Acknowledging the scale mismatch between human life and history can generate new politics

Evidence

Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 551

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does one actually cultivate ‘political patience’ as a practice rather than a resignation? What would a politics built on geological timescales concretely do differently from one built on electoral cycles?
• DEEPTHINKING: This passage resolves the depressive-epistemic problem raised earlier in the book (depression offers a false final truth) by suggesting that radical incommensurability, properly acknowledged, opens rather than closes political possibility.
• XREF: connects to: Struggles for political progress are never definitively won. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 536; The natural world offers nothing intrinsically resistant to capital’s commodification — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 546; Multiple coexisting temporalities, not just homogeneous time, shape political responses.

Broader Connections

• Multiple coexisting temporalities, not just homogeneous time, shape political responses. #expands (0.78)