A visitor to my small southern village, taking the footpath under the A3 through woods and fields to the neighbouring parish church, would have formerly found only information plaques about the role of our village during the wars, a disused historic bridge, and some murals in the underpass that have been there for as long as I’ve known it to be a great route for running and walking.
When I first moved here ten years ago, I met a man who claimed to be the father of the boy who had painted these murals, and proud he was too. ‘Brightened the place up a bit,’ he said. I find it hard to disagree.
Sprawled in unmissable white spray-paint on the concrete pillars and beams of this underpass, the casual tourist can now admire the phrases “Die lefty scum”, “Murder lefty scum” and “MKY murder cult”, “We will kill the non-believers”. I’ve no doubt that to these hard-headed young men (for it is they), I would qualify as ‘lefty scum’, and so I got the hell out of dodge.
This “MKY murder cult” is none other than the Russo-Ukrainian neo-Nazi accelerationist terrorist group, M.K.Y. What a mouthful. As I looked up at this writing on the underpass, the world I thought I knew crumbled. The sleepy village I’ve lived in for most of my life, known for its annual parade and Ofsted “Good” state school, fell away to reveal a strange new world, grafted onto this underpass from elsewhere. I was left with these questions: Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of myselves is to do it?
These questions are not my own, but the words of Brian McHale, one of the foremost theorists of post-modernity. With these questions, he sought to characterise what the fundamental position of the subject is in the post-modern world. Post-modernism is, itself, a word that carries a lot of baggage, and is frequently treated as a bogeyman by left-wingers and right-wingers alike.
To traditional leftists like Terry Eagleton, “post-modernists” are moral and cultural relativists. Descendants of the hippies, they refuse to make judgements or draw conclusions since that would mean imposing an external (and arbitrary) hierarchy of values onto a network of relations that’s way looser than that, man.
To traditional conservatives, post-modernists are an affront to an ordered, often theistic view of the world. Beyond theism and humanism, post-modernists are transhumanist, inventing the self as a continuous process, no longer imbued with an essential soul. We can dye our hair, get tattoos, experiment with gender expression, and even genetically and technologically augment our bodies, because what even is the self anyway? When conservatives question these incomprehensible youths, they are met with the rebuttal going back to Satan himself – “Fuck off, Dad, don’t you think I know what’s good for me!?”
Post-modernism is, in many ways, really a good thing; Francois Lyotard defined it as a scepticism towards unifying narratives, refuting any theory of everything. No self-aware post-modernist could ever be a Nazi, which is good. But there are also no ‘Eureka!’ moments in post-modernity, only the breakdown of form, and the filling of ever smaller niches. Academics work tirelessly to critique the critiques of another critic, whose own critique in the view of Fartov and Belcher establishes quaquaqua.[1]
Since post-modernity’s inception, in that grey area of the 20th century, we can understand the world in an uncountable number of ways – through feminist theory, Marxist theory, queer theory, post-colonial theory, and so on. Even some Christians on TikTok do their own version of ‘cultural critique’ where they connect the dots in the advertising campaigns of alarm clocks to conclude that they must be demonic. The question is no longer of a fragmented world, like a cube viewed from opposite sides. In McHale’s view, we are dealing with different cubes.
An old-school Marxist like Terry Eagleton is understandably nostalgic for a time when the world could be rationally ordered, and in his 2011 book Why Marx Was Right blames post-modernists for taking the wind out of Marxism’s sails. They have left us with a confusing mess of a world that we all agree is failing us, but no one can agree on how we might fix it.
In another vein, the more extremist right-wing parties are preying on the nostalgia for a time when society was univocal. Nowadays, our pluralistic society threatens the singular order of their imagined golden age. Think of the England they took from you, church on Sunday, Football, good old-fashioned values etc. etc.
Some neo-conservatives, like Jordan Peterson, blame post-modernist nihilism for allowing Woke Marxist Islamism (or some other buzzword) to invade our society, corrupting it from the inside with abortions and immigration. Frightening stuff.
Both Eagleton and Peterson reject post-modernity, and argue for a return to old forms. For Eagleton, Marx was right, and we ought to ignore contending viewpoints and stick with him. For Peterson, it’s a judeo-christian nationalism that he suggests is the foundational pillar of Western society, and so we ought to defend that and reject anything else. Tom Holland, of The Rest is History podcast, makes the descriptive case for this in his book Dominion (2019).
All of these are responses to post-modernity, and try as we might to blame the boogeymen of post-modernists, we must realise that post-modernity is not an idea: it’s a condition. It’s the condition of the coexistence of these fundamentally contradictory ideas in the same space, at the same time.
O list, ye sinners, and I will tell ye what such things have to do with graffiti in the A3 underpass. That my small southern village has been stamped by an accelerationist Russian terror group is surprising, but is also symptomatic of the condition of post-modernity. These two worlds cannot be conjoined, and indeed it is more than these two that we must attend to. There is no synthesis, only accumulation, and I foresee an event horizon, writ large in the words “Die lefty scum”.
The words written in the A3 underpass are not the hollow threats of a disaffected “edgy” youth, but the outburst of a tightening system, whose contradictions cannot hold under increasing pressure from the economy, the climate, and the political system.
In previous articles I made the sin of asking us to “do better”. We must question power, take responsibility for our past, refute easy answers. Such mental reformulations are not winning elections, nor keeping American imperialism out of Venezuela, nor lessening the popularity of right-wing populism.
It is a vestigial liberal impulse to call on the better instincts of an imagined “human nature” – rationality, empathy, scepticism. But if progressive liberals want victory, they need to forget about constructing an ideal progressive movement. It’s not minds that need changing, but the world.
What I felt in the underpass that day is the realization that when I turn away from my world, from you, dear reader, and look to this other world, I see that it has been watching me all along. And it is angry.
[1] Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Act 1.
Le cadrage “leçon venue du passage souterrain” m’a accroché — les espaces urbains comme miroirs de tensions sociales plus larges, c’est un angle fort. L’article est-il né d’un passage précis en tête, ou d’un composite tiré de plusieurs villes ?
The image of the underpass as a threshold rather than a destination stayed with me long after I finished reading. You manage that rare balance of cultural critique without losing the human texture underneath – would love to see you develop this into something longer.