THE NEW WORLD OF BRUTALISM WE'RE LIVING IN NOW

BRUCE NAUMAN, FIST IN MOUTH, 1990

If you’re perplexed and unsettled by the state of the world these days, here’s a concept for you. Brutalism.

We’re living now in a new age of brutalism. A golden age of it, in fact. It’s the thread now linking geopolitics, politics, finance, economics, and life itself.

And if you’re feeling low, it’s because you’re being brutalized. I’ll come back to that.

I’ve borrowed this term from architecture. If you don’t know it, think of monolithic, monumental, gigantic grey buildings, rendered in stark concrete. Brutalism as an architectural movement was about function over form. And so it is in our world today.

Let’s think about geopolitics. There, America’s imposing its new vision of order on the world. Might makes…if not right…then just “the way it’s going to be.” The Strait of Hormuz is blockaded, twice over. The world is plunging headlong into the greatest energy shock ever. Trump’s playing golf. This is brutalism in its raw essence. I decide, you pay the price. My fist shatters all.

Then there’s economics and finance. Here, too, you can see brutalism at work. The stock market roars through it all. Unthinking, unblinking. What could possibly go wrong? 1929 beckons. Should a stock market be booming through the greatest period of global disintegration in modern history? Never mind. Don’t ask the question. Brutalism is about cheering on the ugly, senselessly.

Brutalism’s coarse, thoughtless, obscene. Can you see it at work online? There, what used to be sort of random conversations with strangers is now an incredibly disturbing place and space. Threats, harassment, deepfakes, god knows what else. Express a relatively mild opinion, and all hell breaks loose. Brutalism at work again, this time, culturally, and here, it’s become a new touchstone of how human interactions should work. To the ugliest, to the loudest, to the most insulting, the most petty yet aggrieved, the eternal victim, belongs all of culture itself.

I can even see brutalism at work in human aesthetics. The faces of the super rich are barely recognizable as human anymore. What are they trying to achieve? What’s all the filler and surgery for? It’s as if they’re building an armor against the very brutalist world they’ve constructed. Maybe I go too far, or maybe you see what I do.

It’s often said that this is a nihilistic age. I don’t think it is, at least not in such a simplistic sense.

We now live in a world where brutalism is the meta-philosophy underpinning and connecting our world. Brutalism is the ur-thing. The Alpha and Omega. It’s what links fascism, predatory capitalism, dehumanization, technology, politics, the breakdown of global order, the way our economies are being reshaped as instruments of the ultra-rich, the weird, chilling sense of righteousness that the most predatory have.

Brutalism’s inscribed into the anti-ethos that’s shattering everything around us, that the strong should triumph over the weak, and what strength is is the very ability to ruthlessly dominate, crush, humiliate, take, and conquer. In this way, brutalism is a form of raw physicalism, like a gut punch.

It brooks no time for niceties like cooperation, consent, reason, truth, meaning, a higher purpose. It is about raw power, expressed in its most elemental, abusive, demented form. I’ll bomb you, starve you, impoverish you, break you, bend you to my will, and it’ll be your fault that you suffered for not obeying sooner.

(If you want, think with me for a moment about some architectural principles of brutalism. “Massing.” Pretty easy to see that one at work in geopolitics, finance, economics—think of the way, even, that institutions have bowed down. You amass power, and use it to crush. “Repetition.” I don’t need to dwell on that, do I? We all know who repeats himself endless on social media. How about “crudity”? Again, pretty obvious to see.)

But brutalism as a philosophy by which to run a country, society, or a world is also the antithesis of the idea of civilization. Modernity. And that now almost quaint word, democracy. And of course a world that’s run on brutalist principles is hardly going to be a stable, prosperous, or happy place.

I think we’re all being brutalized these days, and we don’t quite know it. Know how to say it. We understand it on an intuitive level, we feel it, but it’s another thing to verbalize it and understand it. The point of brutalism is exactly this. To brutalize. There is no purpose to it except power, of precisely this kind.

And unfortunately, too few understand this. The stock market cheering on brutalism will soon enough find that it too is just another structure to be turned to rubble when it’s no longer indispensable. Think of all the institutions that said they’d stand up bravely in times like these—and how many did. The theme is always the same: the wrecking ball of brutalism is aimed at everything and everyone. There is no shelter from it, and certainly not cowardice and appeasement.

Understand where you are. Where we are. Locate yourself in this nightmare. And maybe then you will be able to find your way out. Brutalism is here to stay. The question for countries, societies, and governments is the same as it is for people: what will you be able to build that can withstand it?

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)