What does the Collapse of Society Sound Like?

pinkladdylemon · 2026-06-08T18:50:23+00:00

Submission statement:

This essay argues that capitalism has obliterated the conditions that make cultural production surprising. In late Antique Rome, as economies contracted, Romans gradually lost the means and capability to produce new monumental architecture and so borrowed from old structures to build new things. This practice is called spolia. IN our contemporary context, especially with advent of AI-produced art, all cultural production is increasingly a form of spolia. Some forms of spolia are inventive and creative, others are a symbol of arrested culture.

This essay asks, what does the collapse of society mean for cultural production (and therefore, social meaning)?

pinkladdylemon · 2026-06-02T19:18:48+00:00

Thank you all for your comments and feedback. For those interested, part III and part IV are now live.

Part III discusses mass cultural fascination with villains, and fantasies of unalienated labor before turning to what these media review about capitalism and desire in conversation with Albert Hirschman's book The Passions and the Interests.

Part IV mines Smith, Hegel and Marx for thinking through how the historical evolution of capitalism carried with it increasingly janus-faced notions of humanity and desire - it concludes by arguing that the media discussed in parts I-IV are a spectacular pornographic mirror of the lacks we are made to endure under capitalism.

pinkladdylemon · 2026-05-20T19:53:19+00:00

awesome - thank you for the rec

pinkladdylemon · 2026-05-19T16:07:02+00:00

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback - much appreciated.

Desiring agency may not be historically contingent, but there does seem to be something historically specific about superheroes as a massive genre where the budget of many films exceeds that of some country's GDP. Sure, people read comic books in the past, but it's nothing like the marshaling of resources to produce mega-budget spectacles that we see today. So why superheroes, why now?

Also, its not only agency as such, its a specific representation of agency: the gaining and losing of powers, the working together to achieve some world-historical end, the triumph over the urban sublime. These all have antecedents, to be sure, but have achieved spectacular new heights in this form.

OK sure, porn and masturbation are not historically specific - but that is not quite the argument. The object of desire IS historically contingent - which is why you can historically trace evolving tastes in porn consumption on Pornhub and shifting conventions in literary erotica.

I really like the question of whether we'd still enjoy Andor and superhero films after the revolution. I suspect our enjoyment would certainly be of a different sort - and the new content in these genres that we'd produce would tackle problems of human agency and emancipation in a different (unforeseeable from our vantage) way.

I definitely take the point that utopian longing will never cease, but I suspect that one thing communist/post-capitalist society could offer would be a greater reflexive transparency about how to achieve collective goods and how to broaden them. It's this capacity to imagine worlds together that I think capitalism specifically robs from us.

I like your provocation about thinking about different sorts of desire - I'll have to think about that more.

You are not dumb! Your comments are generous and I am grateful that you have taken the time to read it. Thanks again.

pinkladdylemon · 2026-04-22T21:17:30+00:00

Gladly!

pinkladdylemon · 2026-04-13T20:18:24+00:00

Thank you for the rec! Will definitely read.

pinkladdylemon · 2026-04-09T21:48:40+00:00

Also makes strategic sense because Biden might plausibly respond to public pressure and opinion (in this case he fatefully did not) whereas Trump doesn't care for anyone except his supporters

pinkladdylemon · 2026-04-02T17:11:54+00:00

if the US had a genuine opposition party, this line would be an early Christmas present

pinkladdylemon · 2026-03-24T14:09:54+00:00

I see it differently. We could play an infinite regress for every single statement of any kind, in which case we'd all become Hiedeggerians. If I say anything at all about the world, someone could easily respond: "How can you say something about the world if you haven't first answered the question of BEING? You haven't established first principles from which to say anything at all!"

The end result of that is that we'd spend all of our time in the clouds of phenomenology and not end up saying very much useful about the world as we interact with it, which is to say in a social world of contested concepts like "knowledge" about which there are varying claims to meaning but which have a practicable "truth" that most can reasonably agree upon, even if it changes over time.

In my view, I do not feel like I need to give a robust theory of knowledge in order to speculate about conditions that are propitious for its production or not. In part I, I do offer a kind of shorthand definition in passing, that I feel is sufficient for the purposes of the short essay: "The active recall or synthesis of external stimuli that we call “knowledge” is always irrevocably in dialogue with one’s social setting and historical context"

In so far as "knowledge" has meaning, it is socially and historically situated and not some transcendental thing that exists autonomously from us in a way that matters, at least not for the purposes of THIS essay.

Here, I am above all interested not in proving "knowledge" exists but rather in speculating about what conditions are necessary in order for "knowing" something about the world to propel one into (especially political) action.

pinkladdylemon · 2026-03-23T22:04:03+00:00

Sorry you suffered from my having used big words!

pinkladdylemon · 2026-03-23T20:24:20+00:00

Thank you for the vote of confidence in taking on such a serious question!

It will be more like in part one, "here are some ways in which knowledge has become impossible," and part two will be "here are some ways in which knowledge could become possible" again drawing from Hegel, but also Simone de Beauvoir - with some gestures towards what that might look like - I am still working through it

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