In this episode, we pick up where we left off with chapters 10, 11, and 12 of "The Fourth Political Theory" by Alexander Dugan. In these chapters, Dugan challenges our understanding of the present and its connection to other periods of time.
00:01:17.820So, we're going to be picking up where we left off.
00:01:19.800We're looking at chapters 10, 11, and 12 today.
00:01:23.860And these are some very interesting chapters.
00:01:25.960I know you told me that these are some of your favorite chapters, and I can definitely understand why they go in some very interesting directions and look at some fascinating topics.
00:01:35.460So, let's go ahead and start with chapter 10, which is the ontology of the future.
00:01:41.640So, Dugan is going to talk a lot about time in this chapter.
00:01:45.960He's going to tell us a lot about our perceptions of time, how they can be altered, how we need to kind of change the way that we see time.
00:01:53.980And the first thing he does is challenge kind of the assertion that the present is what we know best.
00:02:00.380It's kind of the thing closest to hand in the way with which we can kind of understand all other time.
00:02:05.820Can you talk a little bit about his understanding of the present and its connection to other periods of time?
00:02:13.940So, the initial view is that the present is what's most real or what we know most and best, that the past is next degree of reality, so to speak, because you assume that's where actual events happened, real things happened.
00:02:28.460The past was the past, and the question is, can we really know it the way that it was?
00:02:33.840But we don't typically doubt that things happened and there could be a correct account of what happened, and that the future is the least well-known because it's the most indeterminate.
00:02:42.720It's that which hasn't come to pass yet or that which hasn't been yet.
00:02:47.400So, that's a kind of ordinary, common-sense, defensible view of the rank between present, past, and future.
00:02:55.280And Dugan's task gradually is to cast some doubt over all of that because the present, now here he goes into some philosophers like Kant and he'll discuss Husserl in a minute, but the gist of it is that we have much less access to or understanding of what's going on automatically than we think we have.
00:03:15.920In fact, we're always, time is always exposed to interpretation of what's going on, to the significance of what's going on, to the coherence of what's going on.
00:03:24.800And it's this theme of meaning, coherence, and significance that he tries to bring to the forefront in order to be able to connect the theme of time with his more general theme of politics and of multipolarity.
00:03:39.060Because, after all, it's not a book just about time.
00:03:41.720It's a book about the way the dispute over the meaning of time has an effect on how we think about alternatives to modern political ideologies.
00:03:50.380Yeah, and I think most people would probably be a little surprised to find that to be a focus in a book about political theory.
00:03:57.000But I do like the way he kind of explains why this is integral, why you need to understand this if you want to look for new political theories, new avenues and understandings of politics.
00:04:08.560So, like you said, he reaches for some different illustrations.
00:04:13.860I think the most striking one is probably Husserl, who I have not read, I'm not read in.
00:04:17.880But he uses the kind of the analogy of time as music and musical notes to kind of explain the relationship between time and how maybe the present is far more connected and in dialogue with these moments of time than we understand it.
00:04:37.520So, Husserl has a book called Phenomenology of Time and Consciousness, where he examines what it's like when we perceive a melody, for example.
00:04:46.560So, if somebody were to think about their favorite song or lyric or opening riff or something like that, you have the anticipation of expectation of that first note.
00:04:58.720You already hear it even before it's played, if you're remembering it.
00:05:02.020And then, you know, go a little bit into the phrase, into the musical phrase, and whatever specific note happens to be playing, there's also the presence of the past notes there together with it.
00:05:13.660So, it's like, where do you draw the line?
00:05:15.700Where do the beginning and end of the present start?
00:05:19.720When you're listening to a piece of music, it's the whole thing together.
00:05:23.420You know, you have the anticipation of the coming notes, the memory of the notes that were played, and never just the one that's ringing out at the moment all by itself.
00:05:30.180So, this allows us to think about political history, sociological history, about our traditions, about our customs, about the meaning of both our ancestors on one hand and our future generations on the other.
00:05:43.460So, if there's an attitude towards the coming notes, let's say, that they're completely unrelated to the past ones, well, that's a kind of absolute chaos, you know.
00:05:52.860Even in the controlled chaos of some kind of experimental jazz or other forms of music, there's still a meaningful connection.
00:06:00.880So, Dugan wants to take that experience that Hustle described when he looked at our perception of time and the continuities of past, present, and future,
00:06:08.900and use it to help us to think about, as I say, social, political, and cultural history.
00:06:14.500And it is, I think, an evocative and helpful way to do that.
00:06:18.540So, even little observations, he makes that resonate more than it seems at first.
00:06:24.360When he says, for example, that the past is present in the present, the present becomes continuous and includes the past as a vanishing presence.
00:06:35.560So, if we go to our ordinary political opinions and categories and concepts and all of that, there's a kind of progressivism that tries to break with the past.
00:06:45.820It doesn't hear the resonance of the ancestral or the traditional in the present, or it tries to turn away from it completely.
00:06:54.000And that music analogy helps us with genres, with styles, maybe even with remixes, with all kinds of different creative interpretations to think about that continuity in new ways.
00:07:04.720Yeah, and I really like the way that he phrased kind of the future as the death of the present, where you're always kind of just living on the edge of that experience.
00:07:13.060And fully understanding your present is also understanding that kind of the present is dying as it goes along into the future.
00:07:20.760But another thing that I think he takes from Husserl, although I'm not exactly sure, so maybe you can clarify that, but he talks about kind of the short circuit of consciousness and how time is necessary to the consciousness kind of avoid observing itself.
00:07:36.360That if it was to kind of truly do that, it would kind of put itself into a shocking state.
00:07:41.640And so, in many ways, time is necessary as a way to escape this experience, to keep the consciousness from going through this.
00:07:47.940Yeah, so here, I don't know how much liberty he's taking with the interpretation of Husserl here.
00:07:53.960I can't remember Husserl formulating it in quite that way.
00:07:56.480But the insight is, for Dugan, a very important one, the way that he develops it.
00:08:01.440So, as you said, the idea is that we escape into time.
00:08:10.080And if we don't have temporality or time to escape into, we're stuck with this strange moment of consciousness, the self-referential short circuit of consciousness, which creates all kinds of dualities and difficulties and obstacles.
00:08:25.540It's kind of like, I was going to say something about the movie Memento, but I don't want to do any spoiler alerts.
00:08:30.620No, you're fine. I love that movie. Go ahead and make your connection.
00:08:34.200Okay, so the idea that we have to create an illusion for ourself that gives us a purpose to go on or that gives us a world to live into.
00:08:43.540Because once you've perceived the nature of self-consciousness, self-referentiality, the game is over in a way.
00:08:50.560So, you have to reconstitute a new temporality to keep yourself engaged and involved.
00:08:56.580So, hopefully, people who haven't seen the movie see it.
00:09:02.560Why does Dugan care, in some sense, fundamentally about these questions?
00:09:07.000Because you had in the 90s, and still, to a certain extent, the whole theme of the end of history.
00:09:11.700The end of history means that time has come to an end.
00:09:14.600So, you have all kinds of issues here.
00:09:16.580What was time that it could, in principle, come to an end?
00:09:20.020What does it mean for the human being who is in time and who's fundamentally temporal and historical and musical in this analogy?
00:09:26.060What does it mean for the music to have stopped?
00:09:28.840And, as he says later in this chapter, not to run too far ahead, but how is it possible for the human being to commit chronocide to end time, to put a stop to the very dimension in which we live and move and have our being?
00:09:44.020So, the idea that we flee some basic dimension, deep, dark, and fundamental dimension of ourselves, we flee it out into temporality.
00:09:58.300Dugan is very interested in reconstructing both our fleeing, also what we flee into, but also this idea of a radical subject.
00:10:07.780What is that part of ourselves that is outside of time?
00:10:11.540And that is where he goes way beyond Husserl, because Husserl didn't go there.
00:10:17.020And Dugan goes into a set of other authors and other reflections, and he develops this theme of the radical subject in other books and lectures, here only alluding to it.
00:10:24.980But, yeah, it's a very beautiful and strange coalescence of two seemingly totally distinct domains of inquiry.
00:10:33.500Consciousness and time on one hand, politics and history on the other, and yet they're so tightly interlinked here.
00:11:04.760So, he says, for example, about circular time, that the power of the trauma of self-consciousness banishes that trauma to the periphery where it becomes circular time.
00:11:16.560So, you have the eternal return of the same.
00:11:18.700You have the idea of a rise, of a fall, of a decay, of a rebirth, a renaissance, all of those kinds of things.
00:11:23.720That's one way of keeping the cycle going, keeping a cycle going, but without any fundamental changes.
00:11:31.320So, there are people, I'm sure, who listen to you, who listen to me, who read Dugan, or who are interested in traditionalism and all of that, for whom cycles, the circularity of time is probably the key reference point.
00:11:43.300But another one is that the time is regress.
00:11:48.640And as he puts it here, the experience of the short circuit is placed in the past.
00:11:52.360In other words, the temporal Big Bang is in the past.
00:11:54.540And we're always trying to recapture that moment, but we're further and further away from it.
00:12:01.680You know, we're left with just very poor reception of it.
00:12:05.000So, messianic time puts the Big Bang, as it were, in the future.
00:12:10.600The abolition of time, the fulfillment of history.
00:12:13.980So, these are all different models about whether we are primarily looking to replay the whole thing, eternal recurrence of the same, whether we're looking to recapture it by going back.
00:12:27.480That's the kind of traditional time, time as fall, so that the goal there is return.
00:12:35.800And the messianism can be constituted in different ways as well, depending on what you see as the key criterion for the fulfillment of the meaning of history.
00:12:44.640But what all of these structures, what he does in identifying these structures of time, including material time, where, as he puts it here, time is introduced into the substance of the physical world.
00:12:56.240So, you no longer see either time as far in the past or time as in the future or time as cyclical.
00:13:00.480But time is sort of like the, it's built into the objectivity of the world around you in its own way.
00:13:07.240The reason he can do this catalog is because we, therefore, no longer just take for granted our everyday notion of time.
00:13:15.400Everybody has something like an everyday notion of time that it's flowing and we're in that flow, more or less.
00:13:22.500Everybody knows that somehow it depends on our perception because it can seem to pass quickly or it can seem to pass slowly.
00:13:28.540But still, once we begin to delineate different constructions of time, then you have something you can analyze philosophically and phenomenologically.
00:13:39.460So, that plurality of times is very important for him.
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00:16:17.020Yeah, and this is what then kind of where he starts connecting it to kind of the political project, right?
00:16:23.540He once again enters kind of the theme of multipolarity and avoiding kind of a general imperialism.
00:16:31.600When it comes to time, he talks about how there is no shared history of humanity.
00:16:37.000There can only be histories of individual civilizations or individual groups.
00:16:43.800You can't have one overarching understanding of that.
00:16:46.640And to try to kind of force everyone into the same story, into the same shared history, into the same shared understanding of time is, again, something he uses, Western racism, which I'm not a fan of his expansion of that term.
00:17:03.080But we understand what he means by this, the general understanding that everyone needs to conform.
00:17:07.760Everyone only fits in this Western understanding of history.
00:17:10.580Everyone only understands time in this one way.
00:17:13.000And it has to be universalized across the entire globe, across all civilizations and peoples.
00:17:19.220He says that this is kind of a destruction, a form of bigotry, a form of imperialism that kind of keeps the different civilizations from experiencing reality the way that they kind of need to.
00:17:33.080Yeah, and the musical analogy fits in a way, and he does mention it, because the music analogy would be that global, you know, monoculture or a single history for humanity would mean that everybody's playing the same song or that everything can be subsumed under the same genre.
00:17:53.760In music, you have obviously many instruments, genres, tempos, and so on.
00:17:58.060And the idea here is that that's true as well of people's histories, civilizations' histories and states' histories.
00:18:04.220And so we'd have to think about that, because implied in the view of globalism, it is true that there is a single, let's say, unit, humanity, and that it can march to a single tune, as it were.
00:18:16.880And depending on whether you think that history comes to an end or not, that, you know, there's a crescendo and then the music stops.
00:18:24.200And it's not obvious why we should think that, either on the basis of the study of consciousness or on the basis of the phenomenology of time or on some other more narrowly political or social basis.
00:18:35.840Obviously, if you think that the standard of judgment is the three and a half minute pop song or the, you know, four minute super repetitive hip hop song, or if you think that it's a piece of classical music or something like that, but he says you have to get the richness.
00:18:51.560The field of music, like the field of politics, is much richer than can be encapsulated by a single dominant paradigm.
00:18:59.000And so here also he says something which I thought was very interesting, that these different concepts of time, these different histories are so deep that they kind of protect each society from globalization in a way.
00:19:15.240No civilization can truly understand another civilization's time and history in the same way, and that these things are so deeply ingrained that even when they seem like they've been eradicated by imperialism or globalism, they're still there kind of deeply seated in kind of the metaphysical understanding of the subconscious or whatever you want to call it of kind of the peoples.
00:19:40.140And so that kind of protects their identity from being completely subsumed by this kind of globalizing force.
00:19:48.480Yeah, it is a key point for Dugan that there's always something preserved, even if it's suppressed, and even if it's hidden, there's always something unique about the peoples or the civilizations that is preserved up until the irreversible destruction of human essence or human consciousness.
00:20:07.740And then you have post-society, post-humanity, and you have a completely different picture.
00:20:13.660That's like the worst possible scenario and the worst alternative, although he does think about it too.
00:20:18.740So it's not just like, let's say every society, I'll give you an example.
00:20:22.780When he discusses communism in Russia, he says that even though it was a modern European ideology,
00:20:30.420it acquired the characteristics of Russian messianism, of Russian archaism, of Russian mythology,
00:20:37.080it became a very mythologized expression of what was a Western scientific, political scientific construct.
00:20:44.980And that's because it overlapped with the deep roots of the Russian soul, so to speak.
00:20:50.060And so here too, you can try to take Western pop song or something like that, put it in some other context,
00:20:55.940but it's going to get reinterpreted according to the taste and according to the ear and according to the mode and style of that people,
00:21:03.840even if its identity has otherwise been eradicated, up until that final remnant itself is destroyed.
00:21:10.200That's what's at stake for him in all of this, whether the final remnant is preserved or destroyed.
00:21:15.580Yeah, and this again echoes someone who I'm more familiar with, which is Spangler.
00:21:20.240And Spangler kind of talks about how Christianity has its origins in kind of the Middle East and the Magian soul, the Magian man.
00:21:28.500But then when it moves to the Faustian man, it's the same religion in theory, but in practice, it takes on a Faustian character.
00:21:36.500It fundamentally transforms once it's experienced by different people, even though it's thought of as the same religion.
00:21:44.280So this is, again, something that I think is reflected in multiple other thinkers and is something that many have kind of observed across kind of different domains.
00:21:54.260But the next interesting thing that I think he talks about is kind of how the end of history is the end of the future.
00:22:03.420And if we have the end of the future, then there's no place for the consciousness to kind of escape to, to avoid that self-referential moment.
00:22:12.080And so instead, we start seeing the creation of new escapes, things like virtuality, you know, the virtual world and other things that allow the postmodern world allows the consciousness to escape in places that are no longer time because time, the future is no longer there because history has ended.
00:22:31.360And so that's very interesting because I think it then leads us to, again, observations that are present in things like neo-reaction and accelerationism, where a lot of many of these things have been moved into different realms, different fundamental needs and human experiences go into something that is kind of no longer human in a way to kind of recreate things that have ended due to this end of history process.
00:22:58.140Mm-hmm. Yeah. So maybe the neo-reactionaries, I don't know as well as you do discuss it, but for sure, there are examples like Schmidt, Kojev, Strauss, and the authors that I know a little bit better on my end.
00:23:11.140So, for example, Schmidt, when he talks about the end of the political, so the end of the friend, enemy distinction, the idea that we're going to overcome opposition, overcome war, neutralization, depoliticization, and so on.
00:23:22.420He says that there you can imagine if man no longer has anything to live or to die for, any serious existential commitment, then life will go on, but it will be a life of his derisive term is entertainment.
00:23:35.600So it'll be action deprived of real significance. It's another way of putting virtuality, action deprived of real significance.
00:23:43.760And Kojev also had to discuss on the basis of Hegel what happens when man, who is a fighting and working being, no longer has to fight or work because we've reached the stage of universal recognition, universal mutual recognition.
00:23:55.160And there, too, there was the idea that it's not like our activity stops, but our activity stops being properly human.
00:24:02.860It starts being something else. Or as Dugan puts it, I think, earlier in the fourth political theory, there are still markets, you know, there's still TV shows, there's still stuff happening, but it all has the flicker of light with the lack of meaning or significance.
00:24:16.300So there's a real concern that if it's, you know, if man is fundamentally historical, temporal or musical, what happens to man when the music stops?
00:24:28.100This virtual escape is one option, and it's probably one that I think we can see if we look around and it looks like people are creating for themselves, you know, second, third, fourth removed from reality domains in which to play and spin their wheels and continue the appearance of a meaningful human life.
00:24:46.300Which seems to be deprived of all real substance. But the more significant question that Dugan asks in this context, as you saw, right towards the end of the chapter is,
00:24:57.900how is it, what does it tell us about ourselves that there can be an eradication of time? Because this is very important. He says, nobody can eradicate time for us.
00:25:07.420Somehow, every human existence ultimately makes the choice for itself at the end, whether it is to abolish time and institute virtuality or abolish both time and virtuality.
00:25:18.680And that for him, he says very little about it in this chapter, but he indicates it as a theme.
00:25:24.960You know, he indicates it as a theme. So if we said, fine, time is no longer the sandbox that we're playing in, we've moved into virtuality.
00:25:34.520And then at some point, you know, to invoke an earlier phrase from the book, the gloomy end of the show of virtuality also comes and people are sick of the fake double, doubled life.
00:25:45.240Then what are you left with? When you're deprived both of the escape valve and of the pseudo escape valve, then you're sort of left with this.
00:25:53.480Maybe people have this experience who go to like a sensory deprivation tank or go find themselves in the mountains somewhere.
00:25:59.860Once their thoughts stop, they encounter the brutal, bare presence of their naked conscious selves, you know.
00:26:08.940And then what? There's a kind of horror, a kind of terror, but also a kind of new realm that's disclosed.
00:26:15.080And for Dugan, we have to consider not only the possibility that history continues, not only the possibility that virtuality continues,
00:26:22.520but also this realm where you're faced with that brutal, bare self-encounter.
00:26:29.500And I guess that kind of wraps up the radical subject. Is there any more you wanted to say on that idea?
00:26:36.060I know you said that there's a whole other book or exploration of this in other books, but is there anything else on that?
00:26:41.760It is a crucial theme for him because he'll mention it again in a subsequent chapter of this book.
00:26:49.940So you can see that it's on his mind besides the fact, as I said, that he has other books on it and so on.
00:26:54.160But I think that when the people like me and you who are trying to understand, you know, public intellectuals, cultural commentators,
00:27:04.080that whole realm, right? People who are reading serious books and looking at politics and trying to understand it.
00:27:08.600There's always, you know, the sense we have some figures to work with, like Nietzsche's last man.
00:27:14.140Everybody has some sense of Nietzsche's last man. Nietzsche's Ubermensch or Superman as a kind of, you know, right-wing anti-liberal figure.
00:27:20.580Or other kind of reference points, you know, where you can see, aha, here's the will to power coming through,
00:27:27.500or here's something much more degraded coming through.
00:27:30.500It would be worth, at some point, gradually, it's not going to happen immediately, but gradually getting a sense of this alternative,
00:27:38.840the radical subject, as one of the figures that can help us to understand the future, our political future, our political present, our political past.
00:27:49.360Just like Heidegger, just like Dugan has introduced Heidegger into the equation in a big way,
00:27:54.040probably more so than anybody else has done, at least in the right-wing circles.
00:27:57.520So we're going to have to think it together with the radical subject, but that's a project for not today and not tomorrow,
00:28:03.460but people should be aware that it's on the horizon.