Revanchist noösphere frontiers

Abstract

Revanchism has evolved—in both ideological and material-embodied senses of the term—in the decades since Neil Smith's conceptualization in The New Urban Frontier, and since the wave of poststructuralist critiques elicited by David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity. Most troubling are adaptive cybernetic fusions of 21st century computational life with recrudescent 19th-century Social Darwinist hierarchies of human nature and human worth. This paper revisits Smith's interpretation of the Revanche movement of 19th-century France and Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 notorious American frontier thesis; special emphasis is placed on the strange yet influential theories of evolutionary planetary consciousness developed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In the late 1950s, Henri Lefebvre dreamed of writing a history of the devil, and imagined the spaceship Teilhard de Chardin taking humanity to a distant planet with a cool, progressive, gender-transitioning God. In 2024, Steve Bannon invoked Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the “noösphere” to explain Donald Trump's understanding of television and media consciousness amidst new configurations of militant spirituality and right-wing populist politics. Today's noöspheric infrastructures produce multi-scalar mutations of revanchist hierarchies and resentment, in combinatoric hybridities of identity and representation that evolve in asymptotically infinite forms of anti-urbanism.