theory → there is no alternative: theoretical framework
Key concepts: capitalist realism, hauntology, crisis of meaning, liminality, ritual studies
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TINA is a slogan that captured the essence of neoliberalism. In Germany, this policy is known as alternativlos and closely tied to CDU, who recently won the elections. The close second party, famously, is the far-right AfD — founded in 2013, it reflected that opposition in its name. “Alternative” in AfD is the very same “alternative” found in TINA — a direct populist response from the far-right to the center-right. It needs to be said that at that time, Merkel’s alternativlos narrative was rather unpopular among many German people, to the point of it earning the infamous title of Unwort des Jahres (”unword” of the year) in 2010. This rating has been functioning since 1991, and by following it year-by-year i.e. word-by-word one can get quite an accurate feeling of what people thought about and hated in the reunified Germany: starting with ausländerfrei (foreigner-free) and ethnische Säuberung (ethnic cleansing) in 1991 and 1992 it went full circle to Remigration and Biodeutsch in 2023 and 2024. Through that lens, words like alternativlos scattered in between seem relatively harmless by today’s standards.
In recent years, these unwords overwhelmingly come from one source: AfD speeches. Once seen (by some) as a reaction to a redundant narrative, the party now pushes such narratives itself, at a very impressive rate. Among many wins that AfD has claimed in recent history, the most important one is reflected in its name: they managed to monopolize the very notion of alternative. They weakened neoliberalism and strengthened it at the same time: we can see now that there is indeed an alternative, but it is so grotesquely appaling that we are almost forced to come back to the neoliberal TINA-narrative, thus reinforcing its perpetuity. In that sense, we are not far from choosing there not to be an alternative, because the choice in question that is pushed upon us seems increasingly binary: if there is an alternative to the neoliberal Germany, then it is AfD; and if Germany does not want AfD in power, it needs to come to terms with the alternativlos CDU, which is only moderately right wing (on paper) and therefore lesser of the two evils.
The next passage begs to start with words, “how did we get here?” Ironically, the question itself hints to the answer. This question is being thrown around so often that one can argue that this mode of perception is now an integral part of human existence — like missing your stop while scrolling social media, only to look up and find yourself somewhere unexpected. Our attention is pulled in multiple directions at the same time, we are used to being constantly distracted, and even profoundly important things can only get our undivided attention sometimes and for a short time.
We still tend to think that “exposed” means “addressed” or “brought to public attention”, whereas in modern day world it almost always means “normalised” and “integrated”.