So,where do we go from here? The evaluation of moods and atmospheres, as the preparation of a fertile ground for thinking, implies the ambition of creating meaningful incisions into the distinctions that we take for granted. The quest for purity, for a leap beyond the mapped-out possibilities that suffocate us, has legitimised an incessant productivity, which only represses the ever-insistent question of “What now?” Incipit all those efforts of “philosophy after…”, where the increasing fatigue of living through historical times no longer appears as approaching liberation from the forces of History, preparing for the final leap, but as a sentiment of imposing silence beyond the mere call for humility. The new and unexpected, instead of announcing the end of the current state of things, only feeds our cynicism, which resists evaluation under the cloak of sameness.
Have we finally done it? Have we exhausted problematization and spoken ourselves into a coma? Remember when we were aesthetically infatuated by the idea of a post-apocalypse? It seems we’re post that now, and a whole cycle of extremity in the atmosphere, of so much din, has actually left us in a quiet queasiness. The valley is filled with sludge, and everything has been said before, including that hope is for the hopless, and anything that is said hits coldly and strangely against an AI echo.
The desire to live up to the situation might just be the thing that drives us further into despair. The recognition that things should be different is a double-edged sword. And so are clichés, which not only keep us going in our daily grind, but might just carry us up to the moment where some words ring once again true, not as mere confirmations of the state of things, but as promises, not of a better future, but of that unlikely air-current that slipped through the cracks: the promise of breath.