survivability and thinkability

I'm trying something on for size here. I'm not sure I'm ready to make a down payment.

"...the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 20th century when it became clear that from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life under the threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically — collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning."
—Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster"

"Perhaps if we have a terrible privilege it is merely that we are alive and are going to die, all at once or one at a time."
— Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

"What protects us is that in nuclear war the event is likely to eliminate the possibility of the spectacle. This is why it will not take place. For humanity can accept physical annihilation, but cannot agree to sacrifice the spectacle (unless it can find a spectator in another world)."
—Jean Baudrillard, "Fatal Strategies"

In Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Bokonoists announce "Now I will destroy the whole world" when they elect to kill themselves. Individual death bound up with collective death, even universal death—this is the ethical question smoldering at the heart of futurity. Why should I care about anything that happens after I am dead? Or, from another angle: why should the potential annihilation of society fill us with so much more revulsion and dread than the certain prospect of our own inevitable demise?

Or: What does it mean to imagine a future, good or bad, Utopian or dystopian, without you in it?

There is surely a biological imperative at work here—but there is also, it seems to me, a phenomenological one, a kind of onto-epistemological blind spot that demands the projected permanence of one's conscious mind, the makes the actual absence of one's personal subjectivity by definition strictly unimaginable, strictly unthinkable.

Thus, we rechannel our own self-consciously impossible wish for immortality into an imagined collectivity that extends into the future, and the death of collectivity thereby becomes renewed as both the object of horror and the object of desire—in both senses really just our own denied deaths returned to us.

Futurity is the (failed) denial of death.

We can find this impossibility of representation revealed in any imagination of apocalypse—the promise of survivability (and therefore futurity) emerges in any ultimate disaster, the point of view character who dodges every bullet and emerges through to the other side, whether to rebuild capitalism anew or simply wallow decadently amidst the ruins. Even the rapturous, totalizing moment of nuclear annihilation has its inevitable excess, tunnels hidden underground where life, it is imagined, might still go on.

And even in the very rare case where narrative does let the bomb does go off, where all life ends, still we watch it happen from a cosmic position of complete safety, an atemporal position of non-embodiment—outside the text. Think of your position when you see the Earth blow up. Where are you standing?

On the Beach, which with its slow and horrid countdown to the total extinction of humanity heroically attempts to face this problem of death head on (and which consequently may well be the most depressing book ever written) in the end cannot dance to its own music: after jumping perspectives over and over in its final chapter, hoping to escape the necessary moment, it ends with its American hero and his doomed crew still technically alive, still sailing south, towards what little is left.

Bazin writes in "Death Every Afternoon" that “for every creature, death is the unique moment par excellence.” Whether it is personal extinction, or atomic Rapture, or H.G. Wells's giant crabs scuttling about on an empty Earth, death is futurity par excellence; it is that moment towards which all things point but which no things point beyond. It is the most unknowable moment of any history and yet the most familiar—we are doomed to speculate over and over “What if I were dead right now? What if I am to die in this next moment?”, but despite its intense familiarity we are completely unable to ever consider the absence of our own consciousness. Always, this is the way we imagine death: a still body inhabited by a still-waking mind, observing ghosts hiding haunting the ruins. Any and all narrative representations of death must necessarily fail—all possibility of identification ends at the moment when the represented figure dies, at the necessarily distanciating moment when we recognize the character has died but we are still alive. (We can recognize death, but never our own.) Consciousness cannot negate itself; it is always there, even when it is trying to play dead.

We are dealing here with something narrative promises but can never deliver: the authentic, projected sensation of surviving ourselves, in the sense of outliving either our physical bodies or the techno-social, biopolitical structures with which life has become functionally identical. Narrative—and not merely in the death scene or in the apocalyptic sci-fi thriller, but also in the jump-cut, in the chapter break, in the fade-to-black and the page turn after The End—can only reinforce the quintessential solipsism endemic to symbolic consciousness: the principle that no matter what happens our subjectivity is eternal and inviolable, that each of us occupies the center of the universe.

This ideological reinforcement may be called, after Bloch, the dystopian function, and while we can find it across genres we can find it most clearly in horror, in apocalyptic fantasy, in science-fiction disaster, in rape, torture, szchiophrenia, madness, snuff, Holocaust, nuclear winter, death: in depicting what's as-bad-as-things-can-get, we are at the same moment promised that we can survive radical transgression, that nothing can undo us, that our individual subjectivity will survive all, even total destruction, even its own destruction. The dystopian function provides the vicarious, spectacular experience of how bad things might get precisely so that it might again make the impossible promise that you will somehow pass through safe and whole to the other side.

So perhaps we could just as well call it the denial-of-reality principle.

Narrativized attempts to transgress the radical boundaries of bodily integrity and societal longevity, to take the reader over the line into new territory, are always a stretching, never a transposition—the subject will always return to where she is anchored in the end, she will neither move nor break in two. There are limits past which neither representation nor imagination can take us, though we may compel both to try. The dystopian function will always in the end fail the reality test: you cannot just sample death, you can only plunge fully into it. Like any other subgenre of futurity, apocalyptic fantasy—relying as it does on the continuity of subjectivity for its very transmission and comprehension—can never shake us from our subjectivity, and so despite its obsessive attempts to transgress of the life/death, now/then boundary, it is always doomed to fail.

the past as anti-future

Our in-person discussion last week ended up on some interesting ground that bears heavily on the question of the end of the world as a cultural form. We found ourselves wrestling with the question of the origins of apocalyptic fantasy, why these sorts of productions are so very popular. We basically hit upon five overlapping and sometimes contradictory motivations:

1) The roller-coaster hypothesis: We are able to enjoy scenarios about radical destruction or the collapse of civilized society because we do not fear they will ever come to pass.

2) The survivalist hypothesis: We consume these scenarios precisely because we believe they will come to pass, because we know they must come to pass.

3) The recursive hypothesis: Apocalpytic fantasies succeed in the box office and the best-seller lists because these sorts of fantasies had succeeded in the past. In other words, consumer culture just keeps feeding us the forms that have already worked, over and over again.

I think this is probably at once the best and worst answer, as it explains Cloverfield better than anything else, but can't explain the genesis of our initial attraction to the form at all. Take this as a given—I won't be talking much about it.

4) The bare-life hypothesis: We enjoy apocalyptic fantasy because we have been primed by ideology to recognize the absence of civilization as a ultra-Hobbesian state of permaviolence and degradation, which is to say that the purpose of apocalpytic fantasy is to serve as reinforcement and justification for the biopolitical power structures that already exist.

5) The wish-fulfillment hypothesis: We persist in imagining the end of the world because we secretly (or not so secretly) long for the destruction of society in general and/or capitalism in particular.



I'm tempted to note here that #1 generally goes with #4, and #2 generally with #5—but I don't believe it's that simple. They're all inextricably bound up with one another. I'm happy to accept "overdetermination" as the answer to this argument, but not without qualification—I think we must acknowledge that Jameson is essentially right when he insists (following Bloch) on the Utopian kernel at the core of both cultural production and daily life. Without #5—without the carrot, whatever form it takes—apocalypse could never sell. There are plenty of places where Jameson says this, but I thought it might be useful (given that our discussion last week came to focus on what exactly is the Utopian hook in a movie like Saw IV) to look at Christopher Sharrett's well-known essay on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not all of it is available online, but a good portion of it is through Google Books, in particular the part I was hoping to quote:

The point to be made here is that the failure of America's sense of divinely ordained "mission," the development of pessimism and the fixation by many American artists on a nonregenerative apocalypse, suggests a kind of wish-fulfillment calling for an end to history, a divine intervention meant to destroy what cannot be revitalized or what has worked against the earlier collective (that is to say white, male, capitalist) beliefs of society.

What is the nature of this wish-fulfillment? Against Sharrett I would suggest that it is almost no different than the catastrophe of science fiction, or rather that it is of a piece with the tripartite possibility that is opened up by the end of the world. When we pass through societal collapse and find ourselves on the other side, three dialectically interrelated possibilities present themselves:

1) We are now free to rebuild capitalist society, but "right" this time. This sort of story inevitably involves a kind of jack-of-all-trades, Swiss-Family-Robinson, white, male, capitalist Übermensch with exactly the skillset necessary to rise to the equation and restart civilization.

We can see already that this narrative hits nearly all the points above—the latest in a long tradition of Robinson Crusoe stories (#3) that we simultaneously don't fear and yet always expect (#1 and #2), this type of post-apocalyptic fantasy both wipes clean the slate of capitalism's practical injustices (#5) while simultaneously justifying an idealized form of capitalism as the natural state of humankind and our only protection against a life of utter deprivation (#4).

You can usually tell you're in this kind of story when the story ends just as it looks like they're about to get the lights back on.

2) In a second variation on apocalpyse, we find ourselves in the state of nature, again as an Übermensch but this time as one finally empowered to fight and struggle and conquer completely freed from societal constraint. The collapse of society is equated with the collapse of all taboo, allowing us to "do whatever it takes to survive," which often just means murdering other people without compulsion, but sometimes also includes such psychoanalytic breaches as abandoning our wives to sleep with our daughters. The post-apocalyptic here is therefore bound up hopelessly with both nightmare (#4) and with wish-fulfillment (#5)—the one feeds into the other—but it is a nightmare that our identification with the hero allows us not only to survive, but on some level enjoy. (This, as I argued in our meeting last week, is the brilliance of High Rise—Ballard makes all his characters so unlikable that we are denied identification and left with just the nightmare.) Clearly, too, this is a thrill ride (#1) that positions us through the power of identification as the unbound survivor hero we all imagine we would be (#2)—we are able to experience at last (albeit vicariously) the total freedom we long for (#5 again).

3) But there is a third track, which might be called the "quiet end" for capitalism, and which in a kind of reverse synthesis leaves #1 and especially #4 out of the equation. While there is always deprivation and destruction, it is always downplayed in favor of a survivalist mentality that denies the capacities of the individual survival in favor of the collectivity of survivors. It is here, not surprising, that we find the Utopian kernel in its purest form, and likewise that we find renewed in these stories a new sense of history that extends far beyond the "Great Disaster" and its immediate aftermath. This is the longed-for apocalypticism of primitivism or of Earth Abides, a life free from capitalism's pressures and contradictions, a literal turning back of the clock. The past, then, not merely as anti-future, but as super-future.

In the most extreme of these fantasies, as in 2007's The World Without Us, there are no longer any people at all—a strange Utopia, yes, but an undeniable one.

The sheer incomprehensible violence required to ever get there from here—the massive, world-historical hardship that would have to be endured—makes these vision of an ahistorical future no less Edenic when they are presented to us, especially—and this may well be the key point—given the fact that the power of narrative identification always ensures our personal passage, no matter how improbable, through the crucible of Tribulation into a better world.

Week 0: Space, More's Utopia, and Time

Recent blogospheric polemicists have argued against a politics predicated on Utopia on the grounds (if I may summarize) that it is Utopia's very impossibility that is actually its most salient and essential characteristic:

Utopia: perfect, not meant to be found, impossible, hidden, veiled. It is perfect because it is the place where veils are unnecessary. No place for deception when everything is truth. And this is why it must always be displaced — the term ‘non-place’ suggests the absence of something that is always and essentially present to the speaker, the very conditions of speaking. Utopia as double negation, the (necessary) absence of an (impossible) absence.

I think this is largely right, but it elides somewhat the reason why: what has happened to Utopia since More published is that Utopia has shifted from a spatial concern—an actual place impossible to reach—to a temporal one—a possible future you won't live to see.

It's not simply that More, playfully insisting in the prefatory material it's all really true, locates his Utopia in the New World, a distant location well outside the horizon of experience for nearly everyone alive in his time; nor that someone coughs at the moment Raphael Hythloday reveals the island's exact location (as recounted in Busleyden's letter); nor that the sea is so unnavigable and dangerous around the island that "it seldom chances that any stranger, unless he be guided by a Utopian, can come into this haven" (first page of book 2). It is the inescapable nature of a spatial Utopia like More's, an Atlantis or a Shangri-La, to be actual and yet essentially unreachable—really, to be a kind of a parallel universe in an age when there was still room enough for them to exist on Earth itself.

Following More, however, Utopia has been relocated from a location in space to a moment in time—the future—and accordingly we have exchanged Utopia as a signifying noun for the Utopian, a metaphorizing adjective. Now Utopia is no longer actual—it doesn't yet exist—but it is reachable, at least in some theoretical sense;it is realizable through the actions of those individuals for whom it is still yet a dream. This potential reachability draws its logic not from the travelogue, as did More's Utopia, but instead from the religious promise of Christian eschatology of the Kingdom of Heaven (usually the substitution is as easy as replacing the Christian savior for a new one).

At the risk of splitting my hairs too finely, I'm speaking here of the difference between the alternative and the potential.

The move from a perfect place to a perfect time necessarily interjects the impossible questions of planning and transition that are objected to in the linked post. To get from England to Utopia (or from Earth-1 to Earth-2), you only have to know in which direction to sail; but to get from the present to ecotopia or the Singularity you have to plan—you have to build. Any Utopian project becomes quickly and hopelessly overrun with logistical impossibility, and accordingly the relevant imagined timeline becomes more and more prolonged:it's not going to be easy; it's a long hard slog; it's the struggle of a generation; it's a generational struggle; I may not get there with you, but I believe...



This is where the longing for apocalypse originates, in the desire for a radical break that does all the work for us at once.

But there's a dialectical countermovement to this longing for apocalypse. As change and progress become so slow as to resemble stasis, the long arm of the future and the impossibility of ever reaching it has a second and even more pernicious effect on the imagination of Utopia: in addition to voiding the Utopian of its political power and reducing it instead to the failed dreams of the naive for a "perfect world," it also respatializes Utopia, reinscribing it back inside the present. Our teleological view of history makes this happen. If the Utopian dream of tomorrow can be built out of the present moment, the future and the present begin to telescope, narratively, into a single, indistinguishable motion. If the warm-up pitch begets the pitch begets the swing begets the hit begets the arc of the ball over the infield begets the home run that is the end of history, then in a narrative sense they're all Utopia. To be anywhere along the path to Utopia is to already be as close to paradise on Earth as one could possibly be. Insofar as Utopia is impossible, the present is all we have, and insofar as it is inevitable, the present is still all we have. This is how Utopia becomes respatialized not as parallel world or impossible alternative but the nation as it currently exists—no longer over there but here, now, with ever-more empty and vague gestures towards progress or a better tomorrow. This, I think, is the genesis of American exceptionalism: the temporal potentiality of the city on the hill becomes confused with the nation's spatial actuality, and suddenly the possibility that we might be moving towards Utopia becomes proof we already live in it.