The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

by Hanzi Freinacht

For a while it was “democratic socialism”, but after 1989 we haven’t really seen any credible claims for it. Then it was “deep ecology”, but the world is industrializing and consuming and modernizing faster than ever. Then you came up with queer feminism and updated versions of radical feminism, which is nice, but nowhere is there any evidence that “breaking the hetero norm” and “crushing patriarchy” bring forth any true revolution, or lead to an otherwise fair society. Frankly, women have been more liberated by the pill and other advances of medicine, than by postmodern theory. And then you have been going on about neoliberalism, which you take to be an evil spirit that has possessed the world, but you have yet to produce any alternative beyond bureaucratic control. Occupy Wall Street didn’t offer more than a buzz. All of your projects have fallen to the ground, without any of them deeply changing society. There have been some shifts, yes, but we still live in what must be seen as a modern society: still capitalist, alienating, unequal and ecologically disastrous.