As The Anthropocene hurtles ever towards what Walter Benjamin called “The Axial Age of Catastrophe”; strange, and Dark, new alternatives to Liberal hegemony are Rising. With the Climate Crisis; the Crisis of Late Capitalism and COVID 19 - the greatest, the most serious and undeniably important crisis of them all; Democracy is In Crisis and Enlightenment Values Are In Decline. An era of Dark Power beckons on The Horizon.
A new form of “dark capitalism” is Rising; fueled by the Rise of China, and The Cost of COVID. After Neoliberalism, we are also seeing the Rise of ‘New Liberalism’, a middle way between Capitalism and Socialism, where the state increasingly plays a Role alongside Markets. It is obvious the Realignment, caused in part by the West’s ongoing Great Awakening of The New Religion that is Wokeness, is responsible in part for these trends; with The Precariat looking for politicians to play a New Religious role; whether in the form of Democrats like Bernie Sanders, or the discredited, but still lethal, “Political Theology of Populism”.
Dark Power is an emerging concept among scholars of international relations, academics and an obscure, controversial community of online commentators called ‘twitter’. Referring to these increasingly nebulous, “anti-sovereignties” in the Bataillean sense, that characterize State Capacity in an Age of Alarm. Dark Power refers to the ability of States to be “states”; states of transition, or states of being. Dark Power is to “states” what Sovereignty is to The State. Ontology in an Age of Hobbes.
But the roots of Dark Power are Darker still. For they arguably lie not in a selection of thinkpieces written in 2016 and Adam Curtis monologues, but in the obscure, German, controversial thinker Carl Schmitt, with links to the far-right. Schmitt arguably foresaw this ‘New Hegemonic Moment’ with his concept of Dunkelmacht: an obscure, untranslatable, German word with roots in Heidegger’s ontology. Something of the meaning of Dunkelmacht is captured in the equally untranslatable Chinese character for night and marriage. Dunkelmacht is based on Schmitt’s reading of the Alfred Thrayer Mahlen, the geopolitical thinker, who believed, contra many Liberal theorists like Hobbes, that factors such as Geography or Infrastructure or People can also impact “sovereignty”, and permeate it with both Deleuzean and Derridaesque difference.
Schmitt painted a dark picture of a dark world where the Hyperborean powers; such as the BRICS, France, and Poland, are forced to resort to Dark Power to successfully navigate a world dominated by the Hard and Soft Power of Liberalism. He linked this to the proximity of states to mountain ranges and rivers; as opposed to “dark” marshland which characterized the Pomerania Schmitt occasionally visited: as well as the land outside Taksin Sinawatra International Airport. It is no surprise that The Chinese political thinker and legal scholar Xung Meiwing, believed by some to be the theoretical eminence grise of Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China, has written about Schmitt’s concept of Dunkelmacht in his obscure and untranslatable blog “Modern Ethos City Living”; and in his seminal, but untranslated, magnum opus Company Law in China’s Special Economic Zones.
But Dark Power is not without its problematic critique. The popularization of the concept risks stripping it of its fundamentally anti-Liberal core, with its roots in Catholic theology. It can be difficult to tell when power is truly Dark. It is indisputably Dark Power when Reccip Teyipp Erd-o-wan’s Neo Ottomanist foreign policy increasingly has designs on Cyprus. Equally, as Greece increasingly appears to resuscitate the old, Catholic, commitment of Napoleon III to protect the “Eastern Question” with its closeness to Macron’s France, they too are acting in a Darkly Powerful way. But post-Brexit Britain’s Boris Johnsons’s talk of recapturing Hong Kong or building bases in the Carribean are emphatically not.
We can study the affects of Dark Power through comparing the communitarian, state-centred response of Mediterranean countries like Spain to the COVID-19 catastrophe; to the individualist, authoritarian response of Britain - increasingly the sick man of The Anglosphere. One of these things involved the government arresting people who didn’t stay at home, but the other also involved the government arresting people who did not stay at home. What made the crucial difference between the wholesome Mediterranean collectivism and the dire British Orwellian response was Spain’s use of Dark Power in The Crisis.
States, such as Joe Biden’s America. thus cannot avoid reckoning with Dark Power in the Age of Dark Power. Dark Power - with its links to 4th Generational Warfare; is necessary for management, if not victory, in The Forever Wars. The primary means by which states both sovereign and Otherwise exert Dark Power is through unemployed postgrads writing articles portraying their actions in a Dark Power way. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards a thinkpiece on The Anglosphere; Decline, The Climate Emergency and Lukacs. In order to win the emerging “Dark Power Gap”, almost as important as “The Pandemic Gap” and “The Climate Gap”, States, must invest in New Futurisms: Anglofuturism, Eurofuturism, and Latinofuturism. The shock troops of Dark Power are European grad students financially dependent on British Universities and newspapers who nonetheless believe that British foreign policy is a bit of a joke next to the Dark Power of Macron, Putin and Xi. And, finally, we must found faculties, departments and public lectures of Dark Power: a cross-disciplinary field touching on “Theory”, Political Thought, The Study of Civilization-States, New Urbanism and State Capacity.
We end the article on a disturbing note. Perhaps best summed up by this quote from the obscure, controversial Irish poet W.B Yeats, with links to the far-right:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The Falcon cannot hear the Falconer
Things fall aprt… And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”