Thought Experiment

CREATIVE EXPERIMENT, THE END OF THE WORLD

WRITE FIVE SHORT SECTIONS--A POEM, A PROSE POEM, OR STRAIGHT PROSE-- EXPLORING THE END OF THE WORLD SCENARIO USING THE PROGRESSION BELOW:

1.  Some version of ideology, of a familiar version of the End.

2.  Critique, irony that revise and challenge ideology, the standard version.

3.  Focus on trauma and fragmentation, the body shifting forms, identities in flux

4.  Imagining resistance to ruling powers and projecting possible utopias, new worlds

5.  Trying to apprehend the nonhuman, the world without us, an unimaginable end

Here's an example from poet Mary Karr: 

Disappointments of the Apocalypse

BY MARY KARR

Once warring factions agreed upon the date   

and final form the apocalypse would take,   

and whether dogs and cats and certain trees

deserved to sail, and if the dead would come or be left   

a forwarding address, then opposing soldiers   

met on ravaged plains to shake hands   

and postulate the exact shade

of the astral self—some said lavender,   

others gray. And physicists rocketed

copies of the decree to paradise

in case God had anything to say,

the silence that followed being taken   

for consent, and so citizens

readied for celestial ascent.

Those who hated the idea stayed indoors   

till the appointed day. When the moon   

clicked over the sun like a black lens   

over a white eye, they stepped out   

onto porches and balconies to see   

the human shapes twist and rise   

through violet sky and hear trees uproot   

with a sound like enormous zippers   

unfastening. And when the last grassblades   

filled the air, the lonely vigilants fell   

in empty fields to press their bodies   

hard into dirt, hugging their own outlines.

Then the creator peered down from his perch,   

as the wind of departing souls tore the hair   

of those remaining into wild coronas,   

and he mourned for them as a father   

for defiant children, and he knew that each   

small skull held, if not some vision

of his garden, then its aroma of basil

and tangerine washed over by the rotting sea.   

They alone sensed what he’d wanted

as he first stuck his shovel into clay

and flung the planets over his shoulder,

or used his thumbnail to cut smiles and frowns   

on the first blank faces. Even as the saints   

arrived to line before his throne singing

and a wisteria poked its lank blossoms

through the cloudbank at his feet,

he trained his gaze on the deflating globe

where the last spreadeagled Xs clung like insects,   

then vanished in puffs of luminous smoke,

which traveled a long way to sting his nostrils,   

the journey lasting more than ten lifetimes.   

A mauve vine corkscrewed up from the deep   

oblivion, carrying the singed fume

of things beautiful, noble, and wrong.

Here's a quick runthrough--

Talking to the End of the World

Hey end of the world will you please shut up.

Hey end of the world I want you bad because the world we made sucks.

Hey end of the world let me grab you by your starry tail explosive and unimaginable.

Hey end of the world I want so much God here it's killing me or you or everything.

Hey end

of the world

I can't hear anything but clamor and explosion and I can't even think

what you are sometimes, anytime, no time at all. 

Or I get confused and think I am you.

Boots on me are fire.  Floods come off my head, blood rains.

I'm the last fountain in the world, the last mountain gushing radio tears.

Hey end of the world when we make it to camp I'm still running but I don't see you anywhere behind

or even up ahead. 

We make a big fire with the left boot, pour out water from the right.

It's finally the end

of the end

and standing on a planet I see another 

falling around the sun belonging to no one

not even you. 

Jean Baudrillard on The End

In the countdown, the time remaining is already past, and the maximal utopia of life gives way to the minimal utopia of survival. We are experiencing time and history in a kind of deep coma. This is the hysteresis of the millennium, which expresses itself in interminable crisis. It is no longer the future which lies before us, but an anorexic dimension - the impossibility of being finished and, at the same time, the impossibility of seeing beyond. Prediction, foresight being the memory of the future, it diminishes in exact proportion to the memory of the past. When everything can be seen, nothing can beJ)reseen any more.

 What is there beyond the end? Beyond the end extends virtual reality, the horizon of a programmed reality in which all our known functions - memory, emotions, sexuality, intelligence - become progressively useless. Beyond the end, in the era of the transpolitical, the trans-sexual, the transaesthetic, all our desiring machines become little spectacle machines, then quite simply bachelor machines, before dying away into the countdown of the species.  

The countdown is the code of the automatic disappearance of the world, and all our little humanitarian machines, by way of which we anticipate that disappearance - the Telethons,' Sidathons2and all the rest of the Thanatons - are merely the promotional Sales Event for the misery of this fin de sie'cle.  But - and this is even more paradoxical - what are we to do when nothing really comes to an end any more, that is to say, when nothing ever really takes place, since everything is already calculated, accounted for, expired and realized in advance (the simu- lacrum taking precedence over the real, information taking precedence over the event, etc.)?   

The End of the World: Interpretive frameworks

(The apocalyptic as ideological repair, in light of national, social, and personal fears, anxieties, fantasies: e.g., 9/11 and American Exceptionalism)


The apocalyptic as social and political
 critique



The apocalyptic as working-through of historical identities 

and trauma




The apocalyptic as resistance and utopia



The apocalyptic as meditation on the post human or inhuman (religious-theological aspects also emerge here with negative theology, ethics of alterity) 

Elizabeth Grosz, Bodies

Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies): "The notion of corporeal inscription of the body-as-surface rejects the phenomenological framework of intentionality and the psychoanalytic postulate of psychical depth…Rather, it can be understood as a series of surfaces, energies, and forces, a mode of linkage, a discontinuous series of processes, organs, flows, and matter… an assemblage of organs, processes, pleasures, passions, activities, behaviors linked by fine lines and unpredictable networks to other elements, segments, and assemblages." [29]

To map these linkages requires a mode of thought that replaces interpretive metaphors, such as "latency, depth, interiority" with the "image of the flat surface." [30]

Colebrook, on the "Future"

One way to pose the question of the unacceptable is to consider what we, as a species, might affirm as our own or reject as inhuman. This is a standard and complex border, played out in the thought experiments of monstrosity and the genre of the supposedly post-apocalyptic. If we imagine a future where certain aspects of humanity take over then we may adjust ourselves accordingly. Dystopias are warnings or cautionary tales in which a tendency of the present may be averted. (This is perhaps why many post-apocalyptic dystopias have considered unacceptable solutions to the problem of energy (ranging from the cannibalism of Soylent Green [1973] and Kenneth Cook’s Play Little Victims [1978] to the faux humans bred for maintaining the rest of us in Brave New World and Moon [2009].)

206 Chapter 9
Such dystopias would, presumably, act as salutary cautions against us fol- lowing the course of our current actions to the nightmarish conclusions that would follow. If we imagine another species—vampires—who are defined by a certain inhumanity that has manifested itself in the human species, then the battle for humanity as life becomes a figural war against the future. The vampiric or zombied other is an allegory for humanity gone awry, the bad humanity from which we can save ourselves in order to emerge as properly and justifiably human. That is: we imagine what it might be for the inhumanity within ourselves—a rapacity, ruthlessness and consuming rage—to become a species in its own right (figured as the dystopian man of the future). Rather than deal with humanity’s war on itself we have narrativized and figured the horror of humanity into some distant other. We imagine that it is in the future that man becomes can- nibalistic, void of empathy, ruthlessly calculative, and so dependent on technology that he ceases to think; in this exercise of the imagination we preclude considering all the ways in which this ‘other’ dystopian ‘man’ has already (and has always already) arrived.
The supposedly future narratives of the post-apocalyptic are counter- futural. We represent the future as possibly overtaken by destruction, can- nabilism, zombies, violent technocracy or the invasion of mindlessness; in so doing we present as possibly futural and counter-human just those tendencies that have marked the species to date. In so doing—for all our post-apocalyptic or techno-utopian posthuman imaginings—we remain tied to a nostalgia for the properly human that has supposedly been threatened by an inhumanity that may appear from without. We remain in a state of denial or reaction towards the future in two senses: human- ity’s end presents itself to us, and rather than ask the question this poses we instead imagine external threats to the species that are then warded off in a clear species-species agonistics. (One would not want to read too much, or perhaps anything at all, into the current vogue for vampire fic- tion, except perhaps to note that like late eighteenth-century gothic it occurs alongside the frenzied affirmation of the life of man against vari- ous forms of threatening transcendence.) We also war against the future by presenting the world of the present—a world of species self-annihi- lation and global rapacity—as a future dystopia, or as a possibility that may occur unless humanity saves itself. What we do not ask, and herein

Why Saying ‘No’ to Life is Unacceptable 207
would lie a possible acceptance of the future, is not whether man ought to survive, but why this question is so unacceptable as to be constantly displaced and dis-figured. 

from Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (2014), Open Humanities Press

If art in general is a formalizing process that grants the raw violence of life some moralizing structure, then certain modes of narrative would seem to intensify what Fredric Jameson (writing after Adorno) has sum- marized as the ideological transformation of existential horror into social symbolization. Science fiction, for example, codes otherness as such into the delimited and opposed figure of the alien or invader ( Jameson 2005, 141). (...) . In so doing narrative parses into a temporal project—an overcoming of adversity—what could not be confronted as such: our subjection to life. 

The novelistic imagination tends to personalize, or even render familial, the symbolizing order that had once—in epic or tragic modes—required a confrontation with forces that required more than ‘life management.’ 

If one examines cultural production today the manifest content that seems at first to confront radically threatening forces is ultimately returned to the genres of family drama and romance, as though even the end of human existence could be Oedipalized. That is, there is an efflorescence of disaster and post- apocalyptic narrative, but always with a narrative resolution that restores a basic human binary (such as the romance ending that allows humanity to triumph in The Adjustment Bureau [2011] or the victory of New Age humanoids over corporate and military greed in Avatar [2009].) 

Even a story as bleak as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (especially in its cinematic adaptation of 2009), devolves around a father-son relation: the man and boy wander a landscape while struggling for survival against remaining humans; the journey concludes with a sense of the possible renewal of the family-maternal bond as the son is taken in by a potential new family (192). 

Politics: Link to recent account of biopolitics

http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcbiopolitics.htm