The lingering live embers of Venkatesh Rao’s charnel age have left me with deadened impression in my sensorium. Tasting, breathing, and seeing the culture of now feels somewhere between spoiled and not quite ripe.
One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras…We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age. December 21 Ribbonfarm
I have been known to drop an Antonio Gramsci joke from time to time. This is harder to make a joke about though. The age being born as Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists from 1929-1935 surely felt as filled with morbid symptoms and putrefaction as our current as our current extended gerontological Fourth Turning of death and rebirth.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters
That quote is a translation of Slavoj Žižek’s which isn’t quite as pithy as the Slovenian made it sound.
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”
Or for those lacking Italian skills (as I do) here is it translated more literally.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Rao calls charnel vision “a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay,” which can feel foreign to the long century of stability.
Americans enforced this order through its dollarization and the financialization . But empires change and even the longest institutional decay can be seen from far enough remove.
And so we have Swiss politicians running to Washington DC as the cosmopolitan upper classes try to enjoy an August off from the always on mania of this interregnum while also keeping an eye on matters. As it turns out the extra mile to get to an esoteric Dolomite lake or a less well known riviera. If you need to find me I won’t tell.