Keeping busy after the end of the world (The Bed Sitting Room notes, part 1)

[In order to make reading this very extended take on The Bed Sitting Room a more plausible and pleasurable endeavor, I'm breaking it up into a few pieces. Here's the first.]


“Oh, we’ll just have to keep going?”
“What for?”
“Because we’re British.”
“British! What a lot of use that is.”

- The Bed Sitting Room


The trajectory from relations of waste objects with their venomous use-values to radical social relations lost to our historical moment involves, in the case of our project, a particular privileging of the "cultural" object. This is not primarily an account of the real material practices of sifting through the trash of the era, nor of the people who have been forced into such labor. Our treatment of them is metaphorical, or, more precisely, refracted through the films, books, and general discourse in which those practices and peoples make their figurative appearance. On top of that, these cultural examples are overwhelmingly from the part of the world (the "developed" nations and capitalist powers) who bear far less of the burden of cleaning up their mess. These are not the ideological and political representations of material salvage-work and its consequences.

Rather, they are documents of how the dominant architecture of the late capitalist system thinks itself, however symptomatically and against its better judgment. And more, they are documents of relations: to the world at large, to the labor that produces such a world, to its discarded artifacts, and its discarded possibilities of other modes of life. Only in taking these relations as a whole, with an eye toward the last, does the work of analytical digging and searching for necessary antecedents result in a longer history of a constant apocalypse (here in its salvagepunk version) and its not very silver linings.

And so...

After the bomb, the gags.

If there stands, tottering and joyful, a single cultural object of salvage-thought at its best, it is Richard Lester's 1969 film The Bed Sitting Room. Not salvage as the undercurrent, and inconstant mechanism of capitalist recuperation (squeezing value out of every last scrap). And perhaps not salvagepunk per se, coming before the long downturn of overproduction and manufacturing profits, the new world anxieties of cyberpunk, and the total prolifigate waste of all that piles up and waits to be reused. Rather, some kind of obscure precursor, funnier and crueler, sloppy and razor-sharp, the underwatched and unmatched template that deserves its due forty years on. Therein lies its weird temporality: in this refuse (just another largely forgotten film), we find what will come to be but hasn't yet. Fittingly for this available but non-accessed and somewhat dusty history, it casts a different light, a different end of the 60's, a shaky birth of the long 70's, and the hastening toward the long slow fallout of late capitalist apocalypse.

And so this is both a drawing forth of some aspects of what salvagepunk might be from the film that does it best and, more simply, an appreciation for something not watched nearly enough and to which I was turned on very recently. As such, what follows is a lot of summary, and an initial gesture, one I hope to be followed by others, toward situating this amazing thing dropped from the tail of the 60's into our lap. It is very dark, it is very uncomfortable, it is very funny, and it is very, very British.

As one critic put it, it is "like Samuel Beckett, but with better jokes," which is pretty spot on. Nominally based on the Spike Milligan and John Antrobus play in 1963, Lester's cinematic version is a staggering vision of waste and remnant, of frozen, necrotic social relations, and of what we keep doing to keep ourselves busy after the end of the world.

A very Andrei Tarkovsky stump

What we do, at least at first, is that very familiar (and none the less softly startling for the fact) gazing onto the stillness of a world abandoned. The film starts, backed by the soft opening horns of its score, with images of nature in fuzzy flux: staring into the sun, the movement of lava. This gentleness all adds up to the quiet of a world reclaimed by nature, a new pastoralism without shepards.

However, the reels of unspooled history (not my metaphor: a literal image recurrent throughout) start to pile up onto this unspoiled tableau of quiet real things.

With this glimpse of the bomb-hollowed dome of a partially submerged St. Paul's Cathedral (thereby marking the wasteland as London), the sense of a nuclear fallout emerges immediately. Here, in the return to the center of the British empire, is an unavoidable echo of the Hiroshima Atom Bomb Dome.



This resonance acts as an ominous designator of how the world got to be what it is. Furthermore, it is the early sign of the tensions that produce the distinct look of the film and its spaces. For the lyrical solitude of the single stump in the rippling water and the minimalist elegance of the sunken dome meet their negation in the unfathomable amounts of crap filling this world, oceans of trash, slabs of concrete, rusting infrastructure, all the hallmarks of an apocalyptic event that left its mess to be cleaned up by the survivors.



In short, the unresolved aesthetic of the film - its deep ontological messiness - is staked on the gap between the empty and the overfull, between a depopulated world that cannot be filled and a world that is hard to fathom repopulating without clearing away some of this rubble. There may be only 20 or so survivors, but the ground is never clear. Any starting over again is life in the ruins, and not just in a theoretical sense of the end of history.

Yet this is a film which does not beg such a theoretical reading, it insists on it, shoves it on the surface, transforms it into a gag, and repeats it until it passes from quite funny to quite unsettling. It is shot through, from the get-go, with a surprisingly subtle dialectic of event and process, which here takes the unsteady form of the capital-E Event (the Bomb, the catastrophic rupture that literally cannot be spoken, resulting in odd gesticulations, much hemming and hawing and making bomb sounds with your mouth) and static process (after the Bomb, the interminable durations and banal rhythms of everyday life, keeping up appearances as long as even one witness remains, going on because we cannot not go on). In other words, between what is done (and over with) and what is done (over and over again). The call of what is to be done, Leninist or otherwise, to jumpstart this halted progression is the stillborn question that hangs over the whole film. One shares the unspoken feeling, with the fumbling bravado and convention and tradition hindered agency of the characters, that the problem with the apocalypse was that it wasn't apocalyptic enough: it did not clear away the dead weight of the previous world configuration. It was nearly an anti-apocalypse, in that it seemingly did not reveal the hidden but made hidden what was already visible, what was to be done.


This is, of course, the false angle, for what the film is really about isn't a mourning for the absent New but a real struggle to find the Old worth salvaging. It is a struggle to become post-apocalyptic, a task which requires both remembering the past (speaking the Bomb, preserving old forms of social relation) and forgetting the past (letting it become History, throwing away the inherited relations of domination). You aren't post-apocalyptic because the apocalypse happened, the film stresses. You become post-apocalyptic when you learn to do something better, or at least more morbidly fun, with the apocalyptic remains of the day.

Sort, sever, detangle, grasp

[this following the last section on salvagepunk, capitalist salvage operations, and Schwitters, as the midstop before moving toward The Bed-Sitting Room and contemporary horizons]



But isn't this whole salvagepunk enterprise bound to the paradigmatic form of object worship that haunts the whole enterprise, slipping from crass consumerism to the financial crisis call to "get back to real things," the primitivist thought of rediscovering a natural life of pure use-values? The fantasy of the most radical tendencies lying in the most desperate configurations of global slum dwellers, and a melancholic drool before the postindustrial loveliness of all falling apart? Both the fetishization of the tool's rough and ready possibilities of world fixing, and the fetishist's excited glance at what cannot be fixed, all kitsch and crumble?

In short, is this not just more reification, totally unable to escape the hypnotic fixation on objects, however innately venomous or thrown from the cycles of capitalism, as symptom and solution?

To which we answer: yes, indeed.

This is a position intentionally occupied and line of thought taken to its horizon in order to do that same dialectical work of "punk" described, of tracking out to the point of collapse. Fittingly, to see what should be scrapped and what should be saved.

What must be scrapped is clearly this elevation of the object world of late capitalism, antagonistic as it may be to the world that created it. We end up back where we departed and with less clarity, over our heads in contemplation waste, holding up scraps to be recombined, thinking that it we just unlock the potential of all this crap, we'll have the weapons we need.

But, paradoxically, what must be saved is precisely that reification. For what is to be drawn out from salvagepunk is a mode of relating to the cursed inheritances of history, drawn out through that very elevation of objects to the status of social relations.


What needs to be salvaged are social relations, broken forms of lived Communist thought, discarded by our moment as the outmoded waste of a century. At once lost utopian kernels and the massive weight of sometimes catastrophic attempts to live differently, not just the traces but the ruins of an attempt to move beyond capitalism. When we talk of occupying trash sites and of building tools from the junkyard, this is what we mean. Not that we should valorize either the waste dweller forced to live in abjection or the cluttered objects themselves, but rather that our relation as radicals to our radical history must take the form of salvage. The thought of salvage is the thought of all that is thrown out by the totality of late capitalism, the traditions and horizons of collectivity, solidarity, and true antagonism.

As such, we need this anti-capitalist reification of thinking human relations as things and things as embodiments of human relation. We need this in order to grasp - apocalyptically, with a sense of both the immanence and imminent returns of these relations - how to relate to what been ruined, yet which is persistent. The constitutive excess (radical thoughts of the radical reformation of life) can't ever quietly shuffle off the stage, because it is always created anew, ceaselessly, in every moment of the reproduction and circulation of capital. Like the objects of this outmoding world, they are made anew and tossed aside, not broken but declared broken and devoid of value.

Salvagepunk, along with being a kind of cultural object that hasn't fully come into its own, is the attempt to use the shards of a radical antagonism and solidarity in the same way that we might sort, sever, detangle, and grasp objects of insistent value from the wasteland. With a keen eye to what needs to be left to rot and a keener eye for how the world order has shifted since the time the things joined the realm of the unwanted. And from there, the grim smile that recognizes past struggle in its momentary successes and its resonant failures. A dissembling and hacking apart of those past moments, saving something and tossing away more, particularly those traditions in which we've invested too much to see them for the lumbering hindrance that they've become. And the montage and assemblage of our moments of real shock and slow resistance, constructs of waste to face up to this hurtling crash of a system predicated on the construction of waste.

Putting the punk back in salvage (where it was not to begin with)

[More salvage-work, a chunk for the chapter I'm currently writing. Here a response, perhaps to myself, perhaps to comrades who've been keeping me sharp. Certainly to the very valid question of the gap between a grubby aesthetics of salvage and a scrappy politics and thought-process of salvagepunk, with the distinct worry that an attempt to formulate the latter results in either the bellicose vision of a wastescape in which the adept and hardy pull it off or in the self-congratulatory tone that often unfortunately accompanies the pseudo-D.I.Y. of vintage clothing and twee tea cozies. And perhaps even more to the raising of antecedents, from barricades to Merz, L'Atalante to Bed-Sitting Room, which consequently raises the question of what salvagepunk would mean in relation to the recurrent processes of salvage, and, more damningly, why it is more radical than a capitalist entrepreneur who finds a way to burn used diapers in such a manner as to produce a highly effective anti-impotence drug.]

Run aground.

If salvagepunk is a genre to come, a radical principle of recuperation and construction, a certain relation to how we think the dregs of history we inherit against our will, a return of the repressed idiosyncrasy of outmoded things, if it is all this, it is also, rather obviously, defined against the longer lineage of salvage to which it is bound. Taking the initial linguistic form of the word + punk suffix (cyberpunk, steampunk, etc) that started this investigation, salvagepunk is not - or should not be - salvage plus a rakish air, a self-declared fuck the world perspective, and a carefully located sexy grease smudge on the cheek. That needs no work to be brought forth. It already exists, woven into in the machine-frayed hem of every fake vintage shirt sold at the mall.

Rather, to put the punk into salvage is to occupy it too well, not to overextend the logic of the game, but to track it to its horizons. The frayed hems of a mode of thought, and the much larger rips we missed before our eyes. For example, the punk specificity of cyberpunk had nothing to do with noirish mohawked heroes and digital samurai, not drugs or dub. (To be sure, the massification of it, from Hackers to The Matrix, had very much to do with that.) It had to do with the intersection of its deep fidelity to its historical moment and the fact that it no longer believed in a future - the present is already the hollowed out promise of that future.* In other words, it is not speculative fiction: it is just a dead stare portrait of what the neoliberal order wanted itself to be if it had the total hegemony to do it. Not neoliberals themselves, who always cared too much about shoring up nations and "wars of civilization." No, it was the asubjective shape of the thought, the toneless growl of capital turning back against on the remaining petrified forms of its makers's world. The dystopia of cyberpunk was this thought's acid bath, stripping down to the bones. No fussing around with supposed humanitarian concerns and spreading democracy, just financialization, total penetration of markets, the pornographic frenzy of the invisible, as circulation zipped through shady back alley deals and the high architecture of finance with equal greased ease.

Cyberpunk hence was not the sneer at a barren speculative future. It was the hidden sneer of that present itself.

The end of that present is the site on which salvagepunk - not salvage - is emerging. Like all things apocalyptic in the truest sense, it reveals itself as that which was hidden, in the wrecked afterlife of the world dreamed by cyberpunk and lived, unevenly, by all of us for the last 20 years. It stands in the fallout and debris, those burst bubbles and factories that won't de-rust and start a-hummin' again.

Recession and oral horror

And yet, salvage itself is a mechanism, both in practice and in thought, procedure and ideology, deeply ingrained in the circuits of late capitalism. And much further back than that.

From the total inanity of green "upcycled" goods ("ie. recycled/reclaimed into something special", because "Ethical is Beautiful" and they insist on "only using laptops") to wrenching fillings from your teeth to sell to Cash For Gold U.S.A. (for the oral hoarding days must come to an end in these lean times). From the total staggering obscenity of price mark-ups at trendy vintage clothing shops to desperate children rummaging through the stinking mountains of trash. These are apocalyptic times generally, but in particular, the figure and action of salvage looms perhaps largest.

The whole totality is shot through with that scrap and hustle, whittle and swindle instinct. Hip hop's "made something from nothing" ethos, and Pepsi bottling "purified" municipal tap water and labelling it "Bottled at the source." Advertising trawling the shitpool of consumer anxieties and petty fears, dragging up and polishing out new needs and ownership dreams.

And more than all this is the fact that capitalism's great work of salvage is the salvage of time: making something out of every last bit. The worker keeping time to inhuman rhythms of the integrated factory, and Fordism streamlining movements and conversation to the single repetitive task. The colonization of our free time, never being able to punch out, "free time" only a self-subtracting countdown back to the time of value. (Not to mention the work of "creative" capital, when being aware of "what's going on" culturally and socially is our supposed protection against the precarity of labor.) No longer blocks of time or long cycles, but those pseudo-cycles that never start or stop. The factory never sleeps anymore. (Although we may be getting our economic crisis revenge here, with both iconic industrial areas and new zones of production totally halted, seemingly frozen in a dusty moment.)

Shipbreaking in Malaysia

Even in periods of profligate boom years, such as the consolidation of class power over the past 30 years, with the total explosion of consumer credit and the "planned obsolescence" of commodities, the system, as a whole, cannot fully let waste remain as such. The discarded objects are spatially displaced to, for example, South Asia, where we find fields of dead motherboards ("e-waste", as if it was just another set of ones and zeroes waiting to be deleted from a server) left to be stripped for usuable bits, and the silent hulls of oil tankers scrapped, scrubbed, and broken down.

This "gutting of the boat" is a fitting contemporary world extension and transformation of the very etymology of "salvage." For the broader sense of "recycling waste material" is a recent shift, to which we will return. The original use of it, from 1645, designated the payment one received for saving a ship that was going down or about to be captured. Even the action of the saving itself did not come into usage until the late 19th century (with the "salvage corps," those private companies who would either do the job municipal firefighters couldn't in an era of rampant fire, or come in after the burn to save whatever could be saved). And so salvage is shot through with the sense of getting paid (or the transfer of exchange value, more broadly) not for one's work of sifting through the junkheap but of preventing the ship from joining that realm of dead objects (and its sailors the realm of the dead). Not even plundering cargo from the sinking ship or grabbing whatever you can as it goes down. Saving the day and keeping things as they were.

Our moment, when salvage as waste sorting and recuperation, has also seen perhaps the largest and most desperate resurrection of this older mode. For what was that $700 billion bailout (not to mention the untold sums added before and after, now estimated to be somewhere in the long run range of $23.7 trillion) than the fantasy of saving the ship of the entire capitalist financial enterprise, and more than that, of getting some "salvage" in return, a remuneration in the form of money flowing back through all the destroyed channels? The incessant pops of speculative bubbles may as well be the sound of this very fantasy imploding: against the now clearly defunct logic of Keynsianism, you can't save a sinking monetary empire with more money and expect to gain something in the process. And when an economic order refuses to allow for the creative destruction of industries that result in "fire sales" of production materials, leveraged debt, and access to markets, we don't even get the kind of ground clearing that allows for building and accumulation to start anew.

Rifles and corpses

Fittingly and horrifically, the more common sense of salvage, that of trying to find some value in waste, emerged in 1918, in the naming of the "British Army Salvage Corps," who combed the battlefields for materials (tank parts, clothing of dead soldiers) to be redirected into the continuing war effort. The anecdote below gives a sense of the tenor of this (from the British newsmagazine 'The War Budget', January 3rd, 1918):

Unrolling my [gas] mask to read the directions for its use and to try it on, I noticed that the gray fabric had a strangely familiar look and that one corner of the "skirt" of the queer contrivance was pieced out from a rounded seam.

"What's this stuff they use in the gas masks?" I asked of Captain R., who reclined at my elbow. "I'm sure I've seen something like it before."

"Grayback," was the laconic reply. "I should hate to say anything to spoil your appetite, but if you must know, the flap of that mask you just had on was made from the tail of a Tommy's shirt picked up on the battlefield. Possibly he thought he could chase Boches faster if he threw it away; possibly it was cut off him when a comrade applied first aid; possibly--------''

"That will do," I cut in, hastily rolling up the mask and returning it to its case. "Here's hoping no asphyxiating shells sail over to-day to force us to the dread alternative!"

It is here, in both the unfathomable brute fact of the slaughter fields of WWI themselves and in the mordant and furious culture that emerged out of it, that our lineage of salvagepunk starts, although just barely. (With the possible earlier antecedent of revolutionary barricades in all their body-stacking, city-remapping montage.) That is to say, where the punk in salvagepunk begins. Not accidentally, in a European wide apocalyptic moment, where the savagery directed outwards by the Continent was turned back on itself. The World War as the severed end of the previous world.

Salvagepunk is the drawing out of the logic of salvage itself (in its WWI sense), past the point of its own consistency. It takes the basic ground of salvage (there is value here somewhere, if we sift through the ashes, or keep the ship from going under, or strip these bodies) on its own terms, in its own moment and, in doing so, wrecks it. It wrecks it with the simple recognition that we're already past that point and that the world is now irrevocably structured as apocalyptic. The very notion of recuperation means that it is already gone, that the former world is no more.

Hence salvagepunk says: it's already been burnt, already lost at sea. We came to the rescue too late. There is no reward, and definitely no one there to pay it. And we can only begin again from here if we finish wrecking - in thought - what we know to be wreckage yet which refuses to call itself such.

Downhill from here: the 60's burn in Godard's Weekend (1967)

Yet this alone would not constitute salvagepunk, at least insofar as it can escape simply being an aesthetic of rusty hulls and bleached bones, especially in a time when that aesthetic itself is increasingly dominant. The key turn, the raising of salvagepunk to a capture of this historical conjucture (the drawn-out crash of late capitalism) and a rejection of where that will go, if untrammeled, is the work of construction. Construction in the age of wreckage.

In this way, the "look" of salvagepunk should be less about how it appears, from cobbled together caravans to junkworld robots, and more about a kind of look onto that world. The look is two-fold, and German artist Kurt Schwitters, working in the aftermath of the first World War, gives the way in.

Schwitters, Merz Pictures, 1921

As gestured to in the beginning of this chapter, Schwitters is a pivotal figure in this history for several reasons: his association with Dada and Surrealism, his collages of selected refuse and trash, and his naming of his art practice as Merz by decoupling it from Commerz. In English, think stealing away "merce" from "commerce", of cutting away the "with" that describes the social relations of economic life to leave behind the isolated objects themselves, in an inversion of how reification happens.

In describing Merz, Schwitters wrote:

Merz is the graveside smile and the solemn gaze at comic events.

In a broken world of broken things, this graveside smile is the necessary response and one-half of the look of salvagepunk, how it looks out and what we would see on its face. Not the sneer of cyberpunk, which is that of the wanna-be automated world itself, but of those born into this world, who refuse to either look away or to submit to the pornography of melancholy. The work of construction only starts with breaking the baleful spell of decay and mourning, and nothing can do this without the obscene laughter at what we are supposed to be very serious and dour about. (And in reverse, Schwitters's other directive, that solemn gaze, at what we are told is supposed to be frivolous and light and gentle, tearing that open to find the utter nastiness of expected laughter.)

The look, then, is the graveside smile and the perspective of looking toward what can be reassembled "wrongly" and how. It is for this reason that the tradition of montage (from Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker) and collage (Hannah Höch and Schwitters, John Heartfield and Terry Gilliam), détournement (Duchamp, Debord and the Situationist Interational, hip-hop and Italian arte povera) and farce (Monty Python and Richard Lester) is so crucial here: all are forms of idiosyncratic uses of "given" materials. (Recall here our earlier discussion of dialectics and subtraction, via Badiou and the Joker.)

It is worth staying with Schwitter's particular thoughts about construction and objects for a moment because, to reiterate, salvagepunk - not in its Mad Max appearance but in what it could be as an operation of thought and cultural production - is fundamentally about such questions, about how we relate the task of construction to the inherited remains of historical encounters. Reading him on this requires a fair amount of unpacking, for he is at once the man who wanted to use "household refuse to scream with" and to "remove the innate venom of things."

Oddly, though, Schwitters's art is never much of a screaming project, and that mordant grave grin comes closer than any sort of expressionistic yawp. Particularly, he is interested in ways of devaluing and revaluing things, of how to pull them from their situated position within the world of capitalism and its waste products and of how to locate them anew in the position of the artwork. Hence his statement that "the work of art is produced by the artistic devaluation of its elements." The reason for this is what he sees as the problem of the "innate venom" of things, the eccentric, idiosyncratic aspect of objects that must be defanged in order to join the new combinatory logic of the collage. It is here that salvagepunk is radically opposed to Schwitters's work, its sharpest ancestor in other regards. For it is precisely that innate venom with which salvage is concerned: our task is to remove the veil of abstraction - the designation of an object in terms of its exchange value - in order to find that venom, the particularity of its use value which cannot be entirely subsumed beneath a ratio of market demand, labor time frozen in the object, and devaluation across time.

So when Schwitters declares that "what is essential is the process of forming" in relation to working with junk and trash, we can detect an early vision of the wreckage/montage work of salvagepunk. However, the gap widens on the question of where value comes from. He writes, "I set Merz against a refined form of Dada and arrived at the conclusion that while Dadaism only points to opposites, Merz resolves them by giving them values within a work of art. Pure Merz is art, pure Dada is non-art - each consciously so." (Merz 4 Banalitätem) Leaving aside the question of whether or not Dada is truly "non-art," the central difference between what we have been trying to draw out and what Schwitters envisioned is that the work of salvagepunk, even as an "artistic practice", would be providing the occasion for the already-present singular values of things (now visible in the very moment of their ruin, of their monetary and often functional devaluation) to come to the fore. More precisely, perhaps salvagepunk can stand between these points: the production of values (the task of construction and assemblage as producing a second life to the already broken) while still retaining that innate venom that could never be entirely sublimated.

The brilliant mess of cats and records, from Jean Vigo's L'atalante (1934)

It is this belief in "innate venom" or the "idiosnycracy" of objects that gives salvagepunk a stanger, unsettled, and prescriptive relationship to its historical moment, for it represents a kickback against the still dominant logic of postmodernism. We might debate the degree to which the terms of postmodernism theorized by Frederic Jameson and others in the 80's still apply to our moment, when developments in media technologies and massive shifts in the global order produce a perhaps uncrossable rift. However, what we can say is that the notion of salvagepunk we have been constructing here, including both its existent cultural examples and the possible manifestations of its conceptual moves, is one that represents a lost promise of modernism swept under the rug.

For if one strand of modernism (including those practioners of montage, collage, détournement, and face) was born as a tarrying with the emergent world of capitalist imperialism and its consequences, as well as the full flowering of a set of relations between workers and the realm of made things, it has always been about salvage, mapping another current alongside the capitalist work of salvage itself. This brand of modernism has been the task of finding value in the scrap heap, although it was particular in its sense that there is still a whole that needs to be smashed up and made into a scrap heap first. But above all, against Schwitters's own words (which go against the feel of his collages themselves), a sense of the eccentric value of things and all images not being equivalent. In the work of junk-montage and the recreation/recombination of the most banal subregions of the cultural realm, we get glimpses of a different kind of sneer back towards us: the tough, unwanted, and venomous insistence of the objects of mechanical production, from plastics that will not degrade to odd, unsettling singularities of things that were mass produced.

The postmodern turn, despite its emphasis on pastiche and mash-up and hybrid forms, closes off the punk aspect of what salvage could be, precisely because of that emphasis. The issue is the inherent flatness and equivalency of postmodern cultural production, in which, according to now familiar accounts, the disappearing sense of a lived history of the world opens the cache of cultural options to endless reuses, all unmoored from the original situation of the images, sounds, genre conventions, and so on. There is a real sense in which the number of exceptions to this trendline overwhelm its descriptive capacity. However, like all real abstractions whose description of a situation feedback into and dictate the terms of that situation, the postmodern turn has believed its own lines. And so whether or not this has been the experience of those living through the past few decades, the cultural sphere has been marked by its degrees of deviation from or adherence to the hollow frisson of postmodern ahistorical sampling.

Fighting back against a regime that wants its decay and waste greened, twee, and a little sad: still from Decasia, Bill Morrison (2002)

To do this, then, with salvagepunk, is to measure its self-aware extreme deviation from postmodernism. Fundamentally opposed to pastiche, salvage realizes the eccentricity of things in which persist, even after their discarding, outmoding, and forgetting, the peculiar imprint of their time of production and the cache of labor and energy frozen in their form, from which all value has supposedly been lost. Above all, it is that work of construction, not simply gutting to see what can be sold back to the industrial suppliers, but a giving the time to see what values might emerge outside of the loops of circulation and accumulation.

Particularly when combined with other aspects of waste. We don't want to hold up single objects as treasures, like so many vintage lamps or a kitschy artifact of a political world gone by. Instead, to start with a world after the fact of its collapse, an endless series of world collapses. Constructing anew from leftovers of what was once very new. And then occupying the old worlds, inhabiting a moment to the point of its stress and crack, by inhabiting those parts of it already belonging to another time, waste zones of history one and all.




* This reading of No Future-ism and cyberpunk is heavily indebted to Wlad Godzich.

Blow-out

I'm commonly accused of being an apocalyptic fetishist, of calling imminent dark days that may be very, very far off, part of an entirely different time scale of slow decline, centuries of decadence.

But hell, if these are being sighted on the freeway, the gasoline and gore soaked Mad Maxing of the Western civilizational project may be closer than even I would have wagered. (Or more plausibly, the ground shipping industry has learned its lesson from the oceans and is prepping for the asphalt equivalent of Somali piratical requisitioning.)

(Thanks to Mark for sending this my way.)

Some dogs rekindle their hunting instincts

Been meaning to link to, and write about, this (the History Channel show Life After People: The Series) for a while. I haven't yet, in part because I have been waiting for something substantive to say. I'll return to it later this summer when I come back to the question of the apocalyptic city. For now, all I want to say is a few disconnected things:

Washington Monument, in the lush verdant tropicalia of future Washington

It is the ultimate wet dream of an Earth First activist, now transitioned from flickering no-future fantasies to big budget, CGI excessive, drawn out over an entire series: the strange union of primitivist ground-clearing deep time wishing and a station known for its borderline bellicose fetishization of all things World War.

Tarkovsky and those other merchants of apocalyptic melancholy could barely envision pulling off something on this scale, this pornographic in its lingering gaze on the evacuated landscape, this heavy-breathing, false restraint at the lustful gaze toward monuments and networks without upkeep tumbling and fizzling out, this slick drizzle, dust, scavenging claim-stakers and clamoring kudzu unmaking of the built world.

Not terrorism, just gravity, weather, and time

(For a good time, read the episode descriptions. A sample:

Episode Nine: The Road to Nowhere

The post-apocalyptic fate of our cars, planes and roads. Oil refineries turn into time bombs. In the Motor City, harsh northern winters dismantles auto headquarters. While in Texas, the Alamo succumbs to a new invader. Also, animals adapt: armadillos spread, some dogs rekindle their hunting instincts, and long-horn cattle flourish once again.

Their use of the "Also" is quite funny. As in the description for episode 6: Also, Philiadelphia's Liberty Bell cracks for good and San Francisco's cable cars and bridges snap.)

Arguably the greatest and weirdest segment of the series: the survival of the Queen's corgis as they become dirty, scrappy little street-fighting bastards

Last, this series initially seems a genuine betrayal of what the apocalyptic can allow us to think, the processes of construction and becoming collective brought out in the always-hovering move to the post-apocalyptic. In other words, there are no humans left over to work toward becoming a people again. There are the assorted talking heads here to give a bit of master knowledge to validate the money shots of our national icons falling apart, and there is the carnival barker of a narrator. However, if we think of apocalypse in the proper sense, as a lifting of the veil, of the revelation of that which has been hidden, the series and all its indulgent melancholy gains traction. For what emerges is the eccentricity and idiosyncrasy of the leftover objects of capitalism, without their attendants and veilers, no one smoothing the cracks or moving the debris to other shores. No more circulation, no more abandonment, no more accumulation, subtle or primitive.

The caption provided by the show's website - "ONE HOUR AFTER PEOPLE: Built up vapors, normally regulated by workers, linger. Runaway temperatures in the reactor create sparks, and everything ignites. The fuel that once propelled mankind around the world now fuels a seemingly endless inferno."

And in this way, the series in all its drooling gloom and aesthetics of digital decay - you don't need computers to find these sorts of teeming messes and vacant mini-worlds, you just need to know where to look - nails the distinction between the end of the world and the end of days. It is the latter which is properly apocalyptic, in all its dialectical chances to speak the banality and wanting of our epoch, this sequences of days. (Indeed, as Don reminded me, the sense of the end of days as a unit of time measure: the work day, the end of our history and cycles consisting of interlocking 8-hour blocks.) All that remains is the world, not miraculously without humans anymore, but perhaps a lifting fog, not enlightenment but a slow feeling out for the first time in a long time of just what all this is before and behind us. The question, as always, is how to make this kind of groundclearing possible without waiting for us to be gone. Tactics born from dogs, fissured cracks bred from the unfathomable weight of this whole enterprise.

(And yet, at this moment when we see the creaks and groans in the calls for economic state of emergency, unemployment rising still, the extreme difficulty of imagining a way out that isn't ... at this moment, not to hold up the wrong figures, or hold them up wrongly, not to just think of ourselves as wolves and pigs, tactical bestiaries of those ready to rummage and run through the chaos of an order-ending time, or as the prescient witnesses to the slow car crash of this moment. Not to linger too long in the dusky prettiness and stale ferocity of collapse. Recalling instead some other aspects of whatever lineage we align toward, thinking about clean, open spaces, about careful construction, not junk piles but thoughtful, durable piles of concrete and glass to house more than just rich couples. Planning and care, welfare and distribution. Without this bedrock and commitment, our scavenging, hunting, and constructing capacities sniff around pointlessly, finding nothing but the scent of their own trail.)

Construction in the age of wreckage

Avant-garde armor

That which can only be new, which calls itself a fissure in the trendline, a needle skipping from the record to the floor, whatever calls itself thus necessarily calls for a ground clearing, shoving to the gutter the clutter of accreted junk so as to gain visibility and the room to build up momentum.

Or this is how it supposedly goes. And this is been the rallying and outpacing cry of prescriptive radical cultural movements, from the manifestos of Dada and the SI, Constructivist design and Brutalist slabs, dialectical film and anarcho-punk.

This - this mode of emptying the graveyard to make room for new dead - is nothing new, nothing if not the dominant minor logic of the 20th century, the blood-and-noise conviction running alongside its modern twin: the promise of global liberal democracy making capitalism itself a "basic human right." And there is little left in our periodizing mourning which dwells in the basement of the museum of avant-gardes, fingering our collectible remnants of when times were different and when people believed.

So, like the very movements in question, we wind up backs to the wall of that non-choice: either we mark and mock, tell ourselves that it was always just aesthetic play from the start, postmodern equivalences from the start, and that real politics always lay elsewhere, or we maintain a conviction in the thought of the avant-garde, unmoor from our radical past in order to break the baleful spell of melancholic inaction, thereby discounting both the struggle that is our very history and the forces beyond which these days are unknowable.

In other words, we are one of two Jokers:

Cheering up a Hopper, bringing a little life into the mausoleum of culture

"I kinda like this one..."

Jack Nicholson's Joker in 1989, having a band of merry pranksters defacing party in the Museum, saving from alteration only Francis Bacon's "Figure With Meat", entirely missing the point that for them to truly respect the Bacon would not be to reify it as dark art but to basically become what the Joker would become in the American filmic imagination.

Or...

"I'll just burn my half..."

That very figure, a remarkable hearkening back to the 19th century vision of anarchist as terrorist, the Joker as some slavering, negative-thought wielding combination of Sergei Nechayev, Lucky Luciano, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Protesters at the kettled G20 London protest in Ledgerite Joker makeup, proving that us radicals are not immune to and can benefit from the slips and shocks of what mass culture still remains capable of producing

Either defacing or destruction, the positive mark of negation left as a mocking sneer trace or the immolatory fantasy of groundclearing.

Either:

this town needs an enema (it is polluted, I have a conscious program of action, an invigorating solution, via the rather uncomfortable procedure of art-as-life and death-as-art it so as to make it better)

or

this town is itself already an enema (the hollowed out core of what could be, the administered false freedoms of the liberal order, and hence we might as well light the fuse and see what happens, let the world show its barbaric colors pulsing beneath the scrubbed-clean surface: "I'm just introducing a little chaos to this dull rule filled world").

(Or course, what is never spoken but implicitly suggested insofar as it is Batman's own solution, not to use his wealth - his only actual superpower - for any sort of collective social programs but simply to fight the Joker, is that this clown needs an enema. Hence the maddening, Bruce-doth-protest-too-much insistence that "I'm not like you, I won't kill you" - I'll just let your grip slip so you falling to your death is the consequence of your inability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps into the proper role for a maverick committed to preserving the status quo.)

Not this, not that

There are distinct corollaries here with the kind of schematic Badiou (and others, albeit in different terminology) have been proposing in recent years, that of the different inflections of a "passion for the Real": read "Real" here not in a strict Lacanian sense, but rather as the insistence on praxis founded on the ground of what the world could be, neither Utopian nor hemmed in by the reigning symbolic order, but a sense of what lies below, of the bedrock of a social relations and thought to be rediscovered by revolutionary theory and action, particularly insofar as it indicates a relation to how one thinks antagonism and historical projects. Without delving into the specificity of that project (I have extended analyses of this elsewhere if interested), what is to be drawn forth here is, first, its direct relation to political-aesthetic projects and, second, here is the symptomatic blindspot of the model.

The century, as it tracks the supposed heroic arc of avant-garde art and vanguard political thought, is indeed marked by the relation between the ghosts and goals of unity and division, synthesis and contradiction, coalition and antagonism. And as such, the basic question is needed: are we to locate our way out of this mess via the unification of the opposed Two into a new One, or do we need to keep ceaselessly negating, dividing, resplitting, to shove a wedge into the false unity of the globe and show who's on what sight, plainly, harshly? The reformist and/or apologist overtones of the "unifier" position are unmistakable, and I give force, with Badiou, to the latter, to the drawing out of the Two. In this latter position, he recognizes the possibility that was the dominant historical tendency: our well-known annihilative, purgative, partisan conviction that just might destroy the world - or at least the possibility of its own position having coherence - in trying to burn it clean. Yet the work of revolutionary consciousness, political or cultural, cannot be the antithesis to the world that this annihilative passion forges itself as (the destructive embodiment of the antagonism itself), but something else, a horizon toward a third that escapes either the unary phantasm of the One or the terroristic deadlock of the Two. Regarding the image from earlier of the burning pile of cash, the Joker's joke is, fundamentally, that you can't just burn one part of a totality. It's all or nothing...

Against this, as a third of sorts, Badiou offers a "subtractive path: the subtractive path: to exhibit as a real point, not the destruction of reality, but minimal difference. To purify reality, not in order to annihilate it in its surface, but to subtract it from its apparent unity so as to detect within it the minuscule difference, the vanishing term which constitutes it. What barely takes place differs from the place wherein it takes place. It is in the ‘barely’ that all the affect rests, in this immanent exception" (from "One Divides Into Two", in Lenin Reloaded, on which I've written a long review possibly forthcoming in HM).

Concretized as cultural strategy, what does this look like?

Carl Andre, the minimal form of building

Minimalism, that particular (historical) form of abstraction. Robert Ryman, Carl Andre, Agnes Heller. Morton Feldman. Mies. Malevich at his starkest best. Late Beckett, minus the scatological humor. Warhol's films, not his paintings. Late conceptual names, all.

(Yet... this is a longer gesture to track, too far for here, but there is another set of objects that perhaps crystallizes and deploys this barely far better than those productions that self-declare as minimal shifts of difference. Namely, the anti-minimal production of serial genre production, the relentless rehashing of a form that cashed in once, the repetition that tries its damnedest to escape difference. Think here of my great horror film loves, giallo and Hammer, Euro exploitation and minor studio 30's production, then beyond horror, to directors who can't get it quite right, the full-blooded, bawdy, surrealist ceaseless iterations, reading the tradition wrong through too much fidelity, too much studio pressure, a tectonic weight on what should be just another low-level production. Not diamonds but symptomatic coal, doubled back on itself and the very processes of production pressing down on it. Beyond film: psychotic pulp, Weird fiction, the insane linguistic frottage of Harlequin romance, all those books that know it has been done yet are commanded to do it all again, reaching out past themselves, raiding the tombs of other traditions. The feeling before the screen, knowing full well the director was told to play it straight, to make this just like that because that ruled the box office. And in front of you, the feathers drop, a boiling shadow, the words that should never go together, and we all think, how did this happen...)

We have three jokers now, three grains of sand, three ways of working within, through, and against a world order that does not satisfy you.

1. Annihilative passion for the Real, the one who stands before the burning millions of dollars and says, you just don't get it...

2. Subtractive passion for the Real: a Malevitchian Joker? Can we fathom it beyond its invisibility, the Joker somewhere convincing himself that his nearly unseen actions have brought forth, in the impossible difference of the barely different, a contact with the Real? (The non-maniacal Joker who may be a threat to the city, but the city will never know.) Or perhaps: this enema needs a town, a site from which it can barely withdraw.

3. Two unite into One: the Joker who will give the city a cunning enema, cajoling its consciousness via small calculated shocks, cultural sabotage, and lots of gaudy purple clothing.

But the blindspot, and not the sudden productive blindspot of anamorphic vision?

Dead labor caught in the storm

This approach to thinking radical political culture/ culturally radical politics is utterly accurate, particularly for a certain dominant moment in capitalist aesthetics. Yet something rests behind, a lack unacceptable for this conjuncture, at this economic flashpoint, this crisis that may not become a crisis unless we make it so. A lingering dissatisfaction, that there need be something else. The sense that these may be, for our moment, merely modes of petty nihilism, self-subtracting unwillingness to play the game that be the wrong game, and light defacement, just ways of apologetic participation.

More, though, we might say, that each of these have been more than that. But they are no longer.

More, though, is the other possibility not followed through, that the passion for the Real should not only be allowed to count when the dialectical model is that of One divides into Two. For
simply making as Two is not dialectics, at least not the dialectics of my project, from the rust knowledge of salvagepunk to the uncanny existence of our world with its copresent apocalyptic collapse. Capitalism is the bringing into existence of a world of the non-dialectical Two (there is that which is capital and that which might be, and underpinning it all is the unresolvable antagonism of workers and capitalists). All this under the shifting veil that tells us the world is global now, a tremendous heterogeneous One. Our thought must be dialectical exactly because capitalism itself is not.

Anselm Kiefer and the lead-frozen weight of past thought

And as such, we need not just the division that creates the Two but the insistence to not rest in it, either as annihilation or subtraction. Rather, construction, the other possibility so anathema to contemporary dialectical thought so resolute in its following of the vitally important line of thinking that was negative dialectics that it considers anything other than annihilation or subtraction to be the silly promise of unification, of synthesis, of the magical joining together.

What it can't think is the work of salvage and montage, of the work of construction in the age of wreckage.

In other words, to divide up the One not for the sake of purgative annihilation - or for the substractive insertion of a void - but to see what's worth saving in the One that was never there other than in our militant assertion of the world that will be made. That we begin indeed with the racheting up and cracking apart of the pseudo-totality of late capitalism. And then starts the harder task of knowing when to call something a wreck and to dig through that wreckage.

Life among the non-ruins

Like the avant-garde move that we can't afford to leave behind, but here doubled. To clear the wreckage - the wreckage at once material, the crap and scraps of our production processes, and formal, past gestures, manifesto fragments and strategies for repurposing - to make a space for what can be made from it. Then the making, the remaking, not the smoothing synthesis, but welding, stitching, rewiring. All with the chances that were there from the start, too polished to see, too immense to grasp, too broken to have ever been whole.

For a history of salvagepunk

Three moments.

One.

The scattered corpsescape of WWI. The night of the world is Europe looking at the death's face looking back at it, the progeny of nationalist pride and a gleaming weaponry forged from the guts of the Industrial Revolution. Only the Bolsheviks say no and carve a trench into history. And Kurt Schwitters draws forth Merz from Commerz.


Two.

The 60's go kaputt. Then the long 70's, in all their gritty urgency and Satanic deformations of hippie non-thought, Moro's body in the trunk of the Renault, Bretton Woods undoes the filaments of currency as certainty and shape. In England, 1969, The Bed-Sitting Room and Monty Python think the end of it all as little more than the relentless repurposing of the same. Ten years later, Mad Max heads toward the Outback.


Three.

Neoliberalism's febrile tremors and hysterical overcompensations. Small cracks and shimmers, old reptilian brain stirring of something that smells like a revolutionary past. Cyberpunk already came and went: how could it not, given that it coldly sang along with what it felt like on the ground? Steampunk, the wet dream of Obama-time, acts old fashioned as it sails smug over the oceans of dead labor that got us here, tidying up. Salvagepunk, not yet here except as the unbidden tightening of hands learning new tricks. Of the trash heap, only its romance of frozen decay should be discarded. The new building was other architectures in the pre-built wasteland of this life.

Year Zero

I turn 27 today. I am spending the day in a split between reading Kurt Schwitters and riding my bike into the hills: between Merz and condor-circling. Come a few months from now, this blog will turn 1. I have a sneaking hope it will be far sneakier, more foul-thought-polemic-mouthed, and hungrier than I was then. But over the next few months, I will be giving it, so as to give myself, some sort of compulsory education, via a telescope in reverse and a shorter tether. Reason being that my book, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, coming out from zer0 Books next year...

(provisional cover my sister designed for me)

... needs to be written this summer. As such, expect a series of overinsistent working-throughs and reformulations on the apocalyptic question, starting from the initial Apocalyptic notes series written a while back.

First up on the fleshing out program/Lautréamontian dissecting table: salvagepunk, my coinage that seems to be taking on a life of its own (and going on to do more interesting things than my initial capture of a cultural tectonic).

To become of it here: a search for debris and montage beginnings, a sense of why Monty Python (in its Gilliam-inflection) returned to Dada/Surrealist collage aesthetics (and why those "originary" aesthetics were so concerned with a repurposing of the Victorian), the fake vintage t-shirt as the pseudo-apocalyptic freeze frame of the 90's, and how to dwell in thought in the junkyard without raising its filth to a futility of melancholic contemplation and era-naming.

To try to make out of the trashheap something utterly without value but that is, at the end of days, worth a damn.

To envelopment and protection (as long as what we are protecting is the noird birdling of a crumbleworld)

China Miéville on literary/artistic movements to come. Of note here, aside from my pleasure in being designated as the "bard" of salvagepunk, is the manifesto quality of his post: not manifesto in the sense of stridency of certainty, but of the kind of saying that makes the said the case. Naming movements in advance, laying a glass-and-steam pocket for their incubation, out in the open.

This sense of open protection, of the envelope that doesn't hide itself away to wait until it grows important and fierce - for rarely does that work out as intended, is crucially marked in China's post on the inflection of the dystopian/end of days/apocalyptic/cold morning after feel, an inflection that winds through each of the future movements described: each is a navigation through and negotiation of the dominant modes of culturally figuring the end of it all.



The dominant modes to be rejected, that is, from the kitschy reduction of the zombie to the level of a Keyboard Cat meme to the "well, now it's over" misprision of how literary production - or, for that matter, the oil-clanked motors of production and slippery circulation - might come to a grinding halt. All in all, against the grave-diggers of our world, the ones who consign unfinished trajectories to the knacker's or who endlessly repeat, in a pitiable sadness of not quite jouissance, the cultural figure or gesture that really had something there, ceaselessly recombine it to leave it hollow-eyed and twee.

In place of that, let's make sure to keep making tears and pockets for our hard boiled Cthulhus and our hot-wiring wreckage angels.

Combined and uneven apocalypse (Apocalyptic notes, 3)

Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.

- Heine, Lutetia; or, Paris


The world is always already apocalyptic. Just not all at the same time.

What must be overcome is a notion of apocalypse as evental, as the ground-clearing trauma that at once founds a new nomos of the earth. What we need instead is a conception of combined and uneven apocalypse.

In other words: we have always occupied a world in which Heine's entirely new beasts have emerged and exist alongside us, real organizations of suffering and domination. All the more so, in unprecedented invention and brutality, under capitalism. The question is the visibility of these beasts. They are always rearing their figurative heads, yet as they are not accidental but rather necessary functions and consequences of the world order particular to capitalism, they are structural blindspots with profound material effects. The intentional symptom, the shouldn't-be that has-to-be for it all to work: no wonder it's so hard to write a new apocalypse.

This isn't to dredge back up the persistent (and always relevant) point that we remain conveniently unaware of pockets of hell on earth, the zones that approximate the total breakdown of civility and quality of life, or that we catch glimpses of them only when they surge up in the midst of supposedly advanced sectors of the world. The rotting refuse of Katrina revealed what we've "known all along" about the structures of poverty, race and urban decay in America (as the dark mirror barely approximating the zones scattered across our planet of slums).

Instead, a different tack here, moving through the dream-image of salvage punk and the nightmare-image of the dead rising, to venture a properly unstable third: the recognition that the post-apocalyptic is not an image of that-to-be. It is not that which lies beyond the apocalyptic event. It is a necessary optic onto the flourishing wastelands of late capitalism, the recognition that the apocalyptic event has been unfolding, in slow motion accompanied with sudden leaps and storms. Behind our backs and in front of our faces. In waiting for the cataclysm, we missed the drift of it.

The figure of thought to unravel this all here - and the figure of thought around which our post-apocalyptic work must center - is the city. The city in the era of decaying industrial first-world cities, the petro-wealth boom towns beginning to slip, the slum megalopolises across the globe, the epochal transformations that we strain to recognize fully. In a time in which, as Mike Davis has shown with clarity, cities across the globe are wracked by conditions we would be hard pressed to describe as other than apocalyptic, we need to look to the cultural instantiations of apocalyptic cities and their post-apocalyptic refigurings as a way to think through and past our time.

To unravel its post-apocalyptic figuration along three lines:

The city as ruins emptied of human life, the structures of urban existence reclaimed by nature

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

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

To get into it, then...


Post-apocalyptic cities seem caught between two primary fantasies which give a sense of the imagined apocalyptic event that produces the situation: the empty and the full apocalypse, the barren and the teeming, between the loners wandering the evacuated sites of life and the abandoned hordes swarming in some reclaimed outpost of lost humanity. To be sure, the most subtle iterations claim the 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). Yet much of the dominant vision of the city "after the fall" is that of a waste zone, echoes of Tarkovsky's Stalker (and Marker's Sans Soleil) intended. In Tarkovsky's version, the sort of extraurban Zone, girded by the military, is a space delimited 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 apocalyptic condition, 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, a sort of empty anti-commons. The vestiges of day-to-day existence become otherwordly in their vacancy, fused with a halting spirituality notably absent in the far more subtle novella (the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic) that forms the source material for Stalker. (In addition, we might note the future-oriented echoes between the conditions of Stalker and the very real conditions, and consequent decay aesthetic, that came to be in Chernobyl.)

From Lenin's face watching over the abandoned room...

... to the sad majesty of interior sand dunes that may as well be burial mounds.

The result, as evident in the images above, is a form of tragic "magical" realism, of the ruins now entering into contact once more with Nature, succumbing to deep ecological time. A description early in Maurice Dantec's 2005 Cosmos Inc. (about which a much larger reading of post-apocalypticism is deserved) sums up this tendency acutely:

Nature may have been pushed aside by ecoglobal planning, but human cities are turning back into jungles: half-petrified virgin forests in the stagnant water of this unified human world, barely distinguishable from what remains of the natural wilderness around them, or from the out-of-control efflorescence running riot in the deserted streets, the silent highways; the empty buildings, shopping centers, and subway stations.

In these dead cities, cities abandoned by men, nature has become savage again, escaping the automated cycles and engineers of geo-global planning. It is the last vestige of liberty left by technology to the world of Homo sapiens. It does not lack a certain tragic beauty.

We might think here again of 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." The location of liberty in the site, and mode of sight of, the after-city is, at best, the sort of doomed nostalgia epitomized by anarcho-primitivists (and the highly conservative, survivalist, blood and soil, reversing the course of history ending of Wall-E), and, at worst, a form of Hegelian logic distorted beyond recognition: the naked ape (or two self-consciousnesses, to be precise) encounter in the forest, to be mediated and navigated into the master-slave relation, instead writ species wide, the fantasy of the human race confronting itself in mortal combat.


To be clearer, here, we might think of the recurrent instance in Hiroki Endo's Eden: It's an Endless World! manga series, the moment when an individual subject acts willfully so as to bring about the death of the species as a whole. What is at stake here is neither bald misanthropy nor the kind of anti-human logic espoused by certain radical ecological movements (though the series does articulate some 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 fantasy of certain posturing black metallers, this is the paradox suffocating and structuring those who face the blood bath of the 20th century as well as those loners wandering those waste zones, on the other side of the irreversible event. Like the being that must be unlike itself to prove its capacity as more than mute 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.


Ubaldo Ragona's 1964 The Last Man on Earth, the most haunting adaptation yet of I Am Legend, is riven by this, caught and split between the melancholy of nights alone, listening to old jazz records and drinking while the zombies feebly try to break in, and the task of extermination, the long slow work of daytime dispatching of those who will rise.


Of course, in the remarkable turn now well-known and the sudden and utter collapse of the narrative of persistence and lone heroism, the task of extermination finds its real blindspot: the one to be killed is the killer, the one who cannot grasp that a new order has been inaugurated. He kills to preserve the irrevocably gone and cannot make the one kill that alone redeems him. Only in staking himself would the death of the human race become something worth mourning.

Tragic as this may be, we don't want a revolutionary thought-model that is tragedy. (As for whether farce is the correct alternative remains to be seen, though I'm not alone in my suspicions.) We see, in short, the sticking-point of the empty world post-apocalyptic model: it remains in thrall only with the possibility of its own death and with the non-subjective processes to come along and swallow up the ruins of humanity. If this is the dominant figure of our day, we should be truly afraid, for it is the end of politics, the end of the thought of intervention in the patterns of history.

However, the incisive force of apocalyptic thought lies elsewhere and deserves to not be cast aside because one strain of it moves toward self-genocidal visions. Of more interest and promise is the city of uneven time, underground histories at odds with the apparent ruling organization of the urban zone.


Gary Sherman's remarkable Death Line (1972, titled Raw Meat in the U.S.) is one of the most startling articulations of this tendency, a version that, appropriately for this blog, demands the question "socialism or barbarism?" with a subtle, off-kilter severity and a degree of unparalleled literalism. In this case, the definitive answer appears to have been barbarism. Yet the above poster, attempting to shoe-horn the film into the market for exploitation horror, is at striking odds with the film itself. (One might imagine some seriously alarmed viewers looking for gore and nudity, finding instead a dark parable about the capacity of an economic order to turn against those who labor it requires.) Rather, the film is far closer to this:


The moment of mourning, of mute suffering struggling to comprehend. The rough arc of the story is as follows. In 1892, a group of workers digging tunnels for the London Underground were trapped in a collapse. No attempt was made to save them, not because the accident was undetected, but because the corporation behind the digging covered up the incident and went bankrupt, never willing to threaten their crumbling reputation with the disclosure of what happened. The workers were left to rot, slipping through the cracks of a now disappeared company and a state that couldn't be bothered to oversee the abuses of system. In short, capitalism in its standard operating procedure. And what results, then, is barbarism, of the "descent of the species", generations of the workers maintaining a community underground, winding through passageways to pick off commuters for cannibalistic feeding.

Two aspects of the film need to be considered as more than implausibilities needed for the sake of horroring up the plot. If they were trapped collectively below, why have they lost their ability to speak English in just 80 years? And if the underground dwellers know how to get to the other stations to feed, why do they not then return to the world above through these routes?

Regarding the first question: why do they not develop off the bedrock of the Victorian culture to which they belonged? One might imagine a more interesting film in which they maintain a flourishing underground community below, a community that departs from the state of affairs above at their time of burial and then articulates its own history. The Victorian moment in isolation from the world system, set to unpack its ideologies and ways of living without contamination from elsewhere. Instead, though, what we are given is a total slide back to that impossible time. A nightmare image of the human animal cut off from society, we see here a similar tendency to envision that the post-apocalyptic instance is a resetting of the clock, of a slide toward long-forgotten modes of barbarism. The political appeal of this is an apology for the barbarism of capitalism, a tendency one borne out especially in the marketing of the film that shows, unveiled, the true conception of the laboring subject under the industrial order: once humans, but now no longer men and women, less than animals, just the raw meat of production...

The second question, that of their staying below, is that of the post-apocalyptic zone as time out of joint and, against the seeming degradation of those within it, a nascent structure of realizing the act of conscious will to occupy and territorialize an alternate history. For while it is the seemingly contingent set of circumstances that "seal one off" and create this off-time, the pocket of other living that is the negation of the dominant mode of life in the city, we know better: these circumstances are structural, necessary, desired, not by any planner but by the general logic of the capitalist order. These pockets are rarely as dramatically underground (both literally and figuratively) as in Death Line. Consider one of the sharpest post-apocalyptic films to date, Godard's Alphaville. Because, at the end of the day, the point of Alphaville is that you don't need to build a set to approximate a dystopian future. You just need to drive through Paris.


No other world, no forgotten tomb below the hygenic, ordered, and adminstered city. The city itself is that set of off-times, of catastrophes written into the organization of the city, engineered to remobilize them to a productive destruction of frozen capital and the possibility of redevelopment, kicking the unwanted further and further to the periphery.


This leads to the final consideration of the post-apocalyptic city, not just as a fabric of facilitated zones of development, with the attendant post-apocalyptic sites wedged between (and at times situated directly within) massive outlays of new capital, but as a post-apocalyptic zone as a whole. The city as lived waste zone, as designated site of apocalypse, a dark space that gives shape to the combined and uneven development of international capitalism. The city as a negativity, one that is perhaps up for grabs not as a lost site to be reclaimed by nature or newer, greener capital but as a determinate negation.

The great filmmaker of the post-apocalyptic city (that is not in the future but lived now) is John Carpenter, and Escape from New York, that sloppy mess of uncertain politics and lumpen life, is perhaps the best articulation of what is at stake here. The film opens, after announcing that in 1988 "the crime rate in the United States rises 400 percent", with a cartographic depiction of the transformation of Manhattan Island into a designated lived waste zone, the space where all prisoners will be sent and kept in.





The successive additions, most notably the coloring in of the empty space, reveal that the city to be abandoned to those forced there is the hollow zone of after-the-fall: it is a space of collectivity, of bodies that need to learn to coexist. And like the subway dwellers of Death Line, we are seemingly meant to assume that they would want to leave, that being condemned to live there is necessarily worse than the world that sent them there. To echo and alter the early statement, you need to be exiled to realize that you wanted out in the first place.

Not to valorize or romanticize the situation. The Manhattan island of this film is a bleak place, all wet pavement and scattered debris. And one of the opening moments of the film, in a perverse echo of the rafts of refugees struggling toward the shore of developed nations, is a group of convicts on a makeshift raft, heading across the river to the walls of the prison.


Shot down by a helicopter, we see the city first in its exteriority, a dark, dead space from which one will escape, even by certain death.


New York City as the consummate wasteland, the negative space from which life flees. Again, the silent necropolis, halted in time.

But on the ground, things look different. It is an assemblage space, a site of trash and debris, scurrying figures in the shadows, through which the lone hero walks against the backdrop, in the infamous shot of the downed Air Force One, of the total collapse of the American version of managed life.


The more time we spend with Snake in this space, the more familiar it becomes. Like Alphaville's Paris, the discomfort is uncanny, not sublime: we know these sort of spaces, we've walked through the "bad part of town," forgotten as the money and occupants have gone elsewhere. The city of anti-development looks like much of the collapsing urban areas of the West, albeit without the frantic attempts at urban renewal.


Yet in this city, itself the designated apocalyptic zone of America, we find spaces that are truly post-apocalyptic, where life doesn't begin again but has never stopped. The cheering crowds at the deathmatch, the collectivity ready to act together. And in perhaps our finest articulation of Proletkult after the kinotrain, the emergence of culture outside of any industry, the convicts in drag putting on a show.


One makes do. Or rather, ones make do together. Against this cuts Snake, the mercenary who will trade against his fellow criminals out of an apparent continued belief in an American beyond the walled city. He does save the president, he does escape New York, he does resist participation in group formation.

But there is the ending of the film, that crooked non-grin of the misanthrope who will damn the world. After the president makes evident his lack of care for "those who died along the way," Snake pulls the consummate prank of culture jamming, replacing the cassette with necessary information for the defusing of a delicate, nuclear-backed political stalemate, with a cassette of "Bandstand Boogie." Having stated, "although i shall not be present at this historic summit, I present this in the hope that our great nations may learn to live in peace," the cheery sounds that spell nuclear war boom out. Below, the face of power confronted with the big band jazzy consequences of his lack of care for his citizens, even those cast off and refused.


In the final shot of the film, Snake limps away, apparently having produced an exquisite fuck-you not only to the president, but to world peace itself, tearing the tape from the cassette containing the possibility of glossing over the work of death needed to maintain the status quo.


Is this the same misapplied Hegelian logic, that by letting it burn we find there was something we should have saved? It seems not. Snake's gesture operates differently, in that we are no longer facing a flat world in which the decision can be made definitively. The fallout of his actions are not a universal condition (like the later turn in the Endo series, in which we learn eventually that what seemed to be a pandemic ending the human race has affected only certain areas and that much of the world goes on as before). Snake's refusal to play along, then, is different in that it is a knowing rejection not of the world as such but of the first world's claim to be the only world, to be the hegemonic universal beyond which there is nothing worth saving. While the film overvalorizes the "elite" or vanguard group able to navigate a survival of the fittest state of affairs, it simultaneously models a powerful and subtle version of what the revolutionary militant can, and perhaps must, be: to act as if my actions are universal while refusing to forget the embeddedness and particularity of the conjuncture, of recognizing both that we need to think that there is a course of history to intervene into while doing so by recognizing that history is out of joint, uneven and scattered.


To end, then, is to urge us to think about our position as that of apocalyptic analysis and post-apocalyptic ethics and tactics. Neither to urge the hurrying toward a bloody collapse of the system nor to sit and wait for it to come. Instead, to fully analyze our apocalyptic world. Post-apocalyptic is a mode of thought, not a state of affairs. And we face a globe in which portions are designated obsolete, forcibly shuffled off the world historical stage. In those spaces we might detect modes not of protesting this but of moving past it, of recognizing that we haven't been misplaced by accident. We are out of time, in both senses, stuck in histories that don't belong but which can be taken up and used.


If there is a site to fully recognize and deal with this, it is undoubtedly the city. Davis, Harvey, and others have been increasinly calling for the elevation of "right to the city" as a crucial rallying cry, one that might take the form of Brecht's 1921 question from his diary cited by Davis:

Where are the heroes, the colonisers, the victims of the Metropolis?

The world isn't flat, despite what capitalism and its apologists like to themselves and us. It never has been, never has worked that way, and has always depended on the casting to the wolves of whole populations, whole spaces of life. We inherit and occupy the material sites of this casting off, and the first step toward our casting off, both from this point in history and in casting off the weight of a monstrous world system, is to take fully on the burden of an apocalyptic world so that we can start to refuse it and, in this negation set on the grounds of those cities salvaged and never-quite-dead, write the post-apocalypse we want.