Radical Hope: Enlightenment, Universalism and Art Against the End of the World
What Happened to European Values?
Who would speak of enlightenment today? Who would speak of universalism? And who would dare speak of art in the same breath?
Certainly not here in Europe, the traditional avatar of “enlightenment values.” This year has been one of escalating humiliation. Hopes that the European Union might stand as an equal between the two global hegemons, China and the US, a flickering candle of democracy, civil rights and peaceful co-existence in a darkening world, barely survived February’s NATO meeting in Munich. The headwinds got stronger as Trump reached over the leaders’ heads to talk directly to the rump state of a former hegemon, against whose Ukraine invasion the EU had sought to test their role as defenders of the free West. The rout continued, as the great Dutch political fixer, now NATO head, went supine for “daddy” and in July, Ursula von der Leyen capitulated to Trump’s trade demands in an astonishing act of base surrender. Meanwhile, most EU and European national leaders have looked on approvingly as Israel pursues its war of ethnic cleansing, and cheered Netanyahu’s US-aided strike on Iran for “doing the dirty work for all of us.” At the time of writing this essay, they are packing their bags for the White House to discuss how much of the Ukraine they are going to hand over to Putin. It is still only August.
This collapse has been long in the making. If 1992 lit the torch of a new European spirit, a common homeland united by a shared history and values, all underpinned by a single market and regulative framework - by the time of the Great Financial Crisis, it was quietly extinguished. The elites of Europe had adopted a new spirit, that of technocratic neoliberalism, any substantial vision of a common future reduced to risk management, expressible only as a metric. Yet they were unable to halt the EU’s sputtering economic performance, holding on to “free market” nostrums, whilst the globalist order melted around them. Inequality soared, labour rights eroded, welfare states were privatised, infrastructure rusted. By the end of 2024 “far right” parties were in power, or supplied the main opposition, in most European countries. The frantic building of a Fortress Europe was accompanied by the curdling of the open sense of common peace into a paranoid “security.” Seemingly, it is only fear of the others at our walls and the fact that all our pensions are denominated in Euros, now keeping us together.
We still have our “European values,” but these no longer make claim to the universal, they just happen to be the values that Europe has, markers of our identity, democratic and civic emblems, our European “way of life.”
The End of Modernity
Who then would speak of enlightenment? The US empire has definitively repudiated anything but radical self-interest, using the fraying instruments of the global order it once built to coerce its erstwhile allies into acting as an outsourced sovereign wealth fund – invest in us, or else….
China retains the mantle of the modern project state, a paragon of rational statecraft and commitment to (a certain kind of) welfare of its people, one in whose light the US appears as some techno-feudal House Harkonnen. But its modernity, born in existential competition with a murderous West, came with an enlightenment reduced to its scientific-rational spirit bolted onto a long tradition of Confucian statecraft. The emancipatory resonances between the European enlightenment and the painful process of China “standing up” were repeatedly quashed by Mao’s Marxism-Leninism, as they were by Deng’s neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.
The “Global South” looks on aghast as the West not only pulls up the developmental ladder but instals a machine-gun just in case one makes it through (Good Morning Vietnam!). Once they sought to adopt enlightenment principles – dare to know, the questionability of authority, an autonomous citizenry capable of self-government, and the quest for universal peace – and throw them, Caliban-like, in the face the European Prosperos who refused these to the non-whites they had conquered. Now they look more to their own histories and cultures for the resources of hope.
Do we dare to follow the wisdom of post-colonial thought from Frantz Fanon to Sylvia Wynter that teaches us that there is radical hope precisely in the mobilisation of the enlightenment’s emancipatory impulse against the project of domination of people and planet?
Perhaps modernity is ending, taking its enlightenment delusions with it. Whatever ethical core it salvaged from the End of Empires was squandered by the turbo-charged techno-scientific capitalism which has brought us to the very edge of collective ruin. And yet…. Where do we go from here? Where else is there but enlightenment? Sure, we are now aware of modernity’s roots in destruction, depletion and desecration, and of enlightenment’s hubristic tendency to place us humans outside and above nature. Yet, what conclusions are we to draw from this awareness? Do we abandon enlightenment, leaving the field to “capitalism alone?” Are we headed to some techno-feudalism, regional spheres of interest slugging it out in a Hobbesian war of all against all? Do we seek out spaces to live in the ruins, whilst modernity dies a quiet death? Or await the Big Bang, nuclear or climatic, a 21st century Baudelaire asking avalanche, veux-tu m’emporter dans ta chute?
Or does it call for a radicalisation of the enlightenment, occupying a space apart from capitalism and from its European “homeland.” Do we dare to follow the wisdom of post-colonial thought from Frantz Fanon to Sylvia Wynter that teaches us that there is radical hope precisely in the mobilisation of the enlightenment’s emancipatory impulse against the project of domination of people and planet? Not to migrate to some mythical “global south,” but to the concrete universal of a global humanity. Dare to know; the questionability of all authority; an autonomous citizenry capable of self-government; the quest for universal peace. Yes, these remain radical. Could they, perhaps, be our entry into a new phase of modernity, in which we are aware of the pitfalls of daring to know without ethics; questioning without constructing; autonomy without solidarity; imposing peace from the barrel of a gun. Wary of enlightenment sans bread or water…
Arts & Culture: Unrealised Aspiration?
…And more aware of that which links enlightenment to art. The assault on the value of art over the last forty years has been crucial to the neoliberal project. It turned the emancipatory demands for an expanded, democratic sphere of popular arts – Mark Fisher’s “popular modernism” – into the freedom of a consumption economy. Anything requiring public funding needed to supply proxy market metrics, for regeneration, employment, well-being, mental health, social cohesion, graffiti reduction, criminal rehabilitation and so on. European culture is now being asked to supply social and civic cohesion, to defend our democracy. At the same time, a separate strand of “cultural and creative industries” is charged with doing what the German industrial giants have failed to do and boost our global competitiveness. Nonetheless, funding for culture is being cut by states, regions and cities across the continent, because though we are richer now than at any other time in our two millennia history, we cannot afford to spend on art.
Who, then, would speak of art in the context of Enlightenment, and now? As Anna Kornbluh recently wrote: “Artistic mediation - representation in excess of messaging, creativity in excess of use, giving sensuous form to the unexpressed - has always been a fundamental human activity.” It was the Enlightenment, at its own peril, that attempted to theorise this activity in terms of universality, presupposing that all human beings were capable of understanding aesthetic expression in the same way. More than that, such shared aesthetic capacity was thought to provide a foundation for collective meaning-making and, furthermore, for coordinating action. The sweeping ambition has since been widely criticised for its Eurocentric bias, masking that continent’s colonial power grab. And yet, as an unrealised aspiration, a call to universalism persists. Art has become part of the critical post-Enlightenment project – what Habermas once called the “incomplete project of modernity” – tasked with challenging, expanding, and reflecting on the values first articulated during the enlightenment, including those of aesthetic universalism. In doing so, art was tasked with exposing enlightenment’s exclusions, and modernity’s unrealised promises.
Radical Hope: A Planetary Future In-Common
Europe does not own the enlightenment, just like it does not own art. It manifested there, with auras from past lives in other places, moments or civilisations. There may be some vestigial connection between Europe and the enlightenment, but this hangs by a thread. If it is to promote its enlightenment values then it can only do so as a partner with those in the “global south” who still hold these values, refracted as they may be by histories of extractive capitalism, colonialism, environmental degradation and the near obliteration of indigenous cultures. Fortress Europe, a tolerated enclave of the US empire, is a dead end, and inhospitable to the spirit of enlightenment. But so too is the post-human imaginary of a re-invented solar punk feudalism, where we live entangled in the margins of an optimized modernity in which capitalism has eradicated all traces of its once confident emancipatory sibling.
Who would speak of enlightenment, universalism and art now? All those who seek a future; or, like Benjamin’s past generations turning towards the sun, all those who do not want to see our emancipatory aspirations crushed and discarded by a clash of empires. We can build our radical hope on these terms precisely because they have shaped our understanding of modernity. To do so, we need to start from the assumption that the modern world and its history has been shaped by complex and painful entanglements that we need to critically engage with rather than turn away from in dogmatic disgust. We cannot cut ourselves off from the past, there is no position of moral purity from which an emancipatory future could be constructed or even thought. Radical hope means to reject the idea that the end of the world is unavoidable, that we must make do in the ruins of the future. Instead, it urges us to salvage from the ruins of the past that which will help us to build a planetary future in-common.
AA Talk
Wednesday 10 September
20:00-22:00 hrs (doors open 19:30 hrs)
Ventilator cinema (OT301, 2nd floor)
In this AA talk, Justin O’Connor, Patrycja Kaszynska and Sebastian Olma are going to argue that we can build our Radical Hope on these terms precisely because they have shaped our understanding of modernity. Radical Hope means to reject the idea that the end of the world is unavoidable, that we must make do in the ruins of the future. Instead, it urges us to salvage from the ruins of the past that which will help us to build a planetary future in-common.
Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy at Adelaide University, Visiting Professor at the School of Cultural Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester. Between 2012-18 he was a member of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity. Justin recently co-authored Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (2020, Intellect), Reset: Een Nieuw Begin voor Kunst en Cultuur (2023, Starfish Books); and Culture is Not an Industry (2024, Manchester UP).
Patrycja Kaszynska is Senior Research Fellow at University of the Arts London and Research Associate at Culture, King’s College London. She is also Research Affiliate at Northeastern University London, where she was Head of the Art History Faculty before joining UAL. Patrycja has shaped the UK’s national discussion on how the value of arts, culture and heritage is articulated and measured in the context of decision making. Her interests are at the cross section of critical theory, pragmatic philosophy, cultural studies and design with the key focus on the theory of value and valuation studies.
Sebastian Olma holds the research chair for Cultural and Creative Industries at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt) at Avans University of Applied Sciences. He is the founding editor of the web journal Making and Breaking. Alongside his academic work, he has advised policymakers throughout Europe on the facts and fictions of the creative economy. His publications include Art and Autonomy: Past, Present, Future (2018, V2_ Publishing), In Defence of Serendipity (2016, Repeater Press), and, most recently, An-Aesthetic Autonomy: Rebuilding the Art World After Its Neoliberal Degradation (2025, INC longform).