Proclaiming history’s end functions ideologically by eternalizing the present moment

Evidence

So I would say postmodernism is the current name we give to how these old certainties began to run into trouble from the 1900s onward. In that sense, I don’t refuse some of the new things the postmodernists point to. They are extremely important, and the traditional Habermasian defense won’t do. But the attempt to gather them all under a singular sign—which suggests a kind of final rupture or break with the modern era—is the point at which the operation of postmodernism becomes ideological in a very specific way. What it says is: this is the end of the world. History stops with us and there is no place to go after this. But whenever it is said that this is the last thing that will ever happen in history, that is the sign of the functioning, in the narrow sense, of the ideological—what Marx called the “eternalizing” effect. Since most of the world has not yet properly entered the modern era, who is it who “has no future left”? And how long will this “no future” last into the future; if you’ll excuse the paradox? — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 720

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall defines the ‘eternalizing’ ideological move via Marx — flattening a contingent present into history’s terminus.
• XREF: Echoes Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ claim and connects to Marxist ideology critique of treating the present as permanent. — connects to: Speed is modernity’s secular stand-in for eternal life — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 490; What reads as progressive change can consolidate the very order it promised to end — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 544; Mass leaderless protest can rupture the sense of living at history’s end — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1549
• QUESTION: Who exactly is the ‘we’ that has no future — Hall’s global-majority question suggests most of the world never entered modernity to begin with.