Dear Reader,

As we stand on the precipice of the year 2000, Sokal Nouveau finds itself—like the world at large—preoccupied with the countdown. We chant it almost mechanically, as a collective, into the void: 10, 9, 8… The enumeration is backwards, inverted, diminishing. Each syllable signals not plenitude but subtraction, not progress but erasure. And yet, in this strange subtractive liturgy, we encounter the collective promise of renewal.

The backward chant has become, in our moment, more than a ritual of festivity. It is planetary, broadcast via satellites whose own futures are imperilled by the so-called “millennium bug.” On December 31st, when the world chants together, the performativity of decrementality will take on a paradoxical gravity: the nearer we draw to one, the closer we come to both apocalypse and rebirth.

Of course, the silence after one—the absent zero—remains the crucial enigma. What follows? Fireworks and kisses, but also perhaps glitches and collapse. The refusal to utter zero ensures that the void itself is made performative: a gap filled by collective noise and collective hope. This silence is not incidental but structural, the hinge upon which the illusion of transition swings.

What does it mean to arrive at a moment whose significance is defined less by presence than by absence? Our contributors this issue take up these themes in diverse ways, from Clara Weiss‘ (Freie Universität Berlin) essay which reads champagne effervescence as a dialectical allegory of modernity within the fin-de-siècle atmosphere to Samuel Iqbal‘s (Kings College London) ‘Resolutions Without Resolution’ which looks at New Year’s resolutions as paradoxical speech acts whose ritualised failure sustains collective fantasies of renewal.

If the 20th century has been an age of accumulation—of data, capital, weaponry—then its closing ritual is one of subtraction. To chant backwards is to welcome entropy. Yet perhaps in this paradox lies the possibility of beginning again.

It is therefore, with the promise and anxieties of a new millennium, that we present the December 1999 issue of Sokal Nouveau. May it accompany you through the void, the silence, and the noise of midnight.

With anticipatory regards,

Editor
Sokal Nouveau