The Guardian just published an article stating that Graham Hancock’s documentary series on Netflix, Ancient Apocalypse, “is the most dangerous show on Netflix.” It turns out that this program is also the top documentary on Netflix. It has captured the popular imagination with shots of several megalithic ruins around the world. Yet, rather than just condemning it as outright conspirational prehistory ---which it is, as it postulates an advanced civilization that perished with the last ice age 12.000 year ago at the beginning of the Neolithic--- I believe it is more productive to compare the series with the most popular book on the Neolithic published last year: David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. The comparison is most productive because they both emphasize a new hypothesis: the key historical event to understand our present is not 1492, 1789, or 1917 but the apocalyptic beginning of the Neolithic, which challenges any renewed call to revolution (Traverso) or a new master of the Left (Zizek, Badiou). These two texts present that period in complementary ways. Hancock insists that there was an advanced pre-neolithic civilization that disappeared with the last glaciation as a result of the ensuing cataclysmic changes. He connects that culture with the mythic of a universal flood told by several cultures and adds that, before disappearing, it traveled the world teaching the rest of the “primitive and underdeveloped world” all the technologies that would flourish in the Neolithic: the wheel, agriculture, metallurgy, etc. Heroic mythic characters such as Prometheus or Quetzalcoatl would be the last survivors of that advance civilization which were responsible for passing on their technology to the rest of our “primitive” ancestors, and thus becoming the origin of “our” Neolithic “history.” Obviously, his theory is “bonkers,” to add another British term to the Guardian’s denunciation, but it has captured the popular imagination with great photography and digital reconstructions of some of the most impressive Neolithic constructions and temples, from Indonesia’s Padang to Turkey’s Göbekli Tepe. I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed the images, and specially the digital reconstructions, as they are some of the best out there. Yet, what this “crazy, conspirational” show has captured, in a very realistic, “historical,” and pragmatic way, is the apocalyptic tension we face today vis-à-vis the impending ecological and technological collapse we are about face in our near future, an apocalypse that, unlike Hollywood’s numerous renditions, will not take us to a Mad Max postapocalyptic scenario, but will nevertheless change, reverse, or nullify the centrality of global capitalism in ways that we still cannot fully grasp. The show emphasizes the fact that we actually originated in aNeolithic apocalypse and we survived it, and, by doing so, it shows a political engagement with history that, as I will argue in the following, is most necessary and progressive today, for the contemporary Left in is incapable of thinking the apocalypse as a historical and political event or development, and instead, is stuck in an old-fashioned paradigm that, at the least, is simply nostalgic and, at the most, is non-operational: the revolution. The ghost of the revolution haunts the Left but, unlike in the Marx and Engel’s manifesto, only points to the past, wherein the left continues to be stuck.
Similarly, and as I stated in a previous blog (A Neolithic Anti-Oedipus), the Neolithic emerges in The Dawn of Everything as a very historical (no longer prehistoric) laboratory of political experimentation and thinking that surpasses our own in the present and, what is more important, challenges and deconstructs every single believe in which our contemporary capitalist and global society is built upon, which, Graeber and Wengrow, group together under the myth of the “Origins of Inequality:” progress, centralization, urban complexity leading to hierarchical politics, agriculture as necessary revolution towards civilization, etc. This is the great political potential of the book if we are ever to challenge Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism.” For Graeber and Wengrow, the Neolithic is precisely the political field/period in which we can see reflected a political future that will emerge, not after a political Revolution à la Marx, but rather, in the aftermath of an ecological and civilizational apocalypse that will unleash a social and political heterogeneity that today we cannot imagine except as Neolithic prehistory (whose diverse biopolitical arrangements probably contained a diversity that heteropatriarchy has buried almost completely for us). The only shortcoming of their book is that they do not clearly formulate an answer to the initial question posed by the: “[I]f human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ [in contemporary rigid global capitalism]” (2021: 127). For Graeber and Wengrow, unlike Hancock, the real apocalypse from which we emerge is that of the consolidation of a single global capitalist world-system: history, no Neolithic prehistory, is the real apocalypse that peaks in contemporary capitalism but triggers an earlier colonial apocalypse after 1492. But what Hancock and Graeber/Wengrow emphasize with all their limits and contradictions, and this is the point to which I wanted to get, is the fact that the Left does not have a political discourse to articulate what the impending apocalypse of capitalism represents (climate change, pollution, mass migrations, 6th extinction….). The Left continues stuck in the paradigm of the Revolution (and its many variations), and so unless there is a theoretical paradigmatic change, it will not be able to intervene in contemporary and future politics. In this respect, the much-praised book by Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History, seems to me a step back rather than one forward. The uprisings that continue to emerge from Chile to Iran and China, are closer to the Middle-Age and Ancient-Regime protests than to post 1789 revolutions, of which the Soviet one in 1917 still remains the paradigm (see my Globalizaciones: la nueva Edad Media y el retorno de la diferencia). The heterodox Benjamin and Mariátegui, among others, provided a way to think the impending apocalypse and this is where we need to start off.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorJoseba Gabilondo. Publications Archives
April 2023
|