The World is a Wasteland: Living in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

Building on Hu Bo's film "An elephant sitting still", this paper examines a specific condition in contemporary society, in which expectations about the future are declining. This situation is interpreted as a consequence of the progressive collapse of modernisation. The diminishing expectations, I claim, are related to capital's internal crisis, which erodes the very fabric of social mediation; in its place, arise all kinds of atavistic forms of violent desocialisation. I intend to recognize and examine a new condition of historicity in which time is no longer productive. Society experiences history as a dead time of dilated presentism. With this article, I hope to contribute to building a critical interpretation of the current world, highlighting the problems that a radical philosophy must tackle to overcome the present state of things.