Notes From the Wasteland: Competing Climatic Imaginaries in the Post-Apocalyptic Landscape (original) (raw)
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The End of the Project: futurity in the culture of catastrophe (2013)
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Departing from the transformation of everyday life into “projects,” this article explores the notion of a future that is radically open, yet foreclosed by catastrophe, notably in relation to climate change. Drawing on Agamben's The Time that Remains, it explores an alternative futurity that interpolates a Pauline messianism with recent thinking on cosmological extinction and capitalism read through the Freudian death drive. In seeking to cheat an economic regime of a violence that paradoxically feeds off the failure to prevent its own destruction, the suggestion is that “the time of the project” itself must be brought to an end.
“Imaginative Futures: Apocalyptic and Science-Fiction Theory,” Dialog 47/3 (2008): 271-277
Both pastors and academic theologians have struggled with the place of apocalyptic language and imagery within the modern worldview. Many have dismissed apocalyptic as escapist and have alleged that it is divorced from the political and social concerns at the heart of contemporary theology and practice. Yet, contemporary critical theorists have overcome similar suspicions about science-fiction and now embrace it as a unique vehicle for thinking about the ills and the promise of contemporary culture. This essay suggests that within contemporary critical theory one finds useful tools for reading and using apocalyptic language and imagery as a means for engaging a world threatened by sin and violence.
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Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007) manifest an environmentalist awareness of the increasingly destructive power of human technologies while challenging the prevalent models we employ to think about the planet as well as its human and non-human inhabitants. Both novels probe what it means to be human in a universe plagued by entropy in the era of the Anthropocene. For the purposes of this essay, I will concentrate particularly on Dick's and Winterson's portrayals of the dystopian city as a site of interconnections and transformations against a backdrop of encroaching entropy and impending doom. Drawing on the work of several (critical) posthumanists who are primarily interested in dissolving oppositions such as between nature/culture, biology/technology, I show how the displacement of the centrality of human agency due to the intrusive nature of advanced technology is happening in the broader context of the Anthropocene. I also argue that the dystopian cityscapes envisioned in both novels become places that allow for the possibility of new forms of subjectivity to emerge.
Tomorrows: Urban fictions for possible futures
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This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition “Tomorrows: Urban Fictions for Possible Futures” organized by Onassis Cultural Centre at the Diplareios School Athens (May 16 - July 16, 2017). The exhibition hosted works by artists, architects and designers that tell stories about how the future might unfold. Their narratives refer to the emergence of post-natural environments, the appearance of new types of shells and co-habitats, the sovereignty of networks and infrastructures, the rise of a new algorithmic society and the challenges of a new condition beyond the primacy of the human. Offering a contextualization, presentation and documentation of the exhibition, this catalogue seeks to spotlight how future can be used as a tool to critically understand present itself. Among the contributors: Aristide Antonas, James Bridle, Cathryn Dwyre & Chris Perry, Design Earth, Adam Harvey, Lydia Kallipoliti & Andreas Theodoridis, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Metahaven, Shannon Mattern, Tobias Revell & Georgina Voss, Bruce Sterling, Point Supreme, Liam Young. Featuring the historical works of Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Takis Ch. Zenetos.
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Literary scholar Eva Horn's The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age investigates why modern Western culture so often imagines its own end. Through insightful readings of modern literature, film, and philosophical and sociological discourses, Horn argues that our hunger for apocalypse narratives-chief among them those about the so-called Last Man-is rooted in a deep-seated but diffuse mood of risk and crisis that has been generated by contingent and often imperceptible threats, such as impending nuclear disaster and climate change. Without concrete events to anchor it, this anxiety grows and paralyzes action. Representing these possible catastrophes through fiction provides us with cathartic, vivid, and plausible depictions of discrete events. Imagining such scenarios also serves as a practical means of preparing ourselves individually and collectively for possible threats, in turn helping to make them self-defeating prophecies. One of Horn's central claims is that fiction's capacity to imagine and capture affect, nuance, and detail offers a uniquely powerful means of thinking about the future. This essay challenges that position by arguing that fiction (though it is, as Donna J. Haraway has quipped, often the best political theory) on its own lacks the capacity for critique that connects imagined future catastrophes to their latent causes in presently catastrophic social conditions. Horn illustrates that imagined future catastrophes often illuminate the latent vulnerabilities of the societies that produced them, but her focus on apocalyptic scenarios reproduces, rather than challenges, cultural patterns that obscure more quotidian and destructive forms of "slow violence" and "slow disaster." If historians and critics are to achieve the consciousness of catastrophic threats against which Horn seeks to mobilize apocalypse fiction, such narratives must also be folded back into a critical history of the present that asks a more pointed political question: for whom is life already catastrophic?