Other than all that (Notes on Transformers 3)

[It's rare to watch a film that produces a portrait so faithful to how it is to watch it.]

1. I have never sat through such a long porn film.  Or one with so little plot.

2.  It is oddly beautiful at moments.  A massive honeycomb grid planet, a Bucky Ball writ cosmic scale, almost touching the earth before collapsing in on itself with a soft implosion of rust and creeping fire.  But the rest of the time, it feigns beauty by simply making the eyes hurt.  But not the cognitive faculties: it leaves them dull and barely frayed.  For to wound those would be sublime, which this is not.

3.  There is no point in an ideology critique in the face of such a film, because it doesn't have an ideology.  It has a howling wind, dreamt up in the belly of a CGI rendering program, that lifts and carries things, that makes other things pass in front of our behind them.

Among those things are the bad robots.  They are coded as either Arabic (wearing scarves, despite the fact that no other robots wear clothing, camped in the same desert environment where we see the good robots kill bad - or at least wearing aviators, sweating, and with a severe expression - brown people), black (literally black paint, long flowing robot dreadlocks), cops (now we're getting somewhere!), murderous birds, giant Dune-like burrowing worm-snakes that burrow through and python-strangle skyscrapers, and trolls.

The good robots are coded as, alternately, assholes or the vehicles driven by assholes.


4.  Total, utter absence of desire, on all parts.  There is a young woman of sorts, who is supposed to be incredibly hot, or so the film goes to great lengths to point out, from an opening gambit of an ass-level tracking shot up the stairs, from nearly every character, to a degree that starts to erode its own belief in this fact.  But she is a pure cipher: can we all agree that this set of parts constitutes an approximation of an ideal of the kind of woman audience members want to stare at in 3-D?  No, not her in her particularity, but as an aggregation, as a technology, as likely at any moment as any car or truck to suddenly dissemble before our eyes, and reform into something that also does not especially resemble a human but can be expected to pass for one provided that the camera move away too quickly or linger too long, such that there is a false consonance between our gaping and hers.  OK, then, all on the same page?


[The absence of desire is aided and abetted by the absence of any real absence, other than things like modulated dialogue.  Not a thing lacks.  And where it might, fluttering papers, glints from a missing sun.]

5.  Many "people" "die."  But not particularly.  Rather, they run around a set on which some real fake rubble is strewn and, at some point, they are told to throw their arms out or fall down, at which point are erased from the film by a computer, and replaced by a quick, acceptable-for-PG-13 spray of something vaguely blood color, with a sudden visibility of a very polished skull and a femur or two.  They are, that is, vaporized.  Or the "camera" cuts away, such that they are probably crushed under big feet or lacerated by the spinning razors of a metal snake's tail. But there is no gore.  They are not torn to shreds.  They are whole, and small, boring and mediocre, and then they simply are not there.  Even the man thrown through a window to fake a suicide: we do not see the impact, we do not see him open onto the ground.

6.  Conversely, it is one of the goriest films of late, provided we properly anthropomorphize the robots as we are supposed to.  (Or see them as lesser categories of humans, as in the racialized, exoticized, and demonized bad ones.)  There is no anthrorpos violence, but there is a staggering display of violence enacted on the forms - for they have no matter or weight, just shifting colors and textures - of that which is formed [morph] as if anthropos.  They dig their hand-shaped extensions deep into something we are meant to think as a chest cavity, they leak red paint and oil and anti-freeze, large chunks of rust and chunky geared organs splatter the broken city, they wrap chains around their heads and pull hard, until they come free, sputtering cables leaving it unsevered.  And like the bodies of Dante's thieves, they are never all the way one thing or another: falling through the air, they are folding in and out, like seraphim with many wings and unexplainable differences in national accents.

7.  That violence is utterly without any pathos or sentiment.  This is due less to the very terrible story and absence of character development, which, contrary to a well-trod path of thought, is not a prerequisite for a stomach to fall and turn.  It is without consequence because it is without coherence: it is incredibly difficult to see just what is happening, which robot wrist is sawing through which.  This is the consequence of a terrible, terrible brightness and clutter, in which sheets of office paper rain down side by side with trails of smoke and glass that was never broken.  We simply shut off, the far limit case of our own visual processing power, which, it turns out, is far lower than that capable of being registered in HD.  And so it spins and hurls, spits in our faces, but our sight is a glass wall.  It is porous only to a point, until the eyes are filled with light and incapable of mustering a care in the world.  Particularly when that care is for the well-being of a robot that is also a truck, which is also a defense of American interventionism and the indissociable link between defense of the human and defense of the west, which is also none of these things whatsoever, just an algorithm, whirling in the midnight sun.

8.  Because, of course, this is a film that lays more waste to content represented on the screen, in its richly-grained detail and yet which, in the process of its production, destroyed almost nothing in reality.  Laid no waste to cities, sent rockets into no shopping malls.

Consumed nothing, that is, other than literal tons of coal required to power the CGI data processing, other than rare earths frying out from overload, other than little salmon, truffle oil, and pomegranate reduction mini-tarts for the cast, other than an extra permanently brain damaged from a rare piece of real metal, other than nerve endings and synaptic pathways burnt out, other than time itself, other than this time, writing these words, on something that is both as telling of our time as can be and as utterly indifferent to it, other than massive sums of money dematerialized and sunk into the faint shimmer of dust rising from the shuddering body of a robot rendered from scratch, other than all those hands and eyes through which these circuits pass, like that burrowing, winding worm, but without awe, without a speck of glint and worth and glimmer.

Other than all that.

After the Rapture, we will use the abandoned churches as raw material for barricades

 “I’ll say, ‘Oh, what are we going to do this summer?’ She’s going to say, ‘The world is going to end on May 21, so I don’t know why you’re planning for summer,’ and then everyone goes, ‘Oh, boy,’ ” he said. 

The two very refreshing things about the incontrovertible fact of the world's end on Saturday is that:

1) A rather notable distance from the Punctual End of the World as it's come to be cinematically composed, which - think Deep Impact, Armageddon, everything Emmerich touches - means an overabundance of schmaltzy last goodbyes and familial reconciliation, at the last possible instance.  Instead, the accounts so far have a thankfully quotidian, disabused bent to them:

She and her twin, Faith, have a friend’s birthday party Saturday night, around the time their parents believe the rapture will occur. 

“So if the world doesn’t end, I’d really like to attend,” Grace said before adding, “Though I don’t know how emotionally able my family will be at that time.” 

 With any luck, the beaches will not be overcrowded by awful born-agains in mom jeans clutching their previously secular-nihilist-flock straying children (who know have seen the error of their ways, and they know that their dad really loved them and that they didn't appreciate the traditional family values imposed on them enough and yes, there is no time left, but still, at least we can share each other and God as we're totally obliterated by a wave), as the Christian Right gets one final victory jab in with its infinitely desired we told you so.  Instead, those children will be off hating their dismal conservative parents, having sex at parties, reading Cioran, and swimming in the dark ocean, with no tidal wave or cloying scene in sight.

2.

This is actually a win-win situation.  For either:

the Rapturites are wrong, and it's rather neutral, because they were jack-asses from the start, but even if one can't generate any pleasure from watching their frantic post-explanation about necessary recalibration (no pleasure there because we exist in a world in which these people aren't truly laughed out of the room to start), perhaps it will encourage their children to cut ties once and for all.

Or they are right, which would be some excellent news.  For:

Thousands of people around the country have spent the last few days taking to the streets and saying final goodbyes before Saturday, Judgment Day, when they expect to be absorbed into heaven in a process known as the rapture. Nonbelievers, they hold, will be left behind to perish along with the world over the next five months. 

--

On that day, arrived at through a series of Bible-based calculations that assume the world will end exactly 7,000 years after Noah’s flood, believers are to be transported up to heaven as a worldwide earthquake strikes. Nonbelievers will endure five months of plagues, quakes, wars, famine and general torment before the planet’s total destruction in October. 

By "plagues, quakes, wars, famine, and general torment," I assume to be meant the general state of human existence under capitalism.  It's near impossible for any notion of Doomsday to have real purchase in a world order that brushes itself off and plows ahead after, for instance, the Tōhoku quake, after Syria keeps firing on its own, after everything.

That is to say, we get five months of business as usual without Christians.  That is, five months of the contradictions of capital minus a significant portion of the conservative population here and elsewhere, from CEOs to morally-justifying racists and misogynists, all lifted up and out, leaving a structure of power wobbling and full of holes.  And we know that none of us will be saved, meaning that in this slightly teetering order free of evangelicals, we can get busy wrecking what remains and saving ourselves, if only for a couple weeks, a day, of existence without the social relations of value.

Skyline mapped by burning churches, from Ealham's Anarchism and the City, via Cartographies

We just may be a step closer to communising measures, or at the least, to really strutting like the damned we're alleged to be.  To taking over the now empty churches and using them as collective housing, as sites for black metal shows, as refuge and hospital, as raw materials for barricades.  They were fools to leave before we do.  The Vatican will be our strong-hold.  And they will cry in heaven when they see how we decorate the place.  Hint: gold melts at 1948 degrees Farenheit.

Once more, comrades, if you want to be heretics!

If you pull this handle...

Out of the blue, a friend I haven't spoken to in years sent me this.  It's simply staggering.  Had I seen this earlier, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse might have been nothing more than a set of page-shaped paper padding surrounding a DVD of this.

There is a moment - you'll know it when you hit it - when the entire order of vision (that of ink and the hand-built line, with water-colored gray that trembles, that of the cartoon), is thrown literally to the windows edge, where now there is an other world of sight, of photography, above all of the everyday, and it requires only a turning on its axis, a throwing into velocity or freezing, to make it jive and jar with the animation of collapse.  (Note: this dislocation happens only after the world as a whole, shot from afar as a gurgling, pustulant, seething thing, blows up in fall.  It happens only after the animated world as totality is wrecked.)  Nothing I've watched so nails the double sense of apocalypse that always interested me: an end, sure, but an end that means the bringing forth, as if refocusing a lens, lengthening the depth of field, such that the foreground loses out.  That which we were here to see finds itself scrambling, like Koko, back from the teeming fact of the street.  More than that, such a slippage and disaster occurs here in the formal construction of the thing and its manic incapacity to stay with a figure or theme for more than a moment.  The planet will smoke a cigar, but it is not always a head.  It was insofar as it smoked a cigar.  It is no more.

The only thing that remains constant here is the urge to negate, a drive boiled down into single dog form, an admirable counterpart to the catastrophe-encouraging/deferring lupine gang of Wolfen, an asshole on the grandest scale cousin of Tintin's snowy.  But unlike Wolfen, Fitz the Dog manifests just a will to do it all the way (read: a "passion for the Real"), despite the scrambling resistance of his human companion, the Catechon.  And do it in proper, whole by part by atom.  This small white Fenrir doesn't just bring about Ragnarök.  The pup is committed to do it up right, hacking down one of the final trees that stands.  The end, therefore, retains shape because of the ceaseless project of breaking binds and bounds.  A pointless plan alone makes sense of what otherwise is just a bad storm.

[Two already's and a scattered note:

The earth is already turning, beneath them like a spherical treadmill.  We cannot know if there is any traction, if their walking accelerates this, or if it a frictionless gliding.  Moonwalking in place.


The earth is already empty.  We don't see crowds until after the switch has been pulled.

The sign that hangs warns DO NOT TOUCH EARTH CONTROL: the entire facility is labeled CONTROL OF EARTH.  The clown's hands may not be so clean after all.  For while the blame is narrowed into a single handle, as if there was one emergency kill switch and the rest was the blameless play of weather, day and night, we notice, on the wall of switches with which Koko plays, one switch for LIGHTNING.  And it is exactly lightning we see after Fitz finally succeeds that marks the end of the world: it is the sign of the cut here, a montage filler, a break between scenes of destruction and the apparent cause of all being stood on its head.  The point is that the switch is just a fantasy concentration point, the blind that allows us to fumble and fuck with the wall of all the effects of catastrophe without having to claim the moment has yet come.  Leave Koko at those switches long enough, and the outcome will be identical.]


So watch this and come apart.  Of course, like Koko, you lose your head, and it will not be your own you will first find as solace.  We slip into a dark puddle to slosh, without leaving a stain on the filmed desk, for these things may bristle before and aft of each other, but they cannot merge.  Back and forth we go over the animator's page, the sea-drunk's rhythm of a conclusion knocked off its axis.

And on the off chance that this not be the case, rest assured, cameras can tilt the horizon, sidewalks can threaten to slide us right off the map, and we know how to wrestle ourselves to the ground and, clawing, desperate, more than a little bufoonish, to pore over the cracks, looking for that missing friction.  After all, it's not as if we know how to do otherwise.

[Many thanks, J, for this]

Pendulum [Catalogue description beamed back from after the decline of the West]

TITLE: Pendulum

Artists: The New Pessimism

Dimensions variable.  Height: three inches to one mile in length. Width: one centimeter to three inches. Total field of interaction: 2.0943951 cubic miles, plus spray zone (indeterminate)

Materials: Titanium, linear cold generator, magnetized oxide, lubricant (pivot); water, soot, blood, marrow, plastic, feather, excrement, milk, tobacco, glass, bile, wood, pork, sucrose, urine, brick, rubber, ice (pendulum)

Pendulum is, in essence, a simple work.  It was first installed off-site, approximately 18 miles from Head Gallery, thirteen years ago, and it remains off-property.  (That is, it cannot be said to “belong” to the gallery.  The gallery legally owns the small assemblage of material that constitutes the pivot point, but through the ingenious use of some lesser-known Intellectual Property Statutes introduced with the Geneva Convention, the “concept” of the work is excluded from status as either common  or private property.  It literally belongs to no one, although in an accompanying audio tape, the artists stated that “it belongs, as it always did, to the flabby futility of binding science to thought.”) 

The work is best described as falling between an inconstant object, a process piece, and a performance without subjects involved.   Floating one mile above the ground without tether, a single graphite lubed pivot point hangs in the air: an assemblage of small magnets keep it perfectly centered over the installation site  To this pivot is attached a rather crude early version of the linear cold generator, swaying free and pointing its pin-sized beam toward the ground below.  A certain quantity of water is gathered around the pivot, where it remains frozen hard.  However, temperature differentials in the surrounding air cause the outer surface of this small ice lump to melt slightly.  Given the force of gravity, this condensation drips downward, bead by bead, where it immediately freezes around the line of the cold.  What was a blob starts to resemble a short icicle.  This process continues, and Pendulum begins to deform into a thin ray of ice extending toward the earth.  Naturally occurring wind currents, augmented by the disturbance of the ultra-cold beam cutting through them, exert pressure on the pendulum, and it begins to swing.  The momentum of the swing drives the moisture further toward the tip, where it refreezes.  Hence, with every swing, the pendulum grows longer and longer.  It describes a wider and wider arc, whistling over the heads of the city.    It comes closer and closer to the ground, and to the marked zone directly one-mile below the pivot point.  One of two outcomes occurs: either the combination of wind pressure and unstable freezing causes the pendulum to break loose during one of its swings, or it grows downward until, with an oddly delicate and splintering crash, the pendulum strikes the earth and shatters into thousands of shards, droplets, and, given the combined effect of friction and ground temperature, bits of melting slush, all accompanied by a hiss of steam.

Pendulum has remained a controversial work since its inception.  It has killed numerous spectators (the current total stands at 241), although such death, common to most works of our period, has little to do with the controversy.  Rather, a brief consideration of its history, including some of the deaths incurred, give a useful point of entrance to discuss the accusations made against the piece.

First and foremost, the piece has been attacked as a work of neo-Nazi propaganda.  Such an accusation derives from the obvious fact that it is based on the Welteislehre (“World Ice Doctrine”) of Hans Hörbiger, which claimed that the solar system had its origin when a dead wet star smashed into a larger star, its scattered vapors condensing into ice that became the fundamental material of the solar system.  (Ice planets, ice moons, ice ether).  An Austrian steam engineer, Hörbiger's “glacial cosmogony” found favor with the Third Reich as a counter-theory to the “Jewish science” of Einstein, for the rather simple reason that despite being entirely unfounded, it nevertheless provided a seeming accordance: white northern tribes from the frozen north and a solar system founded upon frozen white material.  (Moreover, its lack of accordance with observational phenomena only bolstered its intransigent truth-claims, at least according to Hörbiger, who told Willy Ley: “Either you believe in me and learn, or you will be treated as the enemy.”)  The origin of such a theory came from two moments in Hörbiger's life: first, when he looked at the moon and realized that it looked rather like ice and, second, when he dreamed of an ice pendulum swinging through the emptiness of space, growing longer and longer, until it broke free.  It is from the latter that Pendulum takes its essential determination.

However, to call such this work “neo-Fascist” is to ignore a) the general incoherence of such a designation for the contemporary moment, and b) the way in which the work points toward the petulant obstinacy and total impurity of such a theory.  Regarding the latter points, we should keep in mind that Hörbiger's theory is not a general thermodynamics but a description of a single exception, a regime of ice struggling against an entire universe with which it does not accord.  It is the petty flailing of a thought which would like to remain pure and cannot.  And as for that purity, it should also be kept in mind that condensation forms around a particle of “other” material: that “pure white ice” coheres only because of the included elements of the “filth” it disdains.  This general point, along with the particular fact that Pendulum accumulates a range of filth and refuse both in its passage through the air and in its mopping up from the streets below, had evidently been forgotten by the first victims of Pendulum.  Respectfully keeping their distance from the point of impact yet standing close enough to be splattered by its slushy outburst, they opened their mouths in hope of enacting a sort of ecstatic, sexless money shot.  They were rewarded with a combination of frozen material, ranging from atmospheric sulphur compounds and a not insignificant quantity of irradiated bird droppings, that immediately corroded their stomach lining and internal organs.  It should be noted the blood and other bodily fluids which leaked from their orifices were among the liquids gathered and frozen into the next iteration of Pendulum. 

Second, due in equal part to such incidents of “obscene splattering” and the general shape of the work, Pendulum has been called a “pathetically phallic” piece, a “fantasy of erection unbound by physiological constraints.”  The curators would not disagree, except to point out that the “pathetic” inflection is one critically engaged by the piece.  Aside from the needle-like slenderness of the pendulum blade and its extreme fragility, it need be remarked only that it cannot be predicted where, when, and how it will break.  If it is a manifestation of phallic law, the model it seems to propose is one of inconstancy, instability, and the impossibility of founding any order of pleasure, reason, or meaning whatsoever.

Third, Pendulum is often considered to belong, however loosely, to the Inhuman School.  The supposed personal connections of some of the artists gives further credence to this, but as we see in how the work pre-engages each of its accusations, nearly posing them itself in order to render them idiotic, it is ultimately a scathing attack on that entire enterprise.  The reason for our assertion has to do not with the work itself during its period of descent (which, indeed, has thoughtlessly cut through scores  of bystanders with a bloody thwup and decimated nearby buildings, with neither malevolence nor care) or with the “apparent” symbolic weight of the piece (which, indeed, gestures to a clock-less pendulum counting a deep time beyond the scope of human metrics), but with the interim stage of its recomposition.  It is the explicit instructions of the artists that after Pendulum has scattered its accumulated frozen matter, the process is to be restarted only in one of two ways. 

1.     It may be left to its own devices, with the chance prospect that enough moisture will gather near the pivot to recommence: the last instance in which such a decision was made led to a seven year period in which Pendulum did not swing.

2.     The gallery workers have to do it themselves by means of sponges, buckets, and scaffolding, thereby rendering such an inhuman event dependent on the banal labor of the underpaid or unpaid.  No aerial transport or machines whatsoever are to be used in setting up Pendulum to swing again.  Hence it is has not been uncommon that during the laborious task of recollecting the dirty and toxic water, it is suddenly discovered that the oscillating glint above the installation site is, in fact, a reconstituted Pendulum, having gathered enough moisture and smoke in the clouds above to have begun its downward sweep once more.

Fourth and finally, Pendulum has been hailed – less accused than acclaimed – as the assertion of the power of speculation after the end of a civilizational sequence,  a razor of rationality sweeping through the dark night, as it “cuts through folly and false images of human importance” and discovers “a project for thought after the collapse of any and all philosophy.”  It should be pointed out that a grosser misreading is scarcely fathomable. 

If the sprays of stinking slush and the recurrent sloppy, pointless, and humid killings –   which point only to the incapacity to not do otherwise – were not enough to dismiss this accusation, one of the stranger instances in Pendulum's history should suffice.  The report of one present reads:  

" On its nineteenth cycle, a large crowd had gathered, variously drunken, hushed, rowdy, reverential, and curious, for the predicted moment when full contact with the ground would be made on the nadir of its swing.  Some stood close and stared at the scarred point where the scrape and break should occur.  Others held back, wisely dressed in oil skins or rubber to stay safe while getting the full visceral brunt of the splatter.  I, for one, was bare-chested and forcing myself to wheeze: word on the street of late was that for those, like myself, with the sickness, those nasty compounds and ice-cured bacteria were one of the few remedies capable of shocking the body back into line.  Around 11:33 PM, having previously swung through the collected mass, thereby splitting them by default into two sides facing off against one another, Pendulum sliced back down, stretched thin and sharp, with a high, keening whistle.  The crowd braced and tightened, the suicidal opened their mouths and bared their chests.  And it stopped: through the rarest combination of rigidity, exact length, weight, inflection, and momentum, Pendulum scraped and skidded to an absolute halt, perfectly vertical, utterly fragile yet unbroken, tracing a radiant, glittering line from the center of the earth out to the pivot.  Nothing moved.  The crowd gaped.  Very slowly, a slight trickle of melt became evident, as the sheer idiocy of this 'pure reason' began, once more, to slur into a stream of reeking slush.  Soon, there was little left but a slightly chilled brackish puddle between the fuming earth and the torpid air."

and we would expect the immediate future to enlarge that irrationality

---

 

Yes, that is a butterfly painted on my cheek, and yes, those are metal fingerclaw extensions

NYC in 1990, in the eyes of Italy in 1982, was just one of those years.

The gutter dwelling offspring of an Argento objects on the killer's desk tracking shot, The Warriors, and least heterosexual aspects of Mad Max.

Knives - and rollerskates - out...

Doomsday comes to Williamsburg. (About damn time.)

And on Saturday, I'll be speaking at the 2010 Doomsday Film Festival, joining Paul Schrader, Steve E. Jones, and Heather Urbanski to talk about the deeply awesome Hardware (which is, in a way, Repo Man meets Short Circuit meets The Road Warrior, plus Lemmy from Motörhead) and problems of misbehaving technology.  The whole weekend looks good, despite my deep discomfort with events that involve the phrase "Free ZOMBIE Makeup", as the films are an unusual and underwatched set, especially Colossus: The Forbin Project.

5:45 - 8:15PM
CYBERNETIC REVOLT
Hardware
Richard Stanley, U.K., 1990; 92 min
$8.00 Admission
View the trailer »

A post-apocalyptic scavenger (Dylan McDermott) brings home a battered cyborg skull for his metal sculptor girlfriend, unaware that it contains the brain of the M.A.R.K. 13, the military's most ferocious bio-mechancial combat droid. Soon, the dismembered fragments reconstruct themselves from household appliances, turning their apartment into a combat zone as the reborn machinery goes on the rampage. From underrated visionary Richard Stanley (Dust Devil). Along with appearances by Iggy Pop and Lemmy of Motörhead. "An energetic, low-budget Pandora's Box of delights, tailor-made for the disposable '90s." – Derek Adams, Time Out

Followed by a panel:

• Paul Schrader (Director of Affliction, Auto Focus, American Gigolo, Blue Collar)
• Steve E. Jones (Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism)
• Evan Calder Williams (Combined and Uneven Apocalypse)
• Heather Urbanski (Plagues, Apocalypses and Bug-Eyed Monsters)
• Moderator: Andy McCarthy (mograbs.com)

Fecund revenge: green Geist screws us all

[excerpt from Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, taking on Swamp Thing, scarcity, and "green politics"]

One of the other strengths of Life After People, beyond the genuine pleasure of its recurrent apocalyptic money shots, is its awareness that the processes which unmake the world after people are already taking place. If it refuses to ask how we disappear or how our disappearance would necessarily shape the world left behind, the series makes clear that it takes a constant work to prevent life after people from commencing while we’re still around. Cities may be “third nature,” but that doesn’t stop “first nature” from waging constant war. The battle for the post-human history of the earth has been going on all along from the moment that human history started.

If not the best known, then certainly one of the most compelling (and internally inconsistent) articulations of this is the long running DC comic book series, Swamp Thing.

The sheer breadth of histories and trajectories involved in its story arc are obviously beyond my reach. Of immediate relevance here are two particular moments within Alan Moore’s run as author of the series, set against the general backdrop of Swamp Thing’s “evolution.” The story of Swamp Thing, at least in Moore’s version, is the story of a transition from singularity to universality. It is the transition from a swamp monster (dead scientist recomposed by the nutrient force of the bog) to the fecund Thingliness of all plant life (green elemental force itself, not bound to any particular configuration of matter but rather the abstract Geist of flora). Hence the multiple revelations of the series. He realizes that he isn’t Alec Holland with a plant body, or even the Swamp itself with the injection of a consciousness defused into it. He isn’t even the Swamp Thing: he is one among a recurrent series. He is the idea of the Green, the collective chlorophyllic intelligence of what lives but is not Meat.

He’s also a total hippie hero, Platonic vegan ideal incarnate, complete with mournful eyes for the blighted earth and psychedelic tuber-tumors for inner light exploding acid-trip sex. His consummation of “relations” with his girlfriend Abigail starts with her eating one such tuber and then spreads over multiple pages of pastel light, chakra symmetry, suddenly understanding time itself, and becoming-Oneness. It well may be the world’s most concentrated distillation of New Age ideology. However, just as the end of the ‘60s brought out the seedy and sadistic undercurrent of hippie-dom there from the start, it is this consequences of this trippy bedding-down – free love and ecstasy beyond the need for fucking itself! – which brings his verdant fury to its full antagonistic flowering. It is the moment when care for the earth becomes notably decoupled from care for the human, when protectors of the Green reveal that they are no better at understanding the dialectics of society and nature than the arch-defenders of capitalism.

After a snooping reporter catches their boggy tryst, Abigail is jailed for “unnatural relations” and eventually winds up in the jail of Gotham City, beneath the watchful eye of none other than Batman. Swamp Thing, off dealing with other more literally infernal threats to the earth, learns of this, goes insane, and, manifested in a strip of green cutting across the enclosures and divides of pastures, roads, and buildings, makes a bee-line towards her. The eventual narrative outcome of this – he gets her back, he is “killed” and his consciousness escapes across the universe, and he works his way back – is not particularly relevant here. The point is what happens before: his revenge is the total halting of capitalism and previous modes of daily life in Gotham. It becomes a veritable Garden of Eden, and the hippie population of Gotham, surprisingly not previously eradicated by the rather straitlaced Batman, sheds their clothes and enclosures and goes back to nature in the heart of the metropolis. 

 Like so much of apocalyptic fiction, the structural is only approached through the personal, and so while Swamp Thing himself folds in plenty of claims about how humans act like they own the earth they mistreat and how he won’t take it anymore, the fact remains that this elemental force has known about this general mistreatment for quite some time now. A protector of Gaia, perhaps, but in this case, the rage and puissance boils over because of the mistreatment of a far more particular woman.

This is no accident of bad writing. Moore’s subtlety, or at least what saves him from total devolution into the mediocrity of animist post-’60s thought, is in the recognition of the persistent intersection of the concerns for the personal and the planetary. If anything, the baldness of Swamp Thing’s motivation is refreshing: it makes exceedingly literal and epic the ways in which worries about sustainability and protection of Mother Earth are not infrequently worries about the future possibility of getting laid. Less refreshing and more simply disturbing, in its implications for a type of thinking we recognize far beyond the DC universe, is the concluding gesture at the end of Moore’s run.

Having returned to earth, dealt necessary revenge to those who booted his consciousness off the planet, and reunited with Abigail, it’s time for general reflection on his realized position as elemental force. He has discovered, both in his shaping/pseudo-impregnation of entire planets elsewhere and in his Edenic punishment of Gotham, that he has the full capacity to radically alter the material conditions of a landscape. Hence he wonders, given this power, if he should make the world bloom in full, make it a green, lush environment, to end hunger and strife by eliminating scarcity itself? More than that, to reverse the damage of pollution and to “heal the earth”?

He decides otherwise. On one hand, this is entirely understandable, even for a green elemental power (supposedly) concerned with the defense of the planet. If the ravages of capitalism were not a necessary solution of scarce resource management but a contingent situation made into global order of mismanagement, it indeed follows that unbound plenitude will not necessarily result in things getting better. The infinitely adaptable forms of consumer identity prove, if anything, that the distance from our “natural” species-being to “second nature” knows no bounds. As such, from a historical and materialist perspective, it not only makes perfect sense to grasp that while plenitude and equal distribution is a goal of all egalitarian politics, it does not produce such a politics.

However, Swamp Thing’s reasoning is entirely opposed to this, arguing essentially that because humans have always dominated the earth and “taken it for granted,” simply providing the end of scarcity will not cause them to learn their lessons. They will profligately squander the new fruits of excess, reject all sustainable modes, and continue to wound an earth that now can bounce back from anything (like the sadist fantasy of a body that endlessly self-heals). His solution instead? Humans need to learn to take care of the earth themselves. He will not intervene – they will have to see how they are destroying their precious resources in order for them to change their ways.The cynical ugliness of such a position is unmistakable and would be laughable if it didn’t capture so much of the tone of green movements at their worst. 

 In short, this God-like defender of the earth is dooming it to catastrophic destruction. To sketch it quickly: humans “mistreat” the earth either because they are “just like that” (i.e. transhistorical human nature), or because their historical situation has conditioned such behavior (i.e. historical second nature). Obviously, the flimsier versions of contemporary ecological discourse fall back on the former conception of “civilized man” as the raping and pillaging animal. Even a cursory glance at prior historical modes of the reproduction of life make evident the uselessness, analytically and especially politically, of such an argument.

Taking on the second notion, then, Swamp Thing is caught, thorny brows knotted, between two models of how we learn to act a certain way. Do we act badly because we face fundamental scarcity and have to do whatever it takes to survive in the immediate, sustainability be damned? Or do we act badly because there hasn’t been enough scarcity, hardship, or antagonism? Outside of the Swamp Thing world, our answer would be: both/and. Those responsible for the worst treatment of the world and its human occupants continue to do so because we don’t make things hard enough for them: a little hardship and directed antagonism toward the rich is long, long overdue. At the same time, though, we know very well why such a mass uprising and tidal shift remains difficult. Those who most feel the brunt of scarcity and immiseration are so busy struggling to survive that the historical capacity to act otherwise – either in terms of directing antagonism toward those most responsible or in terms of living more “sustainably” and not participating in the mistreatment of resources – remains a dream primarily for those with the leisure time to imagine it.

In terms of the comic’s narrative, Swamp Thing refuses to recognize either position. Given his peculiar talents, we could easily imagine a mediated form, directing edible flora to areas of the world facing total starvation. But no. He essentially commits to perpetuating a contemporary order in which the problem isn’t just that we face ecological catastrophe. The problem is who it will affect first. (Hint: those already living below the poverty line, those packed into cramped and disease-ridden slums, those in areas barely surviving on monocrop production dependent on particular weather conditions, those in shanties that won’t stand up to tsunamis, those in zones of the world so ignored that no number of liberal guilt donation boxes in Starbucks will change a thing.)

Again, to draw out a now expected point, Swamp Thing’s refusal to be the apocalyptic force that he has been all along is the total commitment to total catastrophe. If he’s worried that making the earth full of food and lush green bedding will allow the thoughtless to litter and chemical plant capitalists to dump their waste in rivers, then punish them. His vegetal powers are not just regenerative but directed: why not be the proper growing eschaton, giving the righteous fruit to eat while lashing the wicked to tree trunks? 

 The only answer can be found in his deep anti-historicism and a fundamental hatred of the human animal – conceived as bad, across time. This rears its head continuously in the degradation of “Meat,” of all things red as opposed to green, of anything that consumes something else, not just humans. (See here his entirely unnecessary torturing of an alligator in the final pages, immediately after his meditation on treating the earth better.)

Folded into all this is a valorization of laboring itself, assuming that man will become wicked if he does not have to toil. And in line with this, how exactly does he propose that the human species will deal adequately with its already dire ecological situation? The only situation we see endorsed is Abigail’s participation in a tiny environmental group, i.e. her transition from literal lover of this defender of the earth to a somewhat hesitant love of earth defense causes. The scope of this group, whose numbers are slim to none, seems closer to letter-writing and pamphleteering. Furthermore, after his decision that the urgent situation of the polluted earth is to be dealt with by this second rate Sierra Club, of which Abigail is one of the only members, he whisks her away via lily pad to their flowering love nest built in the swamp for a couple months of gazing into each other’s eyes and hippie sex.

I’m no great analyst of what should be done with what is indeed a dire situation. But it’s no great task to recognize that putting the future of the earth in the hands of a couple activists before stealing one of them away for a secession-from-the-world honeymoon is more than just a failure. It’s atrocious bad faith in a leafy mask. It’s what follows from forging an eternal divide of the green and the red. It’s a damnation of us all. And frankly, we’re screwed.

The unquiet earth, 2 (on post-catastrophic realism, inhuman human nature, naked boys with nosebleeds trying to set themselves on fire)

[excerpt of last chapter of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, following from yesterday's post]

What, though, of another common articulation of “persisting through the dead world,” not producing the urge to pull the plug on it all but rather the struggle to survive after the fact? We speak here of films that are neither apocalyptic (the event and its revelations are happening) nor post-apocalyptic (the attempt to move forward or build otherwise in accordance with what has been revealed.) Rather, they are post-catastrophic. Something has caused the collapse of society, and we are asked to focus on the quiet desperation and explosions of savagery in the contentious attempts to preserve structures and memories of pre-Event normalcy. This has echoes in films and genres considered earlier but finds its dourest articulation in the dystopian realism of the post-catastrophe model, films such as End of August at the Hotel Ozone, Time of the Wolf (2002), The World, The Flesh and the Devil, Blindness (2008), and, The Road (2009).

These are often very serious films, equally serious about being high art; with that comes both a certain portentous gravity and the capacity for innovative misanthropy. They also share a very marked resistance to explain exactly what sort of catastrophe happened, or at least what triggered it. Therein lies their catastrophic nature: the previous order (and way of ordering human society) has come to a definitive end, but nothing was revealed, no glimpses of totality or of what has been structurally excluded from that totality.

 At most, we see two things. First, we see the material after-effects of that catastrophe: stillness of the blighted landscape, undrinkability of its water, and various consequences of long-time pollution or nuclear winter. Second, the rapid degeneration of the social contract and the emerging degeneracy of people finally let loose in a post-state system to be as bad as they’ve always wanted to be (or that they “cannot help” being). Insofar as these two tendencies are related, the lovely melancholy of the ruins and the visions of pseudo-scarcity function primarily as a backdrop to the all the bad things people do to one another and to other living things (cannibalism, rape, torture, ritual sacrifice, kicking out strangers because you can’t trust anyone).

 And crucially, this isn’t the sort of violence enacted by an emergent dystopian authoritarian order: not systemic exploitation, nothing of the sort of emergent iron fist of Orwell, Judge Dredd, or Aeon Flux, not even neo-nomadic marauders with the prospect of forming a group to be reckoned with. Rather, sloppy assemblages of the scared and hungry, abortive communities, and hollow remnants of nuclear families. The rhythm and texture of these films is analogously marked by this disconnect between setting and behavior, with glacial pacing and tableau framing, out of which the barely repressed explodes again and again: a quiet earth, perhaps, but one on which noise and fury are the rule.

Underpinning this all is a deep commitment to a certain conception of the human animal. At the end of history (here defined as the narrative of a civilizing project tending toward the global stalemate of liberal capitalism), we discover that our capacity to act badly is not historically contingent or determined. More than that, we see that whatever the accidents of history were, whatever the repressions and imbalances that shaped the globe, they were ultimately a necessary corrective to the chaotic fury of the human unchained. According to this perspective, one far more common than a set of serious-minded art films, it isn’t that we act badly because the reigning order’s mechanisms of exploitation and domination were rewarded and learned.

 Nor is it that the catastrophic undercutting of those structures left a void into which the learned patterns could only continue in a bloody and relentless recurrence of the same: what else do we know how to do, other than steal, rape, cheat, and kill ...

And so for all their emphasis and lingering gaze on the material traces of the catastrophe, these films cannot help but evoke a deep anti-materialism, as we are asked to treat the savage behavior we witness as the transhistorical brutish underbelly of the human animal. In other words, we are invited not to see it as the consequence of a social organization that has conditioned such behavior but as the consequence of that social organization no longer existing.

However, what of the fact that these films are in many ways “about” the preservation of older forms (the family, commodity artifacts, storytelling and history, constant appeals to what we do or don’t do)? In its most recent iteration, we might think of the insistent commodity fetishism of The Road, as if the way to preserve the best parts of the Old is to give your son the fizzy New in the form of a can of Coke. But the genre tendency remains capable of sharp critical intelligence, and it’s clearest in the way that it undercuts so much of the post-apocalyptic emphasis on remembering the Old as the necessary mode of salvation. Transhistorical brutishness may still be waiting in the wings. However, the solution may not necessarily be the frantic grasping at whatever tattered remnants remain. In fact, those solutions may do far more harm than good.

Two brief examples. In The End of August at the Hotel Ozone, Jan Schmidt’s sparklingly bleak film, a band of Czech doomsday female soldiers roam a post-nuclear world of ruined and overgrown cities, argue, and torture animals. If they are the face of the New, the New is often mute, rather feral, rather sexy, and deeply aimless: mercenaries without direction, supposed reproductive potential with no future. The preservation of the Old order is the task of two characters in the film: an old woman who leads them and an understandably bewildered old man upon whom they happen. (We might fairly sympathize with his flustered confusion at their attempts to flirt with him: the transition from last man on earth, holed up with memories, to a confrontation with this gang of proto-riot grrls, is a bit of an epistemic shock.) 

 The film is, at its most basic, a nihilistic and relentless destruction of the Old. Despite the attempts to inscribe personal memory as an antidote to the end of history, especially in the compelling shot in which the old woman counts back through history via the rings of a tree stump, the total disconnect between what was and what is can only blossom out into violence. There is an uncrossable rift, leaving only the sense that those unmoored from historical knowledge will be the death of us all. Or, rather, the second death of us all, after the first death of the nuclear winter. It remains unclear, however, just who is unmoored from history, for despite their destructive urge and inability to recall or adhere to older structures of social collectivity, the vital intensity of the women remains the only spark of life.

The question becomes moot. Eventually, following the death of their leader, the soldiers kill the old man for his gramophone, the last vestige of culture. And what was he protecting, holding out for the potential future to come? A single 78 rpm disc of polka, “Beer Barrel Polka (Roll Out the Barrel).”

If End ventures the fundamental incompatibility of the post-catastrophic New with the teetering and musty records of the past, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf pushes further to insist that it isn’t simply that our old modes may be defunct confronted with the barbarian inheritors of the vacant earth. They may directly stand in the way of reclaiming a social decency, and they threaten to destroy the potential agents of a struggling advance forward. The nuclear family is destroyed, as the father of our protagonistic group is shot a couple minutes into the film, and what emerges is an emphasis on new mythmaking, as a groundwork for understanding heroism, sacrifice, and communal good in a time of total despair. A story is told of the “35 Just,” the elite group who safeguards humanity, and of sacrifices for the common good.

But where does it lead?

To a naked boy with a nosebleed trying to set himself aflame on the railroad tracks. Saved at the last minute by a guard, the boy is told:

“You’d have done it [self-sacrifice to save the others], for sure. Believe me. You were ready to do it. That’s enough, see. You’ll see. Everything’ll work out [...] It’s enough that you were ready to do it.”

If this is a slightly more positive version of the notion of retroactive species valorization by collective suicide, the emphasis should be put on the “slightly.” Haneke’s formal distancing keeps a sense of judgment from encroaching too heavily, but it certainly should be noted that the embrace and “saving” cannot remotely compensate for the deeper horror of the logic encouraged here. I’m hard pressed to conceive of the full scope of an ethical logic in which it is remotely good that he was “ready to do it.” Aside from the functional uselessness of a suicide in a filmed world where the mystical power of self-sacrifice seems entirely lacking, this comforting gesture is the worst stain of the Old. For when everything doesn’t work out, as it likely won’t without a lot of hard work and without arbitrary suicides, it is too easy a step to think that perhaps being merely ready to do it isn’t quite enough ...

From the absence of causal links between environmental after-effects and their sources to the incapacity of remembering better to stop the directionless march toward nihilism, these films draw out the full emergence of inhuman human nature. It is a notion to be pursued through the rest of this chapter and beyond, in its dual senses. First, a historical formation that results in behavior fundamentally opposed to a humanist conception of the kind of creatures we are. Second, a longer sense of the absence of originary human nature: it has never been anything more than the deviation from what we assumed to be originary, it lies in that assumed perversion itself, that unlikeness to itself.  An initial stab at this should ask:

Why do the vast majority of apocalyptic fantasies assume that things going bad will lead to human relations going far, far worse?

Why does the end of capitalist days – and the revelation of the undifferentiated – so often entail a return to a vaguely state of nature, a state that few of us know beyond these cultural visions?

To approach these questions, incompletely, we should follow the turn at the end of Time of the Wolf. After Ben’s abortive suicide, the film cuts to forest and verdant green shot from a moving train, a third party perspective with no human behind it, as if all that remains to be seen at the end of history is nature itself, seething silently and waiting its turn.

The unquiet earth, 1

[Combined and Uneven Apocalypse will be coming out sometime at the start of 2011, which gives it one year of existence before 2012 wipes us all off the face of the earth like crumbs.  As such, I'll post some teaser excerpts from the final chapter - which is on post-apocalyptic cities and things like nature and bad behavior and Godard and Snake Plissken - every so often in the months before it becomes a heavy paper object.  Some of this has its far earlier roots in the initial posts on apocalypticism back before this became a more all-consuming project.  Some of it is far more recent.

The final chapter takes on four figures of the city:

1. The city as ruins emptied of human life, a melancholic remainder and reminder of the voluntary extinction of the species at our own hands

2. The city at war with nature, on the losing end of an ongoing battle to assert itself in the face of deep ecological time and the constant push of the green into the gray

3. The city as site of uneven time, of the coexistence of apocalyptic zones with the overall functioning of commerce and urban daily life

4. The city as time-out-of-joint zone within the world order as a whole, the consciously neglected site in which collectivities may begin to emerge

What follows is a bit on the first.]

Post-apocalyptic cities tend to cling to the far poles of a primary opposition between the empty and the full apocalypse, the barren and the teeming. They oscillate between loners wandering the evacuated sites of life and abandoned hordes swarming in some reclaimed outpost of lost humanity. To be sure, the most subtle iterations claim a space that is both (think of the plague city of loners flooded with the walking dead, at once the excess of bodies and the apparent desolation of life).

Running beneath this opposition, however, is a consistent aesthetic and affect of the city “after the fall,” namely, the melancholic contemplation of decay, the dysphoric nostalgia of reveling in what can never be the same again. It is not, however, a question of being alone in the urban mausoleum. To draw from film: there may be a single survivor who eventually finds a few others (The Quiet Earth [1981], the Matheson versions [I Am Legend/Omega Man/Last Man on Earth], The World, The Flesh, and The Devil [1959]); there may be a band of them (End of August at the Hotel Ozone [1967], pretty much half of all zombie movies ever made, the more lyrical parts of Terminator Salvation [2009]); there may be a whole city holding out against the wilds and wild things pounding at the gates (28 Weeks Later, Zardoz [1974], in an odd way). The thread running through is the fantasy of the contemplative museum of ruins, a waste zone (echoes of Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Marker’s Sans Soleil intended) that cannot be escaped: all that remains to do is to mourn without ever putting the past properly to bed. Just the pornography of decay, perhaps experienced en masse but never collectively.

In Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), a consummate film of the broken world’s loveliness, the sort of extra-urban Zone, guarded by the military, is a space closed off from “normal” life surrounding it, in all its decay and Soviet rust-belt prettiness. In our move away from the global event version of the apocalypse, we find again and again the borderland and the bound, the space encircled to keep without and within. Yet in Stalker, what is preserved (as the emancipatory potential of a post-apocalyptic, post-rational Zone) is the hollow, an empty anti-commons. The vestiges of day-to-day existence become otherworldly in their vacancy, fused with a halting spirituality notably absent in the far more subtle novella (the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic) that forms Stalker’s source. This runs the full gamut from a faded painting of Lenin’s face, watching over an abandoned room, to the sad, silent majesty of interior sand dunes that may as well be burial mounds.

Geoff Murphy’s New Zealand doomsday film The Quiet Earth (1985) has the conviction to stick with the going-insane reality of a lone survivor, scientist Zac Hobson, for a decent chunk of the movie. It tempers this with some needed pleasure, a whole lot of rage, and some unforgettable visions of how to take revenge at a world with no one left to blame (other than yourself). Notably, we see a balding man dressing in a woman’s slip and Cesar robes, pontificating from a balcony to a pre-recorded soundtrack of applause and an audience of cardboard cut-outs of luminaries such as Adolf Hitler and Bob Marley.

This is quickly followed by a consummate revenge fantasy: shotgun in a cathedral, blowing away crucifixes, and getting to declare yourself God. Unfortunately, however, the film cannot quite take full pleasure in this, or even in the more mild forms of indulgent joy in fucking with the remnants of a world suddenly without other humans. (Aside from watching our protagonist enjoy a breakfast of a raw egg cracked into a flute of expensive champagne, the great moment of sheer pleasure comes when we cut from a model train circling aimlessly to watching Zac drive a real train.) Instead, it hints from the start that there is something fundamentally wrong with making a racket. Even before Zac discovers two other survivors and develops a normal living situation tensed around a love triangle of sorts, the film already hints that his need to yell loud and destroy the edifices of that past life are wrong, that the correct relationship to the land of the dead is deadly silence and quiet contemplation. One should lead a quiet life on this quiet earth.

Folded into this is an odd assertion of the strength of resignation. The three survivors all survived the galactic disruption of the “elementary charge” because they were at the moment of death: at the respective losing ends of a fight, a faulty hairdryer, and one’s own hands, slipping into a pill overdose slumber. (There are connections between the individual decision to end one's life and the "end of the world" landscape, but here, we can imagine it turned otherwise, back onto a system-wide level: to willfully push civilization to the point of total collapse so as to therefore mediate the terms of that collapse, to weather the storm and be ready to come back from death. The worst of bellicose apocalypticism.)

The broader issue is how our melancholy, yearning, or resignation is marked spatially. We could return here to the function of the dream-image thinking its utopian future, shedding off the accrued material of the recent past and sliding back toward the impossible time “before it all went bad.” In these examples, and running throughout the genre as a common tendency, the fantasy of utopian “liberty” and the visions of an other world are located in the site of the past. And on this site, we encounter both the doomed nostalgia epitomized by strains of primitivist thought, at best, and, at worst, a form of Hegelian logic distorted beyond recognition: the strangers' encounter in the forest, to be mediated and navigated into the master-slave relation, is instead writ species wide into the fantasy of the human race confronting itself in mortal combat.

To be clearer, here, we might think of the recurrent instance in post-apocalyptic culture (for example, in Hiroki Endo’s Eden: It’s an Endless World! manga series) when an individual subject acts willfully – or hints at the desire to do so – in order to bring about the death of the species as a whole. This is neither bald misanthropy nor the kind of anti-human logic espoused by certain radical ecological movements (though the manga series does articulate plenty of those “the earth would be better off us and our attendant damage” sentiments). Rather, buried within all their survivor-guilt and loathing of “what we’ve become” is the dangerous gambit of a properly apocalyptic dialectical ethics.

The human race is only worth preserving if we have the courage to make the willful decision to exterminate it.

More than just the petty “scorch the earth and reset the clock” fantasy of posturing black metal bands, this is the paradox suffocating and structuring those who face the bloodbath of the 20th century as well as those loners wandering those waste zones on the other side of the irreversible catastrophic event. Like the being that must be unlike itself to prove that it’s more than bare drive and instinct, the impossible thought here is that only suicide proves that you are indeed an autonomous subject.

Species-wide Russian roulette: you have to pull the trigger to realize that you never should have done so.

Grozę, Grozę!

from A: "An APC presiding over a Polish Kino featuring "Apocalypse Now" during Jaruzelski's martial law in 1981"

A post-apocalyptic cinema is not a kind of film

My article for Mute on "catastrophe cinema in the age of crisis" is up online here. As they put it:

"Dusting off the tedium and ash deposited by Hollywood's recent spate of catastrophe movies, Evan Calder Williams takes aim at their world-affirming pessimism and calls for some real apocalypse..."

Indeed...

Accelerating toward the cliff

Go read: Mr. Noys over at Mute on "Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis," an extended version of the paper he gave on our panel (with Mark K-Punk) in London this November. If you don't know him, Ben is a) a damn sharp thinker and an interlocutor to whom I owe a lot, b) the other head of our two-headed beast of Babylon, the reasoned pessimist of entropy and transition twin to my rambling/ranting apocalyptic S.I. derivations, and c) lives in Bognor Regis, one of the more Ragnarökian-named places (up there with Bad Axe, Michigan). I have a piece coming out shortly in Mute on crisis and apocalypse movies, meaning that this double-path of our opposed, and necessarily proximate, writing is doomed to continue. That's a doom I can support, almost as much as a Thunderdomed decline of the West.

Mining the unobtainable

Avatar is possible the most staggering display of pure plenitude ever committed to the American screen. On what ground does it rest? Underground, a massive deposit of the unobtainable made manifest - the "Unobtanium" to be mined. Flowering above, total wet fecundity, illimitable hybrid biopower, interspecies interpenetration, an absence of agriculture or organized production, and trees that have developed an information network for which Google would happily displace many millions of animist, lithe, bare-assed tribes. (What is the wealth of the metal in the face of all that lush forest and "technologies of nature" to be explored?) Forget any issues about "war on terror," liberal guilt, noble savages, or the like. It's the full subsumption of politics to the prospect of an era of unbound plenty. If this is a cinema of the crisis years, it is so only it that blows away the very category and possibility of scarcity. A wish-fulfillment of profit and the profligate behind every corner, hanging from every luminescent vine. When each pixel digital fiber drips with such lush excess, what else is there to do but frolic and drool?

Don't bury the dead!

Audio of my talk in London, on apocalyptic politics, in which one can hear me talk very, very quickly, urge all Communists to refuse to bury their dead, explain and come a bit unstuck. (Link here.)

For a bit of total affective contrast (and a shift in political perspective, or at least a deepening of rationalism by the man who claimed he doesn't want an apocalypse because he will be the guy in glasses who will of course be the first killed by tidal wave/wave of fire/wave of zombies), here's Ben Noys' excellent talk on accelerationism and negation from our panel:



Thanks to Mike, over at Avoiding the Void, for recording and uploading these.

Notes on apocalyptic method

[Two sets of three thoughts: on what is to be drawn from thinking combined and uneven development and on what an apocalyptic version looks like.]




What is the perspective which underlies this model of combined and uneven development and which it offers beyond itself? What does this have to do with making sense of movies about the end of the world and our reversion/conversion to cavemen, gas-obsessed barbarians, walking corpses, insane loners in an empty city? And what foothold does it give for a radical politics posed against late capitalism?

First, it is a perspective onto the ways in which we see neither a simple monolithic advance – or reversal, at times – of history as progress nor a scattered patchwork of different time scales, historical projects, and their resultant organization of bodies and moneys. Rather, it is a properly dialectical conception of real abstractions, in this case between political geography and visions of where the world historical project is going. Specifically, it considers the consequences of the intersections between such a monolithic perspective (the march forward of global capitalism through and toward liberal democracy as a way to weather the increasingly severe economic, ecological, and sociopolitical crises bound to emerge) and the zones which can never be seen by it as other than barbaric pockets of anti-modernity, lingering vestiges of intolerance, superstition, and simpler times to be celebrated for their “authentic diversity” while folded in under certain strictures of extractive market relations.

This isn’t to say that one perspective or the other, either the unified teleology of capitalist progress or the competing and incompatible micro-visions of different historical trajectories, is more or less true. Rather, the point is to grasp how the unified vision only gains consistency through its relationship to what cannot fit into it and of how it provides an ideological backdrop for the material shaping of a world that will preserve those unwelcome zones. In other words, decisively not “flattening the world” and welcoming all equally into the financial fold, but providing the narrative of that as the cover story for an opposite practice.

Second, what does or would it mean to fight “progress”, to refuse the trendlines and timelines offered? Neither to desperately cling to past regimes nor, crucially, to fetishized the way things were. Instead, to wonder, like a strain of idiosyncratic apocalypticism at once anti-capitalist and anti-modern, if the savage might throw away his bow for a rifle in order to take aim at the very need to throw away the bow in the first place. To take up the arms of the contemporary capitalist world, either to beat it at its own game (a certain Communist vision of employing “capitalist” technology in order to develop productive forces beyond the limits of capitalist scarcity) or to take it down from within (alternately, versions of Italian workerism and certain Situationist and anarchist cultural practices). The point, as always, is to stay a bit savage in the midst of all this mediated savagery, to fight for something more equal, organized, perhaps even clean and modern, by never going totally non-native.

Third, to stress the givenness of this order. One is always in the shadow of the world that rejects you, and privation is not reduced to the grayness of a degree zero. These are apocalyptic zones, sites in which we see exposed both the collapse of capitalist universality and the revealed presence of what cannot be included (“differentiated”, recognized) without undermining the workings of the global economic order. For this reason, the degradation to the status and material forms of the “backward,” the primitive, the anarchic, the hell-on-earth is always historically marked, and not in terms of what era of backwardness a region approximates. It is not uncommon to hear people speak of certain zones (deep in jungles, high on mountains) as “unchanged since the 13^th century”, or the like, claims which, while perhaps accurate in describing agricultural practices, family structure, etc, are incapable of recognizing that such zones are historically tarred, however much in shadow, with the sign of the Now, precisely because they are visible to us only as a not-this, not-Now.

Even on a less extreme scale, the collapse – and willful maintenance by powerful nations – of certain areas into the barest subsistence farming, warlord powers, “clan” battles, uncontrollable ravages of disease, and aching famine: these must be grasped as “signs of the time”, not as vestiges of what should be outmoded if we could just get everyone to agree on the universal model of liberal capitalism. These barbarisms are the direct result and fundamental support system for all those new beasts springing forth, odd innovations in finance, different ways of streamlining shipping containers, revolutions in the time scales and cycles of capital. The seeming banalities and technical details are the real writers of a new apocalypse. To counter this, to write otherwise, is to also refuse to pass through the old stages, to stand in the present while recognizing that any capture of it we manage is of a moment already passing. The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, indeed.

Before proceeding further, we need to take stock of a theoretical question perhaps specific to my apocalyptic project. If “combined and uneven development” as a concept and model itself grasps the levels of hellishness that ensure and ensured, what does combined and uneven apocalypse offer, beyond a demonstration of a deep attachment to pithy rewording? The point isn’t just to ramp this up, to stress that the political and social effects of capitalism are “apocalyptic,” in the looser sense of so bad that it signals the end of things. Rather, three reasons.

1 . It is rather to stress the apocalyptic potential of these spaces, not as permanent catastrophe – a paradoxical catastrophe that does not signal end but systemic health – but as permanent visibility of the “hidden.” It is not permanent, but a historical duration, particular to the 20^th century and only getting worse, in which no event can signal a phase shift. It is diffuse apocalypse.

2. Despite our brief forays into consideration of “real world” conditions, the emphasis here is on the cultural fantasies of apocalypse and what follows it. Crucially, however, these should nor be taken as just hyperbolic versions of how things really are. Visions of the world after peak oil don’t just ramp our seemingly inevitable situation, zombies don’t just take the struggle of laborers and the denigration of the homeless and make them more mindlessly and necrotically horrible. If there is an allegorical relation at play between these movies and their historical conditions, it isn’t one of standing in as the limit-case of what already is the case. Rather, the argument is that given the ideological structure of capitalism, combined and uneven development is an invisible truth. We know it to be the case, but to speak it, to show it, remains something altogether different. These films and books, mass cultural phenomena and subcultural obsessions, are the closest articulation we can get of the structures of totality underpinning this, not a mirror but a prism. In the distortions of this restless cognitive mapping, we get closer to not just the texture of an age, but the support structure on which it is stretched and formed.

3. If this odd collection of instances, this anti-canon of shared apocalyptic dreams and nightmares, are an inconstant lens onto how things are, they are also a path to be followed to what may be. They are concrete fashionings not of how things will go (the real possibility of zombie holocaust remains unlikely) but how we might like them to, kickbacks against the horror of the endless same, projections out from the barely detectable of this conjuncture to a conjecture of where this leads us. With this comes, necessarily, a revision of what apocalypse can or should mean, and an insistence on readying ourselves for the role we will have its coming to be.

So forget enlightenment, forget the worry of starting in the dusk and losing our way. Let's willfully begin at midnight, with the singing of and about the dark times.