Transitions

In Transitions, writers Sita Balani and Jay Bernard attempt a concentrated study of the present. In an extended dialogue covering the personal, the local, the national, and the international, they examine the historical transition we are living through – unending wars, accelerated accumulation, ecological collapse – but lack a common language to describe.

Balani and Bernard suggest the deterioration of old social structures has left us feeling unmoored, and with this dislocation comes apathy, unease, and the perception of uncanny new narrative forms: rumour, conspiracy, superstition, and intoxication. The idea of transformation, potentially poetic and inspiring, may have taken on a darker tone. Though apocalypse has become the reflexive narrative-aesthetic code to describe our near future, the 'structure of feeling' – to use Raymond Williams' phrase – confers other images too: running out, running dry, running empty. Are we witnessing a historical epoch petering out rather than combusting?

This piercing and personal conversation gives voice to a shared anxiety, reflecting the perspective of two writers committed to the humanities, and to the human, in a political culture that has devalued them. Drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of the conjuncture, Balani and Bernard seek a language with purchase on the moment, addressing class shifts, culture wars, housing crises, and how all these relate to global questions of future internationalism and abolition. Transitions looks to diagnose the exact nature of our unease, to understand what skin we have in the game, and ultimately to ask what might be on the other side of this transitional moment.