Psychology: the Fetish of Western Democracy

The irony of the postmodern age, for Baudrillard, is its obsession with cultural heritage at the same time as it invents increasingly advanced ways of destroying any remnants of culture. An obsession with archaeology and an industry-level excavation of fossils and relics operates in tandem with a decentralised techno-capitalism driven by endless reproduction and the commodification of the virtual sphere, in so doing eradicating the very idea of an ‘origin’. Cultural heritage or the linear genealogy of civilisation is a contemporary invention which retroactively frames any origin according to malleable, economically contingent necessities.

Today, we are obsessed with history just as much as we are eradicating the stability of the past itself. This is to some extent what can be called the ‘fetish for fossils’ that Baudrillard diagnoses: we fixate on fossils as a method of disavowing the temporal destructiveness of modern industry. The rise in popularity of new accounts of the history of mankind, such as those of Graham Hancock, of perplexing original events that triggered the agricultural revolution - including lost cities, tectonic plate shifts, or even alien visitors - are testaments to the indifference with which capitalism infiltrates not only political structures, but temporal categories, reworking what came before whilst propelling us towards an unimaginable future. Behind the fossil we find not only the cancellation of the future, but the destruction of the past.

The underlying implication of our fetish for fossils, of our reconstruction of the past and the future, is that when we are confronted with something terrible, with the possibility of an end, of a limit, or of a catastrophe, we inevitably displace this recognition. Every confrontation with the end is in its very conception re-formatted, rendered digestible and without any serious threat. There is in this perhaps a justification for reviving the Deleuzean category of territorialisation. Every movement away from the confines of a system, towards its limit point, inevitably comes to be registered as an internal movement, as something preconfigured by the system itself. The absolute, external limit to the system of global capitalism is a spectral limit, internally reproduced and relativised as a point of production.

Even the so-called ‘end of globalisation’ with Trump’s tariff frenzy, which could not help but shake the global stock market, will only lead to a period of recalibration rather than capitulation. Trump does not denounce global capitalism, he simply wants it to work more in