their own life, so their reporting is individualized and personal reporting, followed by millions who can interact with them. Their “public” see them as family –

 “Through raw, selfie-style videos chronicling the ever-present threat of explosions or the everyday indignities of displacement, they’re giving outsiders an intimate look at the human costs of war from the perspective of people who live there. Many of the images they share are so graphic that Instagram obscures them with ‘sensitive content’ warnings.”[3]

In this way, Palestinians in Gaza scored a big victory over Israel’s state-orchestrated recycling of the atrocities performed by Hamas during the October 7 attacks. Palestinians are engaged in direct reporting which creates a strong community link versus Israel’s carefully prepared state reports which are often manipulated and even fake. Again, this case convincingly demonstrates that, in spite of all well-documented manipulations, there is a genuine emancipatory potential in emerging digital communities. We should not be afraid to look for this potential even in the worst Rightist-populist phenomena. When Sarah Palin, now deservedly forgotten, enjoyed her brief moment of fame as John McCain’s vice-presidential candidate, she nonetheless enacted something potentially progressive: a figure of a strong self-assertive woman totally outside the scope of feminism, never playing the game of an oppressed victim, never gathering points in this way, never flirting with Political Correctness.

However, as we have seen in the case of “web novels” in South Korea, the price we often pay for adhering to these new communities is all too often depoliticization, which means that in spite of their openness some basic dimensions are excluded from them. This is why Julian Assange has to be mentioned always when we are tempted to praise our Western democratic societies with their human rights and freedoms, or when we criticize the Muslim, Chinese, or Russian oppression: his fate is a reminder that our freedom is also seriously limited. Assange is thus the victim of the new apolitical neutrality: he is not prohibited to mention, we just no longer care for him, his imprisonment goes on in growing indifference.

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[1] INC_nn1_Semiotics-of-the-End_Digi.pdf (networkcultures.org).

[2] What Is Quantum Entanglement? Quantum Entanglement Explained in Simple Terms - Caltech Science Exchange.

[3] Palestinians share their lives in war-torn Gaza via TikTok, X, and Instagram | CNN.