“And I will capture your minds with sweet novelty.”
- Ovid
I recently re-read Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical masterpiece The Years ahead of attending its first theatre adaptation in the UK. A personal account, but narrated in the choral ‘we’, it documents Ernaux’s life and times, from her working-class childhood in 1940s provincial Normandy to her metropolitan heyday in Paris as a teacher, mother, and celebrated writer. For Ernaux, the years don’t so much roll by as pop up with a ‘ker-ching’ at the till. They are clocked by a constant procession of the new: new records, fashions, and technologies; new kinds of homes with new kinds of fittings; fads that disappear almost as soon as they arrive, displaced by the next new thing, as well as new personal and political dawnings: new rules, laws, and loves. Ernaux keeps the reader alert to the way individuals are swept up in the constant churn of the world, their personal lives shaped by a succession of collective experiences. Novelty here is a marker of time.
The theatre production felt appropriately frenetic, since the rolling round of years was staged quite literally, using a circular track that resembled a circus ring around which various time-stamped novelties got wheeled towards the audience, then away again. You had the sense that everything new got its brief moment in the sun before being consigned to history’s shredder. Where, you began to wonder, lay the substance of a life? And that, perhaps, is the point of The Years. It invites you to question whether we amount to anything before we die – given we all follow the same well-worn circuit as everyone who has ever lived before us.
Chasing the new has always been about grasping for tomorrow. Pulling the near horizons of the future close enough for us to see and feel what tomorrow might bring: which is to say that I don’t think you can separate novelty from time.
At its extreme, the determined pursuit of novelty looks like an attempt to outrun or outpace time, as if it might be possible to buy or cheat your way out of death itself by reaching for the rebirth that lies beyond it – the symbolic one delivered by the ‘ping’ of the new.
This weird logic puts reminds me of a relative of mine, a shopping addict who is adept at generating all manner of excuses for constantly acquiring stuff; new cars, new clothes, new furniture. She claims she deserves it. That she’s had a hard time and could use a reward; or she insists that she truly needs new curtains, plant pots, bicycles, holidays. She expresses an avid interest in novelty for the sake of novelty, and scans the internet to feed her habit, searching out the latest model of this or that or the next season’s hot new drop. She thinks of herself as fashion-forward, wants to be on top of things (news, gadgetry, inside-track knowledge), and strives to stay ahead of herself (see ‘death’, above).
On one memorable occasion, after she’d returned home at the end of a two-week stay, when it seemed she’d admirably restrained herself from shopping, I discovered that she’d stuffed several bags full of new purchases, fripperies mainly – clothing, perfumes – behind the armoire in the spare room, burying evidence of an addiction that in rare, lucid moments clearly shamed her. I felt a surge of pity for her in that split second.
When she defended her addiction, I mostly felt censorious. There was the environment to think about, after all, the sweat-shop labour, the enslavement of the Global South in service to the consumer hunger of the Global North. As for the immoral waste of it all… the idea of casually casting out what was surplus to need when so many people the world over had to make do with less than enough.
Over time, I realised that her shopping habit was less about constantly seeking the thrill of the new (though that’s how she would explain it) than it was a desperate attempt to fill a yawning existential hole inside her. The fear that in herself she isn’t enough – isn’t good enough, doesn’t amount to enough, doesn’t mean enough.
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As a teenager studying economics, I remember being profoundly struck by one of the first concepts I learned about: the law of diminishing marginal utility. This states that if the consumption of a good or service increases, the satisfaction it yields increases at an ever-decreasing rate, to the point where it reaches zero. Satisfaction maxes out when marginal utility is zero. So, your second slice of pizza will be incrementally less delicious than your first; your third slice more so. By time you’re onto your fourth or fifth, you may not find it delicious at all.
Diminishing marginal utility is an important predictor of consumer behaviour in explaining why demand curves in micro-economic models tend to slope downward. Its why restaurants are able to profit from offering all-you-can-eat buffets, and why the Zara model of fast fashion works, by spurning the idea of shifting volume and instead producing limited editions of weekly fashion fixes that people can wear once then throw away.
The late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard understood that the speed of our consumption – of new things, information, and events – was a critical factor in hoodwinking us out of our fear of endings. His theory, in short, was that in our rush to consume everything all at once we empty the present of its content. According to Baudrillard, the more we consume the faster the process runs, until – if we move fast enough – we overtake the speed at which time processes through our lives and begin to move backwards. Time on this model isn’t linear but curved like a boomerang. The path it traces, first towards and then away from The End – death, hellfire, apocalypse – is an asymptote.
How to tame the impulse towards novelty, given that its pleasures are short-lived, if not illusory? I certainly don’t have an answer. But I have an analogy, and it takes the form of another book I’ve read recently, William Golding’s The Inheritors. The novel is a paean to the Neanderthals whom we meet just as they are on the verge of being eclipsed by Homo sapiens. Golding reimagines the Neanderthals as an intuitive and joyous people, keenly attuned to nature, while also anticipating the belief systems and clan loyalties that subsequent scholars of the prehistoric world have come to believe Neanderthals possessed.
Golding penned The Inheritors as an angry riposte to H.G. Wells’ dismissal of Neanderthals as brutes. It contains a warning against romanticising the new, since the evolutionary new boys on the block, the swifter, smarter, more resourceful sapiens, don’t always recognise the Neanderthals as human. More: they fail to understand the value of what they supplant. Golding makes you ask who, really, are the brutes.
From the 'Novelty' edition of New Philosopher, which can be purchased here via our online store
