Have we Lost the World for Its Parts? (Part 2)

A Framework for Understanding Fragmentation, Lost Futures, and Locked Imaginations Part III: When Art Forgets to Build

A feeling has followed me through every art gallery, and it's taken me years to understand that what I was encountering wasn't failure but strategy, wasn't accident but deliberate choice, wasn't one artist's limitation but an entire mode of cultural production that had decided, for reasons that made historical sense even if they led to a dead end, that meaning-making itself was suspect and that the most honest thing art could do was demonstrate its own meaninglessness with increasing sophistication. Art became complicit in the iconoclasm by hollowing them from within, by showing us that every symbol was constructed and therefore arbitrary and therefore available for deconstruction, and what started as liberatory practice, see through the lies, understand how power manufactures consent through images and narratives, resist the grand narratives that justify mass death, became something else when it became the only practice, when irony became the only language anyone knew how to speak fluently.

The trajectory runs roughly like this, and you can trace it across decades: Warhol in the 1970s takes Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe and treats them as interchangeable surfaces, icons with no meaning beyond their own circulation, and what's radical about this initially is how it exposes the commodity logic that turns everything into brand, into image, into something that can be reproduced infinitely without loss because there was nothing there to lose in the first place, and Warhol is being honest about this in ways that earlier art wasn't, is saying "look, we live in a world where everything is surface and pretending otherwise is itself a kind of lie," and something is clarifying about that honesty even if what it clarifies is emptiness. By the 1990s Koons is selling balloon animals for millions of dollars and the balloon animals are perfect, shiny, utterly hollow, and everyone understands the joke, art is now a financial asset class, value is whatever someone will pay, meaning is beside the point, but the joke has become the point, has become the whole operation, and Hirst is preserving sharks in formaldehyde and calling it art and selling it to oligarchs and the gesture is so nakedly about commodification that it can't even pretend to be about anything else, and we've arrived at a place where art has become pure critique of the conditions that produce it but the critique has become indistinguishable from participation in those conditions.

The logic throughout is consistent even as it hollows itself out: if modernism tried to show us the world's essence, if Picasso's Guernica was a cry against war and Rothko's color fields were meant to evoke something beyond language, if the assumption was that art could reveal truth or express feeling or make visible what was hidden, then what do you do after a century that demonstrated over and over that every claim to truth masked power, that every grand narrative about human progress delivered mass graves, that propaganda and advertising had colonized every technique that art had developed for reaching people emotionally, that sincerity itself had become suspect because it had been weaponized so effectively by so many regimes? The postmodern answer was: give up on truth, embrace surface, make art that admits it means nothing because at least that's honest, at least that doesn't lie to you about having access to something deeper or more real than the endless circulation of signs.

And there's something to this, something I don't want to dismiss too quickly because I understand the historical necessity of the gesture, understand why artists who'd watched fascism and Stalinism and Vietnam and advertising industries all use emotional manipulation to manufacture consent would want to create work that refused emotional manipulation, that made its own construction visible, that declined to offer false comfort or false meaning. But the problem is what happens when the gesture becomes generalized, when deconstruction becomes the only mode available, when the refusal to build meaning becomes itself a kind of orthodoxy that you can't question without seeming naive or reactionary or insufficiently sophisticated.

Years later in a white-cube gallery in New York—and I specify white-cube because the architecture tells you everything about who this art is for and what function it serves, the pristine white walls and perfect lighting and hushed atmosphere all signaling that you're in the presence of something important even when, especially when, the work itself is insisting that nothing is important, I encountered a piece that was the artist documenting their own process. Video of them mixing paint, receipts from art supply purchases carefully framed and mounted, wall text explaining at length how the work "interrogated the commodification of artistic labor under late capitalism," and the whole thing was smart, was self-aware, demonstrated that the artist understood exactly what they were doing and understood the market they were operating in and understood that understanding the system didn't free them from it, and I felt nothing, or I felt the shape of where feeling should go, felt the absence of feeling as a kind of presence, and the work had done this deliberately, had critiqued itself so thoroughly that it left no room for me to need it or want it or respond to it with anything other than intellectual appreciation for its sophistication.

This is art's complicity in the iconoclasm: it diagnoses the disease with extraordinary precision but forgets, or refuses, or no longer believes it's possible to offer anything beyond diagnosis, and in that refusal it becomes part of the machinery it's critiquing because if art, which is supposed to be the domain where alternatives get imagined, where people practice seeing differently, where the possible gets expanded beyond what the current system allows, if art can't imagine anything beyond its own critique then where else is imagination supposed to come from?

When the institutions dedicated to cultural production have decided that the most sophisticated thing you can do is demonstrate that sophistication doesn't matter, that meaning is always constructed and therefore always arbitrary and therefore always available for deconstruction but never for reconstruction, then you've created a situation where the iconoclasm doesn't need bombs or censorship because the culture is destroying its own symbols faster than any external force could manage.

Around 2010 some artists started noticing this dead end and trying something different, started oscillating between irony and sincerity in ways that acknowledged you couldn't go back to naive belief but also couldn't survive on irony alone, and there's a name for this tendency, metamodernism, though I'm less interested in the label than in what the attempt reveals about the bind we're in. Everything Everywhere All at Once, stares into the void of infinite universes and infinite meaninglessness and then argues, with full awareness of how impossible the argument is, that love and attention matter anyway, that you have to choose meaning in a meaningless world because the alternative is choosing nothing, and these works have power precisely because they don't pretend the irony wasn't justified, don't pretend we can return to sincere belief in grand narratives, but also don't pretend that pure irony is livable.

Here's a limit I feel acutely because I want these works to do more than they can: this is therapy, individual comfort, the restoration of some capacity to feel in a culture that had numbed itself through endless critique, and that matters, especially when isolation and depression and suicide rates tell us that people are desperate for permission to feel something real again, but it doesn't restore collective symbolic order, doesn't give us shared meaning-making structures, doesn't rebuild the institutions and practices that would allow coordinated action toward collective goals. The works say "you personally can feel something despite knowing that feeling is constructed" but they don't and can't say "here's how we build together, here's what shared meaning looks like, here's how we coordinate action based on common understanding," and the reason they can't say that is because they're still operating within a fundamentally individualized framework where meaning is something you construct for yourself rather than something that emerges from collective practice.

And there's a deeper problem that has to do with geography and power: metamodernism as a tendency emerges almost entirely from Northern and Western contexts, from artists who have the luxury of treating irony and sincerity as choices you can oscillate between depending on your mood or the requirements of the artwork, and this misses entirely what artists in the Global South, in diaspora, under occupation have been doing all along, which is creating meaning under conditions where they don't have the option to choose meaninglessness because meaninglessness would mean death. 

So what we have is a situation where art offers two inadequate options: empty critique that breaks symbols without building new ones, or personal therapy that helps individuals feel better without rebuilding collective capacity for coordinated meaning-making, and meanwhile the symbols we actually need, symbols that are collective rather than individual, generative rather than critical, capable of organizing action rather than just expressing feeling, those symbols remain unbuilt because the cultural institutions that might build them have decided that building symbols is naive or impossible or complicit with power, and in that vacuum the iconoclasm continues without significant resistance from the domain that's supposed to resist it.

Part IV: The Locked Imagination and What Sovereignty Might Mean

Listen to how people used to talk about time and you'll hear the difference immediately: "there's always tomorrow" was infrastructure, cognitive architecture, the assumption embedded in the phrase that tomorrow existed as space you could move into, that time carried possibility rather than just threat, that the future was something you could build toward rather than something that would happen to you regardless of what you did. "Tomorrow is another day" meant tomorrow offered chances that today didn't, meant you could fail today and still have tomorrow to try again, meant that linear time was progress or at least opportunity rather than countdown or catastrophe. These phrases weren't cliches yet, or they were cliches in the way that all fundamental assumptions become cliches through repetition, through being so obviously true that you don't question them until suddenly they're not true anymore and you realize you've lost something you didn't know you were depending on.

Listen to how people talk today and the shift is undeniable: "I can't even" trails off without object because the overwhelm is too complete to specify, "we're so fucked" states as fact what used to be feared as possibility, and when young people say "I don't think I'll live to retirement" they're not being dramatic or engaging in generational complaint but rather reading the data, reading the temperature charts and the wildfire maps and the political collapse and the economic precarity and doing the math that says the systems that allowed previous generations to imagine futures aren't going to hold long enough for them to have those futures. This isn't pessimism or bad attitude, this is realism in the sense of accurate assessment of conditions, and the shift from "tomorrow is another day" to "we're so fucked" represents a change in mood and a change in temporal consciousness, change in the basic cognitive capacity to imagine tomorrow as something other than catastrophe or empty repetition.

I realized I'd lost tomorrow sometime in 2023, and I can't tell you exactly when because the loss wasn't a single moment of recognition but rather a gradual accumulation of moments that added up to inability, to a kind of paralysis that I didn't have language for until I tried to plan something and couldn't, tried to imagine next year and found nothing. Palestine is a big part of it, the genocide unfolding in real time, streamed directly to my phone in videos that showed rubble and bodies and grief in few seconds intervals that my brain couldn't process, couldn't hold it, couldn't construct any narrative that made sense of what I was watching except the narrative that power kills with impunity and documents its killing and we watch and do nothing, but it wasn't just Gaza, it was also the economic news from Lebanon, another collapse that made previous collapse look stable by comparison, and I understood with a clarity that felt like doom that Lebanon is next, that the same evil that destroys Gaza would come for Lebanon and probably Syria and probably Jordan and probably every place in the region that couldn't protect itself through military power or strategic value. My family is still there, and when I tried to think through what that meant, what should be done, how to prepare, how to help, my attention would fracture, would split across too many anxieties and possibilities and impossibilities, and I'd find myself scrolling again, looking at my phone again, numbing myself again with the same mechanism that was preventing me from thinking clearly in the first place.

This is the trap, and it's a trap that works precisely because it's closed, because it feeds on itself: the future feels catastrophic which creates unbearable anxiety which drives you to scroll for relief which destroys your capacity to imagine alternatives which makes the future feel even more catastrophic which increases the anxiety which increases the scrolling, and round and round until you can't remember when you last held a plan in your mind for longer than five minutes, can't remember what it felt like to picture next year with any specificity, can't access the cognitive tools that would let you distinguish between catastrophes you can affect and catastrophes you can't, between problems that have solutions and problems that are just conditions you have to navigate, and the inability to make these distinctions means everything feels equally overwhelming which means nothing gets addressed because you don't know where to start and you're too exhausted to start anyway.

And yet some people refuse, and I need to talk about this refusal because it's the only thing that gives me any sense that unlocking is possible even if I can't do it myself yet. Palestinian journalists, the ones I mentioned earlier, the ones who are murdered systematically for their documentation, those journalists kept filming despite being targeted, and by early 2026, over 230 had been killed. Their colleagues kept filming, kept documenting, kept insisting that the genocide be witnessed even though witnessing hadn't stopped it and likely wouldn't stop it and they knew this, knew that international law was theater and that power had decided the documentation was more dangerous than the acts being documented which is why they were being murdered for holding cameras, and they filmed anyway, and what I want us all to understand about this is that it's not naive hope, not the belief that truth will set us free or that witnessing automatically translates to justice, but rather something harder and more fundamental: the refusal to let tomorrow be erased without witness, the insistence that documentation matters even when documentation doesn't prevent, that making people see what power wants hidden has value even if the seeing doesn't lead to action, that the future will need this archive even if we can't see from here what the future will do with it.

Every video was an act of refusal, an act that said: we are here, we are seeing this, we are making you see this, and tomorrow, whatever tomorrow is, whether we're alive to see it or not, tomorrow will know what happened today, will have the evidence, will not be able to claim ignorance or say that no one warned them or pretend that the violence was secret or justified or anything other than what it was. This is militant practice rather than naive hope, this is fighting because there's no alternative even when you know you might lose, even when you know that power has already decided you're disposable and your documentation is threat, and what distinguishes this from despair is the insistence that the fight matters even in defeat, that the refusal matters even when it doesn't prevent what you're refusing, that the practice of witnessing has value beyond its immediate effectiveness in stopping violence.

Thunberg does something similar though the stakes are different: "I want you to panic" doesn't mean "panic instead of acting" but rather "feel the emergency at the scale the emergency warrants and then act from that emergency rather than from the calm that's actually just numbness,"  These gestures share a temporal logic: tomorrow isn't promised, isn't given, isn't coming on its own, tomorrow is something you demand, something you fight for, something you build with others despite impossible odds, despite knowing that power has resources you don't, despite understanding that the systems you're fighting are larger and more entrenched than any movement you can assemble.

This is the shift I'm trying to describe: tomorrow not as promise but as demand, as practice, as thing that requires making rather than thing that arrives naturally if you wait long enough, and I see the logic of this shift, see why it's necessary when the systems that used to promise tomorrow have revealed themselves as extractive and destructive, when the institutions that claimed to be building the future have been exposed as protecting the present arrangement of power regardless of what that arrangement does to actual futures. The shift says: you can't wait for conditions to improve before you start fighting for tomorrow because conditions won't improve on their own, power has no interest in improving conditions for you, the catastrophe will continue and accelerate unless you interrupt it, and the interruption starts not with having a complete plan or certain victory but with refusing the present's claim that there's no alternative.

To be honest, I'm not there yet, can't get there yet, am stuck in a paralysis that understanding hasn't unlocked. I see the refusal clearly, see why it matters, see that Palestinian journalists filming their own deaths and climate activists demanding the impossible and all the people building alternatives in ruins while everything collapses around them, I see that these represent the only form hope can take under current conditions, see that this militant practice is what sovereignty looks like when sovereignty means anything, and I support it, want it to succeed, need it to succeed because the alternative is accepting that power has won completely, and I can't generate it myself, can't access whatever internal resource would let me practice refusal rather than just analyze it.

I can't picture tomorrow not because I lack information but because the cognitive tools required to picture it have been systematically dismantled by exactly the processes I've been describing throughout this essay. I try to read and can't sustain attention past 30 pages, try to plan and my attention fractures across anxieties before I can construct anything coherent, try to imagine alternatives to extraction, to domination, to the iconoclasm itself, and I get nothing, just the scroll, just the fragments, just the perpetual present that scrolling produces, and this isn't metaphor or exaggeration but literal description of what's been lost.

Here's the deepest contradiction, the place where analysis becomes confession: I'm mourning ideals I know were poison, grieving the loss of universalism even though I understand intellectually that it was colonial sedation, that it made me complicit in my own subordination by teaching me to believe in unity that was really hierarchy, and I'm relieved the lie is exposed, relieved that the pretense of universal solidarity has the potential to be abandoned so completely that no one can pretend anymore, and I am devastated that I can't imagine what kind of solidarity might be possible without universalism, what kind of coordination might emerge from fragments that refuse the false unity empire offered. The contradiction won't resolve through more thinking because the contradiction is the condition, is what living through iconoclasm feels like from inside when you've been raised to believe in the symbols being destroyed.

I see people building some mutual aid networks, see them organizing rent strikes, see them demanding reparations and abolition, see them setting horizons by demanding the impossible so that what's currently possible expands, and all of this is important, all of this is necessary, all of this represents the only plausible path toward futures that aren't just intensification of present extraction.

Maybe the lock will open later when I've processed more or rested more or found some practice that restores what's been dismantled, or maybe this paralysis is the permanent condition the iconoclasm produces: seeing clearly, understanding deeply, analyzing precisely, and being unable to act anyway, being unable to imagine anyway, being stuck in the gap between knowledge and capacity.

This is where I am, and I don't know if honesty about it helps or just confirms the paralysis, don't know if admitting I'm stuck is first step toward getting unstuck or just excuse for remaining stuck, and maybe I won't know until later, until time tells me whether honesty was opening or closing, and maybe you're stuck too, maybe lots of us are stuck in this same paralysis, this same gap between seeing and doing, and maybe that's where we have to start, with the admission that right now, in this moment, we're locked, that the iconoclasm has succeeded in stripping us of the cognitive and emotional resources we'd need to imagine our way out, and we don't know yet whether those resources can be rebuilt or whether we're permanently diminished in ways that will determine everything that comes after.

Honesty alone isn't enough, I'm increasingly certain of this even though I'm stuck on what comes after honesty. Honesty without agency is just confession, just telling yourself the truth while remaining powerless to act on that truth, and what honesty requires, what it demands if it's going to be anything other than a refined form of paralysis, is dignified sovereignty. Not sovereignty as nation-states practice it, not the sovereignty that hoards resources and builds walls and defines itself through exclusion and violence, but sovereignty as self-governance: the confidence, the capacity, the daily practice of believing that you can build, to matter, to shape the world around you in however way, to govern your own becoming rather than just accepting whatever gets imposed.

This is what the iconoclasm is really destroying: not just particular symbols or institutions but the fundamental belief that humans matter on a human level, that we're more than servants to systems, more than consumers keeping up with progress that's been defined by someone else for purposes that don't serve us. 

The world keeps telling us, through every platform and every policy and every pronouncement from power, that you exist to adapt, to keep pace, to upgrade yourself for the next platform, to remain compatible with systems that are changing faster than you can track, to make yourself useful to arrangements that don't care if you thrive or break or disappear completely as long as you served your function while you lasted, and your value is measured entirely by your ability to remain relevant to systems that are themselves designed to extract value from you until there's nothing left to extract and then discard you.

This is the deepest lie the iconoclasm tells, deeper than the lies about universalism or democracy or progress, and it's the lie that has to be refused before anything else becomes possible: the lie that human life is meaningful only insofar as it serves progress as defined by power, that your significance is contingent on your usefulness, that you matter only to the extent that you can keep up with technological advancement and economic transformation and geopolitical shifts that you didn't choose and can't control and that are designed to serve interests that aren't yours. Dignified sovereignty says otherwise, says something simpler and more fundamental: I matter because I'm here, because I exist. After all, consciousness is inherently valuable regardless of what it produces or how it ranks or whether it serves anyone else's purposes, and my capacity to build meaning, to care for others, to refuse what diminishes me, to practice attention and commitment and love. These capacities aren't contingent on their productivity or their relevance to systems that want to extract them; these capacities have worth in themselves, and I have the right to govern how I use them even when every force around me is trying to strip that right away.

It says: I can't imagine the whole future yet, maybe won't ever be able to imagine futures at the scale I used to dream them, but I can imagine tomorrow, can picture the next decision, the next day, the next small thing I might build or protect or refuse, and maybe sovereignty isn't grand, maybe it's not the capacity to transform everything or solve everything or even understand everything, maybe it's just the daily practice of insisting that you have the right to govern your own attention, your own time, your own meaning-making, your own participation or refusal to participate in systems designed to use you up. Maybe it's reading those thirty pages despite the phone's pull, despite knowing the next notification might be urgent, despite the voice that says you're wasting time that could be spent being productive or informed or connected. Maybe it's turning off the scroll and sitting with silence even though silence brings anxiety that scrolling was numbing.

Maybe it's choosing to care about someone and/or something deeply when everything around you is structured to make caring feel naive or excessive or dangerous.

Maybe it's admitting: I don't know the way out, can't see the path from here to there, can't imagine the collective institutions we'd need or the coordinated action we'd have to take or the sustained attention we'd require, but I refuse to accept that there isn't a way out, refuse to accept that I'm just here to keep up, to serve, to scroll through catastrophe until catastrophe swallows me, and I refuse this not because I have evidence that refusal works, not because I'm optimistic about outcomes, but because accepting powerlessness completely, accepting that I have no agency over how I spend my days or what I pay attention to or what I build or protect, accepting that would be a kind of death, would be letting the iconoclasm win so completely that even resistance becomes unimaginable.

The iconoclasm wants us to more isolated, more exhausted, more convinced that individual choices don't matter because the systems are too big, and the systems are too big, I'm not disputing that, not pretending that personal sovereignty somehow defeats institutional power or that individual refusal scales automatically to collective transformation, but sovereignty isn't about defeating the systems immediately, not in ways we can see from here, sovereignty is about refusing to let systems define the terms of your existence completely, is about insisting that there are aspects of your life, your attention, your meaning-making that aren't available for extraction regardless of what gets incentivized or mandated or made convenient.

It's the difference between "I'm stuck" as terminal diagnosis and "I'm stuck but I'm deciding how to be stuck" as first assertion of agency, the difference between "I can't imagine tomorrow" as admission of defeat and "I can't imagine the whole future but I'm going to practice imagining small tomorrows until the capacity returns" as commitment to practice despite uncertainty. This isn't optimism, and I want to be clear about that because optimism implies confidence that things will improve and I don't have that confidence, this is survival, this is recognition that waiting for conditions to improve before you start practicing sovereignty means you'll never start because the conditions won't improve on their own, the systems will keep extracting, the iconoclasm will keep destroying, and if you're going to have any agency at all you have to claim it now, under bad conditions, without knowing if it will work, without guarantee that practice will accumulate into transformation.

But you can still decide, each day, whether you're going to participate in your own diminishment or not, whether you're going to let the iconoclasm tell you that nothing matters on a human level or whether you're going to insist that human-level mattering is the only mattering that actually matters, whether you're going to accept that your value is your utility to systems or whether you're going to practice the belief that you have worth beyond use. And I'm writing this as much to myself as to you because I'm still locked, my imagination hasn't unlocked just from understanding the mechanisms of its locking, but maybe understanding is the ground on which sovereignty can be built, maybe honesty about paralysis is the first small choice that says: I matter enough to tell the truth about where I am, about what's been taken, about what needs rebuilding.

And maybe that's enough to start, not to solve everything, not to reassemble the world that was never whole to begin with, not to restore the futures that were always more promise than possibility, but just to begin the practice of believing that I, and we, have the right to govern our own becoming even in ruins, even under iconoclasm, even when tomorrow remains dark and the whole future is foreclosed and all we have is the next decision about how to spend the next hour of attention. This is where I am. This is where the essay ends. Not with answers, not with hope in the sense of confidence about outcomes, not with false promises of reassembly or restoration or return, but with the admission that dignified sovereignty, which is just the insistence that humans matter on human terms rather than system terms, that we have the right to build meaning even when meaning gets extracted, that we can practice self-governance even when governance from above is designed to strip our capacity for self, that this might be the only honest response to a world designed to strip our dignity, and that practicing it daily, small, without guarantees, without knowing if it accumulates to anything larger than the practice itself, might be the only unlocking available to us.

Because the alternative is letting the iconoclasm win completely, is accepting that we're just here to scroll through catastrophe until catastrophe consumes us, is surrendering the last thing that can't be taken unless we give it: the belief that we matter, that our lives mean something beyond their utility, that tomorrow is worth fighting for even when we can't see it yet.

For conversations or collaboration inquiries, contact: I.khazzaka@gmail.com