Coda

Abstract

The Coda considers how the book’s historical critique of modernist verticality can help us develop more nuanced ways of rethinking more current discourses of the horizontal imagination, including decades-old arguments about the “depthlessness,” “shallowness,” and “groundlessness” of contemporary culture as well as the rhetoric of horizontal flows, digital utopias, and the global commons. In particular, it calls for further recognition of the growing ecological crisis and the persistence of social stratification and uneven development despite calls for “flat” conceptions of the social. It concludes by arguing that a more multi-layered and multi-dimensional understanding of the past and the future may be necessary for confronting the challenges of the present.