Boston Review - October 2018

Evil Empire 13

windowless enclosure of the neoliberal order, the circuits of historical

memory are frying, history itself has begun to break apart, and the end

of the end may be in sight.

history is only ever as good as its means of enforcement. From
our perch at the “end of history,” how we remember the past, and
the role it plays in justifying the shape of the present, has been
routinely secured and enforced by the fact of global neoliberal
domination itself. The continuance of this domination is supposed
to serve as proof that history has always been leading to this point
and has nowhere to go from here. This vision of history, of course,
has also been buttressed by a largely unchallenged arrangement of
officialized cultural institutions, disciplinary practices, standards of
expertise, and sanctified narratives of national progress, all of which
have served to reproduce and reinforce notions of a settled history
whose archive could always be expanded with new knowledge but
whose regime of truth could never be upended.
But what good is this historical vision in a world where history
as such has been unmoored and set adrift in the fickle, boiling rapids
of the perpetual present? What security does history provide for the
neoliberal status quo when the apparatuses of memory—from those
officialized cultural institutions and practices to our own internal ca-
pacity for long-term historical consciousness—are the subject and the
instrument of twenty-first-century political warfare?
As we are dragged further down the cragged gullet of the new
millennium, we are experiencing more and more what it means to live
and politick in a world in which the stilled machine of history has rust-
ed under the monstrous weight of the permanent now. After all, these