Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk 0415879493, 9780415879491

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Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

1. Literature After 9/11 Edited by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn 2. Reading Chuck Palahniuk American Monsters and Literary Mayhem Edited by Cynthia Kuhn and Lance Rubin 3. Beyond Cyberpunk New Critical Perspectives Edited by Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint 4. Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk Edited by Paul Crosthwaite

Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk

Edited by Paul Crosthwaite

New York

London

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Paul Crosthwaite to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Criticism, crisis, and contemporary narrative : textual horizons in an age of global risk / edited by Paul Crosthwaite. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in contemporary literature ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. Pt. 1. Critical thought/critical times—Will the apocalypse have been now? : Literary criticism in an age of global risk / Molly Wallace—The future of the future / Nick Mansfield—The incredible shrinking human / Charlie Gere—The risks of sustainability / Karen Pinkus—Pt. 2. Critical perspectives on crisis narratives—Narrating the coming pandemic : pandemic influenza, anticipatory anxiety, and neurotic citizenship / Penelope Ironstone-Catterall—Global capitalism and a dystopian South Africa : Trencherman by Eben Venter and Moxyland / by Lauren Beukes, Andries Visagie—Gray goo and you : the ecophagy of gobal capital / Robin Stoate—Risk and morality in Ian McEwan’s Saturday / Lidia De Michelis—The corporation of terror : risk and the fictions of the “financial war” / Nicky Marsh—Waiting for crisis : Casino Royale, financial aesthetics, and national narrative form / Alissa G. Karl—Phantasmagoric finance : crisis and the supernatural in contemporary finance culture / Paul Crosthwaite—The green afterword : Cormac McCarthy’s The road and the ecological uncanny / Rebecca Giggs. 1. Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Crisis in literature. 3. Psychic trauma in literature. I. Crosthwaite, Paul, 1980– PN441.C75 2011 801'.95—dc22 2010033751 ISBN 0-203-83102-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-87949-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-83102-1 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

vii ix 1

PAUL CROSTHWAITE

PART I Critical Thought/Critical Times 1

Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now? Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk

15

MOLLY WALLACE

2

The Future of the Future

31

NICK MANSFIELD

3

The Incredible Shrinking Human

46

CHARLIE GERE

4

The Risks of Sustainability

62

KAREN PINKUS

PART II Critical Perspectives on Crisis Narratives 5

Narrating the Coming Pandemic: Pandemic Influenza, Anticipatory Anxiety, and Neurotic Citizenship PENELOPE IRONSTONE-CATTERALL

81

vi

Contents

6

Global Capitalism and a Dystopian South Africa: Trencherman by Eben Venter and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

95

ANDRIES VISAGIE

7

Gray Goo and You: The Ecophagy of Global Capital

110

ROBIN STOATE

8

Risk and Morality in Ian McEwan’s Saturday

127

LIDIA DE MICHELIS

9

The Corporation of Terror: Risk and the Fictions of the “Financial War”

145

NICKY MARSH

10 Waiting for Crisis: Casino Royale, Financial Aesthetics, and National Narrative Form

161

ALISSA G. KARL

11 Phantasmagoric Finance: Crisis and the Supernatural in Contemporary Finance Culture

178

PAUL CROSTHWAITE

12 The Green Afterword: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Ecological Uncanny

201

REBECCA GIGGS

Contributors Index

219 223

Figures

3.1

The “earthrise” photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 8 on 24 December 1968.

47

The “blue marble” photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on 7 December 1972.

48

Scott Carey terrorized by his cat in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).

59

4.1

Venn diagram of sustainability.

70

10.1

The Troubled Assets Relief Program is voted down; the markets plummet in the background.

162

10.2

G20 seating plan.

170

10.3

Bond’s big gun in Casino Royale.

174

11.1

Wall Street, looking west toward Trinity Church (completed 1846).

179

St Helen’s Bishopsgate (founded 1210) with 30 St Mary Axe (a.k.a. “the Swiss Re Building”; “the Gherkin”) (completed 2003) in the background.

188

11.3

Location of “London Stone,” Cannon Street (2005).

189

11.4

London Stone.

190

11.5

Temple Bar Monument.

191

11.6

Canary Wharf (1 Canada Square to left of center).

192

3.2 3.3

11.2

Acknowledgments

The origins of this book lie in a conference—“Literature, Art, and Culture in an Age of Global Risk”—held at Cardiff University in July 2009. I am grateful to the School of English, Communication, and Philosophy for its support of the event, and, in particular, to Julie Alford, James Aubrey, Dean Burnett, Martin Coyle, Nathan Heslop, Eleni Kardamitsi, Martin Kayman, Wendy Lewis, Erica Moore, Becky Munford, Tomos Owen, Rob Thomas, Terry Threadgold, Rachel Webber, and Richard Wilson. My thanks to Polly Dodson, Liz Levine, and Erica Wetter at Routledge for their interest in this project and their diligence and professionalism in bringing it to fruition. Routledge’s two anonymous reviewers also provided very helpful feedback. Above all, I am indebted to the eleven contributors, whose commitment and intellectual energy have made them a pleasure to collaborate with. Alissa G. Karl deserves a special mention for her assistance in reading parts of the manuscript. Finally, I wish, as ever, to thank Melanie Waters for her immense love and support.

Introduction Paul Crosthwaite

“Crisis” and “criticism” (as well as the latter’s immediate cognates— “critic,” “criticize,” “critical,” critique”) both have their roots in the Greek krinein: “to separate, judge, decide.” Compacted together at this point of etymological origin, then, are the notion of a decisive conjuncture that we associate with states of crisis and the performance of evaluation, discernment, or discrimination that traditionally lies at the core of the practice of criticism. The affi nity between crisis and criticism is far more intimate than a mere shared etymology, however, as many commentators have noted. Paul de Man, for example, in his celebrated essay “Criticism and Crisis” (1983 [1967]), asserts that “the notion of crisis and that of criticism are very closely linked, so much so that one could state that all true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis” (“true criticism,” for de Man, being that which, in proclaiming a crisis in an inherited intellectual tradition, seeks to “demystify” that tradition, though only, in turn, to produce its own mystifications) (8). In his important early work Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (1988 [1959]), the German intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck argues that the central project of the Enlightenment—the “age of criticism, to which everything must submit,” in Immanuel Kant’s famous words (100–101n)—was to mount a critique of the absolutist state that would generate a sense of escalating historical crisis, culminating in a utopian transformation of society. As John Phillips remarks, one of the chief legacies of the Enlightenment is an understanding of criticism as that which puts “all grounds for knowledge into crisis” (12). According to Nikolas Kompridis, “the deep connection between crisis and critique” that was forged during the Enlightenment persists into the present: To theorists whose thought is self-consciously developed as a response to some deep and abiding experience of crisis, we might wish to give the name “crisis-thinkers.” Although not always apparent, and certainly too little understood, the experience of crisis may well be the primary inducement to thought in our time, the time of modernity. This is not an accident or some contingent fact about modernity; rather,

2

Paul Crosthwaite modernity induces “crisis thinking” because it is inherently crisis generating. . . . Once we appreciate the depth of [the] connection [between crisis and critique], we will also come to see how complexly enmeshed in the self-understanding of modernity are critique, crisis, and the need to begin anew—how deeply, if I may put it this way, they affect modernity’s experience of itself. (Kompridis 3–4)

The history of modern critical thought might, then, be best narrated as a history of attempts to register and amplify conditions of crisis in the pursuit of a radical renewal of the intellectual and social order. To consider merely the period since the turn of the twentieth century (and even then, by no means comprehensively), such a history might explore the relations between psychoanalysis and the fraying social fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the catastrophe of the Great War; the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the economic strife, totalitarian oppression, and global violence of the 1930s and ’40s (a period during which, tellingly, two associates of the School, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, conceived a journal entitled Krise und Kritik); existentialism and the material and spiritual desolation of post-Second World War Europe; post-structuralism and a range of historical forces, from the unresolved legacy of the Holocaust to the Algerian War of Independence, the Vietnam War, the events of May 1968, and the threat of nuclear apocalypse; feminist criticism and the radical reorganization of work, home, family, and sex in the 1960s and ’70s; cultural studies and the breakdown of Britain’s social democratic “post-war consensus” in the 1970s and ’80s; the new historicism and the coalescence of a neoliberal, free market hegemony in the US under Ronald Reagan; and postcolonial criticism and a variety of bitter nationalist, ethnic, or religious confl icts from South Africa to Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine.1 Many of the critical movements that have risen to prominence in the last couple of decades can also be indexed to an array of crisis-formations. The post- and neo-Marxisms of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek, for example, directly confront the challenge to critical thought posed by the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe; the turn to questions of ethics, trauma, witnessing, and testimony in much recent literary and cultural criticism registers the impact of a host of historical atrocities, from slavery and the Holocaust to Vietnam and the war in Iraq; posthumanism and cybercriticism explore the radical breakdown of the boundary between the human and the technological in the age of transplants, routine cosmetic surgery, and the Internet; the “new economic criticism” showcased by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen’s collection of the same name draws impetus from a succession of fi nancial convulsions, from the Black Monday crash of October 1987 to the “dot-com” boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s; the burgeoning field of animal studies confronts the role of human activity in the

Introduction 3 accelerated waning and extinction of animal species; and, perhaps most obviously, the important site occupied by ecocriticism in contemporary critical debates is unthinkable without the background of human pollution of the environment and resulting climate change. 2 The plurality of perspectives within contemporary critical discourse is, then, mirrored by a proliferation of crisis scenarios. Indeed, it often seems that the horizons of everyday life are defi ned, today, by an overlapping series of crises. At the time of writing, in June 2010, for example, G20 leaders attempt to reach agreement on another round of measures designed to secure recovery from the economic slump caused by the global fi nancial crisis of 2008, while fears grow concerning the prospect of a “double-dip” recession; casualty numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq continue, relentlessly, to rise; Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has postponed nuclear talks with the west as a “punishment” for the imposition of new UN sanctions targeted at the nation’s uranium enrichment program; a major diplomatic incident is unfolding after ten people were arrested by the FBI on suspicion of spying on behalf of Russia; the damaged wellhead beneath the stricken BP Deepwater Horizon rig continues to spew tens of thousands of barrels of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico, endangering the region’s fragile ecosystem; and reports that Arctic sea ice is at its lowest ever recorded extent for the time of year provide further evidence of global warming. Meanwhile, the repercussions of other crises of recent times continue, in different ways, to make themselves felt. Major examples include the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, and later bombings in Madrid, London, and other cities; the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the Boxing Day tsunami, and the Haitian earthquake; outbreaks of avian influenza and a full-scale “swine flu” pandemic; the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic; and recent or continuing confl icts in Sri Lanka, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere. Two things are particularly striking about the panorama of crises that confronts us today. Firstly, their diversity: fi nancial and economic crises, environmental crises, geopolitical crises, terrorist crises, and public health crises all jostle for prominence in the media and in public awareness, each presented as a potentially existential threat to familiar ways of life. And secondly, their increasingly global status: crisis-events precisely located in time and space, such as the September 11 terrorist attacks, are nonetheless able, via the real-time networks of the contemporary media, to assume global proportions almost instantaneously, while other seismic occurrences, such as the fi nancial crisis of 2008, can, as a result of the dense interconnectedness of the socio-economic world-system, be said to “appear simultaneously to the world as a whole,” as the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio writes in articulating his notion of the contemporary “global accident” (Virilio par. 2).3 Climate change, meanwhile, poses a threat to the very biosphere itself.

4

Paul Crosthwaite

As the chapters in this book indicate, the heterogeneity and scale of contemporary crises present intellectual challenges that demand a wide variety of critical approaches. The responses collected here also demonstrate the exceptionally—indeed, perhaps even uniquely—penetrating insights that literary and cultural criticism are able to offer into the contemporary climate of crisis. I have already pointed to the intimate connection between crisis and criticism; a further dimension of this relationship is the extent to which crisis is itself liable to critique, for there is, in truth, no such thing as a crisis as such, no state of things that, neutrally and objectively, constitutes a crisis. Rather, in performative fashion, a crisis exists only insofar as it is proclaimed and recognized as such. In other words, crises (though not, of course, the actual events they typically surround) are discursive phenomena, and there is invariably a strategic element to invocations of the language of crisis, whether this be as a means of engendering fear, stifl ing dissent, and consolidating hegemonic power structures, or, conversely, of mobilizing disaffection, laying bare societal divisions, and agitating for radical change. With their acute attentiveness to questions of rhetoric, narrative, figuration, metaphor, and genre, literary and cultural criticism are peculiarly well placed to interrogate the ideological functions served by the discourses of crisis. For example, they are able (as Nick Mansfield does particularly clearly in this volume) to relativize contemporary culture’s image of itself as a culture of terminal crisis, revealing this as only the latest expression of a recurrent impulse to understand history as a teleological narrative in which the present is always the end of times. Similarly, they are in a position to deconstruct the seemingly clear binary opposition—on which much crisis thinking rests—between “natural” and “artificial” disasters and catastrophes, or to trace the ways in which blanket proclamations of “crisis” obscure subtle gradations of protection and exposure, calibrated to hierarchies of power, wealth, and mobility. The productiveness of literary and cultural criticism in this regard is heightened by the increasingly close connection in contemporary public discourse between crisis and a further key term: risk. As sociological “risk theorists” like Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have shown, the potential for adverse events that may assume the status of crises is more and more a matter of risk assessment and calculation—and a key element of such crises (as in the global fi nancial crisis of 2008) is precisely the spectacular failure of the risk experts’ models to project the actual, devastating outcome. As Beck argues (and as Molly Wallace discusses in detail in her opening chapter for this collection), risks are, by defi nition, not realities; they are, instead, possibilities, potentialities, projections, predictions, speculations, fictions, fantasies, myths. As such, risks—like crises—invite the sensitivity to the symbolic field that characterizes literary and cultural criticism. Scholars in these disciplines have a key role, Ursula K. Heise suggests, in unraveling the processes by which

Introduction 5 some stories acquire the power to represent risk in terms that we understand as realistic. The question how such rhetorical traditions filter and shape information about risk so as to postulate certain causal sequences, to make some scenarios plausible and others less so, to make some appear more threatening than others, and to outline likely future courses of events is clearly crucial. (139) Moreover, many of the most visible and influential “stories” of risk in contemporary culture take the very form—fictional narrative—that literary and cultural critics are often most adept and practiced at analyzing. Such novels, films, and television dramas (like the “fi nancial thriller” books discussed by Nicky Marsh, the James Bond blockbuster critiqued by Alissa G. Karl, and the avian flu TV disaster movies decoded by Penelope Ironstone-Catterall) play a major role in shaping public perceptions of global dangers (however fanciful or contrived their plots), and constitute fertile but under-explored resources for understanding—and contesting—the prevailing rhetorical constructions of risk and crisis in the contemporary moment. Likewise, the interface of narrative dramatizations of life under conditions of global uncertainty and instability and the practices of literary and cultural criticism yield forms of knowledge—experiential, affective, libidinal—not readily accessed via the objects of study or methodologies of other disciplines. This collection, then, emerges from the conjunction of criticism and crisis at a time when the social formations within which criticism operates and the cultural artifacts that it takes as its objects are themselves pervaded by actual and imagined states of emergency. It is divided into two parts. Part I—“Critical Thought/Critical Times”—brings the ideas of major twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century philosophers and critical and cultural theorists into dialogue with debates surrounding environmental exploitation and pollution, climate change, and other contemporary global threats. The opening chapter, Molly Wallace’s “Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now? Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk,” lays out some of the key theoretical issues that preoccupy the contributors to the volume. Wallace argues that ecocriticism, which, amid dire prognoses concerning the fate of the planet, has become a vigorous and highly visible field in contemporary literary studies, might augment its theoretical frameworks by looking back to an earlier and now largely forgotten intellectual movement: nuclear criticism. Ecocriticism, with its realist emphasis on the brute materiality of environmental despoliation, and nuclear criticism, with its poststructuralist privileging of textuality, signification, and the perpetual postponement of the disaster-as-referent, have the potential, Wallace suggests, to fuse into a hybrid “risk criticism” equally attentive to the real and symbolic dimensions of present-day “mega-hazards.” Nick Mansfield’s “The Future of the Future” shares with Wallace’s chapter a concern with the temporality of atmospheric or environmental

6

Paul Crosthwaite

catastrophe—its uncanny status of being simultaneously always already here, and always yet to come. Mansfield juxtaposes diverse conceptions of the “event” in contemporary continental philosophy (principally those of Alain Badiou, Claude Romano, and Jacques Derrida) in order to assess their comparative productiveness for theorizing the threat of climate change. While most philosophies of the event, Mansfield suggest, remain confi ned to the realm of human political struggle, antagonism, and revolt, only Derrida’s understanding of the event as the messianic arrival of the wholly other is adequate to the radical alterity of the environmental transformations that now threaten to engulf the very domains of the human and the political. At the same time, however, Derrida’s notion of the “messianic without messianism” extends the tentative possibility of a democratic future to come, forged in the crucible of a warming planet. In “The Incredible Shrinking Human,” Charlie Gere also fi nds in the work of Derrida a means of rethinking prevailing understandings of climate change. Challenging a common view of human beings as separate from, and in a position of mastery over, the Earth and its biosphere, Gere argues for a more humble and modest worldview, which recognizes humanity’s status as merely one among many species, all intimately connected to the planet that is their dwelling place. Such an altered vision is a prerequisite, he argues, for a coordinated and sustained response to the damage already wrought on the Earth and its atmosphere by anthropogenic intervention. In articulating this argument, Gere draws on striking convergences between the Derridean notion of différance and the endless variegations of living organisms described by Darwinian evolutionary theory, as well as Derrida’s late work on the permeable boundary between the human and the animal. In “The Risks of Sustainability,” Karen Pinkus undertakes the vital task of tracing two of the most resonant terms in contemporary environmentalist discourse—“risk” and “sustainability”—back to their origins. It transpires that “risk,” in particular, has undergone an eventful journey over the centuries, notably including a series of perilous sea voyages in some of the foundational epic narratives of the western tradition. Interweaving her etymological investigation with insights from figures including the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler and the queer theorist Lee Edelman, Pinkus demonstrates that the significations of risk and sustainability are by no means as straightforward as they may appear. Her chapter moves toward a provocative conclusion that deconstructs the apparent opposition between risk and sustainability, arguing, instead, that sustainability necessarily demands a willingness to embrace certain kinds of risk. Part II—“Critical Perspectives on Crisis Narratives”—combines wideranging theoretical reflection with close textual analysis to draw out the insights into the contemporary experience of crisis offered by a range of novels and films. These contributions are diverse—reflecting the global dimensions of the project as a whole—but remain consistently focused on the shared

Introduction 7 problematic of world-embracing risk that confronts authors and filmmakers today. It begins with “Narrating the Coming Pandemic: Pandemic Influenza, Anticipatory Anxiety, and Neurotic Citizenship” by Penelope Ironstone-Catterall, a study of dramatizations of avian flu pandemics in US and Canadian made-for-TV movies. Ironstone-Catterall shows how such narratives assume the worst case scenario of spiraling death tolls and societal breakdown as their default mode, and work to instill a sense of perpetual watchfulness, vigilance, and anxiety among their viewers. This is of a piece, she suggests, with a neoliberal imperative to render citizens responsible for their own safety and security, rather than permitting them to look to an interventionist state for guarantees of refuge and assistance in the event of emergency. The chapter also demonstrates how fears concerning pandemic outbreaks of infectious disease are bound up with a sense of the globalized world’s disorientating interconnectedness—the ways in which individuals in disparate locations are linked by invisible chains of influence. Andries Visagie’s contribution, “Global Capitalism and a Dystopian South Africa: Trencherman by Eben Venter and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes” also explores how globalization and neoliberal, freemarket ideology are implicated in the catastrophes imagined by contemporary culture. Visagie explains how, in Venter’s and Beukes’ dystopian near-future visions, the exposure of South Africa to the full force of the global market in the post-apartheid era has led to the uncontrollable spread of disease (in this case HIV/AIDS), poverty, addiction, infrastructural collapse, and environmental destruction. Visagie’s analysis of the two novels serves as a salutary reminder that “global” risks are in fact felt particularly acutely in specific regions (notably, areas of the global south) where the resources to mitigate such risks are lacking or inadequate. Amid the desolation depicted by the texts, however, he detects some “utopian moments” that suggest the potential for hope and resistance in the face of relentless economic exploitation. Robin Stoate’s “Gray Goo and You: The Ecophagy of Global Capital” shares with the preceding two chapters an interest in global flows of capital, the permeability of national and bodily boundaries, and the dangers of contamination and infection. Stoate reads the science fiction sub-genre of the “gray goo” narrative (in which out-of-control swarms of nanotechnological particles putrefy everything in their path) not merely as hyperbolic dramatizations of a conceivable, if highly unlikely, disaster scenario, but also as inscriptions of concerns about the leveling, homogenizing effects of global consumer capitalism. In a striking ideological sleight of hand, however, these anxieties are, Stoate argues, projected onto embodiments of “difference”—that is, non-white, non-heterosexual, and particularly nonmale subjects. Paradoxically, it is these figures of otherness who, in these texts, carry the threat of absolute sameness. The novels Stoate selects for analysis are case studies of the ways in which one form of global (indeed, in this case, cosmic) risk can be made to perform ideological work with regard to a wholly different set of fears about the contemporary life-world.

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Paul Crosthwaite

Lidia De Michelis turns attention toward geopolitics and international terrorism in her chapter, “Risk and Morality in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” De Michelis identifies McEwan’s novel as a fictional counterpart to the accounts of “world risk society” offered by Ulrich Beck and other sociological risk theorists. She indicates how the text, set in London on the day of the antiIraq War demonstration in February 2003, presents daily life as dominated by the perpetual mental assessment of threats and hazards, from the danger of street crime or home invasion to the possibility of suicide bombings in the British capital (the book was published shortly before the terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005) to the possibility of Saddam Hussein possessing and deploying weapons of mass destruction. De Michelis positions her detailed analysis of the novel alongside other, contemporaneous sources—most notably a series of speeches by former Prime Minister Tony Blair asserting his determination to lead Britain into war—which exemplify the growing prevalence of the language of risk calculation in public discourse. Fears surrounding the insidious global diffusion of Islamist terrorism also fall under the lens of Nicky Marsh in her chapter “The Corporation of Terror: Risk and the Fictions of the ‘Financial War.’” Taking as its starting point the near-coincident occurrence of 9/11 and the collapse of the giant Texan energy corporation Enron, Marsh’s probing analysis suggests that the public and governmental outcry that greeted reports of fi nancial insider trading by parties with foreknowledge of the attacks sits uneasily with high-profile valorizations of the American fi nancial services industry precisely in terms of the ruthlessness and force of paramilitary insurgency. Examining a range of fictional and non-fictional texts, Marsh argues that the widespread association of finance with war and terrorism betrays a concern that by seeking to assume, exploit, and commercialize risk, fi nancial professionals may come to pose a threat to the stability and security of their own societies that is troublingly reminiscent of that presented by the hijacker or suicide bomber. The convergence of fi nancial capitalism with conditions of globalized conflict between state and non-state actors is also the topic of Alissa G. Karl’s “Waiting for Crisis: Casino Royale, Financial Aesthetics, and National Narrative Form.” Karl reads this recent installment in the James Bond/007 franchise as a meditation—at the levels of both form and content—on the dynamics of crises: crises of the markets, crises of the nation state, crises of figuration and representation. The speculative financial technique of the “short sell” (a gamble on a fall in stock prices), which initiates the plot of Casino Royale (2006), is interpreted as a model for a crisistemporality in which an imminent and radical readjustment of values of all kinds is anxiously awaited. Working outwards from the movie’s vision of crisis, Karl also weaves a series of striking links with the global fi nancial crisis of 2008. The “credit crunch” is also the starting point of my chapter, “Phantasmagoric Finance: Crisis and the Supernatural in Contemporary Finance

Introduction 9 Culture,” which begins by remarking on the prevalence of expressions of belief in supernatural phenomena during the most intense phase of the crash. Drawing on Derrida’s spectral vision of economics, it goes on to demonstrate that superstition and magical thinking are common and recurrent responses to the prospect of fi nancial crisis, and that such a tendency is quite logical, for the only thing that holds off crisis most of the time is faith in insubstantial, intangible entities (stocks, derivatives, and indeed money itself). I suggest that this constitutive, but ordinarily concealed, aspect of fi nancial capitalism is foregrounded instructively in a range of recent literary and filmic narratives that present fi nance in explicitly supernatural terms, populating Wall Street and the City of London with ghosts, werewolves, spirits, oracles, occultists, and other weird beings. The collection is rounded out by Rebecca Giggs’ “The Green Afterword: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Ecological Uncanny,” which explores a narrative that looks beyond the age of global risk to a time when the worst has already come to pass. Productively drawing together the categories of the uncanny and the ecological, Giggs offers a compelling account of how McCarthy achieves effects of intense strangeness and defamiliarization in his depiction of a world laid waste by some unnamed catastrophe. She points, in particular, to the lack of geographical specificity and recognizable landmarks in the novel’s landscape, arguing that this conveys a palpable impression of the known world rendered alien. The Road extrapolates the logics of risk and crisis to their absolute limits by imagining the worst possible scenario (the “worst imaginable accident” in Ulrich Beck’s terms [Beck 53]), the most devastating cataclysm. As such, the novel offers a fitting, if profoundly disquieting, point of conclusion for this volume.

NOTES 1. A number of these conjunctions of critical innovation and socio-political crisis are explored in Historicizing Theory (2004), an absorbing collection of essays edited by Peter C. Herman. On some specific cases, see also, for example, Hannah S. Decker’s Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 (1991); Paul Lerner’s Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (2003); Rolf Wiggershaus’ The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (1994 [1986]); Ethan Kleinberg’s Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (2005); Robert Eaglestone’s The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004); Lynne Huffer’s “Derrida’s Nostalgeria” (2006); Michael Bibby’s The Vietnam War and Postmodernity (1999); Julian Bourg’s From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (2007); Daniel Cordle’s “Cultures of Terror: Nuclear Criticism During and Since the Cold War” (2006); Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn’s Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism (1993); Dennis L. Dworkin’s Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (1997); Brook Thomas’ The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991); and Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001).

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Paul Crosthwaite 2. On these connections, see, for example, Goran Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism (2008); E. Ann Kaplan’s Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (2005); N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999); Nicky Marsh’s Money, Speculation, and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction (2007); Cary Wolfe’s Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (2003); and Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005). 3. For an application of Virilio’s work to literary criticism, and an excavation of the pre-history of the global accident, see Crosthwaite.

WORKS CITED Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. Print. Bibby, Michael, ed. The Vietnam War and Postmodernity. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. Print. Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007. Print. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Print. Cordle, Daniel. “Cultures of Terror: Nuclear Criticism During and Since the Cold War.” Literature Compass 3.6 (2006): 1186–99. Web. 23 May 2010. Crosthwaite, Paul. “Anticipations of the Accident: Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk.” Textual Practice 24.2 (2010): 331–52. Print. Decker, Hannah S. Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900. New York: Free Press, 1991. Print. de Man, Paul. “Criticism and Crisis.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Rev. ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Print. Dworkin, Dennis L. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Print. Eaglestone, Robert. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print. Greene, Gayle and Coppélia Kahn, eds. Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Herman, Peter C., ed. Historicizing Theory. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004. Print. Huffer, Lynne. “Derrida’s Nostalgeria.” Algeria and France, 1800–2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia. Ed. Patricia M.E. Lorcin. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2006. Print. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Kleinberg, Ethan. Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. Print. Kompridis, Nikolas. Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Print. Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Print.

Introduction 11 Lerner, Paul. Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Print. Marsh, Nicky. Money, Speculation, and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction. London: Continuum, 2007. Print. Phillips, John. Contested Knowledge: A Guide to Critical Theory. London: Zed Books, 2000. Print. Therborn, Goran. From Marxism to Post-Marxism. London: Verso, 2008. Print. Thomas, Brook. The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. Virilio, Paul. “The Silence of the Lambs.” Interview with Carlos Oliveira. Trans. Patrice Riemens. CTheory (1996). Web. 25 May 2010. Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Trans. Michael Robertson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Print. Wolfe, Cary, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Print. Woodmansee, Martha and Mark Osteen, eds. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Print.

Part I

Critical Thought/ Critical Times

1

Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now? Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk Molly Wallace Given its impalpability, its lubricity, can this protracted apocalypse be grasped, or only sensed faintly as we slip listlessly through it? –Andrew McMurray, “The Slow Apocalypse” (1996)

The future inhabits the present, yet it also has not yet come—rather like the way toxics inhabit the bodies of those exposed, setting up the future, but not yet manifest as disease, or even as an origin from which a specific and known disease will come. –Kim Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal (2001)

THE SECOND NUCLEAR AGE From the start of what, in retrospect, may have been the fi rst nuclear age, perhaps no image has so captured the sense of looming risk that nuclear weapons pose as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” an icon that has graced the cover of that publication since 1947. As the editors put it then, the Clock represents “the state of mind of those whose closeness to the development of atomic energy does not permit them to forget that their lives and those of their children, the security of their country and the survival of civilization, all hang in the balance as long as the specter of atomic war has not been exorcised” (“If the UN” 169). And, from its perilously close two minutes to midnight following the detonation of the fi rst Soviet bomb in 1953 to its position at a relatively comfortable seventeen minutes to midnight in 1991, the Clock has stood as a barometer of the world’s proximity to its end. With the end of the Cold War, this icon might seem to have joined duck-and-cover drills and fallout shelters as an archaic relic of the atomic age; nevertheless, it has continued to mark the times—and has marched fairly steadily toward midnight, from fourteen minutes in 1995, to nine in 1998, to seven in 2002, each tick reminding us that, though the cultural obsession with the nuclear may have waned, we continue to live under the shadow of the atomic bomb. But even as it represents the continuity of risk, the Clock has also changed with the times. Indeed, when it appeared on the cover of the publication in early 2007—reset to five minutes to midnight—its symbolic valence had subtly changed. Still measuring nuclear threats—the US’ then-interest in usable

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nukes, the spread of weapons to North Korea and potentially Iran, and the resurgence of investment in nuclear power—the Clock had also begun to register other risks that the Bulletin felt had graduated to the scale of the nuclear, including particularly climate change, but as the Bulletin’s scientific panel of sponsors added, also biotechnology and nanotechnology, an epochal shift that the Bulletin suggested constituted a “second nuclear age” (Board of Directors, “It Is Five Minutes” 66). As Sir Martin Rees, president of The Royal Society and a Bulletin sponsor, put it: “Nuclear weapons still pose the most catastrophic and immediate threat to humanity, but climate change and emerging technologies in the life sciences also have the potential to end civilization as we know it” (“‘Doomsday Clock’ Moves Two Minutes”). In the “second nuclear age,” then, the term “nuclear” appears to operate as a synecdoche for global environmental risk more generally, what German sociologist Ulrich Beck has called “world risk society.” Periodizing the contemporary is always a tricky combination of divining and conjuring, but whether or not recent events warrant its inauguration, the Bulletin’s “second nuclear age” at least offers an occasion for reflection on how we understand contemporary risk. Ticking back and forth between two and seventeen minutes to midnight over the last six decades, the Clock provides a kind of odd synchronicity, such that, for example, five minutes to midnight put 2007 roughly where the Clock stood in the mid1980s (between 1984’s three minutes and 1988’s six).1 Taking inspiration from this temporal coincidence, this essay returns to that earlier moment of risk, and to an accompanying attempt to grapple with its implications: a foundational moment in what is sometimes still called “nuclear criticism,” a subfield of literary studies that has been, since the Cold War, largely neglected—and perhaps for good reason. Though there were multiple nuclear criticisms, variously poststructuralist and ethicopolitical, all varieties were predicated on features of the atomic age that were fairly specific to the Cold War moment—the rhetoric of deterrence and the imagining of total thermonuclear war—both of which, in the age of dirty bombs and mini-nukes, might feel a bit anachronistic. When what the Clock measures is no longer only nuclear, but also chemical, biological, and atmospheric, the speeds are varied and the ends less sure. In the contemporary era of environmental destruction, ecocriticism, the study of literature and the environment, might seem, quite rightly, to have taken nuclear criticism’s place. In the process, however, as I will suggest, ecocriticism may have missed an opportunity to draw insight from this earlier work. My purpose here is not, however, to resurrect nuclear criticism as a field with its own conference or professional organization; rather, I return to this earlier work in order to suggest that bringing nuclear criticism and ecocriticism together under the rubric of something like a “risk criticism,” a literary critical version of Ulrich Beck’s risk society, might offer a way to theorize the mega-hazards of the present. And to do so in time—that is, in the risk temporality of the second nuclear age.

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NUCLEAR CRITICISM’S ENDS An analysis of the political and theoretical implications of the nuclear age, nuclear criticism reached the apex of professional respectability in 1984 when no less a luminary than Jacques Derrida joined other notables in a special issue of Diacritics devoted to the nuclear. His essay, on the “fabulously textual” qualities of the bomb, set off a veritable chain reaction of poststructuralist accounts, with some critics suggesting that nuclear criticism might take its place among feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, and other established subfields of literary studies. Despite the persistence of the nuclear after the Cold War, however, the half-life of nuclear criticism seems to be of a shorter duration, with only a few of the most resilient critics persisting today. As the Doomsday Clock suggests, time—and its end— had a key role in thinking the nuclear, in nuclear criticism fully as much as in nuclear popular culture. The discourses of deterrence, the notion of mutually assured destruction (or MAD), required the potential “midnight” of the clock—that is, the possibility that there would be no future. This certainly is the specter that haunts Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now.” Here, Derrida writes of the potential for a “remainderless cataclysm,” “a total nuclear war, which, as a hypothesis, or, if you prefer, as a fantasy, or phantasm” (“No Apocalypse” 21, 23), provides the condition of possibility for nuclear criticism—and ultimately for the literature that such criticism might take as its object. Derrida’s essay offered, as Christopher Norris notes, something like a weak and a strong rationale for nuclear criticism, with the weak version essentially the argument for discourse analysis more generally (“Nuclear” 135). Because the nuclear war to which deterrence narratives referred had not happened, except in text, it could have no real referent—only, as Derrida argued, a “signified referent” (“No Apocalypse” 23). Thus, the perpetual staging of that future event in the rhetoric of deterrence made nuclear war “fabulously textual”—though no less potentially hazardous as a consequence. Such textuality necessarily altered relations of expertise: because nuclear war has not occurred, no one is expert in it—all experts are working from speculative fictions (whether political or technoscientific)—and as readers of texts, literary and cultural critics are competent interpreters of the various representations of that fabulous event. The stronger rationale carried this argument a step further by suggesting that while the “remainderless cataclysm” could never be a real referent, it was also the ultimate referent, a referent conjured by the sign that marked the very limits of signification. Here, literature takes on a kind of analogical or homological relationship to the nuclear, for, if literature is defi ned, as Derrida suggests, as that which does not—as other discourses do—imply “reference to a real referent external to the archive itself,” then this is something that it shares with the nuclear, which also “produc[es] and harbor[s] its own referent” (“No Apocalypse” 26, 27). For Derrida, paradoxically, this “fabulous”

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referent is also “the only referent that is absolutely real” insofar as, if it were to come, it could not be recontained in the symbolic. Thus, while the “weaker” version of nuclear criticism applies the analytical tools of rhetorical analysis to the texts that figure the bomb, this “stronger” rationale makes nuclear war into a special instance of literature in general. With the nuclear end representing the possibility of a remainderless cataclysm, and literature representing that which can talk of nothing else, all literature becomes, in effect, nuclear literature, even when it does not thematize nuclear war and even when its publication precedes the nuclear age. Indeed, Derrida went so far as to tie “deconstruction” itself explicitly to the nuclear epoch. And other nuclear critics took up this association of textuality and the nuclear. Thus, Peter Schwenger, following on Derrida’s observation that a nuclear war—with no one left to commemorate its purpose or memorialize its ideals—would be the fi rst (and last) war in the name of the name alone, described the nuclear in terms of “an extreme example of the dominance of signifier over signified” (xv), his concern not with what literature might tell us about the nuclear but “what the nuclear referent could tell us about literature” (xi). Similarly insistent on the symbolic power of the nuclear referent, William Chaloupka, alluding to the language of deterrence, asserted: “Never used but always effective, the power of the nuclearists could be seen as the greatest single accomplishment of the poststructuralist era” (12). Nuclear criticism thus joined Cold War culture more generally in what Daniel Cordle has called a “state of suspense,” predicated on an end that could have come at any time, and which, when it came, was to have been sudden, precipitous, and total. Nuclear criticism was therefore necessarily oriented toward the future, but in a way that also required imagining the future’s non-existence. The representation of time and the temporalities of representation are consequently central preoccupations of this work. As Kenneth Ruthven puts it, the instantaneousness of annihilation “destroys that slow-motion time-sense which our language mimes in the tense-system of its verbs, which separate out a past that was from a present that is and a future that will be” (81). This, according to Ruthven, is how one might account for Derrida’s use of the future perfect in his “at the beginning there will have been speed”—“a nuclear beginning that will be simultaneously an end” (Ruthven 82). But this reading seems fairly imprecise, for the future perfect does not, in this case, accommodate the paradox of total thermonuclear war. Indeed, Richard Klein, commenting also on nuclear temporality, specifically rejects what he calls the “mimetic reassurance of a future anterior,” in which “the future is envisaged as if it were the past”: “Nuclear criticism denies itself that posthumous, apocalyptic perspective, with its pathos, its revelations, and its implicit reassurances” (77). If “there will have been,” there must be a future time at which this will be true, which the total apocalypse-without-revelation of nuclear criticism disallowed. Klein indicated that what nuclear criticism might require by contrast is “a new,

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nonnarrative future tense,” one that would avoid “the assumption that the future has a future” (76), and he experimented with the paradoxes of the “Class A Blackout” and the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”—both cases in which the future is predicated on a surprise that cannot be predicted—in order to grapple with this problem. In the case, then, of Derrida’s “total war,” Klein’s prisoner’s execution, or the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock, the cataclysm is always to come. In retrospect, however, that “fabulous” end seems not to have come. The end of the Cold War and the dispersal of the referent-to-end-all-text called into question the utility of poststructuralist nuclear criticism. The focus on the textual qualities and future orientation of the bipolar nuclear confl ict meant that nuclear critics to some extent colluded in the failure to recognize the multiplying effects of the nuclear on the ground. Nuclear critics tended to follow Derrida in saying that the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended a conventional war rather than setting off a nuclear one, a distinction that safely kept the nuclear in the realm of fable. 2 And as activists have long pointed out, the subsequent “fabulous” textuality that predominated in Cold War deterrence narratives always involved real explosions, nuclear tests that were to be read as signs pointing to that future annihilation. As the real people, animals, and plants that were subjected to such tests knew, these weapons were no less “real” for being treated as virtual. Of course, nuclear critics were not blind to the dangers of environmental peril, but the urgency of the fast apocalypse tended to eclipse that of the slow. As Schwenger put it: For most people the most disturbing fact about nuclear temporality is the instantaneousness of nuclear annihilation. If, as we are coming to understand, time is running out for the environment, time is at least still running. Nuclear disaster, on the other hand, is capable of occurring at any moment, in a moment, with no time even for an explanation of why there is no time. (xiii) When the nuclear is only partially annihilating, however, the uniqueness of nuclear time—its instantaneousness, its surprise—diminishes, even as other risks multiply. Time is certainly still running, even as the disaster is also occurring at any (and every) moment.

TIME TO MOVE ON? As the urgency of nuclear peril appeared to wane in the early 1990s, concern with environmental issues—in literary studies as in the larger culture—grew. In an inversion of the order of priority outlined by Schwenger, by 1993, Kenneth Ruthven was noting that environmental issues were eclipsing the nuclear in perceived urgency and timeliness: “our desire

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to forget about nuclearism is encouraged by the new environmentalists, who keep telling us that we have much more immediate things to worry about. Indeed, some of the latest doomsayers appear to have traded in their old CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] badges so as to begin campaigning on a green ticket” (89). Those nuclear critics whose interest had long been more conventionally ethical and/or activist (rather than more theoretical) in several cases did shift their attention to the environment, but often in the process left behind the nuclear. 3 In the Fall 1991 issue of the newsletter for the International Society for the Study of Nuclear Texts and Contexts, for example, Daniel Zins opens his essay “Seventeen Minutes to Midnight” by recalling the response of a colleague to his workshop on “Environmental Security”: “‘Daniel Zins—there’s another one!’” “What he meant,” Zins explains, “was that here was yet another individual who, preoccupied with the problem of nuclear weapons during the 1980s, was now turning his attention to the possibility of environmental holocaust” (6).4 Indeed, by the next—and fi nal—issue of the newsletter in the Fall of 1992, the editor, Paul Brians, whose bibliography of nuclear texts provides an indispensible resource for the literature of the Cold War, was declaring “Farewell to the First Atomic Age”: “The period originally called ‘The Atomic Age’ has passed: no more dreams of unlimited nuclear power, no more threat of nuclear ecocide. . . . It’s time to move on” (3). Naturally, such enthusiastic post-mortems were rather premature. What was then anachronistic was not the nuclear per se but the end-times with which it had been associated. With the dispersal of nuclear risk, the chance of total thermonuclear war—the Doomsday Clock’s midnight— diminished, and this was, as it turned out, fairly fatal to the nuclear criticism imagined by critics like Derrida. Meanwhile, ecocriticism emerged as an upstart counter to poststructuralism—and to Theory more generally. Emphasizing the persistent “real” referent of present and continuing environmental damage, early ecocritics, practitioners of what Lawrence Buell has called the “fi rst wave,” “looked to the movement chiefly as a way of ‘rescuing’ literature from the distantiations of reader from text and text from world” (Future 6)—hardly the discourse most amenable to those whose concern had been with the “fabulously textual.” If what interested poststructuralists about the nuclear was the impossibility of representation, ecocritics by contrast seemed to be returning to “what superficially seems an old-fashioned propensity for ‘realistic’ modes of representation” (Future 31). In this way, fi rst wave ecocritics were more closely aligned with those nuclear critics who were driven more by an ethicopolitical commitment to disarmament than by an interest in the philosophical issues raised by total annihilation, for these more traditionally humanist scholars shared what Daniel Cordle describes as a “very old assumption in English studies: books are, in a rather nebulous sense, good for you” (“Cultures” 1191). One reads speculative fiction of nuclear

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holocaust in order to learn how to avoid it; one reads nature writing in order to learn how to be more ecological. 5 Ecocriticism’s privileging of the real was an important corrective to what did at times get a bit “loony”—to borrow Christopher Norris’ term—in poststructuralist-inspired work. Responding to those critics who took Derrida’s “there is no outside-the-text” too literally, Norris asserts that “it is time to enounce a few simple truths that literary theorists seem bent upon forgetting,” including that “textuality doesn’t go ‘all the way down’” (Uncritical 98). Or, as Kate Soper noted in another context, “it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer” (151). Of course, as subsequent “second wave” ecocritics (Soper among them) have pointed out, it is just as clear that how we know there is an ozone hole and what we think we ought to do about it are products of mediation and discursive production. As a consequence, ecocritical approaches that highlight “hybridity” or perform discourse analysis or emphasize the importance of text have increasingly supplanted what might initially have been an over-investment in access to the real. But even as some ecocritics have returned to poststructuralism to mine it for latent ecologies, few have excavated the environmental potential in poststructuralism’s nuclear turn.6 If we accept the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ contention that what we currently inhabit is something like a second nuclear age, we might require a revamped nuclear criticism to account for it, and Daniel Cordle has made a convincing call in a recent article that nuclear criticism today might usefully historicize the exceptionalist rhetoric associated with the War on Terror.7 Indeed, we might take Paul Brians’ spatial metaphor literally: in the “second nuclear age” it is indeed “time to move on,” not to other issues but to other locales—India, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea— and even to other, related, nuclear concerns—nuclear power and waste, uranium mining, depleted uranium weaponry. As Roger Luckhurst noted, by the time of the publication of his own Derrida-inspired essay in Diacritics in 1993, nuclear criticism had become, not anachronistic, but anachoristic, confronting “misplacements, ‘unreadable’ geo-graphical loci” produced “on the terrain of dissolved Cold War certainties” (90). And, as though in response to nuclear critic Ken Ruthven’s admonition that “if it is to engage with the late twentieth century . . . the new ecocriticism can hardly avoid being contaminated by the concerns of nuclear criticism” (91), ecocritics influenced by the environmental justice movement have continued to address ongoing issues of nuclear politics, in the Pacific and elsewhere (see, for example, Edwards; Kuletz). But as productively anachronistic as calling such practices “nuclear criticism” might be, I would submit that the literary criticism of the second nuclear age ought not to make the mistake of the fi rst in fetishizing the nuclear over other mega-risks. Rather, I would suggest that there are, within ecocriticism, nuclear criticism, and sociological theories of risk, elements of an emergent “risk criticism,” an umbrella practice that might accommodate

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both the “fabulously textual” and the absolutely material qualities of contemporary risk.

RISK CRITICISM If what transformed questions of expertise and competence in the “fi rst nuclear age” was, as Norris shorthands it, that “self-appointed ‘experts’ are so manifestly out of their depth—confronting such a range of intractable problems, aporias, or wholly unforeseeable turns of event” (“Nuclear” 135), this is surely doubly true in the “second nuclear age,” when climate change and biotechnology have been added to the catastrophic mix. In this context, perhaps no contemporary theorist has dwelt so singularly on questions of hazard, expertise, and representation as Ulrich Beck, who has, from his inaugural study, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (1986), to his recent iteration, World At Risk (2007), persistently queried the conditions of what he calls “world risk society,” a period of “reflexive modernity” in which the unanticipated (and unanticipatable) side effects of technological innovations come back to haunt us. As in the Bulletin’s “second nuclear age,” Beck’s work places the nuclear among other “megarisks” of the late twentieth—and now early twenty-fi rst—centuries, though he sets the origins of this “age” somewhat earlier, somewhere in the 1960s or 1970s. For Beck, ozone depletion and global warming, chemical and toxicological contaminations, genetic engineering, and nuclear threats all mark a shift from what he calls the “fi rst modernity” of industrial society to the “second modernity” of global risk. And though he does acknowledge the unevenness of global risk distribution—with some benefiting from others’ losses; some able to shield themselves from hazard, environmental or otherwise—he perhaps optimistically anticipates that risk society will also be characterized by a kind of cosmopolitan spirit of shared hazard, as a common risk makes for a common bond. If the signature fact of nuclear criticism’s “remainderless cataclysm” is its remainderlessness—with no one to mourn, to recontain the event in the symbolic—in the case of risk, “we are . . . experiencing . . . the fact that people have to keep on living afterward” (Beck, Ecological 61; emphasis in original). Survival necessarily challenges the temporality of threat—and indeed the very nature of the catastrophic event. In the case of contaminations by radiation or chemicals, of rising sea levels or potential allergens in genetically modified foods, we are in a situation that seems to imply the inverse of Derrida’s argument regarding the “competence” of the humanities in general and literary studies in particular. In the case of the “fabulously textual” war, there was no “real referent” about which any of the so-called experts might claim to have expertise. In the case of risk, by contrast, one must posit the existence of a “real referent,” and access to the means of its representation appears indeed to be restricted to techno-scientific experts

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and government regulators. Here, the question shifts from a contemplation of one’s future non-existence to a contemplation of the nature of one’s continued existence, and, as Peter van Wyck has pointed out, “Am I already a casualty? is exactly the question provoked” (83); van Wyck continues: It is as though our senses, our very perception, had been expropriated, rendered useless and vestigial in the face of threats that cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. The appeal to the eyewitness (even one’s own eyes) comes to have little value here. There is nothing there, nothing to be seen, leaving us dependent on others (often the same others, that is, the same institutions that produced the threats) to determine the appropriate means (instrumentation) with which to represent it safely back to us and for us. (83) Environmental risk would thus seem to place laypeople, including humanists and literary critics, in a balefully weakened position, waiting for the experts to translate the real that may already be causing harm. Such, at least, is the official line of what, for Beck, is “fi rst modernity,” a world in which experts approach a calculable future. As Beck points out, however, such risk assessments are often wrong—and catastrophically so. From CFCs and the ozone hole to asbestos and cancer, from Thalidomide to BPA, “new knowledge can transform normality into threat overnight.” In the face of shifting expert opinions, recalls, public apologies, “the progress of science refutes its original security assurances,” “sow[ing] the seeds of doubt concerning its declarations about risk” (World 35). Scientific risk assessment would attempt to construct a narrative of present cause and future effect, but, as Beck notes, the limits of such predictions are likely clear to anyone who follows the news on a regular basis, as “what was judged ‘safe’ to swallow today, may be a ‘cancer risk’ in two years time” (345)—or, rather, in what may well be the key tense of risk society, will have been a cancer risk, in a way impossible to predict in advance. Here, Klein’s “reassurance of the future anterior” seems less than reassuring. More “knowledge” produces less certainty, and risk calculation produces incalculable risk. As nuclear criticism was an analysis of the illogic and limitations of what used to be called “nukespeak,” so Beck’s risk analysis is a response to risk discourse. As van Wyck notes, risk “is but a neologism of the insurance industry,” and, in risk society, the limits of “thinkability” are replaced by the limits of insurability. These latter limits, posed by risky technologies old and new, may shed new light on another essay that appeared alongside Derrida’s in the special issue of Diacritics. In an analysis of the nuclear sublime, Frances Ferguson opens with a quote from a letter she received from the State Farm Insurance company: “Under no circumstances does your policy provide coverage for loss involving nuclear accident” (qtd. in Ferguson 4). For Ferguson, this limit is one of imagination—the failure to

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think the unthinkable, as nuclear war was often called—but nuclear accident is not necessarily the nuclear holocaust with which most nuclear critics equated it. The State Farm notice, unlike Derrida’s cataclysm or Klein’s non-narrative future tense, does presume a future, a moment after which the nuclear event will have happened—and will have been an event; it just presumes a future for which the insurance company would not like to be liable. This is the point at which risk-benefit analysis breaks down; at which the “maximum credible accident” produces losses that can be imagined, just not compensated. For Beck, counter-intuitively, risk is also in effect “fabulously textual” insofar as it is not visible until it is represented—or, as Beck prefers, “staged.” Unlike nuclear war, however, that transition from signified to real referent is ongoing. As Beck puts it, risk is always in the process of “becoming real” (World 197–98). A paradigmatic example of this process comes in Peter van Wyck’s book, Signs of Danger, in which he describes the case of a Soviet film documenting the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident. Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, is, van Wyck notes, “a clumsy piece of back-slapping propaganda showing how well the Soviet scientific, technical, military and party authorities came together in the face of great adversity to overcome the severity of the accident. . . . But what we see on the surface of the film itself,” he continues, “are millions of tiny pops and scratches” (97). The filmmakers initially presumed that they had simply inadvertently used defective film stock, but, van Wyck explains, what they had in fact represented was “a record of the impacts of decay particles as they passed through the body of the camera . . . a very striking pointillism of the real—discovered only after the fact, only retroactively” (97). The “signs of danger” here do not signify until they are read, and this reading in turn makes legible the limits of the “expert” narrative. The fabulous textuality and the absolute materiality of risk are represented quite graphically in the medium that now must become also the message. Emphasizing the speculative qualities of risk, Beck offers what risk critics might interpret as a kind of vocation for literary studies: risk is virtual, and “without techniques of visualization, without symbolic forms, without mass media, etc., risks are nothing at all” (“Living” 332). Thus, as in Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” literary and cultural critics are not just competent to take on the technoscientific and political issues posed by risk but are in some sense particularly qualified, as readers of the symbolic forms by which risk becomes real. And, following Beck, several literary critics have taken up the task of risk discourse analysis. Referring to what he calls “toxic discourse,” Lawrence Buell reads across fictional and nonfictional representations of toxicity to excavate its discursive roots in the gothic and the pastoral (see Writing 30–54). And, extending Buell’s analysis, Ursula Heise includes a wide-ranging discussion of risk in her latest book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), in which she turns to contemporary novels that thematize risk in order to explore the effect these

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themes might have on narrative. These approaches shed new light on such much-read texts as Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985), which emerges less as an example of postmodern satire and more as the paradigm of risk realism, as the “hyperboles and simulations that have typically been read as examples of postmodern inauthenticity become . . . manifestations of daily encounters with risks whose reality, scope, and consequences cannot be assessed with certainty” (Heise 169). For these ecocritics, risk thus offers something of a compromise of textuality and materiality. One could easily multiply examples of risk literature—and whether or not literature is, as Cordle puts it, “in a rather nebulous sense, good for you,” such texts are certainly good for thinking through the paradoxical temporalities of risk society. Consider, for example, Richard Powers’ Gain (1998), a novel referenced by both Buell and Heise, in which the immediate speed of the protagonist’s cancer growth fi nds its counterpoint in an interweaving narrative that addresses the over-a-century-long history of the corporation whose products may—or may not—have caused it. Or Marie Clements’ play Burning Vision (2003), which telescopes time and space in order to highlight the legacies of uranium mining in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the fi nal act syncopated by the ominous “tick tick tick” of a clock, “click click click” of a Geiger counter, and “beat beat beat” of a human heart. Or Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), a fictionalization of the legacies of the Bhopal accident, which, among other strategies, experiments with the present perfect tense in order to emphasize the ongoing effects of the chemicals, now in the groundwater: “wonderful poisons,” the narrator marvels with irony, “after all these years they’re still doing their work” (29).8 Or consider the seeming timelessness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), in which futile travel through the barren landscape is told in a past tense that indicates a future from which the events could be memorialized, even as the novel holds out little hope for ecological or social remedy. Indeed, if we needed an iconic example of the ways in which risk is perpetually moving from virtual to real, we need look no further than White Noise, which seemed to anticipate the Bhopal explosion in India, or Beck’s Risk Society, the publication of which coincided with the accident at Chernobyl. For risk narratives, anticipation may already be description.

TURN BACK THE CLOCK? In January 2010, with much fanfare, including a live webcast of the event at “TurnBackTheClock.org,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ board moved the Doomsday Clock a cautiously optimistic one minute further from midnight, such that it is now six minutes to midnight, according to the Clock’s calculations. Clearly eager both to acknowledge the significance of the Obama administration and to raise awareness of and action on world risk in a moment in which crises in the economy seem to be eclipsing crises

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of ecology, the editors explain: “By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing the signs of [international] collaboration” (Board of Directors, “It Is Six Minutes”). Thus, acknowledgements of dire risk (“our habitat could be disrupted beyond recognition” by climate change; nuclear power generation could lead to nuclear weapons development; advances in the life sciences pose risks, “either inadvertent or intentional”) are tempered by hope (the—very—modest accomplishments of Copenhagen; the promises of alternative energy). The editors conclude the announcement with the ominous reminder that has long accompanied the clock’s readjustments: “The clock is ticking.” In the spirit of the activist admonition that accompanied the Bulletin’s announcement, my strategy here has indeed been to “turn back the clock”—in this case, to measure the distance from Cold War nuclear criticism to post-Cold War risk, and to ask whether elements of that earlier practice of the “fi rst nuclear age” might usefully be retooled for the “second.” Now set where it stood in 1988, the Clock provides a useful corrective to any narrative of progress that might mislead us into complacency regarding the nuclear, and with the other catastrophic dangers pushing the minute hand toward midnight, the call to “turn back the clock” seems pressingly urgent. But broadening the source of risk beyond the nuclear raises questions about how far back the Clock need go. The “second nuclear age” usefully turns our attention to the other megarisks of the contemporary moment, but the origins of those crises clearly predate 2007. If we are to take seriously the conjunction of concerns organized under the category of environmental hazard, then surely at minimum Beck’s “risk society,” with its origins in the 1960s, or even the fi rst nuclear age in 1945, would be better frames of historical reference. Indeed, in a context in which some historians, like Dipesh Chakrabarty, have begun to identify the present as part of “the Anthropocene”—the era in which “humans act as a main determinate in the environment of the planet” (roughly 1750 to the present, according to his sources [see Chakrabarty 207])—the Bulletin’s recognition of other environmental threats seems decidedly belated. And if the Clock itself needs changing—its face measuring different scales of the temporality (and, indeed, spatiality) of risk—its ends too must change. The iconic nuclear midnight signifies differently when other threats are included, for, referring both to the potential for sudden and total annihilation—that fear that so dominated the Cold War—and to what Andrew McMurry calls the “slow apocalypse,” midnight begins to look as though it may have been the wrong metaphor all along, for “by holding out for that noisy demise, we can pretend we haven’t been expiring by inches for decades” (McMurray par. 1). In this sense, what the Clock must measure is indeed, as Derrida suggested more recently of the world post-9/11, “worse than the Cold War,” a threat that “represents the residual consequence

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of both the Cold War and the passage beyond the Cold War” (“Autoimmunity” 98). 9 The Clock might better be conceived, then, not only as a countdown to some potential future annihilation, but also as what Peter van Wyck calls a “metronome of threat” (20), syncopating a present that contains multiple catastrophes, historical and to come, simultaneously. In the second nuclear age, we seem to fi nd ourselves inhabiting rather than anticipating the end, as though, as one of the characters in Lydia Millet’s recent nuclear novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), puts it, “The end has already come and gone. And here we are” (521).10 When Derrida said, “no apocalypse, not now,” he meant no revelation, even in the case of what might colloquially be considered apocalyptic, a total thermonuclear war. The nuclear epoch was thus, he argued, also an épochè, “suspending judgment before the absolute decision” (“No Apocalypse” 27). In the present age of risk, we are clearly no closer to “absolute knowledge,” but though we arguably persist in a “state of suspense,” we do not await the same end. “Turning back” the Doomsday Clock has always entailed turning it forward, imagining the future so as to avert catastrophe. In a time in which more knowledge seems to create less certainty, as the “becoming real” of risk offers a kind of ongoing revelation without foreseeable end, we need to be as aware of the past and present as we are oriented toward what might come. But, still, the precautionary principle implied in the future anterior remains indispensible. In a dialogue with Giovanna Borradori following 9/11, even while projecting once again “a future so radically to come that it resists even the grammar of the future anterior,” Derrida himself produces just such a speculative fiction: “One day it might be said: ‘September 11’—those were the (‘good’) old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous! What size, what height! There has been worse since.” And, extrapolating one example of the “worse,” Derrida imagines, “nanotechnologies of all sorts [which] are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere” (“Autoimmunity” 97, 102). As the apocalypse “creeps in,” the problem is less unthinkable non-existence, the absolute end in a remainderless cataclysm, than survival, and, faced with that conundrum, “to knowledge drawn from experience and science we must add imagination, suspicion, fiction, and fear” (Beck, World 53)—and, one might add, hope. The Clock is ticking . . .

NOTES 1. For a time line of the Clock’s movements, see www.thebulletin.org. 2. An important exception here is Schwenger’s Letter Bomb. Describing the “postman of Nagasaki,” a man whose back was scarred by flash burns, Schwenger acknowledges “if Sumiteru uncovers his back at a crowded beach, he is showing the onlookers that nuclear war is not just, as Derrida claims, ‘fabulously textual’” (11).

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3. For a useful overview of the more theoretical and humanist/ethical varieties of nuclear criticism see Cordle, “Cultures.” 4. As a kind of transition from nuclear to ecocriticism, this brief essay is remarkable, providing a useful analysis of the ways in which nuclear holocaust is metaphorically and materially linked to environmental holocaust. Indeed, Zins arguably offers a kind of proto-risk criticism of the sort I ultimately advocate in this essay. 5. As someone who has followed ecocriticism closely over the past fifteen years, I am mindful of the oversimplification in this highly telescoped history. Ecocriticism is diverse, and, overall, as Buell usefully reminds us, ecocriticism’s relationship to other areas of literary and cultural studies “has been unfolding less as a story of dogged recalcitrance—though there has been some of that— than as a quest for adequate models of inquiry from the plethora of possible alternatives that offer themselves from whatever disciplinary quarter” (10). 6. For an example of a kind of poststructuralist ecocriticism, see Verena Conley’s Ecopolitics (1997). For a recent book that reflects insistently on the problems of language, art, and ecology, see Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature (2007). One of the most compelling uses of poststructuralism in considering contemporary nuclear issues is Peter van Wyck’s Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (2005), from which I draw much inspiration here. Despite an extensive bibliography, however, the book does not treat 1980s “nuclear criticism” per se. 7. See Cordle, “Cultures.” Cordle’s book, States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism, and United States Fiction and Prose (2008) also offers a current example of nuclear criticism, but here Cordle is focused much more clearly on understanding the Cold War period. 8. Beukema offers a particularly elegant reading of Sinha’s use of present perfect tense. At one point, Sinha’s main character, “Animal” states: “I’ve tugged his trouser to get his attention. Why don’t you wear a watch?” (51, emphasis added). As Beukema points out, Zafar’s response “What, and handcuff myself to time?” (51) is apt considering the context, for “the use of the present perfect is connected to Zafar’s avoidance of handcuffi ng himself to a timeframe, which is precisely what the tense itself avoids” (Beukema 9). My thanks to Taryn for sharing her yet-to-be-published essay. See also Rob Nixon, “Neoliberalism,” which addresses the temporality and spatiality of risk in Animal’s People. 9. Clearly, considering his focus on 9/11, Derrida’s interest here is primarily in terror. Beck too has begun in his latest book (World at Risk) to include terror in risk society, a provocative move that is also, in my view, potentially problematic. While viewing terror as akin to ozone holes or nuclear meltdowns—the unanticipated consequences of modernity—illuminates the “Western” perspective on such attacks, it also risks collapsing “risks” that are quite disparate. 10. This is hardly a novel sentiment. As McMurray points out, it has been anticipated by Baudrillard and R.E.M., among others (see pars. 21–22).

WORKS CITED Beck, Ulrich. Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society. Trans. Mark A. Ritter. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995. Print. . “Living in the World Risk Society.” Economy and Society 35.3 (2006): 329–45. EBSCOhost. Web. 20 Apr. 2010.

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. World At Risk. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Print. Beukema, Taryn. “‘That Night Has Come Again’: Troubling Temporalities in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” Unpublished manuscript. Print. Board of Directors. “It Is Five Minutes to Midnight.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 63.1 (2007): 66–71. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. . “It Is Six Minutes to Midnight.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 14 Jan. 2010. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. Brians, Paul. “Farewell to the First Atomic Age.” Nuclear Texts and Contexts 8 (1992): 1–3. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Print. . Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the US and Beyond. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Print. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222. Chicago Journals. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. Chaloupka, William. Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Print. Clements, Marie. Burning Vision. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2003. Print. Conley, Verena Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. Cordle, Daniel. “Cultures of Terror: Nuclear Criticism During and Since the Cold War.” Literature Compass 3.6 (2006): 1186–99. Wiley InterScience. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. . States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism, and United States Fiction and Prose. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Ed. Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 85–136. Print. . “No Apocalypse, Not Now.” Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 20–31. JSTOR. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. “‘Doomsday Clock’ Moves Two Minutes Closer to Midnight.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 17 Jan. 2007. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. Edwards, Nelta. “Radiation, Tobacco, and Illness in Point Hope, Alaska: Approaches to the ‘Facts’ in Contaminated Communities.” The Environmental Justice Reader. Ed. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002). 105–24. Print. Ferguson, Frances. “The Nuclear Sublime.” Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 4–10. JSTOR. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. Fortun, Kim. Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Print. 20 Apr. 2010. Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. “If the UN Atomic Energy Commission Fails.” Editorial. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 3.7 (1947): 169. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. Klein, Richard. “The Future of Nuclear Criticism.” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 76–100. JSTOR. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. Kuletz, Valerie. “The Movement for Environmental Justice in the Pacific Islands.” The Environmental Justice Reader. Ed. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002). 125–44. Print. Luckhurst, Roger. “Nuclear Criticism: Anachronism and Anachorism.” Diacritics 23.2 (1993): 89–97. JSTOR. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. McMurray, Andrew. “The Slow Apocalypse: A Gradualistic Theory of the World’s Demise.” Postmodern Culture 6.3 (1996). Web. 20 Apr. 2010.

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Millet, Lydia. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2005. Print. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Enviromental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. Print. Nixon, Rob. “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque.” Modern Fiction Studies 55.3 (2009): 443–67. Project Muse. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. Norris, Christopher. “‘Nuclear Criticism’ Ten Years On.” Prose Studies 17.2 (1994): 130–60. InformaWorld. Web. 20 Apr. 2010. . Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992. Print. Ruthven, Kenneth Knowles. Nuclear Criticism. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1993. Print. Schwenger, Peter. Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Print. Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Print. Soper, Kate. What is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Print. van Wyck, Peter. Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Print. Zins, Daniel. “Seventeen Minutes to Midnight.” Nuclear Texts and Contexts 7 (Fall 1991): 6–10. Web. 20 Apr. 2010.

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The Future of the Future Nick Mansfield Now, what happened is simply attributed to panic. The men had been asked to surrender their arms and they had hesitated to comply. When Yellow Bird threw a handful of dirt into the air, it was to symbolize the coming renewal of the earth, but a gun went off at the same time and the soldiers didn’t know what was happening. The warriors knew that their shirts made them invulnerable to rifles, but they ended up retreating up the ravine towards Pine Ridge under cannon fi re. Those left in the tipis had no chance, and in the end, of the 192 people killed, 18 were little children. (Kehoe 22–24)

The Wounded Knee massacre was neither the origin, nor the culmination of the Ghost Dance movement. It developed from the key second 1890 phase of the Ghost Dance, but there had been an earlier wave in the 1870s and Alice Beck Kehoe still saw Ghost Dancing practiced by the Dakota community at the New Tidings settlement in Round Plain, Saskatchewan in the 1960s. Jack Wilson or Wovoka the figure-head of the second wave of Ghost Dancing was a Paiute from Nevada. He was still teaching his religion, in which the recently dead would return as part of the restoration of the earth, at his death in 1932. He was a Christian, and the God who appeared to him on a winter’s day in 1889—the visitation from which his version of the Ghost Dance springs, a day when the sun died, he said—was the Christian God (Kehoe 6). Ghost Dancing “connects” with the long history of European millenarianism, therefore, a tradition “connected” notionally, if controversially, by Norman Cohn at least, in his classic study Pursuit of the Millennium (1961), with radical European politics of the left and the right, the withering away of the state, on the one hand, and the thousand-year Reich, on the other. I put the word “connected” here in inverted commas, because these connections are at best the kinds of resonances of rhetoric or impulse that are so hard to establish academically, but they are the contingencies, misunderstandings, and fake affi liations, the complex inheritances of phrase and feeling that do so much to drive politics, without being positively identifiable as meaningful sequences of continuity and identity. The historical logic by which two cultural impulses connect is almost impossible to chart systematically, yet resonances can be too insistent to ignore: the Ghost Dance could be taken as a form of Christian millenarianism and so

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too could other responses to demographic crisis in the nineteenth century: the Taiping rebellion, centred on Nanjing between 1850 and 1864, and the rural millenarian movements that arose as a response to drought and famine in north-eastern Brazil around the followers of Antonio Conselheiro in the 1890s (see Davis 188–95). The Ghost Dance and these other movements clearly incorporated aspects of messianism, and it is this link between crisis and messianism that this chapter will trace: messianism as a response to crisis, but not just any crisis—catastrophe, the end of cultures and societies. In the face of such catastrophe, there arises, sometimes militantly, the dream not of the new, but of restoration, of the re-establishment of lost continuities in the face of un-believable, and widely un-believed, change. That continuity could be the renewal of the earth when lost warriors (still remembered) rise again. It could be the restoration of the preAdamic world, which, to the millenarian movements that arose through the unhistorical consciousness of the Reformation period (as Cohn studied it), was still considered not yet fully remote from human memory. As Cohn wanted to point out, millenarian messianism is not itself fully remote from our consciousness. It may inhabit the apoca-politics that always still threatens to be revived as mass movement, or that can still be traced even on the fringes of our political mainstream. There are the fringe fringes, but it is on the mainstream fringes that extreme notions become domesticated and enter apparently sensible discourse. Messianism of course remains dogma for major mainstream social institutions which are still considered partners with government in at least the education and social welfare fields, but this messianism is radically de-literalized, the object of either suspended belief or, perhaps suspended disbelief. How much, however, has the “inheritance” of messianism infected our cultural logics, specifically in our representation to ourselves of crisis, and the solution to crisis? To take an example, our response to climate change (the defi nitive instantiation of crisis for our time) resonates with a certain messianism. We face a future mapped between the unbelievable catastrophe, on the one hand, and the saving (salving) breakthrough consensus to act, on the other hand. These logics are messianic to say the least, in that they invest in the pivotal event, the heroic intervention, the open horizontality of the doomed land and the hoped-for redemption of the people. Climate change is “coming.” It is already here. Indeed, literal physical environmental change will probably emerge less by sudden cataclysm than by gradual transformation (though there will be sudden environmental cataclysms). Yet, climate change is already being experienced primarily not as an environmental, but as a political phenomenon. What we will experience will not be patient adaptation, but sudden disruption—large movements of population, wars triggered by resource insecurity, political militancy, regional economic collapse, and revived dogmatisms of nation, race, and religion—a future, in short, of crisis, brinkmanship, and emergency. The measure and meaning of the impact of climate change hinge, then, on the spectacularity of

The Future of the Future 33 the disjunctive and cataclysmic political event. The event has become a major theme in recent philosophy, from Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (1990 [1969]) (and Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? [1994 (1991)]) through Badiou’s monumental Being and Event (2005 [1988]), to late Derrida (most especially Specters of Marx [1994 (1993)]) and Claude Romano’s Event and World (2009 [1998]). The philosophy of the event attempts to re-think politics not in terms of historical continuities and ideological consistencies, but in relation to sudden and unpredictable disruption, and the kind of human action that is the most appropriate response. Instead of seeing history as the completion of predictive narratives or the adaptation to consensual values, the event accommodates shock, surprise, and emergency, yet in a way that still sees them as conditioned by the situations that precede them. In the context of a climate change politics in which environmental catastrophe will unfold but perhaps not exactly in the expected way; in which some landscapes and populations will no longer be capable of the economic role previously expected of them (becoming more or less fertile, more or less useful); in which corporations will seek to make ever faster adaptations to environmental shocks, or capriciously resist them; and where politics will be played out anywhere on a scale between sudden ruthless emergency interventions and authoritarian nostalgisms (for race, religion, or the freedom of capital), a mode of thought in which surprise, discontinuity, and disruption can be appraised would seem to have most to offer. I will proceed by comparing two key ways of thinking about the event— Alain Badiou’s and Jacques Derrida’s—to see which of these “revolutionary” accounts suits our politics-to-come. Badiou sees the event as an opportunity for an avant-garde political militancy that emerges from a locus subordinate to, but concealed from, the reigning logic of the State. It is a politics of radical human invention. Derrida also sees thinking of the event as a radical renewal of the political. Yet, in contrast to Badiou, his event reaches toward an exteriority that defies the Cartesian construction of Nature on which Badiou’s thought still relies. Derrida forces a reconsideration of the nature of historical time, and of the nature of Nature itself. It is a measure of what is at stake in a climate change future. What is crucial about Derrida’s thinking of the event is the surprising language in which he decides to describe it: the language of messianism. The focus in this present chapter on the term messianism is neither contemptuous nor dismissive, and my saying that our approach to climate change is para-messianic is not to dismiss it as superstitious, chimerical, hysterical, or naïve. The deconstruction of historical time and the assertion of the value of a conception of messianic time become in Derrida’s hands a politics, perhaps our future politics, so I want not to abuse or abandon messianism but fi nd something on its other side, by way of what Derrida nominated gnomically not as messianism but as the messianic, a messianic just short of messianism, a “messianic without messianism,” as he put it. But that is on the other side.

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*

*

“Where can we live but days?” Philip Larkin wrote (Larkin 27). What else can happen but events? Much recent thinking about politics focuses on the event as the possibility of radical intervention and change. The most developed re-thinking of the politics of the event occurs in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, a text from which we can derive a term that will be notionally important (if again radically de-literalized) when it turns up in Derrida’s parenthetic remark: “the messianic is always revolutionary, it has to be” from Specters of Marx (168). The term of course is “revolution,” which Derrida never defi nes, as far as I know. Badiou defi nes it as “generic politics” (Badiou 340), also parenthetically. Generic politics is “what was called, for a long time, revolutionary politics, and for which another word must be found today” (340). Here’s the context: In collective situations—in which the collective becomes interested in itself—politics (if it exists as generic politics: what was called, for a long time, revolutionary politics, and for which another word must be found today) is also a procedure of fidelity. Its events are the historical caesura in which the void of the social is summoned in default of the State; its operators are variable; its infi nite productions are indiscernible (in particular, they do not coincide with any part nameable according to the State) being nothing more than “changes” of political subjectivity within the situation; and finally its enquiries consist of militant organized activity. (340; emphasis in original) The core premise of Being and Event is that ontology is to be known through the language of mathematics. For Badiou, the ontological is always and everywhere multiple. Everything that is counted as one is in fact a multiple made subject to a commanding higher principle of reduction and enumeration. This does not change its nature, which remains multiple but is an example of its subjection to a logic whereby its presentation as multiple is subordinated to the reductionist representation that Badiou defi nes as the logic of the State, or the law. By the same token, set theory identifies that, within sets of multiples, there persists the void set that does not belong to the set, but is included in it. This helps us to unlock Badiou’s second sentence in the passage quoted: a void is included under the aegis of the law, but is not part of it. This void provides the gap or “default” in the law, wherein the radically disruptive becomes possible. This radical disruption by the apparently new, not from within the State’s logic, yet from within its locus, Badiou understands as the event. The process by which a subject demonstrates fidelity to such an event Badiou calls “intervention” (“I term intervention any procedure by which a multiple is recognized as an event” [202]).

The Future of the Future 35 The subject, whether it is to be conceived as individual or collective, as enduring or ephemeral, emerges as a consequence of the insurgency of the event, through what Badiou calls fidelity to the event. The subject is “solely . . . the local effects of an evental fidelity. . . . A subject is . . . taken up in fidelity to the event” (406; emphasis in original). It is through commitment to action in the event that the subject arises. It makes a new truth from out of and behind the reductive logic of State truth. Badiou gives the following “defi nition of a subject: that which decides an undecidable from the standpoint of an indiscernible. Or, that which forces a veracity, according to the suspense of a truth” (407). The subject arises in those regions of the law to which the law is blind, converting by intervention its aporiae into acts. It turns the blind-spots of State truth into the veracities of radical innovation. The subject is not strictly speaking an agent who determines ahead of time a structured plan that it can implement. Instead, it finds itself to have emerged in conjunction with, or even as part of, the incipient event. The event, then, is experienced as a radical disruption, even though it emerges from an already existing set. As the instantiation of the void, the event is that part of the set which is not recognized as existing. It thus defies the ordering principles of naturalism on which State thinking depends. The event, then, is non-ontological. “It does not exist” (209). Badiou writes: “The paradox of an evental-site is that it can only be recognized on the basis of what it does not present in the situation in which it is presented. Indeed, it is only due to it forming-one from multiples which are inexistent in the situation that a multiple is singular, thus subtracted from the guarantee of the State” (192). What makes something the site of an event, therefore, is the intervention which produces from what doesn’t exist within the set (the void) the forced singularity of the event. This means that the event emerges not only from outside of ontology but also from outside of systems of knowing and naming. “‘The’ term which serves as name for the event is, in itself, anonymous. The event has the nameless as its name” (205). This naming is part of the “interpretative intervention” in which the event is wrestled out of the void by the subject. “By the declaration of the belonging of the event to the situation, [the interpretative intervention] bars the void’s irruption. But this is only in order to force the situation itself to confess its own void, and to thereby let forth, from inconsistent being and the interrupted count, the incandescent non-being of an existence” (183). The event is thus insurgent, radically disruptive, and transformative. Badiou’s thinking of the event is self-consciously and determinedly avantgarde. Indeed, along with perhaps Mario Perniola’s astonishing The SexAppeal of the Inorganic (2000), it is one of the key re-statements of the avant-garde mission after its postmodern deconstruction. “The belief of the intervening avant-garde bears on the event-ness of the event, and it decides the event’s belonging to the situation. ‘Miracle’ names this belief, and so this decision. In particular, the life and death of Christ—the event strictly speaking—cannot be legitimated by the accomplishment of prophecies,

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otherwise the event would not interrupt the law” (Badiou 219; emphasis in original). The life and death of Christ cannot be merely assimilated to the flat trajectory between a prophecy and its fulfillment. To Badiou, the story of Christ is the archetype of how, from within a complex situation, always in excess of recognition or simple comprehension, pivotal developments unfold that contrive modes of subjectivity. These new subjects can become historical actors, who subsequently invent meanings and a project that radically transforms history. The event, whose meaning is at fi rst unrecognizable, even ungraspable, confi rms and motivates these subjects in their ongoing historical trajectory. This reference to Christ foreshadows our discussion of the messianic in Derrida, but what is important to recognize now is that the event Badiou identifies is historical. From beneath the law, from the non-ontological emerges the event-named-nameless the law will not know. The event emerges also by way of a subject whose intervention plays out a fidelity to the event, a subject which is, in fact, defi ned and instantiated by its relationship to the event. Events do not happen, strictly speaking, but are known because they make change—because they are thought of and incite subjectivities. They are historical (Badiou 174). Claude Romano is helpful here in his different but related account of the event. Romano’s account of the event is not a gloss of Badiou’s—or anyone else’s, for that matter. It does develop a distinction which may clarify Badiou’s meaning, however. Romano distinguishes between what he calls “innerworldly facts” (Romano 23) and the event per se. The former arise within a knowable context that produces them and defi nes their horizon, in a stable arrangement that is knowable and which can come to a conclusion. Innerworldly facts happen in our conventional understanding of the word. Events, on the other hand, fundamentally re-make the world, or, to be more accurate, they make worlds. Human subjectivity, which Romano nominates “the advenant” is contrived and oriented in relation to such events. “Pure beginning from nothing, an event, in its an-archic bursting forth, is absolved from all antecedent causality,” he writes (Romano 41). This is not to say that the event does not emerge from what has gone before, but the event is always in excess of what gives rise to it. The event disrupts by exposing the advenant to other-ness in an overwhelming and radically disjunctive re-worlding. Romano writes: When exactly does an event happen? This question does not ask about an event in its factual actualization, but about an event as it occurs on the margin of its actualization, an event in its eventness as impersonal reconfiguration of the world. (46) What makes an event an event is over and above what we would conventionally understand as simply what happens. The event may be tied to things that happen, but this is not what makes it an event, in which subjectivity

The Future of the Future 37 is crystallized and the world re-made, or a new world invented. Romano’s distinction here is crucial. The event is not what happens. It can only be seen retrospectively in what it gives rise to. The event as event then is over and above what happens. In this sense, it lacks ontology. The other things that Badiou always lists with the life and death of Christ as key examples of the event are the revolutions of 1789 and 1917. Badiou’s revolution is the invention by a militant avant-gardism of the new from out of what lies hidden in the penumbra of the law, a new outside of ontology, named only as the hole in naming. This novelty is not fi rst and foremost aesthetic or philosophical novelty, but an historical novelty. This reference to revolution illustrates Badiou’s fundamentally heroic construction of historical time, in which subjects arise to engage with dramatically unfolding and rapidly changing historical circumstances, which they in turn bend to newly formulated purposes. In Badiou, the repeated celebration of a relationship to history that is heroic and interventionist seems not only implicitly to dismiss orthodox postmodern concerns about the severely compromised histories of both revolution and political (and for that matter, aesthetic) avant-gardism more generally. It also drowns out seemingly more fundamental political themes enduringly important in the face of crisis: the commitments to justice and democracy, for example. How effectively does Badiou’s account of the event help us understand climate change? In Badiou, militant subjects reveal—or else, fi nd to have been revealed—the secret nature of established situations in a way that they are able to take advantage of. They turn these sudden disruptions into opportunities for political re-invention. Events subvert State logic, but they do not come from a radically different domain. The climate change event, on the other hand, comes from a region completely alien to even the disruption of the humanized logic of the State. This “region” goes even far beyond the logic of Nature as either opposite, or complimentary, to the Human. It is a Nature re-made by the human, yet remaining fundamentally external to it, or suddenly radically in excess of it, a post-Nature, in short, a logic exterior to the thinking or the activism that either establishes or threatens the State. Badiou’s thinking of the event re-stages a traditional understanding of a human politics played out on human terms, insulated from this kind of radical exteriority. I now want to contrast Badiou’s radical yet somehow traditional modernist commitment to an avant-gardist re-casting of historical time, and a certain construction of revolution, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Derrida’s deconstruction of historical time in which he sees woven a logic of both justice and democracy (and an altogether different construction of revolution). Which time, which talk of revolution for that matter, will best match our present experience of crisis? Derrida’s account of the event emerges through a discussion of Marx and specters. “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism . . .” Marx and Engels wrote famously in the opening to The Communist Manifesto. Our orientation to the event in Derrida is always toward the

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future, the irreducibly futuristic, and there is to that point an echo of Badiou’s avant-gardism, though, as we shall see, with significant differences. The encounter with the specter must itself be an encounter with something coming to us, or coming at us unexpectedly, which is to that extent futuristic, uncanny, disruptive, and shocking. Yet, the specter that comes to us from the future must also be coming from the past. It is the dead re-animated, the departed coming back, the past returning by way of the future. In this sense, the specter disrupts the logic of conventional historical time, being past and future, and in its irresistible arriving, present simultaneously. Derrida encapsulates this disjunction by repeated reference to Hamlet’s statement, “The time is out of joint.” The specter is untimely (Specters 4). It is always a “repetition and [a] fi rst time” (10), and it is this that defi nitively links the ghost with the event. The event emerges as the reiteration of things past, but always also as the shock of the new. As both inevitably past and always future, the event cannot be reduced to the present, presence in general, or the knowable. Derrida writes of the specter-event as: this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one [which] no longer belongs to knowledge . . . an unnameable or almost unnameable thing: something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some thing, “this thing,” but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us . . . [which] comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy. (6) The specter-event always remains in excess of us. Even when it happens, something disjunctive always persists, something other and unknowable. It’s possible that an event could have happened otherwise, so the actual event itself, what actually happens, bears with it the long train or trace of all that does not happen, all the event-ness that remains in excess of the actual, all that is virtual in the actual. Derrida describes how the specific and knowable, the One, “never fails to happen . . . but it happens only in the trace of what would happen otherwise and thus also happens, like a specter, in that which does not happen” (28–29). In the event, then, there persists the trace of that which cannot be simply reduced to what has happened. Yet this excess over what happens is more than it is in Badiou and Romano, for whom the excess of the event is merely its incommensurability in relation to what has gone before (and the holes it reveals in established systems of knowledge and nomination). This excess is part of the event-ness of the event. In Derrida, the event remains futuristic and the excess never lessens. In the fi rst instance, this open-ness to what is irreducible is an open-ness to other-ness in general, in Derrida’s particular adaptation of Levinas (something shared by Romano though not Badiou).

The Future of the Future 39 It is part of deconstruction’s constitutional commitment “to what must . . . be rendered to the singularity of the other, to his or her absolute precedence or to his or her absolute previousness, to the heterogeneity of a pre-, which, to be sure, means what comes before me, before any present, thus before any past present, but also what, for that very reason, comes from the future or as future: as the very coming of the event” (28). The open-ness to the past-future/future-past event is an open-ness to the other that Derrida “connects” with justice (27), a justice that is not simply restitution of what was taken away, the restoration of what was lost, the re-balancing of the imbalanced, but “a justice beyond right . . . a [giving] beyond the due” (28). What, then, in the event, is in excess of itself is the excess of other-ness over the same, of an inexhaustible justice over acts of law or right. It is the very excess that is deconstruction itself, as Derrida stated in his (in)famous, enduringly controversial, and influential paper on the relationship between violence and law, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority” (1990), where he wrote, “deconstruction is justice” (“Force of Law” 243). Yet, the connection does not end there: we have seen how the excess of event-ness over the event is the excess of other-ness over the same, of justice over right, of deconstruction over self-identity, but it is also tellingly the excess of democracy over the democratic, of the incitement of democracy over any realized historical version of it. This idea of democracy must itself be irreducibly futuristic; it is, in Derridean usage, démocratie-à-venir, the future democracy or democracy-to-come, the democracy always still to come, toward which our democracies, our democratism, must always tend, but without ever reaching. It is here that Derrida most explicitly announces the further connection with what itself remains further, the messianic, but a messianic without dogma of a messiah who is to be awaited, but who will never come, because his coming, the exactness of what happens, would reduce and freeze its promise, turning its open-ness into orthodoxy. Deconstruction, the specter-event, open-ness, other-ness, justice, democracyto-come are all linked together in their linking to this messianic without messianism: [W]hat remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice—which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights—and an idea of democracy—which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today. (59) The emancipatory promise of the messianic without messianism is linked by Derrida in turn to a non-dogmatic Marxism, the Marxism of the spirit of Marx, the possibility of whose return after his re-announced death at the

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time of the fall of the Berlin Wall was the pretext for Specters of Marx, in the fi rst place. It is at the culmination of this sequence that Derrida springs on us in parentheses the remark “the messianic is always revolutionary, it has to be” (168). We recall that Badiou had said that the life and death of Christ was “the event strictly speaking,” the event which elsewhere he connects with the revolutions of 1789 and 1917. What is the difference between these two versions of the Judeo-Christian event? Well, to be banal, Badiou’s event is historical. Even in its non-ontological non-happening, it can be referred back upon, as with Romano, as the aporetic transition of change. It does not happen, but like the revolutions of 1789 and 1917, it turns out to have happened, even if its results and resonances remain somehow still to come. Derrida’s event, on the other hand, remains excessive. It happens, it has to happen, but even when it happens, it does not happen, or in other words, its event-ness always remains in excess of what actually happens. But this is different from the event-ness of the event in Romano, for whom the status of event is what exceeds what happens and thus only arises later or in retrospect. In Derrida, something about the event remains forever withheld. Something in the event always remains elusive and irreducibly futuristic. Here is the key distinction between Badiou’s avant-gardism and Derrida’s futurism. Badiou’s avant-garde militancy is a disruption driven from out of the set of existing things into the future. It makes out of nothing a radical intervention into what will have happened, giving rise to what we will have become. Derrida, on the other hand, sees the future, present, and past as always co-mingled, not in a complex causative or developmental sequence, but in a radical indistinction. Derrida links this deconstruction of the opposition between actuality and virtuality with the role of the mediated in contemporary politics, thus giving it a “real” reference, but this is only a minor point. What is crucial is that what makes the event is that there is something irreducibly unfi nished about it. It arises only ever in reference to something that exceeds and thus defies it. Put simply, what makes the event possible is the future, the future-ness of the future, which always accompanies the event even when it is present or past. This future-ness is what makes the event possible, but it is also what threatens to ruin it, because any particular event can never fulfi ll the promise of the future; it can never fulfi ll the future which it, of course, can never yet be. What Derrida calls the “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present” (Specters xix) means that the moment is both incipient and withheld, even as history. We can fold these insights back onto the other “connections” Derrida has made: dogmas of messianism are made possible by the open-ness of the messianic impulse, but fail it, because they rigidify its open-ness into repressive orthodoxies. Instances of instituted democracy are only possible because of “democracy-to-come” but they also fail it, or it undermines them because it will always exceed and elude them.

The Future of the Future 41 This very problem is played out in the complex and fraught relationship in Derrida between democracy and revolution. At fi rst glance, Derrida’s take on democracy is an optimistic one, but I want to argue that it is far more complex than that, and we can see this most tellingly in its surprising link to revolution. There is a lot of loose talk about revolution these days, of course. I’m thinking of Badiou himself but also of Slavoj Žižek, for whom the revolutionary breakthrough redeems the suffering of the present “as if by Grace,” because “the future happiness and freedom” it promises already infuse it (Žižek, “Plea” 559). This talk of grace (whose?) and freedom and happiness (whose? public or private? and what would public happiness be?) seems sentimental to me, a discourse in which the dangerous is disguised by enthusiasm, a bad combination you can also see in play in Žižek’s recent commentary on Robespierre (“Robespierre”). To pursue a more complex take on revolution, we must return to one other point Derrida makes about the event. The event is an opening to other-ness but there is no guarantee that what the event is open on is benign. Other-ness is itself easily sentimentalized, especially in the reams of postLevinasian work in which other-ness is merely embraced rhetorically, as hope or possibility or sociality in general, or is supplied with a content only in the form of a silenced or victimized population already approved by radical progressivism, an open-ness which reassures us about open-ness. Even repeated announcements that open-ness involves risk allow for the romanticization of, and enthusiasm for, a very abstract, posturing, or merely aesthetic risk more than the real and ready engagement with unpalatable political danger. In short, there is no reason to believe that what open-ness is open on is good. On the contrary, Derrida argues, justice only becomes possible at the risk of exposure to radical evil: “Beyond right, and still more beyond juridicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism, does not justice as relation to the other suppose on the contrary the irreducible excess of a disjointure or an anachrony, some Un-Fuge, some ‘out of joint’ dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking the evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice or to render justice to the other as other?” (Specters 27; emphasis in original). In other words, it is by way of exposure to “evil” that justice becomes possible. Or again: “To be ‘out of joint,’ whether it be present Being or present time, can do harm and do evil, it is no doubt the very possibility of evil. But without the opening of this possibility, there remains, perhaps, beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst” (29). The only way we can protect ourselves from the danger of the worst is by risking evil. It is important to map this insight too back onto the chain of associations that connects the specter, the event, other-ness, justice, democracy-to-come, and the messianic without messianism in Derrida. Neither the systematic structure of political ideology, nor a compounding set of necessary identities, this list of connections builds by way of incremental re-defi nitions an

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extension of the range of political values, sometimes stretching a meaning, sometimes accommodating a possibility. In this way, it enacts the open-ness it bespeaks, arriving, as we have seen, at the term “revolution,” which it includes, I want to argue, as a sign of its necessary radical distrust of itself. The open-ness of the list is the enactment of its risk, its risk of approximation, of rhetoric, and in the end, of evil. Democracy-to-come is thus itself our orientation to justice and evil at one and the same time, an attempt to save one at the risk or expense of the other. It is no wonder that after the twentieth century, the name for this justice/evil nexus remains “revolution.” Democracy here connects implicitly with the revolutionary impulse. Democracy and revolution are in an aporetic relationship with one another, provoking and requiring while menacing and threatening one another. Democracy will not flourish without acknowledging, perhaps even repeating, its orientation to revolution, even an undefi nable revolution, while at the same time, revolution always proposes to it one of its greatest threats. Through the twentieth century, change was understood primarily in relation to war, reform, and revolution. Revolution even in its post-colonial forms has left a severely compromised legacy, and even the term reform, appropriated by radical neo-liberalism to glorify the determined drivingdown of working conditions in industries across the globalizing world, now has a hollow sound. We are fundamentally ambivalent about change, especially when change is now most commonly named in public discourse in the phrase “climate change.” Far from being the opening horizon of human renewal, change might be something we simply don’t want. The climate change future is the coming of a specter-event, one which disrupts any post-Cartesian logic of human competence. The defi nitively modern account derives human agency from a confidently expanding, even completable human knowledge built on the alienation of the human from the natural. Human history becomes possible in this logic as human self-making in a context increasingly knowable and controllable. The Cartesian is the model of the human relation with nature with which Badiou connects, albeit radically in the form of an avant-gardist process of repeated historical disruption and shock. He comments in an interview with Oliver Feltham: “I am Cartesian: man is the master and possessor of nature” (Feltham 139). The Badiouian event is a militant speculation, a startling gesture only recognized later to be what has happened, but whatever has happened has always arisen from the void in the already existing human situation as the result of albeit un-self-conscious human acts. From the human past, the human future springs, shocking and disruptive, yet made. The spectral event is different. The specter always bears with it some irreducible other-ness that is beyond knowledge. The other-ness that confronts us in the climate change crisis is not simply the return of “nature” from before human intervention. It is the result of a nature fundamentally changed by the human, a post-Nature. Although this post-Nature can never be disentangled from the human that has processed it, it will remain

The Future of the Future 43 unpredictable, always surprising and disjunctive. The human uncertainty about the climate change crisis and how to deal with it is not, then, simply the result of our not having enough information, or not knowing what exactly to do. Our confusion is part of the complication the crisis itself brings to our resolute systems of human knowledge and agency. We will make our future in relation to the limits we have ourselves made, the past we have engineered not intentionally but unwittingly, the past now coming back to us from the future. Will we still understand it as history? It will exceed us, even though it is what we have wrought. The event cannot not overwhelm us, and we must make our future in relation to this overwhelming. It will constitute what we become, while we attempt to “deal with it,” whatever that will mean. In sum, the climate change event comes to us always as if it is and remains beyond what we can know and do. This is the scale of the challenge it proposes to us: defying the logic of history, the independence of Nature, and even the most de-subjectivized human action. Yet we have no choice but to act, and politically. What will this politics be? Perhaps our politics will revolve around what Agamben has defi ned as “the state of exception,” in which sub-populations will be deemed unworthy of being saved, as they almost already were in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as they almost already are now in the cold shoulder the world turns to pleas from nations threatened by rising sea-waters. Will it be a democratic future? My argument about democracy and revolution is not a simple advocacy of revolution, and it is also a radical distrust of democracy (a term itself easily sentimentalized). I do believe that democracy is a revolutionary concept, a fact we have forgotten, in our horror at what revolutions have become and our cynicism about democracy (a cynicism which can only be the result, I believe, of the extravagant optimism that only something like a revolutionary impulse can have incited in us). My point is that democracy emerges in relation to something that exceeds it and that defies it and that it yearns to fulfill, but cannot—what Derrida calls democracyto-come. This something is by its nature violating of time, and this violation makes possible within itself, violence. The climate change crisis is a political crisis, one in which democracy is being re-invented, as it must be in any crisis as the simultaneous risk of both justice and evil, a justice that can be snatched from the jaws of evil, and which is to that extent alienated from evil. Yet conceptions of justice can themselves give rise to murder, and to that extent our confrontation with democracy-to-come is the risk also of an evil justice. Crisis is both danger and opportunity, and the crises that loom at us now are no different. Their danger comes from the way they open us to an open-ness that is unknowable and fraught with the possibility of incalculable loss, albeit unevenly distributed. These losses may equally be the result of actions undertaken to deal with the crisis, or of failures to act. They may be done in service of an idea of global justice, or in repudiation of it. They may be the result of a new international democratic

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engagement, or imposed upon it, or indeed they may be the result of an imposed democracy, injustice justified by a larger unrealized and unrealizable justice-to-come. The politics of the future, in short, will bear with it excesses to knowledge, action, democracy, and justice that will remain continually confronting, yet with which there will be no choice but to engage. It will be a fundamental re-making of one kind or another, of either an open-denationalization of problem solving or of the hardened authoritarianism of increasingly defensive and isolated states with the goal of protecting the future of their peoples. Both possibilities—the de-constitution of states or their re-constitution along populist-authoritarian lines—open on to the horizon of political possibility, the potential for the total re-making of political order that Hannah Arendt saw as the defi nition of revolution (Arendt 18–19). I am reluctant to sign up to the Agambenian take on the future political risk of climate change, because like so much political critique after modernism, it understands power as something alien, not possessed, toward which we are passive. I would argue for a positive construction of power, and I don’t mean this in the Foucauldian sense, that power constitutes more than it represses. I mean that our orientation toward democracy must be positive and active. Yet it must be so in consciousness of the doubleness of democracy as both the possibility of what Derrida calls “justice” and of violence, even of their obscure combination, and this is democracy’s complex revolutionary inheritance. We know what the past violences of democracy have been because we heroize them. What can the future violences of democracy be? The de-realization of the crimes done in its name, from New World conquest to Middle Eastern rationalizations of widespread human rights abuse, serve as examples. We know democracy will become an alibi for the arrogation of world leadership to certain societies, because that happened a long time ago. The point is that democracy may give rise to types of violence that it can routinely dissimulate because of its agenda of the ever-extending enlargement of human possibility, or even because of its apparent incontestability. Derrida’s account of the spectral event is double, and it is in this doubleness that its value is most clearly apparent. On the one hand, it allows us a way of thinking of the radically disruptive quality of the event that emerges from outside of the logic of post-Cartesian humanized time, from what we have called the exteriority of post-Nature. On the other hand, it can also give such an event a political value, albeit an ambiguous one, one that sees the possibilities of democracy and the risks of revolution entangled with one another, a future of crisis, but one from which political hope might be recovered. Our orientation toward the climate change event—whether that event be apocalypse or redemption—is both a fear of the overwhelming event and a faith in democracy-to-come. Our response to the event must necessarily expose us to the opportunities of democracy, the possibility (again!) of its renewal, but what makes this possibility possible is revolution, the horizon

The Future of the Future 45 of the re-constitution of political order from scratch, a re-worlding as defi ned by Romano. The idea of revolution is both the opportunity and the threat democracy brings. I am not recommending this to you as something in which to intervene, but to enlist your enthusiasm. Since the 1960s, political activists have encouraged us to rise to politics, as if politics were simply a choice, an act of personal responsibility and the combating of apathy and not what we are, as if it could simply be one denomination of the freely chosen moral commitment of individuals; but this makes politics merely affective moralistic self-dramatization, or in Badiou’s hands, a dream of insurgent street-style militancy. It is not a question even of what politics I would prefer, but of the politics that we are, that is, in our dubious future, at one and the same time, always to come and always already here now.

WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. London: Penguin, 2006. Print. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005. Print. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements. New York: Harper, 1961. Print. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts : El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. New York: Verso, 2001. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Morning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. . “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority” Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. 228–98. Print. Feltham, Oliver. Alain Badiou: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2008. Print. Kehoe, Alice Beck. The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1989. Print. Larkin, Philip. The Whitsun Weddings. London: Faber, 1964. Print. Romano, Claude. Event and World. Trans. Shane Mackinlay. New York: Fordham UP, 2009. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. “A Plea for Leninist Intolerance.” Critical Inquiry. 28.2 (2000): 542–66. Print. . “Robespierre or the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror.” Lacan.com. 2006. Web. 2 April 2010.

3

The Incredible Shrinking Human Charlie Gere

In 1966, Stewart Brand, then best known as an acid pioneer associated with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and an artist working with the avant-garde multimedia art collective USCO (“Company of Us”), had an epiphany. Having dropped LSD on a roof in San Francisco he looked down from “300 feet and 200 micrograms up” and realized that from there he could see that the earth was curved. “I had the idea that the higher you go the more you can see the earth as round.” Brand realized that despite ten years of space exploration there had as yet been no public photographs of the whole earth. His first reaction was to print up a batch of badges with the legend, “Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?” (Turner 69). In 1968, the crew of Apollo 8, orbiting the Moon, took the famous “earthrise” picture (Figure 3.1), and, in 1972, the Apollo 17 mission produced the equally well-known “blue marble” picture of the whole earth (Figure 3.2). Brand’s next, more far-reaching response was to found a combination of magazine and mail order catalog, known as the Whole Earth Catalog, promising “access to tools” to help produce alternative forms of being and living (Turner 71). The catalog was crucial for the extraordinary coming together of acid and silicon in Northern California that would result in the personal computer revolution and lay the ground for our current hypertechnologized society. In 2005, nearly 40 years after Brand had his LSD epiphany, Google released Google Earth, a program enabling the user to view satellite images of almost any part of the earth. The default view when the program is started shows an image of the earth suspended in space that is similar to the photograph of the earth taken from the moon used by Brand for the cover of the Whole Earth Catalogs. The pictures of the whole earth taken up by Brand are credited with helping to kick-start the ecological movement, by presenting an irresistible image of Earth as a fragile, beautiful planet. The 1969 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog starts with the words, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” It is this assumption of God-like mastery that I wish to address in this chapter, particularly in relation to a perception of our environment considered as a globe over which we have control and which is our responsibility. I wish instead to propose

The Incredible Shrinking Human 47

Figure 3.1 The “earthrise” photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 8 on 24 December 1968. NASA.

that we acknowledge that we are an integral part of the environment and that images of the globe as evinced by Brand’s “whole earth” image are not just misleading, but actually a part of the very problem they are intended to address. Against the idea of an earth shrunk to a size that we can see as a whole, we should be more realistic about our own actual shrunken status, power, and importance. In his essay “Globes and Spheres” (2000), Tim Ingold analyses the significance of the image of the globe, particularly as it is used as a characterization of the environment, as in phrases such as “global environmental change” (209). He fi nds such usage paradoxical, since an environment is “that which surrounds, and can exist, therefore, only in relation to what is surrounded” (209). He points out that it would be fairer to propose that the figure of the globe suggests that it is we who have surrounded the

48 Charlie Gere

Figure 3.2 The “blue marble” photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on 7 December 1972. NASA.

environment, rather than vice versa, and that the “global outlook” ceases to position the environment as the ambience of our dwelling, and even expels us from it altogether (209). He goes so far as to claim that “the notion of the global environment, far from marking humanity’s reintegration into the world, signals the culmination of a process of separation” (209). Ingold also points out that we are taught what the earth looks like from a point of view that only a few of us have ever seen in reality, those few being of course astronauts who have viewed the earth from outer space. Later in the essay he suggests that, once the world is conceived as a globe, it can become an object of appropriation for a collective humanity. In this discourse, we do not belong to the world, neither partaking of its essence nor resonating to its cycles and rhythms. Rather, since our very humanity is seen to

The Incredible Shrinking Human 49 consist, in essence, in the transcendence of physical nature, it is the world that belongs to us. Images of property abound. We have inherited the earth, it is said, and so are responsible for handing it on to our successors in reasonably good condition. But, like the prodigal heir, we are inclined to squander this precious inheritance for the sake of immediate gratification. Much of the current concern with the global environment has to do with how we are to “manage” this planet of ours. (214) Accompanying this concept of “managing the Earth” is a discourse of intervention, implying that humans can not only choose whether or not to intervene, but also that they may do so from a kind of platform above the world, “as though they could live on or off the environment, but are not destined to live within it” (215; emphases in original). Ingold points to the title of the book Man’s Role in the Changing Face of the Earth, edited by William L. Thomas and published in 1956. He points out that the title presents the Earth as a face that is presented to humanity (215). If it is, then it is arguably a female face, and as such it might well be that of James Lovelock’s “Gaia.” The name Gaia was suggested to Lovelock by his neighbor William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies. Despite its New Age co-option, Gaia, as Golding would have well known, was not benign at all in Greek myth. Despite this, and perhaps indicating an ignorance of Greek myth, Gaia has been co-opted as a kind of secular Madonna, an idealized figure of feminine, maternal care and nurture, which is being abused by masculine science and exploitation. What Ingold does not discuss, but would add a further dimension to his argument, is the fact that once the Earth becomes a globe it also becomes susceptible to being shrunk, at least as far as its representations are concerned. There is indeed a history of the representation of the Earth as a shrinking globe. To some degree this is literally prefigured in the production of globes as objects in the seventeenth century and after. David Harvey traces the development of this kind of representation from the Renaissance onwards as a transformation of time and space in the service of power. He claims that, the Renaissance revolution in concepts of space and time laid the conceptual foundations in many respects for the Enlightenment project. What many now look upon as the fi rst great surge of modernist thinking, took the domination of nature as a necessary condition of human emancipation. Since space is a “fact” of nature, this meant that the conquest and rational ordering of space became an integral part of the modernizing project. The difference this time was that space and time had to be organized not to reflect the glory of God, but to celebrate and facilitate the liberation of “Man” as a free and active individual, endowed with consciousness and will. (239)

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Among the illustrations in the chapter in question are two diagrams, one from a well-known text book on globalization showing “the shrinking map of the world through innovations in transport which ‘annihilate space through time,’” and another from a 1987 advertisement for the telecommunications company Alcatel, with the strapline “this is the year the world got smaller” (241–42). In each case, the image consists of a series of representations of the globe getting smaller down the page. This idea of the globe diminishing in size does have a more complex implication than may at fi rst be obvious. It implies that we also shrink with the globe as it gets smaller. This can be seen in one of the original representations of a shrinking globe, the book Cosmic View (1957), written by Kees Boeke, a Dutch Quaker and educationalist, which starts with an image of a girl sitting holding a cat, followed by a series of images of the same image at ever greater scale, pulling out from Earth into space, and then back down to the molecular level. Cosmic View inspired the 1968 Film Board of Canada film Cosmic Zoom and Charles and Ray Eames’ 1972 film Powers of Ten. Unlike those images of a shrinking globe intended to portray a greater degree of power, control, and connectivity, these representations involve a humility in which the human also shrinks in importance in relation to the universe. They are also reminders that we are ineluctably part of the earth, not somehow above it, looking down, as if from a God’s eye view. Though Martin Heidegger was careful to state that he was not referring to a picture of the world, but the world as picture, in his essay “The Age of the World Picture” (2002 [1938]) (67), nevertheless it would seem obvious that making pictures of the earth is only possible in a time when the world is conceived as a picture, with the concomitant emergence of the human as subject, with the world standing at its disposal (69). Following Heidegger, in his book The Creation of the World, Or, Globalization (2007 [2002]), Jean-Luc Nancy asks, “How are we to conceive of, precisely, a world where we fi nd only a globe, an astral universe, or an earth without sky?” (47). He suggests that, A world “viewed,” a represented world, is a world dependent on the gaze of a subject of the world. . . . A subject of the world . . . cannot itself be in the world. . . . Even without a religious representation, such a subject, implicit or explicit, perpetuates the position of the creating, organizing, and addressing God . . . of the world. (40) Yet, as Nancy points out, even within the most classical representations of God, and especially within the “great transcendent accounts of rationalism” (41), such as those of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, or Leibniz, which are nothing else than accounts of the immanent relation of the world to itself, ontotheology is deconstructed from within. For Nancy, a “world is never in front of me, or else it is not my world. . . . As soon as a world appears to me as a world, I already share something of it: I share part of

The Incredible Shrinking Human 51 its inner resonances” (42). He continues, “It follows from this that a world is a world only for those who inhabit it” (42). Thus “the meaning of the world does not occur as a reference to something external to the world” (43) and the experience of the world consists in traversing “from one edge to the other, and nothing else” (43). There can no longer be an observer of the world, a point Heidegger realized in exposing the end of the age of the world picture (40). “A world outside of representation is above all a world without God capable of being the subject of its representation” (Nancy 43). Nancy suggests that the world is thus neither “the representation of a universe (cosmos) nor that of a here below (a humiliated world, if not condemned by Christianity), but the excess . . . of a stance by which the world stands by itself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself, relates to itself without referring to any given principle or to any determined end” (47). He compares this to “the rose grows without reason” of the mystic Angelus Silesius. Thus, following Nancy, rather than “gaia” a better metaphor for our environmental condition might be “khora,” as discussed by Derrida in his essay of the same name. Derrida took the concept of “khora” from Plato’s Timaeus to describe “the spacing that is the condition for everything to take place, for everything to be inscribed” (Chora 3). Elsewhere he suggests that it “is a matrix, womb, or receptacle that is never offered up in the form of presence, or in the presence of form” (Dissemination 160). The conjunction of “matrix” and “womb” is a reminder of the derivation of the former from “mater,” meaning “mother.” In “Faith and Knowledge” (2002 [1996]) Derrida describes “khora” as “nothing (no being, nothing present)” (59). It is “desert in the desert” (59), “there where one neither can nor should see coming what ought or could—perhaps—be yet to come. What is still left to come” (47). This desert is the “most anarchic and anarchivable place possible” and “makes possible, opens, hollows, infi nitizes the other. Ecstasy or existence of the most extreme abstraction” (55). The “abstraction” or “desertification” of this “desert without pathway and without interior” “can . . . open the way to everything from which it withdraws” and “render possible precisely what it appears to threaten” (47). Derrida connects the desert not just to “khora,” but also to his conception of the “messianic, or messianicity without messianism,” meaning “the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration. The coming of the other can only emerge as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming, when the other and death—and radical evil—can come as a surprise at any moment” (56). Derrida describes Plato’s understanding of “khora” as an “abyssal chasm” or “mise en abyme,” “the opening of a place ‘in’ which everything would, at the same time, come to take place and be refl ected” (On the Name 104; emphasis in original). Derrida warns against thinking of “khora” as emptiness, and above all to avoid “hurling into it the anthropomorphic form and the pathos of fright. Not in order to

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install in its place a security of foundation, the ‘exact counterpart of what Gaia represents for any creature, since her appearance, at the origin of the world: a stable foundation, sure for all eternity, opposed to the gaping and bottomless opening of Chaos’” (On the Name, 103; Detienne and Vernant, Les ruses 66). Much is made in the discourse around environmental crisis about the “planet” and the need to save it. In literal terms, the planet is fi ne, and will probably continue to be so, until the death of the sun, some four billion years from now. What is at stake instead is the fate of life, of organic rather than inorganic beings. Just as human beings are woven into the texture of a planet they often imagine themselves to have subordinated to their own mastery, so too are they part of—rather than, as has often been proposed, uniquely distinct from—the organic diversity of that planet. The best explanation so far for the development of life on the planet—and the best case for the relatedness of humans and other organic beings—is of course Charles Darwin’s. It is plausible to suggest that Darwin’s ideas and those of Derrida are far closer than might at fi rst be obvious. In his essay “Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida” (2003), Colin Nazhone Milburn describes “the innumerable possibilities of variation” that “produce an infi nite field of organic difference, a spectrum that Darwin cites as evidence for evolution: ‘Certainly no clear line of demarcation has as yet been drawn between species and sub-species . . . or, again, between sub-species and well-marked varieties, or between lesser varieties and individual differences. These differences blend into each other in an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage’” (Milburn 609; Darwin 44). Milburn continues that “adherence to the fi xity, the immutability, or the natural essence of species is challenged by the variety and dispersion at play in the Darwinian world. Individual diversity and evolution through natural selection necessarily put essentialist thinking into question, for Darwin destabilizes the concepts of species and type—and in so doing also challenges the ontotheology supporting these concepts” (609). Milburn explicitly suggests that “Darwinian nature operates as différance as such, what Derrida describes as ‘the production of differing/deferring’. . . . Darwin strikes a blow to Western metaphysics—a harbinger to Derrida’s monstrous ‘event’” (610). Milburn argues that “in The Origin of Species, Darwin displays monsters as startling deviations from type proving the instability of species boundaries, since ‘monstrosities cannot be separated by any clear line of distinction from mere variations.’ Monsters appear within a single generation as notably different from their kin, but once stabilized in the breeding population of organisms, ‘monstrosities . . . graduate into varieties’” (Milburn 606; Darwin 9, 38). He further suggests that “monsters disrupt totalizing conceptions of nature and destroy taxonomic logics, at once defi ning and challenging the limits of the natural” (604). He quotes Derrida to the effect that “a monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name . . .

The Incredible Shrinking Human 53 it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure” (Milburn 605; Derrida, “Passages” 386). Thus only after the event, in a process of belated recognition, nachträglich or après coup, will we know what something is. (Cognition, knowing, is always perhaps recognition, and as such bound up with repetition.) In his conclusion to The Origin of Species, Darwin writes: Systematists will be able to pursue their labours as at present; but they will not be incessantly haunted by the shadowy doubt whether this or that form be in essence a species. . . . In short, we will have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species. (391–92) Derrida speaks of “the monstrous arrivant,” which is “absolutely foreign or strange,” but must be welcomed and accorded hospitality in order to be open to the future in the form of that which arrives (l’à venir/l’avenir) beyond what we can know, expect, or program for. “A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow” (“Passages” 387). Milburn suggests that, Not only does the metaphor of the Derridean monster arise from a discourse authorized by Darwin, but the Darwinian attack on essentialism and humanism forms the preface to Derrida’s terrifying project. . . . Together, Darwin and Derrida enact a critique of artifactual constructions of nature that disrespects boundaries and emphasizes the deviances, the perversions, the mutations, and the monstrosities of the world. (604) That molecular biology and Derridean deconstruction can be connected is perhaps surprising, but not as unreasonable as it might appear. Derrida alludes to the connection between writing and molecular biology in Of Grammatology (1976 [1967]), describing the “contemporary biologist” who “speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell” (9). Christopher Johnson points out that Derrida’s fi rst publications coincided with the revolution in biological science caused by the discovery of DNA. In France in the mid 1960s, the French biologists Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and André Lwoff won the Nobel Prize for their research into the role of RNA in genetic transmission. Jacob and Monod both published books in 1970 that, in different ways, resonate with Derrida’s conception of writing in terms of biology. Monod’s book Le hasard at la necessité emphasizes the role

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of chance in the form of random mutation in the emergence of life while Jacob’s book La Logique du Vivant compares the action of genes to scripts and alphabets (Johnson 165–66). In his book on Derrida and Wittgenstein, Henry Staten declares that “my own view is that deconstruction and everything else are ultimately contained by Darwin’s tale” (xvi). Similarly, Ellen Spolsky claims that: nothing could be more adaptationist, more Darwinian than deconstruction and post-structuralism, since both understand structuration—the production of structures (and this is the same thing as the production of theories of structures ad infi nitum)—as an activity that happens within and in response to a specific environment. It is an activity that is always already designed for cultural use but also always ready to be reused or redesigned as needed. It is important, however, to emphasize here that this is not a Panglossian vision in which satisfaction is always available. In fact the opposite is more likely true. Since the cultural/ biological nexus is always in motion, it never exactly fits. It is always on a journey between novelty and obsolescence. The motto of this world is certainly not “whatever is, is right” but more accurately, “whatever fits well enough will do for now.” The categories of the world, and the structures of categories, remain the same or revise themselves depending on their interrelation with other categories in their environments, but only slowly. There are no absolute unchanging categories or structures. Like the reciprocal mutations between parasites and hosts, recategorization is constantly in process. . . . The variations and revisions for both Darwin and post structuralists are neither divinely nor benignly directed. (56–57) Christopher Johnson suggests that Derrida’s theory, especially as it relates to questions of the biological sciences, can be summarized as follows: that there is “a certain infi nity” that is a precondition of the system, though it is neither “before” the system, nor, in metaphysical or theological terms, transcendent, and might, instead be thought of as “something like the total ecology, the total context . . . that which . . . always exceeds the determination of its frontiers.” This infi nity is only presentable through the “narrow, fi nite window of determination,” which requires a “minimal departure” from infi nity, “a minimal difference, that constitutes the location, the actualization of the infi nite within the fi nite.” But “determination is not predetermination” (189). Johnson continues: Though structure, stricture, and coding are the necessary conditions of the system and contain its tendency to exponential “demesure,” they are not the sufficient conditions for its persistence or survival. If determination were simply the intentioned appropriation and containment of the infi nite, the pre-established harmony of sense

The Incredible Shrinking Human 55 (meaning, direction, telos), then the system would become paralysed in a circular repetition of the same, which is death. On the contrary, determination, as Derrida sees it, is a blind precipitation towards sense, through which becoming is, so to speak, stamped with the authority of being only after the event (après coup, nachträglich). Furthermore, the undecidability of the inaugural instance, the danger or violence of such precipitation or descent is not abolished in one sweep. The inaugural is also percurrent, chance inhabits necessity (in this connection, Derrida frequently quotes Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dès n’abolira le hazard”). The reappropriation or containment (the reproduction) of the inaugural difference can never be absolute, and the closure of the system is only possible through its continued (repeated) opening. It is not a question of standing or falling, but continuously standing and falling, walking and limping. . . . The system works because it does not work. . . . The element of play or non-fi nalization in the system is the condition of its survival; given the openness of the system to environmental change, to the unanticipated and incalculable intrusion of the event, it offers the possibility of new structures, in short, of evolution. (Johnson 189–90; emphases in original). The Darwino-Derridean world is a world of singular others. As soon as one enters into a relation with the other, one is obliged to sacrifice all the “infi nite number” of others, the other others, to whom one should be bound by the same responsibility. In The Gift of Death (1995 [1992]), Derrida discusses the episode in the Old Testament in which God demands that Abraham sacrifi ce his beloved son Isaac, which is also the subject of Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling (1843). Key for Kierkegaard and Derrida is that Abraham keeps this demand a secret from Isaac and his family, thus transgressing the ethical order. In not revealing God’s demand and his decision to obey it, Abraham “assumes the responsibility that consists in always being alone, entrenched in one’s own singularity at the moment of decision. Just as no one can die in my place, no one can make a decision, what we call ‘a decision,’ in my place” (Derrida, Gift 60). To speak would be to lose this absolute singularity and by extension liberty and responsibility. This goes against the grain of common sense thinking as well as philosophical understanding, in which responsibility would lie precisely in “accounting for one’s words and actions in front of others, of justifying and owning up to them,” thus “involving oneself suffi ciently in the generality to justify oneself, to give an account of one’s decision and to answer for one’s actions” (60–61). But, according to Derrida, for Kierkegaard, Abraham teaches us that to speak and justify oneself according to the “generality of ethics” in this manner would be irresponsible, in that it involves dissolving one’s “singularity in the medium of the concept’ (61). Ethics,

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in that it trembles between absolute singularity on the one hand and generality on the other, is therefore aporetic. The aporia is that, if one tries to fulfill one’s absolute duty to God out of duty, in the sense of a generality called “duty” that can be “mediated and communicated” (63), then one is not fulfilling one’s relation to God. Derrida argues that, against Kant, Kierkegaard regards acting out of duty, “in the universalizable sense of the law,” as a dereliction of absolute duty (63). From this, Kierkegaard shows the necessity of Christ’s injunction, quoted in Luke 14:26, for his disciples to hate their mothers and fathers, wives and children, brothers and sisters, and even their own lives (64). To hate or sacrifice what one already hates is no sacrifice: only by hating and sacrificing what one loves can one perform one’s absolute duty to God, which presumes “that one denounce, refute and transcend, at the same time, all duty, all responsibility, and every human law” (66) in the name of an absolute duty, which is here “none other than the name of God as completely other, the nameless name of God as other to which I am bound by an absolute, unconditional obligation, by an incomparable, nonnegotiable duty” (67). But, Derrida points out, if “God is completely other, the figure or name of the wholly other, then every other (one) is every bit other. Tout autre est tout autre. . . . God, as the wholly other, is to be found everywhere there is something of the wholly other. And since each of us, everyone else, each other is infi nitely other in its absolute singularity, inaccessible, solitary, transcendent, nonmanifest, originarily nonpresent to my ego . . . then what can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation to every (one) as every (bit) other [tout autre est tout autre], in particular my relation to my neighbor or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent as Jahweh” (77–78; emphasis in original). Thus the sacrifice of Isaac “is shown to possess the very structure of what occurs every day. Through its paradox it speaks of the responsibility required at every moment for every man and every woman” (78). Derrida even asks, “how would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention other people?” (71). In “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (2001), Derrida writes of his experience of his cat (the same cat as in The Gift of Death?) embarrassing and shaming him by gazing at his nakedness. In this essay, Derrida is at pains to point out that the cat that looks at him naked is “a real cat . . . a little cat.” It is not the figure of a cat that responds to him, and it does so not “as the exemplar of a species called cat, even less of an animal genus or realm” (377). Before it is even identified as either a male or female cat, Derrida sees it “as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, enters this space where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized” (378).

The Incredible Shrinking Human 57 The “bottomless gaze” of this unique, irreplaceable cat, demonstrates “quite simply the naked truth of every gaze, given that that truth allows me to see and be seen through the eyes of the other, in the seeing and not just seen eyes of the other” (380). “The gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself” (381). Against the long tradition of thinking, from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Descartes to Kant to Levinas and to Lacan, that would distinguish Man from Animal on the grounds that animals do not have speech or reason, Derrida follows Hume in asking whether they suffer, to which the answer is that “no one can deny the suffering, fear, or panic, the terror or fright that humans witness in certain animals” even if “some will still try . . . to contest the right to call that suffering or anguish, words or concepts they would still reserve for man and for the Dasein in the freedom of its being towards death” (396–97). The gaze of the animal brings Derrida to “the edge of the so-called human” and its supposed bordering with, or opposition to “the animal,” a name humans “have given themselves the right and authority to give to another living creature” (392). “Men would be fi rst and foremost those living creatures who have given themselves the word that enables them to speak of the animal with a single voice and to designate it as the single being” (400). But to question this limit is not to question the “limit between Man with a capital M and Animal with a capital A” (398). It would not be to question the differences and ruptures between men and other living creatures. Nor would it be to assert by contrast some kind of geneticist, biologistic continuum linking together men and animals (398). The frontier between man and animal is rather “plural and repeatedly folded,” a “multiple and heterogeneous border” (399). Derrida continues: Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than “the Animal” or “Animal Life” there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely . . . a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of organization among the realms that are more and more difficult to disassociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death. These relations are at once close and abyssal, and they can never be totally objectified. They do not leave room for any simple exteriority of term with respect to another. It follows from that that one will never have the right to take animals to be a species of a kind that would be named the Animal or animal in general. (399) Derrida suggests, further, that,

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Charlie Gere confi ned within this catch-all concept [of the Animal], within this vast encampment of the animal, in this general singular, within the strict enclosure of this defi nite article (“the Animal” and not “animals”), as in a virgin forest, a zoo, a hunting ground, a paddock or an abattoir, a space of domestication, are all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors or his brothers. And that is so in spite of the infinite space that separates the lizard from the dog, the protozoon from the dolphin, the shark from the lamb, the parrot from the chimpanzee, the camel from the eagle, the squirrel from the tiger or the elephant from the cat, the ant from the silkworm or the hedgehog from the echidna (402).

He asserts that, “I would like to have the plural of animals heard in the singular. There is no animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of ‘living creatures’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity.” At the same time, however, we must not ignore or efface “everything that separates humankind from the other animals” so as to create a “single great, fundamentally homogeneous and continuous family tree (415). Thus, for Derrida, humankind separates itself from “the animal” as it separates itself from the earth. Nor is the solution to this separation a kind of continuism, in which the differences between animals and humans (and between animals and other animals) are simply ignored. The alternative is to engage with the implications of Derrida’s provocative and more-or-less untranslatable phrase, “tout autre est tout autre.” This requires not only that we regard every encounter with those with whom we share the earth as an encounter with an other, but that we recognize that we too are other to every other (including every other human). In Derrida’s comic, bathetic anxiety about his sacrifice of all the other cats in the world when he feeds his cat, there is also a kind of humility about our relative incapacity and lack of power. It also involves a certain cutting down to size, a shrinking, in which our supposedly God-given superiority to, and power over, the environment and its inhabitants, is replaced by a more realistic relationship, in which a singular cat confronts a singular man, not exactly as equals, but at least as equally small in contrast to an earth and indeed a universe that neither can master or control. In the 1957 fi lm The Incredible Shrinking Man, the hero also confronts his cat in circumstances somewhat different to Derrida’s various encounters, but also in such a manner as to reveal the cat’s otherness and singularity. The fi lm recounts the story of Scott Carey, a handsome young man, who is unwittingly affected by a mysterious cloud of some radioactive substance while on a yacht with his wife. After a while he notices he is getting smaller. As the fi lm progresses, he shrinks, fi rst to the size of a human dwarf, then to that of a doll. While at this stage of

The Incredible Shrinking Human 59

Figure 3.3 Scott Carey terrorized by his cat in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). Universal.

his progressive diminution he lives in a doll’s house, and, when venturing out, is attacked by his cat (Figure 3.3). Thus, the animal he previously regarded as his pet becomes a threat and also part of a complex world of different entities and organisms no longer reducible to the singular term, “the animal.” As Scott gets even smaller, he falls down the stairs to the cellar in his house, and can no longer attract the attention of his wife. In the cellar he confronts new dangers, including a spider which is now larger than he is (actually a black widow spider, which is not native to the United States). He defeats the spider and makes an epic trip up to a shelf where some food left earlier helps sustain him. Even so, he realizes that he is continuing to shrink and there seems to be no solution. The Incredible Shrinking Man is elevated from the status of a mere B movie by the denouement, which, instead of producing a “deus ex machina” to save the hero from his dilemma at the last moment, allows him to accept his fate with a curiously moving fi nal voice-over, which runs while he looks out of an air vent at the top of the cellar wall onto the backyard of his house: I was continuing to shrink, to become . . . what? The infi nitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close—the infi nitesimal and the infi nite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet—like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp

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Charlie Gere the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God’s silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infi nite. I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends in man’s conception, not nature’s. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!

Putting aside the theological dimensions of this passage, what is perhaps more to the point is his acceptance of his own monstrosity, his otherness, and his failure to coincide with himself. This chapter obviously lacks “solutions” to the pressing problems of environmental degradation. That these problems exist I do not doubt. What I am far less certain of is that anything can be done about them. In this I am echoing the recent pronouncements of James Lovelock, who not only suggests that we can do nothing about global climate change, but that we absolutely cannot predict what might or might not happen. It is this last point that I find particularly apt. The predictions and arguments about climate change are themselves symptoms of a sense of separation from the world of which we are part. But, as in The Incredible Shrinking Man, we should acknowledge that “Man” is no longer, indeed never has been, lord and master of Earth or Globe, surveying it from a transcendental platform, separate from “the animal,” but is rather an ineluctable part of the world, a world which is, furthermore, necessarily open to an unknown, monstrous future. Thus, against the supposedly shrinking globe which we are supposed to manage, it is “man” who should and will shrink to acknowledge “his” own singular monstrosity as a necessary concomitant of there being a future at all.

WORKS CITED Boeke, Kees. Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps. New York: John Day, 1957. Print. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. 2nd ed. 1859. Ed. Gillian Beer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369–418. Print. . Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone, 1981. Print. . “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Trans. Samuel Weber. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. 40–101. Print. . The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print. . Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Print.

The Incredible Shrinking Human 61 . On the Name. Ed. Thomas Dutoit. Trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Print. . “Passages—From Traumatism to Promise.” Points . . . : Interviews, 1974– 1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 372–95. Print. Derrida, Jacques and Peter Eisenman. Chora L Works. Ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser. New York: Monacelli Press, 1997. Print. Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Les ruses de l’intelligence: La metis des Grecs. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. Print. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. The Incredible Shrinking Man. Dir. Jack Arnold. Universal. 1957. DVD. Ingold, Tim. “Globes and Spheres.” The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill. New York: Routledge, 2000. 209–18. Print. Jacob, François. La logique du vivant: une histoire de l’héredité. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Print. Johnson, Christopher. System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print. Milburn, Colin Nazhone. “Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida.” MLN 118.3 (2003): 603–21. Print. Monod, Jacques. Le hasard et la nécessité: Essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie moderne. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Print. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World, or, Globalization. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print. Spolsky, Ellen. “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory As a Species of Post-Structuralism.” Poetics Today 23.1 (2002): 43–62. Print. Staten, Henry. Wittgenstein and Derrida. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Print. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print.

4

The Risks of Sustainability Karen Pinkus

RISK The title of this essay may seem contradictory. How can sustainability— normally defi ned as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”—be risky? To bequeath the planet as we found it to our children—this is the very least we ought to do. Sustainability, captured in the figure of the innocent child, is unassailable regardless of one’s political position in the way that Lee Edelman speaks of the absolutely compelling logic of what he terms “reproductive futurity”: “How could one take the other ‘side,’ when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends?” (Edelman 3; emphases in original). Order can be closely aligned with narrative, and in this essay I will call on three foundational narratives—The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy—to see how the intrusion of risk may or may not undo meaning. As a starting point, then, to do good or act well within the order of sustainability—that is, without rupturing productivity or impeding progress, and in a vaguely pleasant and ethical manner—makes perfect sense. But when we begin to ask what we mean by risk, by the present, by “future generations,” by “meeting needs,” and so on, we may fi nd that we are no longer so confident. Questioning after words—invoking the title of Heidegger’s apparently untranslatable “Frage nach der Technik” (1954) or “question after technology”—may seem the least sensible thing we can do in the face of the climate crisis. The question after words is both a question after the words in question, and a question after questioning itself: essential precisely in its im-practicality. As a practical matter, “risk” has become a common term in climate change discourse, usually deployed by insurers and market watchers in their attempts to quantify the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. From the UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (2006) to a recent suggestion by the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that publicly traded companies should warn investors of potential effects of

The Risks of Sustainability 63 climate change on earnings (without actually endorsing the “theory” that the climate is warming), fi nancial bodies are well entrenched in the riskcalculation business, a business that probably has no business asking what is meant by “risk.” What is meant by risk? In beginning to respond, we will fi nd ourselves— surprisingly, perhaps—in dangerous sea waters, tracing the movements of the hero in Homer, Virgil, and Dante. It is perhaps counterintuitive that we should start with canonical authors and texts that are not normally associated with riskiness, let alone with the kinds of contemporary discourses normally applied to analysis of risk society. Yet it may turn out that retracing the word risk can open up significant ways of thinking about the greatest crisis of our own time—climate change. The etymology of “risk” is highly debatable; a definite origin for risk is a risky proposition. The modern English word can be traced with absolute certainty to the French risque or Italian rischio, both in use by the seventeenth century.1 But if we are willing to stand at the edge of a precipice, we find some sources that posit the root of risk in either the Greek for root (as in rhiza or rhizikon) or in a Greek term for a rocky cliff, 2 or in some conceptual amalgamation of both. In either case, sources lead to a possible first use in the Odyssey. While for modern readers Homer signifies high literature, we should recall that the written text we possess derives from a long oral tradition and combines folkloric tropes with existing epic structures, particularly the epic nostos or return home. The appearance of “root-as-risk” in the text that scholars have established as Homer’s Odyssey can in no way be presumed to represent an origin, let alone the institution of a concept. Still, curiosity and the love of (sea) exploration itself may lead us on. In book XI, Odysseus is invited by his host, Alkinoös, to narrate his wanderings to the Phaiakians.3 We learn that in the underworld, the shade of Teiresias prophesies that Odysseus might return home if he can leave the cattle and sheep on Helio’s Island unharmed; “but if you do harm them, then I testify to the destruction of your ship and your companions . . .” (XI, 112–13). Teiresias also foretells Odysseus’ end: after his homecoming, the Greek hero will eventually set out for yet another voyage, after which he will make his way home yet again and offer sacrifices to the gods. Then—in Odysseus’ retelling of Teiresias’ prophecy—“Death will come you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you in the ebbing time of sleek old age” (XI, 134–36). Odysseus is fated for a second nostos, a second epic in which he would depart again, to return again to land to make offerings, yet his death will come from the sea. The mention of the second return is so brief that we might be tempted to elide it, and to focus instead on Odysseus’ death at sea, in an “unwarlike” context, in old age. The Odyssey ends long before this coda, but later sources interpret the prophecy of a “sea death on land” to mean that Odysseus is eventually killed, accidentally, by a son born to him by Circe, who wields an arrow tipped with the poison of a stingray. It is only through our collective

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and retrospective knowledge of the multiple narratives and fragments that make up the mythology of Odysseus that we can make sense of the prophecy, assuming we grant it any importance in our motion through the epic narration, given the text’s extremely telegraphic style at this point.4 In the next book of The Odyssey—still a fi rst person narration by the hero to the Phaiakians—Odysseus and his men have found safe haven on the Island of Circe. She offers yet another version of Teiresias’ prophecy/ warning: after they leave her island, the men will fi rst pass the Sirens, and the enchantress gives detailed instructions on how to minimize the potential danger—that is, risk in the modern sense. Following this, the ship will come to a strait—in most accounts of Homer’s geography thought to be Messina, separating Italy from Sicily.5 Here reside Skylla (a six-headed monster who emerges from the stone of a cave to gobble up seafarers) and Charybdis (a whirlpool). The strait is flanked by cliffs. The cliff of Skylla is smooth and cannot be scaled, but on the other one—towering over Charybdis who sucks down ships at regular intervals three times a day—grows a large fig tree with rich foliage (XII, 103). Circe cautions Odysseus to avoid the whirlpool Charybdis, and instead to draw close to the unscalable cliff and Skylla’s cave, “for it is far better to mourn six comrade friends lost out of your ship than the whole company” (XII, 110). The risk of Skylla is predetermined, calculated by the number of her heads. But Odysseus stubbornly asks if it is possible to pass through without any loss at all. Circe warns him not to oppose the gods, but to sail on to the Island of Helios. Repeating Teiresias nearly verbatim, she foretells that if Odysseus can avoid harming the sacred cattle and sheep on this Island, he may reach Ithaka, but: “if you harm do them, then I testify to the destruction of your ship and your companions” (XII, 139–41). Once on board the ship, Odysseus repeats Circe’s instructions about the Sirens, and his men prepare themselves with wax ear plugs. As readers know, Odysseus the risk-taker subjects himself to the Sirens’ song which he will later describe to his men. At this point the narrative progresses paratactically and telegraphically. Having overcome the Sirens, the Greeks encounter rough seas. Unlike with the Sirens, however, Odysseus now uses circumlocutions to “sail around” the specific question of the danger at hand. He reassures his men that they can prevail, but he does not repeat Circe’s instructions. As he narrates: “I had not spoken yet of Skylla, a plague that could not be dealt with, for fear my companions might be terrified and give over their rowing, and take cover inside the ship” (XII, 222–25). The motivation for Odysseus’ silence is apparently one of calculated risk: it is better not to tell the men, but in the next lines we learn that he had “let go from [his] mind the difficult instruction that Circe had given [him]”(225–27). Is the instruction difficult because Odysseus cannot accept it, or has he “let it go” because of a lapsus? Or because Skylla belongs to a fluid realm different from the terrestrial dangers Odysseus encounters elsewhere? (see Schein 41). The language is ambiguous, as are Odysseus’ actions: he girds himself

The Risks of Sustainability 65 as for battle. Sailing through the strait, the men are fascinated by the whirlpool, so they do not notice the monster who, exactly as predicted—as a trope—swallows six men. Even at this point, Odysseus does not explain what is happening; he simply directs his men to sail on. Once they arrive on Helios’ Island, Thrinakia, and honor their dead, the men repeat their vow not to touch the sacred flock. Odysseus, if he heeds two nearly identical prophecies, knows that homecoming depends on this, even if he has also been foretold to return and die in old age. But the air is windless for many days and fi nally, some of Odysseus’ men decide they would rather violate the vow than starve to death. It is a high risk proposition, but one made not without some logical calculation: the men have only heard the prophecy secondhand, by a leader who occasionally withholds or “lets go” information from his mind. Moreover, because it is repeated twice in identical language, the warning sounds like a commonplace fairytale motif that has migrated into the epic. Perhaps it is a remnant of the past rather than a present danger. In punishment, Zeus sends down fi rst the West and then the South Wind. The winds do allow the men to leave the harbor, but they are driven back through the strait of Skylla and Charybdis. This time Odysseus steers toward Charybdis as directed by Circe. But the boat is drawn under, along with all of the crew. Only Odysseus grasps onto the tall fig tree to save himself, yet as he explains: “there was no place where I could fi rmly brace my feet, or climb up it, for the roots [the risks?] of it were far from me, and the branches hung out far . . .” (XII, 433–36). We should note, briefly, the strangeness of this passage. We have been led to understand that the cliff of Charybdis is shorter and less sheer than that of the other side, yet it is difficult to imagine how the hero might reach up from his ship-in-ruins to grasp a tree—perhaps growing from the rock or on top of the cliff. Moreover, fig trees are not particularly strong. Why not an oak, for instance? Perhaps because the fig tree, as a symbol of fertility, is associated with the two female monsters, embedded in a tradition that this particular textual variant does not bother to amend for the sake of logic.6 Indeed, the language here is extremely straightforward, as if the “risk” of the fig tree in or on the cliff is simply a locodescriptive fact. As readers (or listeners), we are asked to take a leap of faith: we must trust Odysseus since he alone of all the men is saved and manages to float off on a part of the ship’s mast.7 From here, he goes on to reach the Island of Kalypso and, eventually, Ithaka. Homer’s text includes two nearly identically worded warnings (by Teiresias and Circe) followed by Odysseus’ repetition-preterition (he repeats the warning about the Sirens and the cattle but passes over Skylla and Charybdis, two monsters who are, themselves, repeated). And, if we wish, we could count the recounting of all the previous warnings to the Phaiakians as a fourth repetition and then the recounting to the reader, a fifth. In what can only be described, then, as a highly overdetermined portion of text, Odysseus and the reader sail around, caught up in the obstacles

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and buffeted back and forth until the seas calm at the start of Book XIII, Odysseus has fi nished speaking, and the narratorial voice returns to the third person. If, indeed, the origin of risk lies within this cluster of repetitions and circumlocutions, then it seems improper to pluck it—to uproot risk from its rootedness in a rhetorical whirlpool. The root (of) risk grows from a cliff—a safe haven from the storm, but not yet the storm itself. Whether or not it stands as the origin of risk, the Greek rhiza does not migrate directly into Latin. Radix (root) derives from Indo-European wrad (perhaps also the origin of rhiza) and the closest equivalent to risk in the modern sense, periculum, comes from a different source.8 Root as risk, we might say, is cut off after its rootedness in (Homeric) Greek. At this point it may be worthwhile to take a little detour around Heidegger, the thinker of technics who comes closest to the monumentality and temporality of climate change, even though this precise term was not available to him. Heidegger insisted on truth, not as the Latin veritas or certitudo, not as a calculable or provable absolute in opposition to falsehood, but as the Greek aletheia. The question of how to translate this word into German, and then into English, has long occupied critics. “Unconcealedness” is a common English translation of the German Unverborgenheit. At the core of this term lies the verb Bergen or the noun Entbergung, both used by Heidegger to approximate the peculiarity of Aletheia. Entbergen has been translated as “disclose,” or “unconceal,” and it may contain within it Berg, mountain. For Samuel Weber, however, this term is best rendered as “harboring forth.” Harbor derives from the Icelandic herbergt meaning a military shelter or the Old English here (“army, host”) and beorg (“refuge, shelter”). In short, Heidegger’s Entbergen, whether the geological focus is placed in the mountains, or, as Weber prefers, on the sea, means to keep something safe, to sustain it. Heidegger’s idiosyncratic addition of Ent both preserves this sense and opens up security to its opposite (Weber 65). Ent attaches to bergen and acts like risk itself. It un-harbors itself from safety to risk. This is important in that for Heidegger, technics proceeds by Entbergen, harboring forth, or, “insecuring” (Weber 66). So technics can be thought not so much as a process of protection or enclosure, harboring, but rather, the contrary: a loss of shelter, or dis-closure, to use another common translation for the word aletheia. So under what circumstances would a rational being risk harboring forth? In the Icelandic sagas harboring forth is a way of life: for pillage, to fi nd a bride, to gain land holdings. Or one harbors forth because the harbor is, in fact, not so secure as it seems, or because there is a danger threatening the harbor from outside. This is the radical sense of Entbergen and not simply one aspect of modern technics, as some risk-theorists might argue. For Weber, the translation of Entbergen as unsecuring is crucial to reading Heidegger’s “Question After Technology” precisely because it evokes its very opposite: “the frantic effort to establish control and security” that

The Risks of Sustainability 67 characterizes the risk society (Weber 70). And the possible etymology of risk as root/cliff confi rms such a reversal. Putting aside questions of the fidelity and transmission of Homer’s text in writing, the unfi nishedness and questionable integrity of the text we have received as The Aeneid, not to mention the difficult “translation” of Greek into Latin—a fall away from truth as aletheia in Heidegger’s thought—we can certainly note patterns and ellipses, including the ellipsis of risk itself, transmitted over time.9 Back to the sea, then: the voyage of Aeneas is also told in the fi rst person by the hero to his host, although with a slightly different outcome (Dido is seduced by the narration where in The Odyssey Alkinoös is simply moved to help Odysseus return home).10 Virgil’s Aeneas narrates that he visits a shrine of Apollo (his underworld trip occurs later in the story, after his sea voyage) and receives a prophecy that the “highest auspices/Are clearly to be seen for [his] sea faring” (III, 510–11). Yet before reaching the “Italy you think so near” (III, 520), he must undergo certain trials. The oracle warns that when he comes to Scylla and Carybdis, he should steer clear of them for it is “better to . . . take the long route west” (III, 576–77).11 The oracle offers a geographical (climate change!) etiology for the monsters— what was once a single landmass has, over a long period, been cleaved— along with a precise nautical description of Carybdis’ movements, actually verified by modern oceanographers, and a precise physical description of Scylla. In contrast with Odysseus’ secrecy and obstinance, when the Trojans come to the straits, the hero’s father, Anchises, expresses the sort of absolute certainty that is missing in Homer: “No doubt of it! Here is Carybdis, that abyss, and those Perilous points of rock that Helenus Foretold, with deadly ledges undersea. Steer off, men, put your backs into the stroke!” (III, 740–44). And although with difficulties to overcome, the Trojans sail past; just as they do, again, on return: “But Helenus’ commands, his warning stood: No steering between Scylla and Carybdis, That channel so near death on each either side” (III, 904–6). Much is retained from Homer, including the repetition of the passage through the strait, but with the elimination of risk in favor of certainty and resolve. This is not the place to elaborate on the intertextuality between The Iliad, The Odyssey (to say nothing of other Greek texts), and The Aeneid. Suffice it to say that in Virgil the reader learns about the monsters through the voice of the oracle, and not through the hero’s narration. This has the effect of turning us back to epic patterns and displacing “risk”—if there is any—to an ancient past. Indeed, inasmuch as we are positing a genealogy of risk, we could say that Aeneas moves beyond the atavistic “root” of risk to a more practical and calculating approach, one more appropriate to the founder of a civilization for whom sea-faring is simply a means to arriving on land. Dante, who probably did not have direct access to the Homeric text, creates his own unique narrative around Ulysses, based in part on the Aeneid and on medieval sources. Dante places Ulysses in the eighth circle of Hell,

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where “evil counselors” are eternally burned in flames. Ulysses and his companion, Diomedes, form a twin flame.12 Dante is curious: he interrupts his own narrative flow with a detour (a contrapasso—a turn around, but this is, of course, also the name for the form of punishment “turning around” the sin) and asks his guide, Virgil, if he may speak to the flames. Virgil volunteers to act as a mediator since he can speak Greek. The flames explain that they are co-punished for various acts of treachery during the Trojan War. Of course, from Virgil and Dante’s point of view, these acts are indeed offensive and Odysseus is a crafty enemy. Having learned the names and crimes of the twin flame, the pilgrim might be expected to move on. But it is as if Dante, the pilgrim, cannot resist a second turning around, a harboring fourth. So he returns to Ulysses who narrates his second voyage, accomplished after his return to Ithaca (and without Diomedes): having returned home after so many years: Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence Of my old father, nor return of love, That should have crown’d Penelope with joy, Could overcome in me the zeal I had To explore the world, and search the ways of life, Man’s evil and his virtue. (XXVI, 92–98)

Compelled to “harbor forth” or “insecure” yet again, the aged Ulysses brings his men to the edge of the world and urges them to transgress the ultima thule, “virtue to pursue and knowledge high.” Ulysses brings his men into the strait of Gibraltar, where: From the new land A whirlwind sprung, and at her foremost side Did strike the vessel. Thrice it whirl’d her round With all the waves; the fourth time lifted up The poop, and sank the prow: so fate decreed: And over us the booming billow closed. (XXVI, 130–35)

Here, we learn the precise reason why Ulysses is punished with evil counselors: his excessive need to “in-secure,” his disregard for his companions’ lives in his quest for adventure. Were it not for Dante-the-pilgrim’s own “harboring forth” beyond the superficial image of the twin flame we would not have access to this secondary narrative. However, the contrapasso is odd, since Ulysses and Diomedes together represent an earlier moment in the hero’s life. In a sense, Dante-the-poet telegraphs what we have already established as a telegraphic narrative in the Homeric tradition. He conflates the origin of risk in the Scylla and Carybdis episode with the theme of the (excessive) second voyage; he locates Odysseus’ death at sea, glossing over the second

The Risks of Sustainability 69 return home, reducing a series of different variants to the sin of false counsel, but also hubris. Finally, when we take together The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy, we fi nd “risk” formed around a whirlpool of repetitions and reversals. But before we settle too comfortably on this series of narrative variants as the origin of risk, we should acknowledge that other sources indicate the Arabic, rizq, meaning a tax owed by a native people for the maintenance of occupying troops. This term may migrate into the Greek rouzikon (around the eighth century) where it means a natural, as opposed to a monetary, tax. A twelfth-century writer, Eustatius of Salonicus, uses the expression “andres tou rizikou” to designate a soldier of fortune. A second Arabic origin may be risq, meaning riches or good fortune. Perhaps both of these meanings combine in the Middle Ages in the context of maritime insurance policy (Wilkinson 91). Whether it derives circuitously from the Greek rhiza, the Arabic rizq, or some other source entirely, “risk,” in the Romance languages, begins to solidify in the seventeenth century as danger; the possibility that something unpleasant will happen; a person or thing regarded as a threat or as likely to turn out well or badly; the possibility of fi nancial loss. Risk develops along with modern technics as an industry, integral to markets rather than simply protecting them from something outside. Let us put this investigation aside and turn to the second term in my title.

SUSTAINABILITY As noted, the commonly accepted defi nition of “sustainability”—that produced within the 1987 Brundtland Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development—is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Of course, we fi nd variants of this defi nition—everything from sustainability as radical ecology to the following nationspecific defi nition put forth by George W. Bush in 2007: “to create and maintain conditions, under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfi lling the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans” (Bush). Unlike with risk, the genealogy of the word sustainability is apparently solid and uninterrupted. It comes into English from the Old French “sustenir,” and before that from the Latin sustinere, to hold up, to keep or safeguard, to tolerate. This verb, in turn, can be traced back to the Latin tendere, from which we also get tenuous and thin, then to the Greek teinein. The root (the risk) of this word is tenet from the Proto-Indo European base ten, meaning to stretch. At the root of sustainability, then, is the idea of stretching something, like an animal skin, into place, causing it to maintain its shape. Moreover, the modern sense of sustaining sustains itself

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as tenet, used in Latin rhetoric to introduce a statement of doctrine. To sustain, then, is to keep a form by stretching thin, and eventually to hold up a rhetorical point. As an adjective, “sustainable” modifies nouns such as building, development, or agriculture. Although not an outright negation of these nouns, it plays a braking or cautionary role with relation to them. Just as risk can be quantified in the fi nancial markets, sustainability is often graphed as the nucleus of overlapping ellipses representing different spheres of modern life, the social, the environmental and the economic (Figure 4.1). First, this widely reproduced Venn diagram presupposes the separation of the economic from other spheres of life, an idea which we may fi nd entirely problematic. Moreover, it supposes that the environment is a recognizable entity that exists independently of but intersecting with two other entities that belong to the human. To further complicate matters, imagine that we were to substitute for “environment” either “ecology” or “nature.” Many theorists have dismantled the idea that ecology/nature is “all but the human” and we need not rehearse their arguments here. We use the term “environment” interchangeably with both ecology and nature at times, but it literally means all that turns around us, surrounds us. The diagram above fails to represent this in graphic terms. Moreover,

Figure 4.1

Venn diagram of sustainability.

The Risks of Sustainability 71 and crucially for the present discussion, “environment” derives from the Latin vibrare, to shake or brandish. From here the word migrates into virare or gyrare, meaning to turn or cause something to come about, such as a ship. Originally a nautical term, the old French viver (like English veer) comes to signify a circle in or around an object. Neither the structure nor origin of “environment” are adequately captured in the diagram above. Furthermore, there is no indication of technics or time—those two powerful and interlocking terms—in what is essentially a static representation. Rather, sustainability is figured as a shape whose borders are indicated by what it shares with or takes from other spheres of life, while it has no life of its own. Now, if technics is characterized by what Bernard Stiegler, after Bertrand Gille, insistently terms “permanent innovation,” then the very idea of sustainability seems self-contradictory, phantasmatic. Stiegler writes, “Urgency occurs when the immediate future is violently introduced into the present as the undetermined but immanent possibility of an accidental, unforeseen event” (Disorientation 138). Yet by its common definition, sustainability denies such violent reversals and contradicts the temporality of technics, that is: “to perpetually go faster in order to reduce risks; through this acceleration, to displace risks by taking them to their limits” (140). But for all that as a fantasy sustainability sutures over this violence without actually affecting it, we should not be surprised that sustainability has been taken up by industry as a marketing tool, invoked precisely within the context of a panicky “real time” that favors only immediate gains. In terms of business, and as long as it is not too far away in time, the future is actually calculated as part of a strategy of control, or, as Jean François Lyotard writes, control is achieved when the present is subordinated to the future which will now be “predetermined” and “the present itself will cease opening onto an uncertain and contingent ‘afterwards’” (ctd. in Stiegler, Disorientation 142). This, I think, is precisely the “future” implied by sustainability, a future always already predetermined through strategic planning and regulation. The hidden secret of sustainability—that which is rarely stated—is its necessary relation to free markets and the property rights and responsibilities of wealthy nations. The sustainable future coincides with the big “life changes” in the personal-economic cycle: graduation from university, buying a home, starting a family, promotion, grandchildren, retirement, and so on. These are the events represented in television commercials for fi nancial planners and investment companies. Various scenarios of reduction, stabilization, and mitigation of greenhouse gases function around decadal scales. For example, my own home state of California’s Air Resource Board has outlined a self-regulated scheme to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. An 80 per cent reduction of current levels is hoped for by 2050, with no penalties for failure. The promotional material for a recent French

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documentary, Home (2009), states: “We barely have ten years left to reverse the trend [of greenhouse gas emissions].” The year 2030 is a key target for many of the scenarios presented in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and so on. The time of sustainability is out of joint with geological time. Even the popular idea that climate change starts with the industrial revolution fails to synchronize with the temporality of carbon-based life forms compressing under ground. Fossil fuels are produced over millions of years; anthropogenic intervention is a mere blip on the geological timeline. Sustainability, in other words, carves out a time that is workable around the human time of the now and near future. Yet even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges “uncertainty” about the ability of science to account for irreversibility and inertia, when they note: Mitigation action needs to take account of inertia in both the climate and socioeconomic systems. Mitigation actions aimed at specific climate goals would need to take account of the response times of the climate system including the carbon cycle, atmosphere, and oceans. A large part of the atmospheric response to radiative forcing occurs on decadal timescales but a substantial component is linked to the century time scales of the oceanic response to the same forcing changes. . . . The time scales for mitigation are linked to technological, social, economic, demographic, and political factors. Inertia is characteristic of the energy system with its long-life infrastructures and this inertia is highly relevant to how fast greenhouse gas concentrations can be stabilized. Adaptation measures similarly exhibit a range of time scales and there can be substantial lead times required for measures to be implemented and to take effect, particularly when it involves infrastructure. (Intergovernmental Panel 101) Sustainability opposes itself like a fortress against such uncertainty, disavowing violence and rupture. It seeks to minimize risk. And since I have developed risk in relation to narrative, it would only seem fair to do the same with sustainability. Yet it turns out we do not need to invoke any particular narrative, since almost all narrative is, precisely, tied to the sustainable. First, in the originary sense of the root ten, ancient narratives are precisely about stretching thin to maintain a shape. But more significantly, in the modern sense of the word, narrative is tied to another very powerful ideological form, what Lee Edelman terms “reproductive futurity”: the idea of the Child as the only means for thinking about the future. The imaginary presence of the child-as-future is both compelling and omnipresent—think only of various Hollywood post-disaster narratives that engage climate change with varying degrees of specificity: I am Legend (2007), Cloverfield (2008), A.I. (2001), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Children of

The Risks of Sustainability 73 Men (2006), Wall-e (2008) (the latter with its gendered robots playing the role of parents to a redeemed humanity) or even the History Channel series Life After People (2009) where the children are gone, but their coming to be still haunts the earth in the paternal, narratorial voice-over. On what grounds could one argue against the (sustainable because associated with the Child) future? To recall Edelman’s tautology: “How could one take the other ‘side’, when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends?” Edelman’s alternative does not come from within that order, but is, paradoxically, a “queer oppositionality that would oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such, which is also to say, that would oppose itself to the logic of opposition” (Edelman 4). And as he clarifies: “Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of meaning’s eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every structure or form” (4). Sustainability is so deeply imbricated in reproductive futurity, and this model so normalized that even those who prophecy or celebrate the end of the human are conditioned by it. Some climate experts predict scenarios in which “there is no future”—that is, if we follow Edelman, there is an object called “no future,” in many ways just as tangible and describable as either a utopian vision of a greener future or a projection of Darwinian adaptation to disastrous climatic conditions. In fact, Edelman might agree that the refusal of reproductive futurity is a refusal of all meaning itself. He writes: Hence whatever refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends (11). Any attempts to refuse or rationalize (je sais bien, mais quand même in the Lacanian formulation) this stark choice being meaning and jouissancedeath are always already anticipated and negated: To the extent that jouissance, as fantasmatic escape from the alienation intrinsic to meaning, lodges itself in a given object on which identity comes to depend, it produces identity as mortification, reenacting the very constraint of meaning it was intended to help us escape. But to the extent that it tears the fabric of the Symbolic reality as we know it, unraveling the solidity of every object, including the object as which the subject necessarily takes itself, jouissance evokes the death drive that always insists as the void in and of the subject, beyond its fantasy of self-realization, beyond the pleasure principle. (Edelman 25)

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In contrast, sustainability, like conservation (watching over together) implies or writes a narrative coherence: There is now at this moment a way of (my) being that I will keep (to myself) and pass on, fulfi lling an ethical duty. I will have passed on to my children—to the Child—my “now,” however imperfect it may be, and I will have managed to disavow precisely the shock of modern technics by reaffi rming an absolutely “normal” time. Such an affi rmation is nothing if not comforting. Stiegler writes: It is as if time has leapt outside itself: not only because the process of decision making and anticipation (in the domain of what Heidegger refers to as “concern”) has irresistibly moved over to the side of the “machine” or technical complex, but because, in a certain sense . . . our age is in the process of breaking the “time barrier.” (Stiegler, Fault 15) To break the time barrier, to acknowledge that speed may be older than time, is certainly unsettling, but the narrativizing power of sustainability would serve as a brake. In a similar vein, sustainability seems to correspond to allegory in the sense of Paul de Man in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” when he writes that allegory is, “the spreading out along the axis of an imaginary time in order to give duration to what is, in fact, simultaneous with the subject” (de Man 225). Allegory is an illusory, ideal, narrative time in contrast to the single, nondurational and unsettling moment of irony. Can we claim, then, that sustainability acts like allegory upon risk (irony)? The risk, that is, the root, of sustaining is the harbor, that which secures, but also that place from which we should—we must—in-secure in technics or poetics. Risk is not only mere “danger” or “difficulty to be avoided at sea,” but also that which saves, harbors, precisely in in-securing. This is not to say that “risk” is the equivalent of a queer space beyond the pleasure principle that disavows all meaning. This seems too great a claim for risk, which, after all, we have found embedded in narrative. Rather, risk may represent an unraveling of sustainability that could ultimately prove productive. Sustainability, on the other hand, may seem to pose no risk. It is all too easy to dismiss sustainability as a misguided, liberal discourse that either forecloses the possibility of radical change or narrativizes in order to enfeeble the explosiveness of the momentary. We must, I believe, take seriously the pleasure that it contains in potentia. To be sure, the pleasure of conserving and sustaining, like economizing, is low impact and far from a negative jouissance. Moreover, we should recognize that this form of pleasure is not simply intellectual or ethical, but also bodily, sensorial, and ego based. Perhaps an approach to climate change that takes seriously such a pleasure might exploit it for new, risky forms of labor and community. Yet in disavowing risk, in projecting a future that is ever just ahead,

The Risks of Sustainability 75 circumscribed by precise borders, it is the most dangerous thing of all. Sustainability needs risk. To paraphrase Heidegger, the sustainable as saving may come from the greatest, most abysmal risk. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Jody Valentine for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay. NOTES 1. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.) cites a 1661 source where the English word is spelled risque and means “peril, jeopardy, danger, hazard, chance.” In the OED, the English verb has a similar established origin in this period. For the links to a possible Greek origin and in relation to The Odyssey, see Online Etymology Dictionary; see also Skjong, “Etymology.” 2. On the latter etymology, see Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, ed. Pianigiani; see also Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, ed. Cortelazzo, Cortelazzo, and Zolli. 3. Throughout this essay I retain the English spellings of the translations from which I cite. 4. In one version of the tradition, recounted in the Telegony of Eugamon (or Eugammon) of Cyrene, after killing his father Telegonus then marries Penelope, while Telemachus marries Circe. The text does not survive, but was known through fragments. According to the mythography of Hyginus and others, Telegonus and Penelope give birth to Italus, the hero of Italy. Telegonus is known as the founder of Tusculum (a city south of Rome) or Praeneste (Palestrina). Roman poets often refer to “walls of Telegonus” or “Circaean walls” to refer to Tusculum. In some traditions Telegonus (also called Teledamus) is described as a son of Odysseus by Kalypso. 5. I will not address here the question of inconsistency around the number of ships in Odysseus’ retinue at this point in the text. 6. Reinhardt stresses that Circe mentions a fig tree but does not tell Odysseus its purpose. The adventure demands his presence of mind to think of grasping it. “So the fig tree was there for no other reason than for the hero to hold onto it” (103). 7. It is worth noting that in the Argonautika, almost certainly directly influenced by Homer, Hera recounts the danger of Skylla and Charybdis—roving rocks—to Thetis, who will have to protect Jason and his men (IV, 825–34). Thetis then calls upon her sister Nereids for help. The Argonauts pass the Sirens and then Thetis takes control of the rudder and steers the ship in between the rocks as the Nereids help lift the ship up. The Argonauts manage to make safe passage to Thrinakia, and there is no second passage through the whirlpool as in the Odyssey. Instead the men pass directly to Alkinoös. 8. The Latin riscus, meaning trunk or chest, comes from a different Greek word—riskos, perhaps itself a borrowing from Phyrgian (Chantraine 976). Latin has no precise equivalent for “risk” in the modern sense. 9. Obviously The Aenied is not a literal translation. But the “translation of the Greek language and world into Roman Latin was—is—a decisive event in the unfolding of productionist thinking” (Clark 31). It is one of only three shifts that emerge, for Heidegger, as truly historical (geschichtlich).

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10. The simile Virgil uses to introduce Dido mimics that used by Homer to introduce Alkinoös’ daughter, Nausikaa. Indeed, just as Aeneas seduces Dido through his words, so Odysseus might be said to seduce the maiden Nausikaa. As Shapiro writes: “The whole episode is punctuated with so many hints at a possible (yet impossible) marriage of Odysseus to Nausikaa that one earlier critic supposed that a familiar folktale motif—handsome stranger arrives from overseas, wins the heart of the princess, and wins her hand in a test of valor—was in the poet’s mind until he realized that it was utterly unsuited to the context of the Odyssey and the theme of the hero’s return to his faithful wife” (155–56). 11. Those land-masses in the past, they say, Though one unbroken mainland long ago, In cataclysm leaped apart; a change That the long ages of the past could bring– The sea rushed in between, to cut away Hesperia’s flank from Sicily, and washed With narrow tide the sundered shores and towns. Now Scylla haunts the starboard side, Charybdis, Never appeased, the side to port—and deep In her whirlpool gulps down the great sea waves Three times a day and spews them up again, Sending the whiplash of her spray to heaven. Scylla lies immured in a rocky cave In clefts of inky darkness, darting out Her faces, pulling ships on to the reef. First she looks human—a fair-breasted girl Down to the groin; but then, below, a monster Creature of the sea, a wolvish belly Merging in dolphin’s tails. Better to round The seamark of Pachynus, and stand out To sea, taking the long route west, then sight Weird Scylla in her overhanging gloom And froth of rocks where sea-green hounds give tongue. (III, 558–80) 12. In the Aeneid, Virgil writes: Then the night came when Diomedes and that criminal, Ulysses, dared to raid her [Athena’s] holy shrine. They killed the guards on the high citadel And ripped away the statue, the Palladium, Descecrating with bloody hands the virginal Chaplets of the goddess. After that, Danaan hopes waned and were undermined (II, 226–33). This desecration—among other acts—explains why Diomedes and Ulysses are together in Dante’s Inferno, but not why they are with the false counsellors. Indeed, it is only when we learn about Ulysses’ second voyage that the placement makes sense, but the second voyage is undertaken without Diomedes, making the form of the flame and the placement inconsistent.

WORKS CITED Bush, George W. Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management. Executive Order 13423. 24 Jan. 2007. Web. 2 Apr. 2010.

The Risks of Sustainability 77 Chantraine, Pierre. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque. Paris: Klincksieck, 1999. Print. Clark, Timothy. Martin Heidegger. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Dante Alighieri. Inferno. Trans. John D. Sinclair. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Print. de Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 187–228. Print. Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana. Ed. Ottorino Pianigiani. 2008. Web. 2 Apr. 2010. Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana. Ed. Manlio Cortelazzo, Michele A. Cortelazzo, and Paolo Zolli. 2nd ed. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999. Print. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Print. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Richard Lattimore. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Print. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Ed. Bert Metz, Ogunlade Davidson, Peter Bosch, Rutu Dave, Leo Meyer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Web. 2 Apr. 2010. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2010. Ed. Douglas Harper. Web. 2 Apr. 2010. Reinhardt, Karl. “The Adventures in the Odyssey.” Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. Ed. Seth Schein. Princeton: Princeton UP 1996. 63–132. Print. Schein, Seth. “Introduction.” Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. Ed. Seth Schein. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Print. Shapiro, H.A. “Coming of Age in Phaiakia: The Meeting of Odysseus and Nausikaa.” The Distaff Side. Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey.” Ed. Beth Cohen. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. Skjong, Rolf. “Etymology of Risk.” 25 Feb. 2005. DNV Research and Innovation, Norway. Web. 2 Apr. 2010. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print. . Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Print. Virgil, The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1981. Print. Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras: Form Technics Media. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Print. Wilkinson, Iain. Anxiety in a Risk Society. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.

Part II

Critical Perspectives on Crisis Narratives

5

Narrating the Coming Pandemic Pandemic Influenza, Anticipatory Anxiety, and Neurotic Citizenship Penelope Ironstone-Catterall It has all of the makings of a cheesy Hollywood horror fl ick: A shapeshifting killer travels the globe, leaving millions of corpses in its wake, and the world’s medical community can’t stop the carnage. It’s a sophomoric idea for a movie script, but that’s exactly what unfolded during the waning months of the First World War, late in 1918. . . . Many epidemiologists believe that a similar scenario will happen again. But this time it will be worse. This is not hyperbole. (Webster and Walker 122)

Anxiety about an impending influenza pandemic did not originate with the emergence of the novel influenza A/H1N1 strain from Mexico in the spring of 2009, nor with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) declaration that this virus had achieved its pandemic potential soon thereafter. It has a much longer history. The story of pandemic influenza is one that appears to be as slippery as the pathogen that causes it, subject over time to forms of narrative drift and narrative shift in much the same way that the viruses are themselves subject to antigenic drifts and shifts. Exploration of influenza narratives reveals, however, significantly more drift than shift, as there is a repetition of registers of meaning-making rather than the emergence of new narrative forms to make sense of novel viral threats. How meaning has been made from potential or realized pandemic outbreaks is a matter of import because imaginaries of contagion are deployed to justify increased intervention in bodies and serve as the ground on which demands for governance and self-governance are legitimated. Contemporary modes of governing the flu operate by sustaining anxiety regarding anticipated outbreaks. A horizon of expectation marks the pandemic narrative, suggesting that the pandemic story will unfold in predictable ways, despite epidemiological evidence that highly pathogenic and virulent strains of influenza do not themselves emerge in an orderly or predictable fashion. While uncertainty dominates medical and scientific discourses on influenza, a narrative of certainty seems to be repeated in broader cultural discourses. In this narrative, pandemics are expected to follow the same course, and—most notably—to unfold according to dreaded imaginings of the worst-case scenario. Epidemiological defi nitions of what constitutes a pandemic—more specifically, their focus on spread over geographic space and across populations

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rather than on mortality rates—have been criticized because they are perceived as causing undue anxiety and panic. Rather than following others in taking the WHO to task for declaring the spread of novel influenza A/ H1N1 to be pandemic, my aim is to look at how the pandemic narrative has been structured and serves to support the idea of the worst-case scenario as the only scenario in the risk discourse around influenza. Rather than being a by-product of recent public-health schemes designed to circumvent risk by means of pandemic preparedness, anxiety serves—much as it does with other risk discourses—as the ground for the pandemic narrative. It is supported by a structuring of the times, spaces, and subjectivities of the pandemic story, the rhetorical rights of reference that serve as its hinges. As I will illustrate in what follows by means of a discussion of popular-science books on H5N1 and two television programs dealing with an imagined Avian Influenza pandemic, these times, spaces, and subjectivities serve to support the notion that we must be concerned about an anxious futurity in disease ecologies (time), intensifications in global interconnectedness (space), and microbes that do not respect the boundaries of discrete subjects, instead showing them to be porous, messy, and threateningly interconnected (subjectivity). It might seem somewhat odd that I will not be focusing my critical attention on novel influenza A/H1N1, given its recent notoriety, and will instead address that apparently now-passé virus, H5N1, more popularly known as Bird Flu. While H5N1 is no longer, in the words of Marc Siegel, the “bug du jour” (False Alarm 17), it is still important to speak about it, not because I follow many others who have sounded the alarm since around 1997 that Avian Influenza is and remains the next “big one” (thereby making H1N1, like SARS before it, a kind of dress rehearsal for the “real thing”), but rather because the stories told about H5N1 reflect and elaborate discursive regularities in the pandemic narrative. They have also served as an important resource for meaning-making around H1N1. The stories we tell ourselves about contagion influence what might be called a pandemic imaginary and have ideational and material consequences. These consequences are not felt simply by that supposedly easily swayed body often referred to as the “general public,” but are also the stuff that gets elaborated in the cultures of scientific and biomedical research and public health initiatives. What Webster and Walker refer to as the stuff of a “cheesy Hollywood horror fl ick” was, we should recall, also the stuff that daily and with insistence appeared in news-media reports around H1N1. I will wax psychoanalytic for a moment here and make the claim that what we have seen around so-called Swine Flu—much like what we saw around so-called Bird Flu—represents a new edition of an old confl ict or, rather, a new iteration of an old story that threatens to become the stuff of commonsense because it is often repeated. The stories we tell ourselves reveal something of the tensions that inhere in contemporary understandings of influenza, understandings that have the ability to affect material relations,

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as we have already seen in bird and swine culls, quarantines, travel alerts, overcrowded hospitals, and in scrambles to procure antiviral and vaccine stocks. These tensions are also seen in various practices and techniques of neoliberal governmentality that responsibilize individuals, whether it be in the context of influenza vaccination campaigns that encourage us to roll up our sleeves or in discourses of self-help that instruct on the means of securing pandemic preparedness. Highlighting the central fault lines, limits, and liabilities of discourses on and around viruses, pandemic narratives also tell us something about the stakes of presumptions of knowledge and of the ideational and material boundary-work they serve. They show the manner in which constructions of risk—a means of governing in terms of “aggregated futures” and statistical probabilities (O’Malley 13)—and uncertainty—a way of governing futures that are imagined as singular, unique, or indeterminate (O’Malley 14)—have become curiously conflated in the pandemic narrative. This conflation suggests not only the malleability of the concepts of risk and uncertainty, but also the manner in which concepts central to governmentalities expand and contract at different conjunctures. Discourses on influenza and the “coming pandemic” also show the ways that affective or psychical life can be summoned up, reworked, directed and redirected, particularly in the production and reproduction of anxiety and uncertainty in many competing and overlapping quarters and often in the service of several perceived hazards simultaneously. Modes of representing or narrating an imagined pandemic serve to rekindle and refocus anticipatory anxiety. This anticipatory anxiety is anchored in a conception of risk that serves as a central support for and justification of both government and self-government under the auspices of pandemic preparedness. This support and justification has consequences for what might be called a politics of anxiety as well as for our ability to respond— or respond in time—to the same sort of pandemic for which we are told to be prepared. We are not talking here about a fear of the flu that has, over time, become ingrained in public health initiatives and the broader pandemic imaginary. Indeed, it is important to separate out fear of the flu from the anticipatory anxiety that grounds the pandemic narrative. While fear is always fear of a defi nite object, anxiety lacks an object and is always before something, is always anticipatory. Like the anxiety that grounds it, the pandemic narrative has a recursive structure that supports the paradoxical production of affects and defenses that make it possible both to identify with prevailing uncertainties or imagined crises and to dis-identify with them. Flu discourse can provide the possibility of direct implication in the information of risk, the identification of and with the presumed source of anxiety in the “me, here and now” of the next pandemic against which we are helpless. But it also provides the means of resisting that information, be it in phantasmatics of agency through pharmaceutical intervention in the form of vaccination or anti-viral medication, in lists of instructions

84 Penelope Ironstone-Catterall for what to do to protect yourself and your family, or through psychical mechanisms of separation, forms of ideational boundary-work and isolation that, like an inverted quarantine (Szasz 4), are designed not only to keep viruses away but also to keep viral thinking at a distance and serve to bolster the impression that a flu pandemic will not happen to me, at least not here and now. The production and consumption of knowledges work to support this psychical boundary work, rendering the problem of contagion a problem of knowledge, “an epistemological drama, a question of knowing and discovering” (Albertini, “The Geographies of Contagion” par. 8). Claims to knowledge regarding Avian Influenza have come fast and furious since 1997, most of them emphasizing the idea of an anxious futurity in global disease ecologies and the sense that, even with the benefit of knowledge to undergird all those practices and procedures that are developed under the complex, contradictory, hotly contested, and politically loaded umbrella of “preparedness,” there will always be something more to this story of influenza than will be made fully intelligible, at least for us, here and now. One place where this can be seen is in popular books published on H5N1. The lengthy list of titles on Avian Influenza includes books like Nikiforuk’s Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century (2008), Kunda and Lin’s The Bird Flu Handbook: What Is Avian Infl uenza, and What Do We Need to Know To Be Prepared for a Pandemic? (2005), Davis’ The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005), Farndon’s Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know (2005), Revill’s Everything You Need to Know About Bird Flu and What You Can Do to Prepare For It (2005), Siegel’s Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About the Next Pandemic (2006), and Avlicino’s Bird Flu: What We Need to Know (2006).1 What struck me in my explorations of these popular science books, and what may also have struck you as you were reading this list, is the way that the phrase “Everything You Need to Know” is repeated, although not necessarily in the service of the same arguments or predictions. 2 The litany of details pertaining to H5N1 and its progenitors is also remarkably consistent in each of these books as each outlines the history of influenza pandemics of the past, focusing primarily on the Spanish Flu pandemic in the wake of World War I; tells us what a virus is, how it spreads, and how it is distinguished through its protein “license plate”; describes how antiviral drugs and vaccines work; outlines existing emergency-preparedness plans; and suggests to readers what they as individuals can do to be prepared. These details are used in different ways and to different ends in these books, highlighting different risks, different knowledge claims, different sources of dis-ease. Each source of dis-ease is then presented as demanding different responses from readers. It is no mistake that you are the one who needs to know, to be prepared when, not if, “the big one” hits.

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In many respects, these are self-help books that appeal to the neoliberal demand that citizens govern themselves, become responsible for their own management, and adjust their behaviors at the same time as the state withdraws from a number of arenas, including health care. The “bionic citizen” (Isin 222) who is rational, competent, and able to calibrate itself according to calculations of risk is the central character in this neoliberal drama of self-help. The responsibilized subject, while still a key character in the worn theatre of liberal democracy, is not the neatly contained, affect-free package on which this neoliberal drama is predicated. Instead, as Engin Isin argues in his article “The Neurotic Citizen,” this subject is dominated by its neurosis, is anything but masterful because fraught, paradoxical, and filled with tension as it confronts responsibility in a world where uncertainties prevail. This anxious subject, governed through its neurosis, is the same subject who must make sense out of flu discourses. This subject is the addressee of popular science books and magazines, is looking for everything he or she needs to know in order to be prepared for a pandemic. This anxious subjectivity is not simply the product of the commodification of fear, as some argue (Gardner; Glassner; Furedi), but is a product of the bio-political demand for self-governance, of being charged with the task of assessing, evaluating, and reducing risks. This task generates an anxiety that cannot be eliminated altogether, but may be palliated and managed through modes of rehearsing and imagining preparedness and security by becoming masters of the epistemological drama of the pandemic narrative. Both symptomatic of neurotic citizenship and a palliative for it, popularscience publishing on pandemic influenza does not serve as an affective reservoir for otherwise affect-free spaces of rational inquiry, but is a part of a social strategy designed to meet the demands of heightened insecurity. Two televisual representations of an imagined H5N1 pandemic stand out as serving to reflect and reproduce the anxiety of implication that keeps the neurotic subject at the ready. They are the ABC made-for-TV movie Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America, directed by Richard Pearce and fi rst aired on 9 May 2006, perhaps unsurprisingly, during “Sweeps,”3 and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s docudrama Black Dawn: The Next Pandemic which, perhaps surprisingly and defi nitely unconventionally, aired on the network’s “news information series” the fifth estate on 11 January of that same year (in his review of Black Dawn for Canada’s The Globe & Mail newspaper, John Doyle called it “the most peculiar fifth estate program in years”). While different in significant ways—Fatal Contact follows the conventions of the movie-of-the-week format while Black Dawn adheres closely to the conventions of the docudrama, interspersing interviews with experts in the fields of virology, epidemiology, public health, and government with dramatized segments played by actors—the ground on which both are based is quite similar, and is one with which we have been repeatedly refamiliarized by our news media in the past year: the histories of influenza, particularly the influenza pandemics of the twentieth

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century, namely the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918–19 that is estimated to have killed up to 100 million people, the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957, and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. Both Fatal Contact and Black Dawn draw liberally on this history of pandemic disease, projecting the information of pandemics past into the anxious futurity of the “coming pandemic.” The rationale for doing so is not exclusive to these movies, and goes like this: If the mortality rate for Spanish flu was between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent, then, given the current global population, it stands to reason that between 150 and 350 million might die in the event of a new pandemic with the pathogenicity and virulence of the virus of 1918–19. Both programs work with these numbers to imagine “what if” such a pandemic were to happen to us, here and now. What if H5N1 or Avian Influenza, a novel virus to which our immune systems have not been previously exposed, made the viral leap to easily infect humans? What would the ease and speed of global travel mean for pandemic spread, the transmission of the virus, and for possibilities of containment? What would happen, not only to those dealing with illness, death, and dying on the medical front lines, but also beyond? Would our institutions—medical, social, and economic—be able to withstand it? And what would it do to us, our social organizations and the threads that bind us together in human communities? Working through the “what if . . .” provides the ground for a fairly bleak picture if we are to follow the thrust of these programs. There will be consequences, both tell us, to which we must own up and for which we must bear responsibility should we not act now to prepare ourselves. And they don’t mean simply stockpiling hand sanitizer or preparing our pandemic survival kits either. Fatal Contact opens with images of Canada geese flying in formation. Around each goose, Global Positioning System coordinates appear, indicating precise location and altitude. Cut to a radar screen, which shows the location of the birds and their rapid movement across space. Cut to a map of Asia. Remote imaging indicates the location of fi rst a few and then more epicenters,4 representing what we imagine might be viral “hot spots” from which waves of infection radiate outward. Expand map, fi rst to more of Asia, then Europe, then North America, then the rest of the world as multiple waves expand to take in the entire globe. This is one way of imagining what a pandemic might look like. But there are others as well, and Fatal Contact juxtaposes many of them. While the technically mediated version of pandemic spread authorizes an idea of certainty and scientificity around speculations about origins and consequences, the drama that unfolds in the remainder of the fi lm speaks to randomness, happenstance, and uncertainty as defining. Technical certainty predicated on a complex modeling and calculus of epidemiological risk is outstripped by what might appear to be haphazard occurrences—contacts between people in airports, at Chinese “wet” markets, in the workplace, at a Little League game. While seemingly random, however, these interactions

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have social structures on which they are based, and certain of these become the hinges for the four parallel stories Fatal Contact weaves together. The central narrative follows the epidemiological story in which the selfsacrificing Dr. Iris Varnack (played by Joely Richardson) of the Epidemic Intelligence Service is able to clearly picture the pandemic and address it head-on by means of her cool head and her reliance on inductive reasoning. Supporting her work is Colin Reed (Stacy Keach), US Secretary of Health and Human Services, the face of the governmental public health response. Another story looks to the structures of government in the midst of crisis, following Virginia State Governor Mike Newsome (Scott Cohen) who, while viewing himself as “proactive” in the midst of crisis, is shown to be misguided as he quarantines entire neighborhoods, leading to claims of a racist agenda and significant unrest, while simultaneously constructing his own “fortress of solitude,” an inverted quarantine that he fi nally abandons, not owing to political pressure, but after the death of his son from a shortage of insulin to treat his diabetes. We glimpse the difficult realities to be faced on the “front lines” through the eyes of a husband-and-wife partnership: Alma Ansen (Justina Machado), a New York City nurse who watches as the hospital in which she works is inundated with the ill and the panicking, runs short of much-needed medical supplies, and suffers staff shortages as medical personnel get sick or refuse to go to work; and her husband, a member of the National Guard who is redeployed from Iraq to New York to provide support for the “war on influenza” at home. To give us an idea of how large the problem might get, Alma ends up working in a makeshift hospital that has been set up in a train station, and we see a vast humanity crammed in there, the dead alongside the dying. Throughout the film, there is talk of developing a vaccine, but this is incredibly slow and, when it is fi nally developed by the French, its distribution is stalled by political infighting and avaricious nationalism. It is not uncommon, as Priscilla Wald tells us in her 2008 book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, for outbreak narratives to include a superspreader or a “Patient Zero” who is identified as the source of the outbreak, and this serves as the fourth story the fi lm weaves. With typhoid, the superspreader was Mary Mallon. With AIDS, as narrated by Randy Shilts, fl ight attendant Gaetan Dugas served this purpose. With the novel influenza A/H1N1 pandemic, it was a four-yearold Mexican boy, Edgar Hernández. “Patient zero” in Fatal Contact, and the focus of the family and community narrative in the movie, is Ed Connelly, a globetrotting purchaser for a discount big-box company called CostMart who goes to Guandong province in China to reinforce the principles of just-in-time production on the factory floor of a company bent on over-producing and therefore driving up product costs through increased warehousing costs. At the outset of this movie, but not fully elaborated, is this culprit in the pandemic story: the globalized economy in which complex global interconnections, facilitated by ease of transportation, mean,

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this fi lm tells us, that a virus hatched in Asia, coughed into the air by an ill factory worker, infects an American businessman who then passes it on to others in the airport bar, on his return fl ight home, and at his son’s Little League game, and leads to an unstoppable spread of disease that takes over the world in a matter of weeks, kills in its fi rst wave nearly 24 million people, leaves the world’s economy in a shambles, overwhelms hospitals, and makes it difficult to procure even basic provisions. An influenza pandemic will, Fatal Contact tells us, nearly destroy not only governments and medical institutions but also the basic trappings of human civility. Until, that is, communities organize and start providing for themselves, as the wife of the fi rst victim, Denise Connelly (Ann Cusack), realizes once she emerges from grief over the loss of her husband and fi nds food shortages, garbage piled on the suburban streets around her home, and elderly neighbors on the brink of starvation. The message is clear: government won’t be able to help you, but you can help yourselves. Organize early. Organize often. Fatal Contact also repeats another classic underpinning of the outbreak narrative, the colonial story that invokes the idea of a foreign invader that threatens the integrity of a nation in imperceptible but catastrophic ways, that demonstrates how borders are leaky, how the “us,” generally construed as the global North, is constantly threatened by contamination by and from an ostensibly primitive “them.” We see this in imaginings of Africa as the seat of the diseases that gained notoriety in the 1980s such as Ebola or HIV/AIDS (Schell), imaginings that shifted after 1997, along with anxiety about a coming Avian Influenza pandemic, to Asia. Fantasies about and ways of representing the origins of disease often pit an “us” against a “them.” Fatal Contact does not hesitate to play on these fantasies regarding the “primitive” origins of lethal viruses. At the end of the movie, while the waves of illness and death from H5N1 are ebbing around the world, Varnack is called to Angola to investigate a possible mutation of the virus. Walking through a village in a Hazmat suit, Varnack sees bloodied bodies inside and out. When asked by a colleague who is there with her, “It’s not possible is it? All of them dead?” Varnack replies: “It’s not only possible, it’s already out there.” Fatal Contact ends, not only with the inkling of a possible sequel to this movie, but also with a sense that the source of our worst fears is “already out there,” lurking in the African jungle and waiting to emerge. We are right to be anxious, the movie tells us, because it is not a question of if but when it will happen. The original broadcast of Fatal Contact was topped and tailed by information and educational programming telling viewers to fi nd out more about Avian Influenza, and leading them to online viewer guides, the most notable prepared by the American Department of Health and Human Services, 5 a move that indirectly authorizes the made-for-TV account of the worstcase scenario. Also making significant use of content support by way of the internet, the fifth estate’s Black Dawn: The Next Pandemic goes one step

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further in authorizing its rendition of the worst-case scenario through use of clips from interviews with real-world influenza experts such as Torontobased microbiologist Allison McGeer, virologist Robert Webster, epidemiologist Roy Anderson, historian and author of The Great Influenza, John Barry (who was also a consultant on Fatal Contact), and Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, David Butler-Jones, a name that has been a staple in H1N1 reporting for broadcast and print in Canada. The docudrama Canadianizes its fictionalized account of what a pandemic might look like by framing it through the eyes of a front-line medical worker, Toronto nurse Jane MacDonald. This account is fleshed out by fictional news reports from around the world that are seen on television sets in various scenes or are cut directly into the program. Far less graphic in its portrayal of a possible pandemic, this docudrama nonetheless spells out many of the same outcomes as Fatal Contact: hospitals overflow with patients; mountains of garbage pile up on streets as municipal services are closed down; and the world waits for a vaccine that is slow to arrive. But it also includes more: travel alerts are issued; public transit is shut down; schools and daycares are closed; a television huckster hawks survival books fi lled with information that he claims the government “doesn’t want you to know”; bandits break into drugstores to steal sparse Tamiflu stocks; and, in a Canadian twist drawn from the history of Spanish Flu, public hockey arenas serve as morgues as the death count climbs beyond the capacity of mortuaries. Most of the potentially anxiety-provoking material in Black Dawn does not come through the fictionalized narrative but is delivered through the interview segments that dominate the show and are framed by both the devices of docudrama (Lipkin; Paget) and those of the in-depth current-affairs reporting for which the fifth estate is usually known. The use of the conventions of docudrama is curious here for, while generally reserved for the re-enactment of historical events or to animate the lives of real-world figures, the docudramatic genre, as a notional historical interpreter, lends a particular credibility to the speculative and predictive story Black Dawn will tell. The introduction of “host” Bob McEwen sets the stage for this curious shift from historical interpreter to imaginative “what if . . .” projection: Tonight, you will learn the chilling reality of what it would really mean should the virus learn to spread from one human to another. It’s already found a way to jump from birds to people. . . . Experts agree that if the H5N1 virus becomes pandemic it will spread rapidly. The best estimates are that millions, perhaps hundreds of millions would die. But imagine this: you hear a news bulletin it’s spreading. People in Asia are dying, and it’s headed here. You have some urgent, life-altering decisions to make. . . . Our scenario is dramatic, even shocking, but it is solely based on reality, on a year of in-depth research.

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There is an urgency here, a present-tense insistence bolstered by the words of “some of the most distinguished experts on pandemic influenza and emergency preparedness” and “what they told us to expect.” What you are about to see, in other words, is not simply speculative, but is an imminent reality for which you must prepare . . . now. And that reality is one in which uncertainty prevails for international health agencies that cannot know if the virus will go pandemic, national governments that cannot secure borders from the contagion’s march, and local governments and hospitals that must deal with great numbers of the sick and dying. The fi rst expert clip in Black Dawn is from virologist John Oxford who opines that the recent film version of The War of the Worlds is a good model for thinking about “this fi rst pandemic of the 21st Century”: “It will be threatening,” he says, “and it could very well bring the whole society to a standstill.” Vaccine researcher David Fedson explains why, drawing on calculations that a 1918-style pandemic today would kill between 175 million and 350 million people. This paints an ominous picture, made all the more daunting when historian John Barry explains that viruses are slippery, “on the edge of life” and are, because they are not fully alive, “hard to target.” In the event we could be complacent, influenza media darling Robert Webster chimes in: “Many people in the world think: Big deal, influenza’s like taxes; it comes around every year whether we want it or not. The truth of the matter is influenza is much more serious than we realize. The cost of influenza to the community runs into billions of dollars and occasionally, once or twice a century, we can have a pandemic that appears. And it’s the pandemics that we really worry about.” I have gone into detail about the way the expert commentary sets up Black Dawn, not only because it illustrates the ways in which the urgency of response is framed in the film, but also because it presents this urgency in the broader context of probabilities calculated with epidemiological certainty that highlight the problems of pandemic management or containment and public complacency. The pedagogical and didactic thrust of Black Dawn must not be overlooked. At intervals throughout the piece, viewers are directed to the fifth estate website for “more information,” while at the close Bob McEwan provides three reasons why we should do so: to gain knowledge of government and health-agency plans and what is already being done to “get ready”; to fi nd explanations of how experts come up with projections about diseases and death rates using the example of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918–19; and, to offer “practical advice” in response to the “alarming questions” the docudrama may have raised for “you.” Once again, it is no mistake that you are the addressee of this docudrama, the one who needs to know, to be prepared to respond when, not if, “the big one” hits. At the nexus of individual responsibilization and collective uncertainty, the affective or psychical dynamics of popular representations of H5N1 take their place within “neurotic citizenship,” a mode of governmentality in

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which the management, not the elimination, of anxiety is paramount. The neurotic citizen is incited to make social and cultural investments in order to eliminate various dangers by calibrating its conduct on the basis of its anxieties and insecurities. This neurotic subject is the addressee of popular representations of pandemic influenza. It is a subject who is insecure, whose ability to calculate is far less productive than its affective structures. Managing the anxieties of this neurotic subject is not made possible by the rational evaluation of competing truth claims or claims to knowledge, as neoliberal thought has implied. Rather, it operates by way of a two-fold movement that enables this anxious, neurotic subject to both identify itself in prevailing uncertainties or imagined crises and, seemingly paradoxically, to dis-identify with them. On the one hand, the pandemic narrative provides the possibility of direct implication in the information of risk, the identification of and with the presumed source of anxiety in the me, here and now of the coming pandemic against which we are helpless. It works toward achieving this by means of its appeal to us, here and now and the manner in which it orders subjectivities, spaces, and times of the coming pandemic. On the other hand, since anxiety is fluid and free-floating and becomes attached to risks in complicated and often contradictory ways, the appeal for identification may also produce contrary responses, a result that has caused considerable consternation for risk communication and health promotion professionals. The pandemic narrative is not simply productive of identifications but also generates dis-identifications as its addressees resist or deny implication in its information through a variety of psychical strategies. In this, it may also provide examples of the curious mechanisms that enable us, here and now to resist implication in various sorts of information, particularly the sorts that would plunge us knee-deep in crisis. This “not me, not here, not now” is reflexively produced in numerous discourses of risk. The positing of an anxious futurity of pandemic disease, an anxious futurity that, until recently, found its focus in H5N1, can produce identifications and dis-identifications as it works to interpellate us in the risk discourses surrounding influenza, discourses that generate a neurosis at once individual and collective, mine alone and irreducibly ours together. The pandemic narrative works to pinpoint an uncertainty that is imminently arriving here, but is always already over there (in Africa, in Asia, or in a small town in Mexico). It also names a current threat and a vague possibility, an abstract actuarial prediction and an epidemiological reality, a once and future killer on every horizon. A number of ideational sleights-of-hand are necessary to maintain these productive tensions between the me and not me, the here and not here, the now and not now. For example, in the dominant flu discourse since 1997, it has been as though there were no other forms of influenza affecting bird populations and generating epizootics, as though “The Bird Flu,” singular, is identical to all other flus, and, most sinisterly, to that virus that is believed to have caused so many deaths in 1918–1919. (Given the centrality of H5N1

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or Bird Flu to the pandemic imaginary, the Swine Flu or novel influenza A/ H1N1 pandemic came as something of a surprise.) The anxious pandemic futurity is bound to a traumatic pandemic history that has not been fully claimed. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918–1919, once famously called the “Forgotten Pandemic” (Crosby), is remembered today almost obsessively as the indexical pandemic, the pandemic to which our current anxious imaginings point in their recursive temporality. The pandemic imaginary asks us to reconsider our conceptualizations of the flu as something other than survivable, something most of us have already lived through. It asks us to wonder about a different “flu”: no longer a quotidian illness against which we may be vaccinated yearly; not a benign illness we may contract in its seasonal pass through our communities; not an inconvenient but nonetheless unexceptional illness for which we have a veritable pharmacopoeia stored in our medicine cabinets. Instead, we are asked to think or think again of influenza as a “monster at our door” (Davis), a sign or symptom of the pathologies of contemporary life, its gluttony, surely, but its anxiety-producing global interconnections even more. Boundaries are breaking down between the me and not me, the here and not here, the now and not now, and this is distinctly responsible for our anxieties about pandemic influenza.

NOTES 1. More recently, and following directly in the footsteps of these earlier texts, is Terence Stephenson’s H1N1: The Facts (2009). 2. Even The Great Bird Flu Hoax: The Truth They Don’t Want You To Know About “The Next Big Pandemic” (2006) by Joseph Marcola, for example, starts with a chapter subtitled “What You Really Need to Know about the Bird Flu.” 3. Nielsen Media Research conducts audience research that concentrates on monthly rating periods known as “Sweeps.” Viewing diaries are sent to sample homes and ratings tabulated in seven-day increments, which is why “Sweeps” is sometimes referred to as “Sweeps Week.” Television networks attempt to boost viewing figures, and hence advertising revenues, by airing new and dramatic episodes of popular programs, premiering new series, and broadcasting specials, such as made-for-TV movies, all of which are widely promoted beforehand in order to maximize viewership. 4. For a discussion of the use of natural disaster metaphors in pandemic discourse, including a discussion of the use of earthquake or tsunami metaphors in it, see Wallis and Nerlich. 5. See .

WORKS CITED Albertini, Bill. “The Geographies of Contagion.” rhizomes 19 (2009). Web. 26 Feb. 2010. Avlicino, A. A. Bird Flu: What We Need to Know. Victoria, Canada: Heritage House: 2006. Print.

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Barry, John M. The Great Infl uenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York: Viking/Penguin, 2004. Print. Black Dawn: The Next Pandemic. CBC-TV. 11 Jan. 2006. Television. Crosby, Alfred W. America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Infl uenza of 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. Davis, Mike. The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. New York: New Press, 2005. Print. Doyle, John. “What’s Scarier, CBC Makeover or Bird Flu?” Globe and Mail [Toronto] 11 Jan. 2006. Print. Farndon, John. Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books, 2005. Print. Fatal Contact. Dir. Richard Pearce. Perf. Joely Richardson, Stacy Keach, Ann Cusack, Justina Machado, David Ramsey, Scott Cohen. ABC. 9 May 2006. Television. Furedi, Frank. Culture of Fear. 2nd ed. London: Continuum, 2002. Print. Gardner, Dan. Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear. Toronto: McClellan and Stewart, 2008. Print. Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print. Isin, Engin F. “The Neurotic Citizen.” Citizenship Studies 8.3 (2004): 217–35. Print. Kunda, Manoj and Ward Lin. The Bird Flu Handbook: What Is Avian Infl uenza, and What Do We Need to Know To Be Prepared for a Pandemic? US: Vayu Publishing, 2005. Print. Lipkin, Steven. Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002. Print. Mercola, Joseph. The Great Bird Flu Hoax: The Truth They Don’t Want You to Know About the “Next Big Pandemic.” Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006. Print. Nikiforuk, Andrew. Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century. Toronto: Viking, 2006. Print. O’Malley, Pat. Risk, Uncertainty, and Government. London: Glass House Press, 2004. Print. Paget, Derek. “Codes and Conventions of Dramadoc and Docudrama.” The Television Studies Reader. Ed. Robert Allen and Annette Hill. London: Routledge, 2004. 196–208. Print. Revill, Jo. Everything You Need to Know About Bird Flu and What You Can Do To Prepare For It. London: Rodale International, 2005. Print. Schell, Heather. “Outburst! A Chilling True Story About Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change.” Confi gurations 5.1 (1997): 93–133. Print. Shilts, Randy. And The Band Played On: People, Politics, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Print. Siegel, Marc. Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About the Next Pandemic. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. Print. . False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Print. Stephenson, Terence. Swine Flu H1N1: The Facts. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2009. Print. Szasz, Andrew. Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Print. Wald, Patricia. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

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Wallis, Patrick and Brigitte Nerlich. “Disease Metaphors in New Epidemics: The UK Media Framing of the 2003 SARS Epidemic.” Social Science and Medicine 60.11: 2629–39. Print. Webster, Robert and Elizabeth Walker. “The World is Teetering on the Edge of a Pandemic That Could Kill a Large Fraction of the Human Population.” American Scientist 91.2 (2003): 122. Print.

6

Global Capitalism and a Dystopian South Africa Trencherman by Eben Venter and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes Andries Visagie

The body of dystopian texts in South African literature is relatively small and largely limited to the writing of white authors. Some of the best known examples of dystopian novels are Promised Land by Karel Schoeman, going back to 1972, and J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, published in 1983. Both texts sketch a dark future for South Africa in response to the apartheid regime (1948–1994). Examples of novels with a dystopian orientation published since 1994, the date that marks the transition to inclusive democracy in South Africa, include Oemkontoe van die nasie (Spear of the Nation) (2001) by P.J. Haasbroek and, of course, Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee. In 2009, Afrikaans novelist Louis Krüger published an apocalyptic novel Wederkoms (Second Coming), which is a response to growing concerns about environmentalist issues in South Africa, a theme that also reverberates in Horrelpoot (Trencherman) (2006) by Eben Venter and Moxyland (2008) by Lauren Beukes, the two novels that form the main focus of this chapter. In contemporary white writing in South Africa it seems as if dystopian texts appear more regularly than utopian texts. One reason may be that the white elite regards utopian thinking with a degree of distrust, particularly after the end of the ill-fated apartheid policy which may be regarded as an example of a modernist utopian project that decidedly had dystopian effects for the majority black population. As utopian thinking has, since the end of apartheid, lost credibility, there is a greater affi nity with a dystopian imaginary as a socially more acceptable modality to respond artistically to current debates (Grebe). In their introduction to the recent book of autobiographical essays At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa, Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall identify the “emerging registers of uncertainty, skepticism and doubt” (10) among the contributors, black and white, to their book. They add that the “surfacing of skepticism and doubt emerges after a cultural moment of wonder at what was often referred to as a ‘miracle’ of political transition without bloodshed” (10). This chapter will attempt to articulate perspectives on utopia and dystopia from the South African literary world—which often leads a somewhat

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isolated existence from developments in Europe and North America—with issues that are preoccupying societies elsewhere in the world. The global reach of capitalism and its involvement in risks posed not only by fi nancial developments but also by technological innovation and the phenomenon of internationalized terror have not escaped the African continent. On the contrary, eventualities that are safely contained within the discourse of risk that translates into timely preventative action in the North may well manifest themselves as full scale hazards in the South where the capacity to deal with risk is often underdeveloped. AIDS once posed a global health risk. In recent times it remained relatively contained in the North but proceeded to ravage sub-Saharan Africa. My intention with this chapter is to take South African literature as a point of departure in an attempt to interrogate the value of utopia (and dystopia) in critical reflections on global capitalism and the evolving discourse on the risk society. Both Trencherman and Moxyland emerge from an aesthetic with a strong social orientation that, since the second half of the twentieth century, has dominated South African literature. Whereas the littérature engagée of the French existentialists had a significant influence on the establishment of a more pronounced social and political focus in Afrikaans writing, with André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach providing the intellectual thrust behind this movement, writing in English and the African languages responded to the social injustice of racial discrimination from a liberal English tradition (notably Alan Paton with his influential novel Cry, the Beloved Country [1948]) and more localized political changes fuelled by the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace inaugurated a new strand in the social aesthetic that still defines South African writing today. Coetzee’s novel, published in 1999, a few years before the Nobel laureate’s emigration to Australia, adds gender-based violence and land reform in a post-apartheid context to racial inequality, previously the main focus of socio-political engagement in South African writing. Corruption in the African National Congress (the ruling party since 1994); deterioration of basic services such as the supply of clean water and electricity; the fact that South Africa now numbers among the six most violent societies in the world; the AIDS pandemic with an infection rate of 18 per cent, contributing significantly to the low life expectancy of 51 years; and the alarming gap between rich and poor, only rivaled by Brazil and still defi ned along racial lines, dominate not only media headlines but also inform the writing of contemporary South African authors. The entanglement of these contingencies with the pressures of global capitalism cannot be overlooked. A striking example is the exposure of food security in South Africa to the threat of global capitalist practices. Agriculture in South Africa is left largely to its own devices as the current government is reluctant to stimulate food production by offering subsidies to local farmers. Food grown locally is therefore often more expensive than cheap imports from countries where agriculture is protected by state subsidies.

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Furthermore, South African agriculture is stymied by its limited capacity to compete on global export markets with the cheaper produce from countries where agricultural subsidies apply. As a consequence, food security in South Africa is undermined, exposing vulnerable sectors of the population to volatile food prices. Although the ANC government succeeded in creating a freer society and achieved significant successes in improving the lives of the black majority in South Africa, its socialist tradition as a liberation movement soon had to make concessions to the demands and seductions of big business. All too often a connection with the ruling party is embraced as an entry point to the procurement of lucrative business deals and a variety of fi nancial benefits. Eben Venter’s Trencherman and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes respond in different ways to tensions that are often the localized fault lines of power struggles that are played out on a geopolitical scale. These novels are not simply representations of the crises that condition public discourse at the start of the new millennium but pose a challenge to global capitalism as the perceived agent of socio-political decay in South African society. Whereas Eben Venter imagines a failed state as the inevitable outcome of political indolence in the face of rampant consumer capitalism, Beukes presents the readers of her cyberpunk novel with a technological dystopia as the outgrowth of a capitalist logic based on accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 41–50). In Trencherman and Moxyland, the critique of consumer capitalism (Venter) and technological capitalism (Beukes) is articulated with recent developments in South African history since the fading of the national optimism and euphoria that characterized the presidency of Nelson Mandela from 1994 to 1999.

UTOPIAN LITERATURE AND THE NEGATIVE UTOPIA OF RISK SOCIETY Dystopian literature is a phenomenon which forms part of the larger body of utopian literature that grew exponentially in the twentieth century, partly due to the popularity of science fiction. Utopian and dystopian literatures should not be regarded as absolute opposites but rather as literatures that exist in a continuum within the same paradigm. In a dystopian text, the author presents a description of a society that is considerably worse than the society familiar to the contemporary reader, whereas utopian texts present alternatives to society that are much better and happier compared to the reader’s environment. Both utopian and dystopian literature is more focused on collective social and cultural phenomena (socio-political institutions, norms, and relations) than on individual characters or character psychology (Wegner 80–81). Currently, theoretical debates about utopian and dystopian literature are dominated by the fraught relationship that this literature has developed

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with capitalism. In his recent book about utopian literature, Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson maintains that utopian literature poses a significant challenge to the seemingly relentless expansion of global capitalism (xii). The world has to submit, not so much to the presence of an enemy, but more to the universal belief that historical alternatives to capitalism have become unviable and impossible and that no other socio-economic system is practically feasible or even conceivable. In contrast, Raffaella Baccolini fears that utopian thinking has been coopted by capitalism (Baccolini and Moylan, “Conclusion” 246). Utopia has become indiscernible from the quest for materialistic satisfaction and is therefore commodified, devalued, abused, and polluted. Today consumerism appears as the defi nitive mode of happiness. The so-called “critical dystopia” opens up a path to liberating utopian thinking from appropriation by capitalist consumerism. According to Tom Moylan, the critical dystopia has the potential to discover hopeful possibilities and new sources of initiative from within the prevailing circumstances, even if there is no guarantee of success (Baccolini and Moylan, “Conclusion” 247). On the one hand, it is a skeptical, critical questioning of present society and, on the other hand, it is an inquiry into new ways of transforming society. The apparently necessary negotiation between utopia and dystopia that forms the basis of Baccolini and Moylan’s work also informs recent theory about the risk society. The awareness of global risk and the real danger of catastrophes that threaten human existence on earth have revived apocalyptic thinking, which is often linked to utopian and, more particularly, dystopian fantasy and anticipation (Levitas 198). Indeed, in risk theory, the shift from a focus on present realities to expectations about the future prospects for life on earth has opened the door to considerations normally associated with utopianism, which is usually oriented toward the future. Ulrich Beck describes the sociology of risk as “a science of potentialities and judgements about probabilities” (“Risk Society Revisited” 213), before elaborating on the type of virtual reality that he associates with risks: “Believed risks are the whip used to keep the present-day moving along at a gallop. The more threatening the shadows that fall on the present day from a terrible future looming in the distance, the more compelling the shock that can be provoked by dramatizing risk today” (“Risk Society Revisited” 214). In risk society, utopia has a negative and defensive character, a result of the shift from concerns to achieve something good to concerns about preventing the worst from happening (Beck, Risk Society 49). The negative utopia of risk society is a utopia of safety as risk functions as a mainstay, the sometimes imperfect safeguard against harm. In my discussion of Eben Venter’s Trencherman and Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland, I will focus on their representations of risk in capitalist society with particular attention to the interplay of both utopian and dystopian elements in their largely dystopian fantasies about a future South Africa. In different ways, the two novels explore the sliding scale that accommodates

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utopia and dystopia as two extremities that cannot exist in isolation from one another, since the one inevitably animates the other. Utopia only acquires meaningful defi nition by virtue of its negative counter-image; dystopia only appears manifestly undesirable once it is compared to utopian alternatives. Although Venter and Beukes opt for dystopia in their novels, giving voice to the typical disaffection of the white minority with the increasing political marginalization of white culture and politics in South Africa since 1994, they never lose sight of utopian alternatives that, to their credit, are not limited to the narrowly defi ned aspirations of the white population. In both novels there is acceptance that the black majority should continue to shape the future of South Africa, but both writers argue that whites should return from their privatized and often privileged retreats to become part of public life.

THE DYSTOPIA OF GLOBAL CONSUMER CAPITALISM IN TRENCHERMAN With the publication of Trencherman in 2008, originally published in Afrikaans as Horrelpoot in 2006, prominent novelist Eben Venter provoked his readers with a very bleak picture of a future South Africa. In Trencherman, Venter consciously rewrites Joseph Conrad’s classic novella about European colonialism in Africa, Heart of Darkness, fi rst published in 1899. Conrad’s characters Marlow and Kurtz reappear in Venter’s near-future narrative as Marlouw and Koert and they experience very similar events to their counterparts in Heart of Darkness. After the death of their parents, Marlouw and his sister Heleen hand over the family farm in the Eastern Cape, Ouplaas, to the black farm workers consisting of the Hlongwane and Zuka families. They emigrate to Australia and Heleen raises her son, Koert Spies, in Melbourne, far removed from the social and economic decay which virtually destroys South Africa. However, as an adult, Koert returns to Ouplaas and establishes in collaboration with the Hlongwanes and Zukas a monopoly in the meat trade based on intimidation and stock theft. Heleen persuades Marlouw to travel to South Africa in order to establish precisely what is happening to Koert. Marlouw arrives in an anarchic South Africa without any form of central government, where AIDS is claiming the lives of 10,000 victims every day, a country where the roads are impassable and where broadcasting and telecommunications have all but collapsed. A massive explosion followed by a fi re on a vast scale has destroyed the greater part of the countryside. Most white South African have already left for places like Australia. On Ouplaas, Koert develops into a kind of monster. He is not only the leader of a corrupt meat syndicate but also becomes physically grotesque when he succumbs to his unchecked appetite, hence the title of the English version of the novel, which refers to an individual who is devoted to

100 Andries Visagie excessive eating and drinking. Koert is also dying of gangrene, which has infected one of his feet. Marlouw realizes that he will not succeed in saving Koert by taking him back to Australia. Finally, Koert dies in a collectively staged violent onslaught with the involvement of the people of Ouplaas. Marlouw flees in time and reaches Melbourne in a traumatized state. Fear as an ongoing preoccupation in Trencherman can be seen as one of the main catalyzing factors in the development of a dystopian image of South Africa: Marlouw’s fears show a resemblance to many of the fears that white South Africans currently express about their future, and the novel consciously responds to these fears and plays them out fully to their logical conclusion. With the publication of the English translation of his novel, Venter acknowledged that the question of fear is inseparably woven into the dystopian fabric of the novel. He said: “the story is dystopian. Or, at least, the opposite of utopian. Dystopia is the imaginary place where everybody and everything have to endure the direst of circumstances” (“Ten minste het ek dit gesê” 5). In an interview with Charles Malan, Venter lists his novel among the increasing number of dystopian novels that have appeared all over the world since 2006. As examples he mentions The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy, The Eagle’s Throne (2006 [2003]) by Carlos Fuentes, The Stone Gods (2007) by Jeanette Winterson, and Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (2008), remarking, “I believe Trencherman taps into a similar Zeitgeist and gains relevancy by doing so” (Venter, “Interview”).

Utopian Moments in Trencherman Dystopian literature that, in many ways, is a development engendered by utopian literature typically combines both utopian and dystopian elements that are engaged in struggle, as is evident in Trencherman. Repeatedly, the utopian impulses in Trencherman appear to be overwhelmed by the grim and bleak situation that dominates the narrative. Furthermore, the novel suggests that, to a large extent, capitalism has immobilized and co-opted the utopian imaginary and that dystopia is, in fact, the only viable reaction to the ever-increasing globalization of capitalism (Baccolini and Moylan, “Conclusion” 235–36; 246). The question is to what extent Venter succeeds in establishing a critical dystopia in his text with utopian moments that may function as pointers to hope and meaningful oppositional action. These involve, fi rstly, the relief work of the Swedish character Per Strand as a utopian project in a dying South Africa; secondly, the utopian potential of gardening and nature in the novel; thirdly, the representation of a prosperous Australia as an antithesis to a devastated future South Africa; and fi nally, the civilizing intentions of Koert’s mission to Ouplaas (Visagie). In this chapter, I will focus on the representation of Australia as antithesis to South Africa and Koert’s intentions with his mission to Ouplaas. In Trencherman there is a sustained contrast between the desperate conditions in South Africa and the prosperity of Australia. Upon his return

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from South Africa, Marlouw meets his sister Heleen in an expensive restaurant in Melbourne where he orders the most expensive steak on the menu: “Marbled Black Angus rib-eye steak with porcini dust in a light sauce of parsley, oyster mushroom and garlic” (308). The wealthy Heleen, who, thanks to her South African husband’s successful career in Australia, could order anything her heart desires, simply has no appetite. Marlouw’s disenchantment with the “clinical orderliness” of Melbourne is mentioned immediately after a quotation from Heart of Darkness, a probable reference to Brussels, where the colonialist employers of Joseph Conrad’s Marlow are based: “I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams” (307). In Marlouw’s view, Australia is no paradise; Koert, too, felt, before leaving for South Africa, that Melbourne made him “sick” (18). In his typical bastardized language, Koert indicates that he moved to Ouplaas because he felt that he could build something up while Melbourne left him with a feeling of worthlessness: “Middleclassy shitroaches, each and every one of youz. Mammie sips her baby cappucinos. Mammie wears bling bling sandals. And Pappie whores after is job. An whaz left for Koert, a little something? Fuckall-hole, actually” (246). Marlouw also admits that he agreed to travel to Ouplaas in order to experience again a more authentic way of life (296), and not primarily to persuade Koert to return to Australia. Although Australia functions to a certain extent as the utopian counterimage of a dystopian South African in Venter’s novel, Australia is fi nally represented as a capitalist dystopia. The vision that challenges the reader in Trencherman seems to confi rm Raffaella Baccolini’s view that capitalism has co-opted Utopia and that the pursuit of material gain has been anointed as the ultimate form of happiness and fulfi llment (Baccolini and Moylan, “Conclusion” 235–36; 246). The emptiness and spiritual depravity that accompany consumer culture, the fate of the Spies family in Melbourne, cast a dark shadow over this paradise of prosperity. There is indeed a sharp contrast between destroyed South Africa and prosperous Australia, but both countries display in diverging ways characteristics of dystopian spaces. Venter aims to undermine the high expectations of many prospective South African immigrants to Australia by representing it fi rst as a consumer paradise and then exposing it as simply another type of dystopian society.1 In a departure from most dystopian narratives, Venter re-imagines the trope of a journey from a dystopian space to a contrasting utopian space (or vice versa) as, instead, an encounter between two divergent dystopian spaces. Just as Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that “emissary of pity, and science, and progress” (Conrad 36), is initially motivated by utopian ideals in his so-called civilizing mission to the inhabitants of the Congo, Koert Spies harbors the illusion that he can develop the people of Ouplaas by

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introducing them to aspects of Western culture. But the so-called enrichment that he offers them appears to be limited to elements from the dubious capitalist utopia of consumerism: I am the one who does the sacrifices round here, right? Since I’ve arrived, I’ve given these specimens in the middle of nowhere eine Leben. For them I brought in the music, music from das Welt, for them the DVD’s, an we watched it nite afta nite mine brudder. Terminator en Rambo and romance shit so tha’ there can be love all over. So much, too much. I waz the one that bought the Bells and tha Jack Daniels. Do you think for a instant any of these wretched wretched specimens had ever tasted Bells? . . . Sag mir, izzit truly human to propel yourself all the way through this miserable life without ever sampling a taste of Bells? Einer nach dem andern I made them come and plunged my fi ngertot in de Bells and let them taste. Baptised with Bells, brudder. Gold in de grain. Do you realise everything I managed to do on this Platz? (Venter, Trencherman 240–41). Koert enchants the people of Ouplaas with stigmatized aspects of Western popular culture, like the violent films Terminator and Rambo and whisky with well-known brand names. Koert’s perverted “foreign investment” and so-called “aid” (242) to Ouplaas with his imported liquor, Nintendogames, and “classy consumer shit” (243) form a point of convergence of the two contrasting dystopian spaces in the novel—the destroyed South Africa and capitalist Australia. It becomes apparent that Koert and Heleen’s Australian dollars were used for the purchases to the benefit of the Hlongwanes and Zukas. As Eben Venter suggests in an interview (Venter and Malan), Koert’s bastardized language can also be seen as a linguistic dystopia—a degeneration of Afrikaans that taps into the fears of many speakers of Afrikaans that their language may disappear eventually. The only potential utopian element that remains after Koert’s mission to Ouplaas after his violent death is the fact that his black mistress Esmie Phumzile is expecting his child. However, the prospect that she may guarantee the continuation of an Afrikaner presence on Ouplaas by giving birth to the fourteenth Louw-Spies generation is also doomed to fail. The child will probably die shortly after his or her birth as Esmie is suffering from AIDS and is likely to infect her child with the deadly virus. Trencherman, with its vision of death and depravity, deliberately situated in the postapartheid period, which promised to be the salutary ending of a history of colonialism, passes severe judgment on the current regime (Gräbe 67). But in the words of Jaap, the taxi driver who meets Marlouw at the airport in Bloemfontein, the novel also issues a timely warning to white readers: The mistake we made was to withdraw from politics. That was fatal. Look, there was not a single person with expertise left in any

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municipality. Sewerage and drinking water the same. Government splintered. And the Afrikaners salivated with delight. . . . I’m talking about the middle class and the elite. The ones who wallowed in icing sugar. Fuller fridges. Bigger houses. Staircases and multi-storeys and columns. Wedding cakes, to say the least. . . . Became tourists, you see. We stayed on as tourists in our own country. No one accepted responsibility for anything. Meneer, the apathy was mind-blowing (Venter, Trencherman 63). This passage is a fairly accurate account of the withdrawal into materialism that characterizes the apathy of the more privileged layers of the white population in South Africa since the transition to black majority rule. Venter’s dystopia of unchecked consumer capitalism in South Africa (and, indeed, Australia as one of the preferred destinations for prospective white emigrants) is a reflection on the societal risks associated with a privatized existence that opts for a retreat from politics in a short-sighted and self-serving embrace of material gain.

MOXYLAND BY LAUREN BEUKES: A TECHNODYSTOPIAN CRITIQUE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM In her debut novel Moxyland, published in 2008, the young writer Lauren Beukes represents a future South Africa in 2018 as a capitalist dystopia where government aggressively promotes the interests of the corporate elite to the detriment of freedom in the rest of the country. The promise of a utopian dreamland, the fun-filled never-never land as suggested by the title, Moxyland, is invested with deep irony from the outset of the novel. Moxyland is a cyberpunk nightmare, a novel with serious critical intent. The text seems to confi rm the statement by Imre Szeman that “the public face of globalization aims not only to keep capitalism at the centre of things, but to clear the field of all possible challenges and objections” (174). Not surprisingly, the group of young activists in the novel discover that there is no more easy reliance on a vision of a social order in which change can be achieved “by cutting off the head of the king” (Szeman 174). Anti-corporate activist Tendeka Mataboge lives in Cape Town, described in an essay by social scientist Achille Mbembe as “one of the strangest cities in Africa” where one can still witness hierarchical logics of yesterday: “the White giving orders, the Coloured at the counter and the Black at the bottom, lifting heavy loads, cleaning, and smiling at the countless petty humiliations he or she has to endure to make a living” (160–61). However, in Beukes’ representation of Cape Town in the near future, racial stratifications seem to have been replaced by economic apartheid. The “dystopian agent is corporate culture; the citizens are separated, as rigidly as under apartheid, into corporates and civilians” (Heyns). Tendeka

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mounts a resistance campaign to undermine the reservation of certain spaces for corporate use only, ranging from separate transport systems to private beaches. He solicits the help of a group of street children, and a motley group of reluctant or compromised activists, among them the art school dropout, Kendra Adams, a corporate programmer, Lerato Mazwai, and Toby, a young man with little direction who abandons his literature studies to pursue his dreams of achieving fame with his video blog. Government protects the interests of the corporate elite and Tendeka has a history of clashes with the police who attempt to disconnect his mobile phone from the integrated network that regulates not only communication but also access to transport and all purchasing transactions. Tendeka relies for advice on a mysterious avatar from the internet who uses the tag skyward* and purportedly operates from Amsterdam, urging Tendeka to undertake ever more daring subversive acts. With the help of Lerato, Tendeka successfully sabotages the video advertising boards of her company Communique and he leads his gang of street children triumphantly into an art gallery, proclaiming: “Death to corporate art!” (135). They destroy the artwork Woof & Tweet, which is a gruesome “red and meaty” creature, a “lab-manufactured plastech bio-breed with just enough brainstem hard-wired to respond to input” and to project sound (127–28). A turning point in Tendeka’s defiance is a gamehack of the “real-world” game FallenCity which takes place in the Cape Town underground. While the game is in progress, Tendeka leads his gang of “homeless and phoneless” protesters (166) into the underground, demanding free access to transport and “passes for the people” (161) to share in the privileges of the elite. The police spray the protesters with a deadly virus of the “M7N1 Marburg variation” (170), which is fatal if the infected do not report to the appointed vaccine centers within 48 hours. Tendeka refuses to be vaccinated and, instead, proceeds to bomb the vaccine centers, hoping to expose the brutality of the government through the failure of the vaccine program and the death of many people as a result of the infection. Eventually Tendeka dies of the infection, unaware that his supposed ally, skyward*, is a creation of the company Communique. In collaboration with government, the corporates in locations such as Cape Town and Mumbai create and incite their own “terrorists” like Tendeka as a form of risk management. They foster activist interventions as a means to preempt any future actions that may pose a real threat to the interests of the privileged corporate class in their technologically advanced compounds, set apart from the surrounding urban decay and the so-called “Rural.” The novel ends with Lerato receiving a promotion from her company, Communique. Her activist tendencies will be co-opted for identifying and manipulating would-be activists; in the words of one of her superiors, recalling the name of the avatar, skyward*, used to mislead Tendeka: “You’ll be running several identities, posting, inciting, organizing—whatever’s required. Let’s just say you’re on the up. Heading skywards” (230).

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The involvement of the art school drop-out, Kendra, in a biological testing program of the company Inatec is an example of the correlation between wealth distribution and risk distribution in Moxyland. The wealthy corporates of Inatec select a group of young vulnerable civilians with a creative background to participate as human guinea pigs in an experiment that eventually would make them hopelessly dependent on a soft drink produced by a company called Ghost. Kendra receives an injection of “designer robotic microbes” (5) that attach themselves to her cells to start a process of reproduction that resembles a viral infection. She has to sign an agreement stating that she “understands that Inatec nanotechnology is still in the prototype phase of development” and that “she accepts full responsibility for all the risks inherent” (49). Inatec devolves all the risks to the participants with the promise that the “nano” will enhance their immunity to disease and improve the general state of their bodies. The Ghost logo is displayed on Kendra’s skin, provoking an accusation from Tendeka that she is a “lab rat” and “corporate bitchmonkey” (16). The effect of the nanotechnology is that Kendra has to drink an ever increasing number of Ghost drinks until, fi nally, she is reduced to physical misery, prompting the Inatec scientists to remove her from the program by giving her a lethal injection. The novel ends with the suggestion that during sexual intercourse Kendra had passed the genetically engineered microbes to Toby so that an epidemic may follow. The health risk that the corporates wanted to devolve to less privileged individuals is likely to produce a boomerang effect (Beck, Risk Society 37) to strike back at society as a whole, including those who created and derived profit from the risky venture. With Kendra’s experience, the novel demonstrates how the capitalist logic of wealth production is intertwined with risk production, the hazards of which are fi rstly devolved to those who are excluded from the privileges of the wealthy elite. Moxyland does not seem to register a clear transition from a class society to a risk society. Instead, the novel emphasizes the point that capitalism, with its persistent disparities in wealth distribution, propels the production of risk and that, if current trends continue, attempts to divorce risk society from the logic of capitalism are not likely to yield meaningful results. Lauren Beukes seems to corroborate the point made by Ruth Levitas that a discourse of risk or risk society can only contribute to a utopian transformation if it is coupled with a rigorous analysis of capitalism (209). This may apply to global capitalism but it applies, in particular, to the coexistence of risk and capital in a developing country such as South Africa, where in recent times the gap between rich and poor has widened to the extent that it now poses a real threat to the stability of the state. Moxyland is utopian in the sense that it represents a vision of South African society that has overcome the racial divisions that at present still dominate political discourse in South Africa. Yet, the novel also grapples with the difficulty of wresting utopia from its appropriation by capitalism. How can Kendra’s utopian desire for a perfect body be separated from the

106 Andries Visagie efforts of the Inatec scientists to develop technologies that will eliminate disease? Or should the utopian ideals of science again be distinguished from its abuse by the corporate elite for maximum profit? The risks attached to experiments with life-enhancing nanotechnology seem to be staggered by the capitalist interests of the Ghost company, which not only insists on giving intrusive visibility to its logo, but introduces the logic of immoderate consumption, based on the dependency that the participants in the program develop for the Ghost soft drink. As history has shown, utopia as such offers no guarantee for constructive change as it is enmeshed in a complex network of socio-political factors subject to a variety of antagonistic pressures. The values invested in utopia may range from the altruistically noble to the self-serving ideals of an elite. As a vehicle for change directed to the future, utopia is therefore unstable in its susceptibility to partial interests but it is nonetheless a necessary precondition for even the most modest of programs aimed at the achievement of a more just society. In Moxyland, utopian ideals motivate both the corporate elite and the anticorporate activists. Ultimately, access to power and resources determine the outcome of the respective campaigns but, nevertheless, the aspirations of those who are defeated by the ruthless interests of capital retain a certain integrity and coherence as the prevailing antithesis to mounting greed and civil repression. In an open letter to Nelson Mandela about corruption and violent crime in South Africa after the transition to inclusive democracy, Breyten Breytenbach affi rms the need for utopian thinking in a time of social and political decay: it is . . . true that we have to transcend our limitations, that we must cling to the notion of a utopia (call it “clean and accountable government” or “common sense”) as justification and motivation to keep on moving and making a noise. For the mind has to dance, even with death, if we want to stay it from reverting to despair and narcissistic self-love. To survive, we must assume the responsibility of imagining the world differently. (35; emphasis in original) In response to persistently high levels of poverty in South Africa (more than 50 per cent of South Africans still live in poverty while sustained economic growth seems to benefit only a privileged minority), Lauren Beukes creates a vision of a dystopian South Africa in Moxyland that, at the same time, does not discount the power of utopian impulses to imagine a different society. Although Toby cynically describes Tendeka as a “Struggle revivalist . . . born fifty years too late” (11), it is Tendeka who bears the ideal of a more equitable society. One of his projects is to counter the corporate invasion of public facilities such as the former city library that has been converted into a platform for “blaring logos and adboards” (25). He conceptualizes a project to cover the walls of the former library with graffiti murals painted by the

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street children in defiance of corporate encroachment on public facilities. It is his hope that the group of street children will “make a mark on the city that usually filters them out like spam” (26). Naïvely, he finally follows the advice of his presumed anti-corporate advisor, skyward* (in reality an agent provocateur of the company, Communique), to accept corporate sponsorship for the project, thus undermining the object of the whole exercise. An interesting element in Moxyland is the ambiguous position accorded to the arts and artists, whose integrity is undermined by their inability to resist the seductions of corporate culture. On the one hand, struggling artist Kendra Adams quite deliberately uses outdated photographic techniques to capture street scenes in Cape Town; on the other hand, she displays the logo of the Ghost soft drink on her skin as one of their brand ambassadors. Similarly, Tendeka’s graffiti murals, intended to protest against corporate encroachment, are eventually funded by corporate money. In the aftermath of Tendeka’s protest against corporate art, Kendra’s photographs increase in monetary value simply because they were splattered by the blood of the corporate artwork Woof & Tweet, which was on display in the same gallery. Her work is not appreciated primarily as a tribute to community life on the streets of Cape Town or as a reappraisal of outdated photographic technology but rather as testimony to the sensational destruction of a corporate artwork (143). Beukes’ cyperpunk narrative explores the energies that are released when technology meets culture. She is acutely aware that technology can be abused and may lead to the creation of a techno-dystopia, as happens in Moxyland. Yet, she realizes at the same time that technology also offers artists exciting new creative opportunities. The artist characters in her novel cannot distance themselves from the technology that forms the backbone of the repressive state and corporate control. As Jakob Arnoldi points out, science and technology often generate risk; new technologies have side-effects and often have unforeseen applications that undermine belief in scientific knowledge (34, 48). In fact, as Ulrich Beck points out, the discourse of risk begins where trust in the progress promised by technology ends (“Risk Society Revisited” 213). However, for the characters in Beukes’ novel, there is no possible retreat from technology and the risks of terror that it generates in their dystopian world. They have to accept the complicity that seems to be an inevitable part of the risk society as described by Beck (Risk Society 33), and which also informs the fictional world created by Beukes in Moxyland. In the novel it becomes unthinkable to fi nd a consolidated position at a remove from the capitalist sphere of influence, a realization that elicits the following response about activism from Mr. Muller, one of the minor characters in the novel: “What are they protesting, anyway? Capitalism? As if there’s an alternative. Where do they think their fancy technology comes from?” (207). There is no one who can struggle for change with clean hands. From the outset, Lerato, Kendra, Toby, and Tendeka are part of a system that is morally bankrupt.

108 Andries Visagie In Beukes’ corporate dystopia, the victory of ruthless technological capitalism seems to be decisive. Yet, unlike Eben Venter’s Trencherman, Moxyland is not a bleak and despairing novel. It is illuminated by the activist energies of the characters and the belief that art, whether it be in the form of Kendra’s non-digital photographs or the imaginative computer games played by some of the characters, may transcend its status within global capitalism as mere entertainment and an archaic cultural practice (Szeman 171) to become a meaningful site for the invention of utopian alternatives to the repressive society spawned by runaway capitalism.

CONCLUSION My inquiry into utopian moments in Trencherman has shown that Eben Venter posits a number of utopian eventualities, but consistently follows a strategy of reversal and debunking, thereby transforming these eventualities into anti-utopian or dystopian elements. This strategy invites the conclusion that Venter’s narrative cannot escape complete and utter pessimism. Yet, I suspect that the novel may function as a critical dystopia for readers who refuse to sink into passive melancholy after reading the text, and who are determined to resist the bleak projections about a future South Africa. Moxyland by Lauren Beukes functions as a critical dystopia and provides pointers to the liberation of utopian thinking from appropriation by capitalist consumerism and its technological seductions. The novel also presents a provocative representation of the overlap between the so-called risk society and a society where a considerable disparity in wealth distribution largely dominates public discourse. Risk is no stranger to the resolute course pursued by capitalism through modern history and a dystopian text such as Moxyland emphasizes the need for an integrated interrogation of capitalism and risk theory. South African texts such as Moxyland and Trencherman are couched in an aesthetic that takes it premise from local tensions produced by racial discrimination and inequalities in the allocation of material resources. As such, they respond to realities that preoccupy many third-world societies but at the same time they sniff out the likely implications of global financial, ecological, and terror risks, albeit with the hesitance and modest reserve often displayed by creative works from societies that are acutely aware of their more marginal role in global decision making.

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Beck, Ulrich. “Risk Society Revisited: Theory, Politics, and Research Programs.” The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory. Ed. Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, and Joost Van Loon. London: SAGE, 2000. 211–29. Print. . Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. London: SAGE, 1992. Print. Beukes, Lauren. Moxyland. Johannesburg (Auckland Park): Jacana, 2008. Print. Breytenbach, Breyten. Notes from the Middle World. Chicago: Haymarket, 2009. Print. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg, 1999. Print. . Life and Times of Michael K. London: Vintage, 1983. Print. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 1994. Print. Gräbe, Ina. “Apokalips nou of later? Eben Venter se siening van die Suid-Afrikaanse samelewing in Horrelpoot (2006).” Tydskrif vir geesteswetenskappe. Supplement—Die verskynsel van geweld: besinninge, analises, oplossings 74.4 (2007): 59–68. Print. Grebe, Coenraad. “Afrikaners is plesierig: distopia in suburbia.” Die vrye Afrikaan. Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings, 15 Nov. 2006. Web. 30 June 2008. Haasbroek, P.J. Oemkontoe van die nasie. Pretoria: Protea Boekhuis, 2001. Print. Harvey, David. Spaces of Global Capitalism. London: Verso, 2006. Print. Heyns, Michiel. “Kicking against the corporates.” Rev. of Trencherman by Eben Venter. Sunday Independent [London] 5 July 2008. Web. 23 June 2009. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Print. Krüger, Louis. Wederkoms: Die lewe en geskiedenis van Jannes Hoop. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 2009. Print. Levitas, Ruth. “Discourses of Risk and Utopia.” The Risk Society and Beyond. Critical Issues for Social Theory. Ed. Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, and Joost Van Loon. London: SAGE, 2000. 198–210. Print. Mbembe, Achille. “Why am I Here?” At Risk: Writing on and over the Edge of South Africa. Ed. Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2007. 144–70. Print. McGregor, Liz and Sarah Nuttall, eds. At Risk: Writing on and over the Edge of South Africa. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2007. Print. Paton, Alan. 1948. Cry, the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort in Desolation. London: Jonathan Cape, 1948. Print. Schoeman, Karel. Promised Land: A Novel. Trans. Marion V. Friedman. London: J. Friedmann, 1978. Print. Szeman, Imre. “Imagining the Future: Globalization, Post-Modernism, and Criticism.” Metaphors of Globalization: Mirrors, Magicians, and Mutinies. Ed. Markus Kornprobst, Vincent Pouliot, Nisha Shah, and Ruben Zaiotti. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 167–83. Print. Venter, Eben. Horrelpoot. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2006. Print. . “Interview: Eben Venter’s Trencherman.” Interview with Charles Malan. LitNet. 2008. Web. 20 October 2008. . “Ten minste het ek dit gesê.” Rapport (Perspektief) 15 June 2008: 5. Print. . Trencherman. Trans. Luke Stubbs. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2008. Print. Visagie, Andries. “Horrelpoot (2006) van Eben Venter: ’n Verkenning van die grense tussen utopie en distopie.” Stilet XXI.2 (2009): 52–68. Print. Wegner, Phillip E. “Utopia.” A Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. David Seed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 79–94. Print.

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Gray Goo and You The Ecophagy of Global Capital Robin Stoate

In his 1986 book Engines of Creation, MIT nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler coined a name for a catastrophic phenomenon that was beginning to appear in science fiction. The “gray goo” scenario is a situation in which microscopic, molecular, self-replicating technologies—an idea based on concepts propounded by the physicist Richard Feynman in the 1950s, and eventually intended for any number of beneficial purposes from medical aid to experimental science—spontaneously start to evolve and multiply beyond control, literally consuming their environment and turning it into a homogenous organic slop that eventually spreads to assimilate the entire universe. This process, described as “ecophagy” (literally “eating the environment”) by Robert Freitas of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in California, and rooted in dramatic projections regarding contemporary developments in nanotechnology, appears in a number of science fiction texts. Greg Bear’s novel Blood Music (1985) is the most widely cited example of this phenomenon; the novel describes a near-future world in which simple molecular “biocomputers” (later “noocytes”) consume and transform the specific human body into which they are injected, before spreading to absorb and transform the whole of North America into vast, formless strata of matter. Another, more recent fictional representation can be seen in the remake of the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), the climax of which depicts an alien robot transforming itself into a swarm of “nanites” that dissolves everything in its path. It is also a concern that has attracted wider attention in the “real” world—self-described “transhumanists” such as Raymond Kurzweil and mainstream media organs such as The New York Times have published pieces on the need to contain the potentially global threat of nanotechnology through a “responsible” development and deployment of the idea (“Nanotechnology Dangers and Defenses”; Osborne). Similarly, in 2004, Prince Charles responded to the notion in a way that did not name gray goo directly, but which urged particularly careful handling of nanotechnology, and expressed concern over a perceived lack of ethical consideration: If we look at the EU’s research programme for nanotechnology, only an estimated 5 per cent of total funding is being spent on examining the

Gray Goo and You 111 environmental, social, and ethical dimensions of these technologies. That certainly doesn’t inspire confidence. (Prince Charles par. 5) It is not, of course, unreasonable to warn or build safeguards against such a scenario—nobody really wants to be dissolved into a fluid gray mess— and indeed, the purpose of my study here is not to determine the likelihood of a gray goo scenario.1 My focus is on its representations in fiction: what can be uncovered in fictional depictions of the gray goo scenario are wider concerns about the homogenizing effect of global capital and an ensuing total obliteration of difference itself—but with the latter “blamed” upon the bodies of marginalized subjects. In other words, anxieties about literal corporeal dissolution into a continuum of matter are symptomatic of fears of a capital-driven global assimilation of all subject positions into transmissible, digitally encoded, abstracted, commodified ciphers—and yet, within these narratives, the perceived source of this disastrous global sameness is, ironically, displaced away from capital and onto exoticized representatives of difference itself. This is to say that while the leveling of difference, by the transcription into what Donna Haraway terms the “common language” of (digitized) capital in those considered “other,” is desirable for the agents of capital itself (particularly in the drive to create new market demographics), there is a lingering risk that that obliteration of difference will overspill into the agent coded as active; the subject in charge could lose control and human(ist) exceptionalism could be eroded or erased (Haraway 164).2 The scapegoats for this rampant dissolution become the putatively inadequate bodies of those traditionally coded as other to the lingering normative subjects of Western discourse: those who are non-male, non-white, nonheterosexual, et cetera. This chapter examines gray goo texts as points of convergence for those varying, tangled, and often contradictory concerns. Unraveling the discourse of gray goo in two novels—Prey by Michael Crichton (2002) and Bloom by Wil McCarthy (1998)—we can see the ways in which gray goo serves as both a model for the capital-driven dissolution of difference, and as a cluster of metaphors that scapegoat normatively marginalized subjects (primarily women) by linking the putative inadequacies of their bodies to the burgeoning threat of the constantly expanding, gooey menace. My approach here has much in common with Stephen Dougherty’s work on the biopolitics of the killer virus novel, upon which I draw at several points throughout my argument, but I also draw upon feminist scholarship on embodiment that considers explicitly the effect that the perceived permeability of the female body has on normative notions of subjectivity and difference. Informed by Elizabeth Grosz, Margrit Shildrick, and others, I move through readings of each of the two novels that focus specifically upon the part that women have to play in these narratives of dissolution. My overall contention is that despite its explicit links to “post-industrial” economies, and its obvious metaphorical connection to the flow of capital

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inherent in these structures, a trajectory of nanotechnological research resulting in the outcome of ecophagy by gray goo is shown to be less a problem with capital itself, and more a problem of adequate control. Pollutant effects on that sense of control, which (supposedly) hitherto rested in the hands of rational, humanist agents, may be derived from interference by damaged or incomplete subjective participants.3

NANO-CAPITAL: THE PERMEABILITY OF THE ENCODED BODY Fluidity is built into the very vocabulary of global capital exchange: liquidity, cash flow, income streams, floatation, solvency, bailouts, slush funds, dark pools, bubbles, et cetera. Money—or rather, the digitally abstracted simulation of the same—is increasingly (and perhaps inherently) liquid, promiscuous, and intangible, even as its flows become more carefully mapped technologically (and indeed constituted by that mapping). Perhaps more interestingly, though, this liquidity in itself can be bound up, like nanotechnology, with the issues, possibilities, and problems of the imperceptibly small. For instance, there are concerns over the receding palpability/comprehensibility of fi nancial transactions in the wake of practices such as high-frequency trading: fi rms and hedge funds with enough money and foresight to do so use data centers of powerful computers to read the fi nancial markets algorithmically, and thus profit from automatically buying and selling shares instantaneously, taking advantage of combined gains from thousands of miniscule millisecondto-millisecond discrepancies in prices (see Binham). The nanoscale character that this practice takes on in the imagination resonates with the notion of gray goo almost as much as does its fi rm rooting in the technological: these computer-originated transactions are too small for us to comprehend; they are too quick for us to perceive. The liveliness of this mode of capital exchange has inspired deep anxiety in fi nancial institutions: the practice of high frequency trading, which currently accounts for 42 per cent of the US market, is “under scrutiny” from a number of regulatory bodies in Europe and the US (Binham). The practice itself has little or nothing to do with the nature of what is being bought or sold, but is based simply on the algorithmic relationship between figures, stabilized into sameness by abstraction and encoding. Many lament the tendency for money to slip through our fi ngers, but the concerns evidenced by such widespread investigations show that this nano-capital goes further than that—it threatens to soak through our skin and pass through our bodies, beneath perception and beyond control.4 There are still more tangible examples of this seeping dissolution of difference by globalized capitalism. Rosi Braidotti demonstrates how the homogenizing effect of capital in post-Cold War Europe is distilled in the commercial campaign for the United Colors of Benetton clothing brand:

Gray Goo and You 113 The colossal success—at least here in Europe—of Benetton’s advertising campaign seems to sum up the semiotic code of the European unification project: all united in our respective differences, provided that our currency is the same, our living standards comparable, and our designer clothes, of course, made in . . . Italy, with capital held transcontinentally. (Nomadic Subjects 246) This advertising campaign cheerfully imagines a post-prejudicial world “united” by a specific product, and the unique selling point of that product is the very leveling effect of its “universal” appeal, this state being accessible only through the act of purchasing. Difference itself is annexed, reproduced as a version of itself that can become a saleable commodity in a common order of exchange (Braidotti refers to this in a later work as “the global market of Sameness” [Transpositions 58]), and thus, effectively, dissolved. 5 Clearly, this dissolution of difference and assertion of sameness is sold as a positive phenomenon—it is, supposedly, a mode of moving beyond prejudice—and the success of the campaign is an obvious indicator of the appeal of such a sentiment. But it is the potential overspill of this flow of capital into the controlling subject (the consumer, the corporation, etc.) rather than the commodifiable object which poses the threat. The cognitive dissonance in the constant expansion of homogenizing capital crystallizes in the tension between the desire to control difference (the other, the markets, the world) through liquidity and the comfort of marketable sameness on one hand, and the fear that capital itself could run out of control (as seen in the imperceptibility of high frequency trades) on the other, meaning that such interventions would reach back out and drag the (mythically) unique individual subject into the abstracted, commodified mire, too. This “Benetton effect” and high frequency trading are both, then, visible intensifications of a process of fi nancial and digital abstraction (and thus, through the global commonality of this encoding, homogenization) of the subject that is well accounted for in the work of a number of scholars. Citing Donna Haraway, Stephen Dougherty shows how fictional discourses of infection and contagion found in killer virus novels express anxieties about a steady transcription of the body into an abstract and staccato digital code, a tendency occurring within a sociopolitical and economic landscape that advances “a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (qtd. in Dougherty 1). For Dougherty, a crisis of subjectivity engendered by the flow of global capital and the associated “ontological shift whereby the corporeal body is turned into an information system, a purely discursive network of signs” (2) is signaled by a series of metaphorical breakdowns between the language of infection and the language of digital communications within novels describing the dramatic spread of contagious, deadly viruses that

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dissolve or hemorrhage the body (4). Crucially, Dougherty points out an alignment between embodied/subjective instability and marginalized subjects—in this case, the “non-whites” who “most viscerally embody the threat of viral contagion”: these diseases are almost invariably seen to arise on the African continent or other areas of former Western colonial domination, and to spread through the vector of normatively inadequate and indistinct body-subjects (5). The killer virus novel is only, for Dougherty, able to reconcile or rescue the embodied self by appealing back to colonial narratives in which a normalizing (white Western) force restores order and containment over this rising threat (20). This, then, brings us to the issue of representation of uncontained subjects in gray goo narratives. Grouped together here are a cluster of studies examining the shapes and representations of embodiment in post-Enlightenment Western culture. Firstly, the (relatively) recent turn to the body as subject of study in feminist theory engenders a wealth of critical positions on the ways that corporeal instantiation of any kind, and especially of the kind marked as “other” to the liberal humanist subject, disrupts the “objective” primacy— and threatens the very bounded existence—of that subject. Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies (1994) advances ways to understand gendered subjectivities “through” the body (vii). Grosz suggests that this approach helps to problematize the universalist and universalizing assumptions of humanism, through which women’s—and all other groups’—specificities, positions, and histories are rendered irrelevant or redundant; it resists the tendency to attribute a human nature to the subject’s interior; and it resists tendencies to dualism, which splits subjectivity into two mutually exclusive domains. (ix–x) Grosz’s work generates the beginning of a framework for examining the dangers of permeability for the Cartesian cogito-self: the body’s ostensible purpose is purely to provide a binary other to the mind, and its tendency to invade and disrupt the reason of that mind resides in its (perceived) unensouled, physical, desiring influence (5). Offering an understanding of embodied otherness that resonates strongly with Grosz’s study, Margrit Shildrick’s Leaky Bodies and Boundaries (1997) and Embodying the Monster (2002) both examine the question of the body’s pejorative position and its attendant inadequacy as a vessel for the Cartesian subject. In the former, Shildrick writes that women are denied full objective agency by the way that certain things place them “closer to nature,” specifically bodily processes such as menstruation and the much larger female role in reproduction. Both of these things are seen as somehow polluting to the rationality of the humanist self: In being somehow more fully embodied than men, women have been characterized simply as less able to rise above uncontrollable natural

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processes and passions. . . . It is as though bodies could somehow interfere with moral thought, instructing the mind. . . . Losing control of oneself is to a large degree synonymous with losing control of, or having no control over, one’s body. (Leaky Bodies 26–7) This fear of “losing control” of the body is located most strongly for Shildrick in discourses that place the female body as simply an “underdeveloped” version of that of the male with blurred, permeable boundaries (28). This dangerous indistinction between the mind and the body, coded as female in phallocentric discourses, unsettles the very bases of objectivity and so the operational stage for any kind of supposedly rational intervention or interrogation, and threatens absorption of the subject into the undifferentiated object-realm of nature. Permeability is, again, the key here. Phallocentric narratives are extremely wary of assigning agency to anything that cannot be mapped onto dualisms with neat, clean divisions: an attempt to distance the subject from pollutant others is coded into the bases of the binary oppositions that determine the logic of identity, and the putative literal “leakiness” of othered bodies—whether through menstruation, childbearing, perceived vulnerability to infection or otherwise—maps inevitably onto the ontology of the self, and constitutes a constant threat to these divisions. Shildrick’s later monograph expands further upon this by examining the bodies of entities considered “monstrous” in Western culture. Singling out the discourses surrounding “hybrid creatures, conjoined twins, human clones, cyborg embodiment, and others,” she notes the threat that such subjects pose to the boundaries of selfhood and difference (Embodying the Monster 2–3). Not only do monstrous bodies— defi ned primarily by said leakiness, permeability, and hybridity of selfhood (10)—threaten to compromise the normative subject, they do so by the very ontological indistinguishability between the two. My own position combines elements of the above perspectives. The gray goo narrative expresses anxieties about a steady dissolution of difference in the face of increasingly fluid capital, but those anxieties manifest through older discourses of the threat posed by leaky natural (female) bodies to the white, masculine, Western mind. The gray goo narrative associates the dissolving, hemorrhaging leakiness and contagion of catastrophically powerful nanotechnological agents with the perceived permeability of specific kinds of othered bodies, which, in turn, function as scapegoats for the homogenizing effects of codified capital. These bodies are unable to maintain properly their ontological boundaries and thus contain their tendency to infect or dissolve bounded subjects hitherto instantiated in ostensibly solid, fi nished body-vessels. In other words, the late capitalist “point of crisis” (Dougherty 2) for the body-self reaches perhaps its most explicit instantiation when that crisis is literalized by the threat of nanotechnological entities created in a laboratory by profit-making corporations, but, as the project of transcription into code remains desirable as part of the late

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capitalist project, blame for the “goo” of money shifts to marginalized subjects, loathed for their inability to properly master the process.

SWARM Of the novels under examination in this chapter, the most normative in its portrayal of the nanotechnologically besieged body is also the most recent. Jack Forman, the protagonist of Michael Crichton’s Prey, is an unemployed computer programmer from California, made redundant after whistle-blowing on his employer’s corporate fraud and then clandestinely blacklisted from jobs at other similar fi rms. He is, by this turn of events, made into a stay-at-home dad, while his brilliantly intelligent wife Julia leads work on nanotechnologies at the secretive Xymos laboratory.6 Jack once designed a series of computer programs with so-called “emergent behavior,” which a team of Xymos researchers—led by Julia—licensed for use in its experiments with medical nanotechnologies. In broad terms, the novel defi nes “emergent behavior” in programming as when the computer program in question, rather than being pre-programmed with rules and responses for every eventuality, is given a set of basic rules, and left to run and learn from its own mistakes. Xymos uses emergent code, designed by Jack, to control a swarm of billions of the microscopic particles it has created, ostensibly for the purpose of looking inside the human body (but as it later becomes apparent, having been at fi rst a military surveillance technology).7 However, owing to a number of misjudgments made by Xymos researchers, the swarm escapes into the surrounding Nevada desert—and begins both to reproduce and to “learn.”8 Its learning is guided by the particular set of rules that Jack programmed into the system that was originally intended for “pure” software applications. The emergent behavior that the swarm control program emulates is modeled on emergent behavior seen in “nature,” specifically the rules underpinning the “instinctual” actions of predators. Thus, when the swarm escapes the confi nes of its hermetic laboratory birthplace, it begins to “hunt” creatures on the outside—fi rst small animals, and then, inevitably, human beings. The codified body-subject—the swarm, born of capital investment, intended to be a generator of more capital, and constructed molecule-by-molecule of “pure” data—is seen as dangerously unstable and possessing the potential to absorb the human subject. However, the deadly cross-contamination made possible by the money-lubricated flow of software into nanoscale hardware (the licensing of Jack’s code) is only paid lip service—notably by Crichton’s doom-laden foreword, which notes the increasing investment in nanotechnology, but is less concerned with that than with “our self-deluded recklessness [and] the long and difficult journey to control our technology” (xii). While the foreword is ostensibly a comically grave one-size-fits-all condemnation of human naivety in the face of the liveliness of technology,

Gray Goo and You 117 digital capital itself—while used to indicate the increase of research over time—is never implicated as a basis for the threat. The dangers here are posed by the “recklessness” of certain subjects, manifested through a lack of “control” of technology. The foreword exculpates global capital—from whose impulse the push for nanotechnological breakthroughs originates— before the novel even begins. Crichton mentions Fujitsu, Intel, and IBM, along with the US government, as major investors in nanotechnological research (xiii), but does not consider this penetration of cross-pollinated state and private investment into the erstwhile pure/bounded rationality of the natural sciences (another outcome of the increasingly promiscuous language of encoded capital) to be, in itself, a problem. Rather, he outlines the possibility of managing the ensuing technology through “international controls,” making comparisons between the threat of nanotechnology and that of computer crime: “we’ve learned to put hackers in jail . . . errant biotechnologists will soon join them” (xv).9 Individual rogue subjects are a risk within the global system of capital exchange, but the liquidity of the system itself does not have to constitute a risk. The novel, as a whole, glosses over the role of capital, even as it depicts the capital-driven circumstances within which the story takes place. In order to do this, it locates a scapegoat for the threat: the novel’s most deeply ingrained anxiety, on which the blame for the outbreak of the nanotechnological swarm is more squarely laid, concerns female bodily permeability, and the risk that this poses to male boundedness and subjective stability. Prey’s particular deployment of the permeability motif for the purposes of horror is shared by both the gray goo narratives in this chapter: the swarm of nanobots kills subjects by literally soaking into their bodies and transforming them. It gets into the mouth, nose, eyes, and lungs and breaks the body down as “food” at the molecular level—eventually turning it into homogenous goo. We see this fi rst on a small scale, when the swarm attacks a wild rabbit and partially dissolves its insides, and we see it with increasing frequency and intensity as the swarm begins to kill human characters: I looked down and saw David Brooks’ shirt. Then I realized I was standing on what was left of his torso, which had turned into a kind of whitish jelly. My foot was right in his abdomen. His rib cage scraped against my shin, leaving a white streak on my pants. I looked back and saw David’s face, ghostly white and eroded, his features eaten away until he looked . . . featureless. . . . I felt instant nausea, and tasted bile. (419) Jack’s accidental stepping into the dissolved shell of a fellow scientist’s disintegrating carcass shows the disgust generated by the literal dissolution of the body to pale featurelessness.10 The primary explicit source of horror in the novel, then, is in the swarm’s ability to literally dissolve the bodies of those it attacks, rendering them into an averaged-out sameness. The bounded human subject, as instantiated within an organic

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body, is seen as vulnerable to this invading influence; the monstrosity of the swarm emerges from the fluid nature of its radical leakiness—it does not just contain and/or emit a dangerously fluid influence, it absolutely embodies it in and of itself. Again, while it is sensible enough to suggest that few people really want to be dissolved or eaten alive by swarms of microscopic particles, Crichton’s anxieties about the permeability of a data-encoded body are even more explicit when looking beyond the obvious horror of physical dissolution and death. Eventually, the swarm learns to literally invade the brain and take “conscious” control of subjects: by the end of the novel, Julia has fallen completely under the influence of the swarm, and takes on an explicitly antagonistic role. She embodies as a hybrid the murderous leakiness of the nano-entities with what appears to be the unstable pseudohuman form par excellence: the female body. In many ways she starts to become something of a caricature of the femme fatale—she becomes sultry and her earlier infidelity (Jack’s suspicions over her having had an affair with a co-worker are confi rmed) erupts into a kind of pansexual promiscuity; her figure and features become hardened and statuesque, she is suddenly given to hysterical outbursts of jealousy (466), and she begins to dispatch her enemies by way of transferring swarm particles to them with a deadly, poisonous kiss: Vince grabbed a fistful of Charley’s hair and tried to hold his head steady. Julia continued to kiss him. Then she stepped away, and as she did I saw a river of black between her mouth and Charley’s. It was only there for a moment, and then it faded. . . . Julia wiped her lips, and smiled. Charley sagged, dropped to the ground. He appeared dazed. A black cloud came out of his mouth, and swirled around his head. (457) Julia is, in fact, the axial point around which the novel’s gender-coding of nanotechnological horror rotates. There are a number of ways in which the codification of this horror as female is manifested through her, but clearest is the line drawn by Crichton between a perceived incompatibility of women and scientific endeavor because (and through the motif) of women’s presumed biological destiny: childbearing. It is apparent from early in the story that Julia’s inability to balance properly her domestic and working lives (along with the replacement of Jack as breadwinner) leads to the slow decline of her family. The most explicit expression of this poisonous collision between rationality and the feminine sphere of childcare, though, is in what initially causes the swarm to become dangerous in the fi rst place. When it fi rst escapes the lab, the male members of staff at Xymos are intent on destroying it while it would be easy to do so. But Julia refuses, as shown in this conversation between Jack and one of the Xymos scientists:

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“[It] was Julia’s idea to treat [the swarm] like a child. She went outside with bright blocks, toys. Things a kid would like. And the swarm seemed to be responding to her. She was very excited about it.” . . . “But David,” I said, “You all knew this was a runaway, evolving outside the laboratory. Didn’t anybody think to just go out and destroy it?” “Sure. We all wanted to. Julia wouldn’t allow it. . . . She was, I don’t know, she was really taken with it. I mean, she was proud of it. Like it was her invention.” (256–57) Julia cannot bring herself to wipe out the swarm because her feminine and ontologically unstable “instinct” to rear children has interfered with the rationality of her subjectivity and polluted the hitherto objective scientific project she was leading; as Shildrick remarks, pregnancy is “the paradigm case of breached boundaries” (Leaky 35). The supposed inevitability of the feminine right/desire/need/requirement to bear children is always at risk of manifesting the kinds of subjective indistinctions that make women’s bodies inadequate vessels for a bounded, objective self. And, combined with the Enlightenment gender myth that while men create with their minds, women can only create with their bodies, in this case the collision between those two approaches is disastrous, and eventually engenders total dissolution of tangible embodied difference. Julia’s decision to treat the swarm like a child is instrumental in the entity’s shift from contained experiment to nearinvulnerable, hyper-permeable menace. We see the effects of this poisoned subjectivity everywhere in the novel; the swarm infects and absorbs more and more subjects—mainly hyper-rational scientists—turning them to Julia’s side. Significantly, the swarm even begins to take on human form; it imitates the physical characteristics of the human beings around which it has spent time, but often de-coalesces into faceless, uncanny mannequins. This failed attempt by the swarm to attain the embodied manifestation of a “true” human subject allows us to view the normative perception of the female subject: a failed (but dangerous) caricature of male selfhood, thwarted by its own body’s ambiguous boundaries. Perhaps the most bizarre example of this is the point at which Julia’s swarm body literally engulfs Jack’s: And the moment I spoke, a river of pale particles streamed off Julia, curved in the air, and came down like a shower all over my body and into my mouth. I clamped my mouth shut, but it didn’t seem to matter, because in the mirror my body seemed to dissolve away, to be replaced by Julia’s body. It was as if her skin had left her, flowed into the air, and slid down over me. Now there were two Julias standing side by side in front of the mirror. (506) In this strange scene (somewhat resonant with a kind of inversion of the mirror stage), Jack’s self-image disappears as his own body is literally (re-)integrated into a female body.

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Throughout Prey, we are harrowed by depictions of the dissolution of difference into gooey homogeneity, ostensibly driven by the literal conversion of capital into code into matter (the cyberpunk dream of “data made fl esh”).11 However, culpability for the liquefying side-effects of that process is frequently dislodged onto vulnerable body-subjects. As Dougherty notes in his examination of the killer virus novel, “bodily crisis and expressions of authentic anxiety about humankind’s fate in an increasingly digitized, late capitalist society” are depicted in “the loathsome disintegration of the organic body beset by infection” (4). This “loathsome disintegration” becomes all the more of a risk when we start to encounter bodies that cannot adequately shore themselves up against subjective invasion, and Julia is the clearest example in Crichton’s novel of the ways in which the “blame” for the instability of the coded subject is dislocated onto the similarly unstable condition of femininity. This notion takes on an interstellar scale in Wil McCarthy’s novel Bloom.

THE FECUND ZONE: WOMEN IN BLOOM Bloom presents a picture of nanotechnology gone awry that is simultaneously more radical than Prey in the goo’s transforming reach and equally marginalizing of those figures that the novel’s discourse marks as responsible for that dissolution. While Prey limits the infestation/infection of its nanoscale antagonist(s) to a small laboratory in the Nevada desert and its unfortunate occupants, Bloom concerns a truly vast expansion of gray goo—in this case, “technogenic life” known as “mycora,” a man-made fungus-like entity that rapidly assimilates not just human beings, but most of Earth’s solar system. Set in the late twenty-fi rst century, Bloom’s protagonist, John Strasheim, is a bootmaker and part-time journalist, carving out a meager living on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.12 Like most survivors of the accidental escape of this manmade life form on Earth, he is part of “the Immunity,” a rather uptight culture of workaholics living mostly among Jupiter’s moons. The Immunity lives in an artificially engineered and environmentally ubiquitous “immune system,” which protects them, largely, from the invasion of the mycora which have colonized most of the rest of the solar system—though there are still occasional outbreaks or “blooms.” Noted for his volunteer “news” coverage of an outbreak of mycora on Ganymede, Strasheim is asked to join an Immunity mission to travel into the heart of what is now known as the “Mycosystem.” Because most spacecraft would quickly be dissolved and assimilated by the mycora, the ship in which the “myconauts” must travel—appropriately named the Louis Pasteur—is treated with an experimental “T-Balance” coating; a substance painted onto the hull that is capable of resisting absorption.

Gray Goo and You 121 Bloom makes similar judgements to Prey about the respective values of a strictly humanist version of bounded subjectivity, and the dangers of a feminine-coded invasion/infection/perversion of that subjectivity. Its portrayal of nanotechnology-gone-mad apparently absolves capital of its own solvent threat: the novel sets up a money-free “ladderdown” economy based on the relative energy potentials of various elements within nuclear transmutation. This is the novel’s only explicit symptom of anxiety over the diminished tactility of digital capital. Replacing the abstraction of encoded money with a system that has constant recourse to a scientifi cally measurable use-value (in the form of energy released and metals produced) speaks of a desire to be able to comprehend the value of a thing in and of itself, rather than its increasingly homogenous exchange-value. Indeed, Strasheim’s home is a city inside a moon, where the streets are literally paved with gold (19). In a segment where the Louis Pasteur’s value in the ladderdown economy is explained in scientifi c terms, one of Strasheim’s colleagues outlines why this is the case: Many people are surprised to learn that lead’s energy potential is only twenty-five percent less than uranium’s, but the thing to remember is that lead has ten fewer transmutation targets—eighty-one versus ninety-one—which translates into a factor of a thousand reduction in its value. Gold, three rungs lower still, is worth about a five-thousandth as much as uranium. It has beautiful mechanical and electrical properties, but really, the major cost of paving the streets with it is the labor. (75) The flow of capital in Bloom is made invisible by ladderdown exchange— or at least, presented in a form that eschews the infinite interchangeability of digital code. The economy underwriting the mission to the heart of the Mycosystem (and indeed everything else) is built upon nuclear transmutations that have specific, solid, unshakeable foundations, rooted in the comfortingly immutable laws of physics. Infi nitely reciprocal, undifferentiated abstraction of value has been denied here in favor of linear relationships between materials and their ability to animate specific physical outcomes. The absence of money here is telling both of the subjective anxieties surrounding its permeable diminishment into digital code, and the need to defend projects (i.e., scientific teleologies) whose explication is heavily reliant upon the driving forces of corporate capital. These anxieties are displaced, as with Prey, onto the marginalized bodies of women. The way that the mycora infects and absorbs (and thus kills) in Bloom is very similar to the way that the swarm does so in Prey: it effects a total dissolution of the vulnerable corporeal body. When an outbreak of the life form happens, the environment and human beings alike are quickly broken

122 Robin Stoate down and assimilated into the mass—as shown in a section describing a deliberate release of mycora by a man attempting to sabotage the Louis Pasteur’s mission: The air vent and the wall it was part of began to boil, their substance turning fluid, turning into rainbow-threaded vapors as the tiny, tiny mycora disassembled them molecule by molecule. . . . I knew exactly what I was looking at: class-one threaded bloom in early germination phase, two minutes before fruiting began. . . . The bottle man stepped up behind Tug Jinacio and pushed him bodily into the bloom. Tug’s body did not come apart at once into threads and dust, but his skin had gone rainbow-crystalline with mycoric frost before he’d even hit the floor, and of course he never did rise. . . . That Jinacio suffered in the twelve seconds of his death goes without saying, but the images are not on file. God, I owe him that much, at least. (58–59)13 Bloom illustrates once more the fear of a leaking, fecund, aggressively indeterminate body to the bounded subject, and like Prey, it enriches its sense of horror by drawing upon the mycora’s “feminine” characteristics. Descriptions of the mycora in Bloom often focus on the entity’s radical fertility as a source of fear. The outbreak of bloom described in the novel’s opening segment laments the fates of those “unfortunate enough to be within the fecund radius when the fruiting bodies swelled and popped” (4). This idea of a “fecund radius” or “fecund zone” crops up regularly in the novel, and the threat of being permeated by and integrated into this radically embodied entity’s “meaningless program” (5) is ever present: the caricature of pregnancy that we see here is, of course, lacking in the “meaning”—the unified, teleologically stable mind-self—of the male characters who fight it.14 One of the primary means of on-the-spot defense against mycoric outbreak is also feminine-coded: those at ground zero of an emerging bloom will hope that, before they die, they will be able to drop a couple of “witch’s tits”—devices that drop the temperature in that small area and literally freeze the bloom in its tracks (3). The unexamined deployment of this somewhat medieval metaphor, with the attendant maintenance of its connotations of coldness and abjection, essentially fights one feminine stereotype with another: the relentless, all-consuming reproducer is neutralized by the equal-but-opposite specter of the frigid, unnatural vision of a female body with no apparent use for men. Apart from this one rather striking trend of devices underpinning the depictions of the mycora, there are characters and entities who even more clearly embody the text’s tendency to displace the gray goo enemy’s undesirable, ontologically indistinct qualities onto othered subjects—and, again, women in particular. As with Prey, Bloom’s primary antagonist figure is a female scientist whose objectivity has been “polluted” by her succumbing to the will of this radically embodied entity. And, as with Prey, it is a version

Gray Goo and You 123 of pregnancy and the nurturing “instinct” of the mother that is the foil to the scientific project, and, by extension, the integrity of the bounded subject itself. As shown earlier, Prey’s Julia distorts the teleologically “pure” aim of the nanomachines by literally treating the swarm like a child. In the case of Bloom’s bioanalyst character Renata Baucum, clandestine sabotage of the Louis Pasteur at several points during the mission culminates in an attempt to release an outbreak of mycora onboard the ship—by rupturing a pouch of TGL spores that she carries inside her body: My skin went instantly clammy. . . . “Are you saying you’re full of spores?” “I’m sorry!” she cried suddenly. Tears quivered at the corners of her eyes. “The storage cyst is ruptured; I can’t undo that.” . . . She gasped, then screamed. Alarm klaxons sounded. Warning lights began to flash. Baucum’s skin began to change color, and then to shimmer in an oil-on-water sort of way. She screamed again, and this time it sounded all wrong, like she was coughing up a lungful of dandelion fluff, or trying to. . . . Baucum’s skin had lost its smoothness, had developed an unmistakable powdery-vapory aura of rainbowblossoming mycostructure, and I was more afraid of that than I can tell you, more afraid than if she were burning, or aiming a weapon, or anything. (234–35) This literal, physical dissolution of Baucum—effected by her desire to let the mycora assimilate her—plays out before the rest of the crew like a grotesque caricature of the birth of a child. There is, I think, a resonance here with the “chest-bursting” xenomorphs of Alien (1979), and both representations of this process represent, on one level, an expression of male fears of female fecundity. It is notable that Strasheim considers the threat of absorption into sameness represented by Baucum’s changing, permeable/permeating body to be a more grave threat than that of the potential death that would ensue from being attacked in a more conventional manner. The nightmarish permeability of gray goo remains the source of horror because of its enduring threat to the boundary logic of humanistic subjectivity that makes normative difference possible, rather than the (apparently) comparatively mundane risk of organic death. Before this moment, though, Baucum exhibits a number of other behaviors which suggest a much closer alignment between women and the mycora (and so, women and this dangerously unbounded body). Baucum, like Prey’s Julia, evokes the figure of the femme fatale by seducing Strasheim, presumably to stop him from “reading” her in the way that he had been attempting, and thus to prevent him from uncovering her plot.15 “Using her body” in an attempt to disrupt the clarity of Strasheim’s inquiry in this way is a microcosmic resonation of the threat from the mycora: “those soft tissues I had so recently admired” (234) are what transfix the journalist-protagonist’s gaze, even as Baucum is assimilated by her own gut-born colony of spores. While

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Baucum is the only fully fleshed-out (as it were) female character in the novel, McCarthy’s representation of the conspiracy that aids and abets her desire to join the bloom is steeped in a similar kind of feminine coding. The “Temples of Transcendent Evolution” are a quasi-religious organization dedicated to researching the mycoric bloom and attempting to locate the “mycoric soul” (29). The only definite representatives of this organization that we encounter in the novel are women, and like most members of the Immunity, Strasheim has little time for them (the Temples’ churches are regularly burned to the ground) (29). It is just one of several of the novel’s expressions of frustration at the feminized version of inquiry represented by the Temples and the women who allow their embodied experience to pollute their minds.

CONCLUSION Overall, the gray goo narrative demonstrates a tendency for the instability of categories of difference evoked by the digitized, commodified subject to be blamed upon marginalized bodies, rather than upon a coalescing of effects produced by the codification of the human body emerging out of late capitalist attempts to transcribe the self into abstract, digital (and thus universally exchangeable) essence. There is a deepening concern about the homogenizing effect of the breakdown of subjective boundaries by the codification of the subject, and, in response, fictions that register these anxieties rehearse marginalizing discourses, which have the perceived ability to restore objectivity, and thus the possibility of normative difference. Indeed, at times, both of the texts uncover threats in female subjectivity as a means of exonerating the capitaldriven codification of the subject, performing an explicit removal of money from the bases of the narrative’s threats of dissolution altogether. What haunts both novels is the specter not of the inherent mutability of digitalized capital, but that of lost “control”: control of the scientific project; control of nature; control of—and by—women. While promiscuous, steadily atomized money itself either lurks somewhere in the texts or is represented by a money-shaped hole in the texts’ logic, the notion that it is in any way responsible for the gooey collapses of human subjects into the undifferentiated object-world is rejected with alacrity. Instead, persistent, pervasive discourses regarding a putative female inability to attain rational subjectivity are deployed as the “real” reason why our systems of abstraction and digitization are inherently risky, prone to leaks and cross-contaminations. The rehearsal of these discursive patterns flows, constantly, through the gray goo narrative.

NOTES 1. For a scientific critique of fictional representations of nanotechnology (and Crichton’s Prey in particular) see Phoenix.

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2. That is, considered other within the framework of a normative logic of identity, which includes as other “the world” itself. 3. Furthermore, the continual reiteration and rehearsal of this battle for control in the face of such permeable subjects is performative in its construction of that controlling humanist agent assumed as an a priori entity. 4. I recently discovered that there is a venture capitalist group called NanoCapital, whose specialism is to support financially the development of nanotechnology. 5. For still further discussion of the Benetton effect and difference, see Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 146ff. 6. The name is rather unsubtly descended from real-life nano-research laboratory Zyvex (see Phoenix). 7. The ocularcentric tendency to use new technologies fi rst as a means of extending the visibility of a “target” resonates with Paul Virilio’s consideration of the joint development of the film camera and the machine gun as codependent technologies of warfare in War and Cinema (1989 [1984]). This is not to mention the ramifications of this kind of imaging for the male gaze and its scopophilic attempts to “know” the female body. 8. Placing the action of Prey in the Nevada desert also quietly marks it as resonant with a tradition of military-industrial complex “skunkworks” ventures (organizations of scientists given considerable autonomy by their employers to carry out experiments that may or may not lead to specific marketable breakthroughs). 9. This is also rather reminiscent of Prince Charles’ manner of surveying of the nanotechnological research landscape; he also produces figures about investment in nanotechnology. Like Crichton, though, Prince Charles does not implicate this capital flow itself in potential problems with nanotechnology, merely opining, instead, that the money is simply not being spent correctly (i.e. on controlling the technology). 10. As Dougherty also points out, this kind of bilious response to the corpse may also be worth viewing through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection (25n8). It is worth noting, too, that, as a character, David Brooks is a scientist of great rationality until he is struck down by a moment of hysterics leading directly to his death (310ff). His failure to embody a properly masculine paradigm of behavior under crisis leads to his being overtaking fi rst by intellectual instability and then literal dissolution by the feminine-coded swarm. 11. See William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984). Dougherty, though, rightly warns against seeing cyberpunk as a genre adequate for interrogating anxieties over the encoded body—partly because cyberpunk revels so much in these shifts, ignoring their wider implications (2–5). 12. McCarthy’s writing seems intended to fall into the so-called “hard” science fiction category, where the exploration and extrapolation of “ideas”— scientific ideas—is privileged. So, Strasheim is a bootmaker before he is a journalist, because on Ganymede, gravity is so different from on Earth that providing special boots for the colony’s occupants is of the highest priority. 13. The “zee-spec” described here is a mobile computing device, worn like goggles. For Strasheim it serves as a means of recording and enhancing his “realworld” perception and experience. This is another example of the desire to use technology primarily in order to intensify the gaze of the (male) subject into the object-world. 14. Being “in bloom” is also a term for being visibly pregnant, and has any number of descendents: to have “flowers in the window,” etc. 15. Indeed, in one moment, Strasheim is horrified when Baucum wishes to “trade zee-specs”—despite having just had sex with her. He sees this as “a shocking intimacy”: it is fi ne for him to share the base flesh of his body with this

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WORKS CITED Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. 20th Century Fox, 1979. DVD. Bear, Greg. Blood Music. Westminster: Arbor House, 1985. Print. Binham, Caroline. “High Frequency Trading Faces Review by U.K. Treasury.” Bloomberg. 3 Feb. 2010. Web. 4 Feb. 2010. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print. . Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Print. Crichton, Michael. Prey. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Print. The Day the Earth Stood Still. Dir. Scott Derickson. 2008. 20th Century Fox, 2009. DVD. Dougherty, Stephen. “The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel.” Cultural Critique 48 (2001): 1–29. Print. Drexler, Eric. Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. New York: Anchor Books, 1986. Print. Feynman, Richard P. “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics.” Annual meeting of the American Physical Society. California Institute of Technology. 29 Dec. 1959. Web. 12 Sept. 2008. Franklin, Sarah, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey. Global Nature, Global Culture. London: Sage, 2000. Print. Freitas, Robert. “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations.” Foresight.org. Apr. 2000. Web. 15 Dec. 2008. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. London: Voyager, 1995. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Print. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print. Kurzweil, Raymond. “Nanotechnology Dangers and Defenses.” KurzweilAI.net. 27 Mar. 2005. Web. 15 Sep. 2009. McCarthy, Wil. Bloom. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. Print. Osborne, Lawrence. “The Gray-Goo Problem.” The New York Times 14 Dec. 2003. Web. 15 Feb. 2009. Phoenix, Chris. “Don’t Let Crichton’s Prey Scare You—The Science Isn’t Real.” Nanotechnology Now. Jan. 2003. Web. 15 Sept. 2009. Prince Charles. An Article by HRH The Prince of Wales on Nanotechnology. Independent on Sunday [London] 11 July 2004. Web. 18 Mar. 2010. Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: Sage, 2002. Print. . Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism, and (Bio)Ethics. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiler. London: Verso, 1989. Print.

8

Risk and Morality in Ian McEwan’s Saturday Lidia De Michelis

In 2001, Ian McEwan powerfully addressed the emotional politics of September 11 and its sublime aesthetics of pity and fear in two Guardian articles exploring the universal grammar of affect mobilized to shore up faith in ethical bonding and common humanity in the face of the paradigm-shifting, cinematic scenario of the attack on the US. Focusing on the last words and disembodied love messages of the men and women who were soon to die in the collapse of the Twin Towers or the hijacked planes, and reflecting on the “nature of empathy,” he famously wrote: “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality” (“Only Love”). This view, resonant with core tenets of evolutionary psychology which defi ne the mind as “a narrative machine,” genetically predetermined to create “scenarios” and “options” and entailing a biologically based sense of morality (Wilson ix), is by no means new to McEwan’s work.1 However, it is only after September 11 that, in considering the “gulf of imagining” brought on by the shattering experience of watching horror at a distance while thinking that “the world would never be the same” (McEwan, “Beyond Belief”), he invests his signature aesthetic concern for the interconnected workings of fiction and morality with a distinctly planetary and “species conscious” (Amis 9) dimension. In 2005, such ethical tensions and probings, and the interrelated issues of the globalization, customization, and internalization of an unfocused, often unchallenged, sense of threat and terror, are given expression in Saturday (2005). The novel, which hinges on a “day in the life” of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, explores the way individual consciousness and psychic life are constituted and evolve against the dual backdrop of the London peace demonstration of 15 February 2003 and the wider scenario of anxiety, moral instability, and epistemic uncertainty brought to the fore by the eruption of delinquent fury into the bounded space of the home and the divisive debate on the Iraq War. This imaginative terrain, which foregrounds the cognitive and creative lead of the moral imagination in resisting pre-mediated global spectacles of violence and hegemonic discourses of

128 Lidia De Michelis threat, intended to naturalize a political culture of surveillance and control, is at the core of my analysis, which addresses the way McEwan’s characteristic “sense of open-ended peril, or edginess” (“Author Interview” 129) is incisively historicized in Saturday to provide a meta-narrative meditation on the meaning of humanity, as the epigraph from Bellow’s Herzog suggests, in the face of the inchoate scenario of the twenty-fi rst century. The complexity and thematic cogency of this novel, which aspires to “embed” the literary “in the warmth of the real” (McEwan, “Journeys without Maps” 134), lend themselves to critical approaches that give priority to variously aesthetic, canonical, generic, spatial, and broadly socio-political interpretations. The most persuasive readings address the way Saturday’s multiple threads are woven together and aestheticized through the ethical workings of the imagination. For not only does the all-important role of this faculty in shaping alternative futures resist the current global imaginary of neoliberal simplification and homogenization, it also defi nes the intellectual and emotional atmosphere of this novel. By foregrounding the self-searching, ethically alert, omnivorous quest of an individual consciousness obsessed with control, who eventually embraces his own entanglement 2 with the seductive intricacy of real and fictional life as a bond-creating legacy intrinsic to the human project, McEwan pitches his protagonist against public projections of the future which appear to be increasingly “baffl[ing]” and “fearful” (Saturday 4). These imaginaries are themselves seen as being pre-determined (and at the same time redeemed from the indignities of both apocalyptic thinking and petty contingency) by their ultimate inscription within the grander design of evolutionary extinction, the wondrous “tragedy of forms continually dying” (56), which remains unreflective of ethical and cultural engagement with malignant agency and manufactured risks. Hence, while I basically subscribe to the view that the overriding concern of the novel is the interface between the artistic and scientific imagination, and the idea of fiction as the only form that is able to represent the “metaphysical dimension” of historical events against the wider canvas of politics and culture (Groes, “Introduction” 4), 3 I have chosen to explore McEwan’s imagined scenarios of fear through the privileged focus of the sociology of risk. This domain has been compellingly explored and systematized since the early 1980s in the works of leading anthropologists, social scientists, and philosophers, such as Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas, Anthony Giddens, Deborah Lupton, Samuel Huntington, Frank Furedi, Zygmunt Bauman and, most famously, Ulrich Beck. Beck’s theory of the “world risk society,” in particular, and its post-September 11 addendum of a “clash of risk cultures, risk religions” (“Living” 337), points to a major crisis in conventional humanist tenets and values against the current backcloth of liquid modernity (Bauman), ridden by manufactured risks which are “global, unpredictable, and resist regulation” (Mythen 304).4 In addition, the haunting

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discursive emergence of the specific risk of de-territorialized terrorism also has elicited disquieting, controversial responses by thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek. Relying mainly on a cultural studies and discourse analysis approach, this chapter aims in particular to highlight, in Saturday, the referential and metaphorical resonance of the way in which these theories of risk have been popularized and circulated pervasively across multiple public spheres, giving currency to the so-called “discourse of risk,” one which, echoing Beck’s “clash of risk cultures” (“Living” 337), also implies ideological and cultural choices concerning personal and collective self-defi nition, the place of the “Other” and, ultimately, the emotional politics of bordering and bordercrossing, understood from both a literal and figurative point of view. Against the multi-layered, sinuous texturing of McEwan’s plot, the Iraq War thread naturally stands out as the paradigmatic fictionalization of the issue of risk, being an obvious example of the de-territorialized, exported wars that are characteristic of second stage modernity, according to Beck. However, Saturday’s sensuous embodiment of the life of “active self-monitoring, self-governance, self-regulation and self-dramatization,” which Anthony Elliott has recently described as a defi ning characteristic of “intensive risk society” (“Foreword” ix-x), also helps to highlight the way this novel brings to life the systemic fear inherent in our way of life as a result of the neo-liberal de-socialization of risk and the dissolving boundaries between public and private violence. Indeed, McEwan’s narrative accumulation of objects, thoughts, memories, projections, and sensations works as a structuring device that appears to legitimize the fear of “not being able to live one’s normal, regulated, or optimized life as a member of the public, population, or society” (Debrix and Barder 407), a perspective that pertains fully to the Western elites’ and middle classes’ current perceptions of happiness and threat. In this way, Saturday also crucially foregrounds the inescapable cultural rootedness of the whole issue of risk in the everyday experience of identity and otherness. Within this larger design, as Susan Green has noted, the “over-allegorical” (Wood) inscription of Arnold’s “Dover Beach” represents an aesthetic rupture, “a metaphor for revelation” (Green 67), “for literature’s capacity to reach beyond the literal” (70). In this way, it provides a way out from the informational and discursive loop which prevents us from seeing through the fog of public words, and helps to frame the issue of risk itself, in its dual incorporation as a private invasion and a public event, as originating from failed human exchanges and a growing inability to sift one’s way through an overload of “pre-texts” and a deafening clash of discourses. While agreeing that the attack on the Twin Towers has radically altered the collective mindset of the West, McEwan has repeatedly warned against “treating September 11 as the only and most spectacular event of human cruelty” (“Faith and Doubt”), or considering our current sense of “end-time thinking” (“The Day of Judgement”) as based on sound fact and scientific

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calculus. This notion, which also informs the protagonist’s hopeful reflections about the possibly recursive, unexceptional nature of the 2003 crisis (Saturday 32), helps to frame the saturation of Perowne’s thoughts and the metaphorical terrain of the novel by mass-mediated discourse not so much in the context of McEwan’s actual engagement with risk, as of the alarming and infectious effects of its anticipation and/or perception.5 Drawing on Raymond Williams, Iain Wilkinson has persuasively linked the current success of the category of risk as a flexible “heuristic device” (8) for accessing different sociological frames of reference with that recursive emergence of “new idioms of cultural expression” (14) that is a defi ning characteristic of profound social change. Similarly, Jack Holland (284) points to the current epistemic and denotative instability of the term “crisis”— “illusive, vague, imprecise, malleable, open-ended” in Colin Hay’s words (2)—which has pervasively penetrated multiple public spheres. Convincingly historicized and intertwined with the private threads of the story, the profoundly subjective nature of the perception of “risk” and “crisis” provides a compelling subtext to Perowne’s meditation on life in contemporary London. This is all the more evident if one pays heed to the inextricable web of connections and fertile intertextuality between Saturday and modernist fiction (in particular, Joyce’s “The Dead” [1914] and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway [1925]), which has informed much critical appraisal of this novel6 and led Sebastian Groes and Laura Marcus, among others, to talk, respectively, of McEwan’s relationship with a “modernist hypercanon” (Groes, “Modernist Consciousness” 103) and his adoption of a “temporal ‘double consciousness’” that mirrors the modernist “looping backwards and forwards in the temporalities of memory and anticipation” (Marcus 84, 83). Paul Crosthwaite’s remarks about “the globalizing dynamics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” as being “one of the key conditions” (“Anticipations” 335) for the rise of modernist fiction are also particularly relevant to the understanding adopted in this chapter: that risk is largely a perceptual category which cannot exist outside historical contextualization and discourse. Building on Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, Crosthwaite convincingly links the “unprecedented conditions” of economic interdependence and time-space compression analyzed by these authors to the “emergence of systemic risk and the global accident” (336). Finally, by putting in due relief, in accord with other critics, Virginia Woolf’s description of an early twentieth-century community of anxiety networked “by waves of sound which . . . speak aloud of battles and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world” (“The Narrow Bridge” 222), Crosthwaite (“Anticipations” 338–39) also provides a useful clue to the rich inter-discursive irony underpinning McEwan’s engagement with the literary as a privileged laboratory for the cognitive and aesthetic breakthrough of the creative imagination. Consistent with this ideal overlap between configurations of risk which, while conspicuously different, are suggestively similar from a cultural and

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socio-functional point of view, Saturday’s implication with the discursive and mass-mediated matrix of “perceived” danger and emotionally hyped constructions of threat also entails a conflation of radically divergent, in fact often contradictory, theories of risk (Wilkinson). As a consequence, such a theoretically inconsistent and yet powerfully disorienting circulation of favored expressions, which help spread and naturalize a largely uncontested emotional shorthand of systemic danger and bio-political fear, will inevitably seep into my discussion of McEwan’s text. In the following pages, I shall briefly—and necessarily unsystematically—point to some of the key concepts which have gained currency within this planetary jargon of risk and highlight their relevance to my reading of Saturday. This takes its cue, of course, from Ulrich Beck’s argument that “being at global risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century” (“Living” 330), an aphorism perfectly suited to describe Perowne’s anxious self-questioning about his own life and the condition of the world (Saturday 80), which sets the general mood at the very outset of the novel (4). Beck also draws attention to the inherent “irony” of “the narrative of risk” (“Living” 329), which largely depends on the “optimistic futility” of attempting “to anticipate what cannot be anticipated” (329). Being merely the “anticipation of catastrophe” (332), risks are therefore but mental or discursive constructions, which “exist in a permanent state of virtuality, and only become ‘topical’ to the extent that they are anticipated” (332) and made apprehensible through “techniques of visualization,” “mass media,” and “symbolic forms” (332). Moreover, as Gabe Mythen maintains, building on Deborah Lupton (74), as risk cultures are based on “hazards and dangers that are indexed to future outcomes” (Mythen 301), they are also necessarily future oriented, and from a Foucaultian perspective, vie to determine the shape of the future by pre-emptively resorting to discursive surveillance and precautionary imaginative and symbolic control. “Risk,” Yee-Kuang Heng adds, further politicizing the debate, “provides a cognitive map for colonizing the future” (74). From this viewpoint, which highlights the epistemic import of the imagination of risk, Dick Hebdige’s claim that the ways “different futures are imagined [discursively] . . . open up or close down particular lines of possibility” (275) also seems to be relevant to assessing the flaming airplane episode, in which Perowne’s response is pre-empted, as it were, by his internalization of the anxious aesthetics of September 11. More rewardingly, Hebdige also provides a clue to interpret Perowne’s literal crossing (and willful trespassing) of Tottenham Court Road, an action which serves as prelude to the car crash and the ensuing crisis with Baxter: temporarily transformed into a space/state of “exception” (Agamben) by a traffic ban prompted by the peace demonstration, the street becomes the unlikely stage for a dramatic ritual of violence (Saturday 84–95) which entails the surrendering of both morality and the law to a brutal script of clashing masculinities.7

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Of the three leading theoretical insights into the issue of risk—Mary Douglas’ anthropological attention to the cultural relativity of risk perception and its link with secularization and the erosion of social solidarity (Wilkinson 51), the “governmentality” approach variously influenced by Foucaultian theory, and Beck’s “risk society” framework—the fi rst is by far the least relevant to the protagonist’s thoughts. The neurosurgeon’s imperviousness to cultural “otherness” is particularly evident in the Harley Street scene, where three women wearing burkas are effectively excluded from Perowne’s empathetic horizon through their de-humanizing description in terms of “three black columns” (Saturday 124). (This is in stark contrast to the fact that, eventually, he will reach out to pity Baxter, his attacker, and embrace his genetically and class-based alterity.) A much more pervasive subtext is provided by Foucaultian concerns about the way conceptualizations of the social world in terms of risk help to reproduce regimes of control and anxiety by promoting an “individualizing worldview” (Wilkinson 56), in which “subjects/bodies act upon themselves fi rst and foremost” through the voluntary application of “dispositifs of fear and security” (Debrix and Barder 409). This is further compounded and cross-fertilized by the epistemic uncertainty and focus on the impossibility to apprehend or harness the future in terms of rational risk assessment predicated in Beck’s influential outlook. Intermixed with the grander discourse of genetic randomness and chance which recurs throughout the novel—encroaching at times on the “manufactured risk” discourse of biotechnological self-destruction—these critical understandings inform, or are at least implied in, Perowne’s fantasies about the burning airplane, his impatience with the role of the media in framing our perceptions and decoding of the present, the confrontation with Baxter near Tottenham Court Road, the worried scrutiny of Tony Blair’s unchecked instant of “fleeting self-doubt” (Saturday 145), and the vexed debate on the public moral grounding of the Iraq War. I have provided a close reading of these episodes in another article (De Michelis 2007). Nonetheless, mention must at least be made at this juncture of the way in which, despite his rational attempt to quell emotion through the anticlimactic discourse of Schrödinger’s cat (Saturday 18), Perowne’s catastrophist forebodings on seeing the flaming airplane acutely convey not only the ubiquitous reach of the media in disseminating over-determined, exceptionalist moods (“words like ‘catastrophe’ and ‘mass fatalities,’ ‘chemical and biological warfare’ and ‘major attack’ have recently become bland through repetition” [12]), but also his feeling of belonging to a “community of anxiety” glued together by “a different scale of news value . . . set by monstrous and spectacular scenes” (176). From this perspective, David Harvey’s influential argument that the “foreboding generated out of a sense of social space imploding in upon us (forcibly marked by everything from the daily news to random acts of international terror or global environmental problems) translates into a crisis of identity” (427) provides a useful

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template for assessing the disorientation and crisis experienced by Perowne throughout his fateful Saturday. The car crash episode, too, which is inscribed by its opening sentence within the semantic area of “coincidence” and “chance” (“but two things happen, almost at the same time” [Saturday 79]), thrives on its somewhat unstable, ambiguous status, suspended between “accident”—to be understood in its conventional OED meaning of “exceptional occurrence . . . mark[ing] a departure from the certainties and security of the norm” (qtd. in Nyers 23–24)—and a distinctly late-modern perception of risk, which feeds on the experiential disruption of temporal and spatial categories. “Accident,” in actual fact, applies to the chain of events leading to the confrontation between Perowne and Baxter, the unexpected and very brief suspension of the temporary prohibition to cross the road which allows, as it were, a “random mutation” (Saturday 56) of police control to determine an otherwise impossible, and blatantly hyper-real time-space scenario. At the same time, the episode provides a narrative actualization of the fact that, as Rigakos and Law have noted, risk itself, by its own nature, “does not occupy time or space,” being “an unrealized potentiality which is changed the moment the microscope of science [or, one might say, the aesthetic imagination] is trained on it, the moment it is measured” (80). The notion of risk obviously permeates the allegory of terrorism implied in Baxter’s attack on Perowne’s family and “fortress” home later in the day (with a pun, Baxter is described as being undone “by a single bad idea lodged in every cell” [Saturday 94; emphasis added]). As Aveek Sen observes, “happening in parallel to global terror,” this invasion uncannily “domesticates” the dangers of the ever spreading “culture of threat” that penetrates not only Perowne’s home, but “his most inwards responses and imaginings”. Moreover, while the impressive electronic and mechanical apparatus defending the entrance door (Saturday 36) is an apparent reminder of the “capillarized, localized, and disseminated, but also maximizing, totalizing, and regimenting operation . . . of the quotidian biopolitics of fear” increasingly falling upon individuals (Debrix and Barder 409), its eventual penetration points to the growing inadequacy of the modern notion of the “Walled City” (Massey 6) in the face of late-modern porousness and insecurity. The analytical tool of risk is also well suited to defi ning the repercussions and displacement caused by the protagonist’s original act of trespassing. Being fraught with moral overtones (for Perowne in actual fact violates not only the boundaries of Tottenham Court Road but also the limits of his professional ethical code), this episode presents a “risk-value” which resonates in the protagonist’s fearful acknowledgement, at the end of the novel, “of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control and breed new events, new consequences, until you’re led to a place you never dreamed of and would never choose—a knife at your throat” (Saturday 277).

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It is, however, Tony Blair’s unique embodiment of the issue of sincerity and “good intentions” (Runciman) and his persuasive deployment of the discourse of risk in defense of the Iraq War—a war conducted, in Beck’s view, “in order to prevent what we cannot know” (“Living” 335)—that prompts Perowne’s attempt to rationally assess the elusive moral balance and speculative accounting of risk. What he experiences is rather a mere feeling of utter “ambivalence” (Saturday 141; 180); the very same “ambivalence, the bitter and tragic irony,” which, again according to Beck, assumes “a world historical significance with the advent of global risk” (“Living” 338). Addressing the “sincerity issue,” which was so prominent in the general election campaign of 2005 and is put in sharp relief by Perowne’s ironic description of his meeting with Tony Blair (Saturday 144), transcends the disciplinary focus of this chapter. However, mention must be made at least of the episode in which Perowne is attracted by the “angled banks of identical” (140) close-ups of the Prime Minister giving an interview, reflected from a shop-window display. In this scene, Tony Blair is represented, to borrow Beck’s perspective, as actually staging global risk, that is, performing his own good intentions and “genuine” agonizing over decisions in order to actualize a psychological scenario in which “risks hover over human beings” (Furedi, “Culture” 5), thus “placing a premium,” as Runciman notes, “on decisive action—any decisive action” (10; emphasis in original). For risk, he adds, “allows politicians the twin luxuries of certainty and uncertainty to be deployed interchangeably, as the occasion demands” (10–11). McEwan’s personal politics concerning the post-September 11 new world order and British involvement in the so-called war on terror has exercised several opinionists and reviewers, especially after Adrian Hamilton aligned him with the “clash-of-civilizations literary brigade.” While it is perhaps worth noting that Saturday was published in February 2005, at the start of the British general election campaign, and thus necessarily thrived on its topicality against the wider “noise” of the political commentariat, I dissent from simplistic readings of the Iraq War subplot in this novel as just an example of the all-too-comfortable self-complacency of Western intellectual elites, or merely a way to play to McEwan’s huge American audience. Tony Blair’s inscription within the argumentative (and indeed imaginal) structure of the story is, in fact, cogently functional to McEwan’s investigation of the discourse of risk, one that entails the staging of ambivalence, ambiguity, and, possibly, double standards in order to deconstruct and expose their role as epistemic deadlocks affecting everybody’s experience. At the same time, by spotlighting the fl aunting of the “‘What if?’ question” by politicians “using hypothetical attack scenarios to concretize the idea that it is inaction (non-violence) . . . that is impractical” (Mythen and Walklate 235; emphasis in original), Saturday provides a public, hyper-mediated projection of the way in which private choices are dramatically influenced by the global discourse of exportable risk and terror.

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From this angle, it is perhaps telling that, in addition to the scene of his conversation with Perowne at the Tate Modern (Saturday 143–45), the figure of the Prime Minister is called upon in at least three capacities and in three different settings: as a “performer” delivering a televised interview that Perowne, caught up in a traffic jam, can only watch, but not hear; as an “author” whose “Glasgow speech” is explicitly addressed as a powerful intertext, interfering with the protagonist’s visit to his ailing mother, who is stricken by dementia;8 and fi nally in the shape of a disembodied “argument” between the protagonist and his daughter, which briefly erupts into the smug, domestic space where the Perownes are having a family celebration only to be soon defl ated and superseded by the unpredicted explosion of Baxter’s inarticulate culture of exclusion and hate. This atmosphere of utter indecipherability, and the dilemma underlying ethical and practical decisions in a world of globalized doubt, is acutely rendered by Perowne’s de-stabilizing self-questioning while watching Tony Blair’s interview from the car: Friend or foe? . . . Does this man sincerely believe that going to war will make us safer? . . . He could be on the verge of a monstrous miscalculation. Or perhaps it will work out—the dictator vanquished without hundreds of thousands of deaths, and after a year or two, a democracy at last, secular or Islamic . . . Wedged in traffic alongside the multiple faces, Henry experiences his own ambivalence as a form of vertigo, of dizzy indecision. (141) The term “vertigo”—which in this case overtly points to the crisis of credibility affecting both public discourse and leadership, and the ensuing loss of direction impairing individual ethical responses—also fits, as Paul Crosthwaite has noted, with Paul Virilio’s view that, the consciousness of the subject . . . can never be coterminous with the infi nitesimally brief “event” of intensive time; rather, the subject may either respond to an event that has already occurred, occupying a present in which the event itself is past (a “present-past”), or attempt to anticipate the event, experiencing the “vertigo” of a future that, paradoxically, is “already here, already seen, already given.” (Crosthwaite, “Fiction” 6; Virilio 140). Later in the novel, Perowne again responds to the sight of Tony Blair speaking at the Scottish Labour Party Conference by indulging in strategic fantasies concerning Iraq. If one considers how profoundly media-conscious the “Glasgow Speech” is, incorporating the march as a form of spectacle and addressing citizens primarily in their capacity as misinformed spectators (“As you watch your TV pictures of the march, ponder this: if there are

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500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for” [“Blair’s Speech—Key Quotes”]), Perowne’s reflections on the extent to which his ability to think independently has been pre-empted by the mediated discourse of risk takes on devastating relevance and urgency: For or against the war on terror, or the war in Iraq; for the termination of an odious tyrant and his crime family, for the ultimate weapons inspection, the opening of the torture prisons, . . . the chance of liberty and prosperity . . . ; or against the bombing of civilians, the inevitable refugees and famine, illegal international action, . . . and the swelling of Al-Qaeda’s ranks. Either way, it amounts to a consensus of a kind, an orthodoxy of attention, a mild subjugation in itself. (Saturday 180–81; emphasis added).9 Set against Saturday’s sustained dialogue with Tony Blair’s mediated persona, the scene in which Perowne meets the Prime Minister appears to be just the tip of an iceberg, Blair’s speeches and attitudes being a major inspiration for McEwan’s mise en scène of “a day in the life” in the age of pre-emptive war and global terror. Saturday, indeed, seems at times to unreflectively endorse Blair’s view that September 11 generated a radically new scenario for engaging with risk. This apodictic idea that “September 11 changed the world” (Blair, “Address to the US Congress”), and along with it “the paradigm within which the military, politics, and public opinion interact with each other” (Blair, “Our Nation’s Future”), has been recently reformulated in terms of a change of “the calculus of risk ” (Norton-Taylor and Watt)—and hence overlaid with the expert discourse of risk assessment—during Blair’s appearance at the Chilton Inquiry in January 2010. Building on his initial description of the attack on New York and Washington as the events that “marked a turning point in history” (“Leader’s Speech” 2001), this discourse has at times taken on a compelling visionary power (“From September 11th on, I could see the threat plainly. Here were terrorists prepared to bring about Armageddon” [“The Continuing Threat”; emphasis added]). In actual fact, Tony Blair’s rhetorical construction of September 11 as an epistemic divide irreversibly decoupling a modern world of rational risk assessment from a late-modern scenario of global risk has been consistently embedded in a reconfiguration of the future in terms of “dangers” and “choices facing humankind” (“Leader’s Speech” 2001), which is faithfully mirrored by Perowne’s thoughts. Tony Blair’s words seem, again, to underlie the protagonist’s agonizing over the possible outcomes of the war in Iraq, and to inform Perowne’s quarrel with his pacifist daughter Daisy, which at times apparently mimics Blair’s famous “imagine you were in my shoes” set-piece at the 2003 Labour Party Conference and on several other occasions:

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Imagine you are PM. And you receive this intelligence. . . . . And I see the terrorism and the trade in WMD growing. And I look at Saddam’s country and I see its people in torment. . . . So what do I do? Say “I’ve got the intelligence but I’ve a hunch its wrong?” . . . You see, I believe the security threat of the 21st century is not countries waging conventional war. I believe that in today’s interdependent world the threat is chaos. (“Leader’s Speech” 2003; emphasis added). Perowne’s formula ruminations about the pros and cons of waging war in Iraq provide a compelling demonstration of the way that, according to Frank Furedi, the disciplinary public perception of living in an age of global risk hinges on the effective enforcement of a “cultural script,” “a socially constructed phenomenon” which “transmits rules about feelings and also ideas about what those feelings mean,” so that “individuals interpret and internalize” them “according to their circumstances and temperament, but express them through culturally sanctioned idioms” (“From the Narrative” 237). Such deep apprehension of the moral danger implicit in words being devoid of meaning and affect also underlies Perowne’s indictment of his daughter as someone giving “a collation of everything she heard in the park, of everything they’ve both heard and read a hundred times, the worst-case guesses that become facts through repetition” (Saturday 186). More fundamentally, however, Perowne’s confrontation with Daisy—the only character in the novel to attend the peace demonstration, herself with child and a symbol of the nurturing ethics of poetry and peace—addresses a defi ning point of the ontology of risk. This is what Slavoj Žižek has called the “ultimate deadlock of the risk society,” the unbridgeable “gap between knowledge and decision, between the chain of reasons and the act which resolves the dilemma,” in the face of which “we nonetheless have to decide” (334). Unable to engage with Daisy’s position from an emotional point of view, Perowne keeps referring to the utter undecidability of the choice at issue: “But this is all speculation about the future. Why should I feel any certainty about it? How about a short war, the UN doesn’t fall apart, no famine, no refugees or invasion by neighbours, no flattened Baghdad . . . ?” (Saturday 187). And when Daisy fi nally prompts him to cross the margins of his overloaded, bounded imagination, and reach out to a new understanding of a possibly ethical and value-laden understanding of choice (“making guesses about the future is what you do sometimes when you make a moral choice” [188]), Perowne seems himself unable to renounce his rational control and put himself at a distance from the cultural script sanctioned by Tony Blair’s discourse of pre-emption and precaution: “No rational person is for war,” Perowne rebuts, echoing the Prime Minister’s point that “[a] few decades ago, we could act when we knew. Now, we have to act on the basis of precaution. . . . We have to do so on the basis of prediction, not certainty” (Blair, A Global Alliance 31). “But in five years,” the protagonist goes on,

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“we might not regret it. . . . You’re right, it could be a disaster. But it could be the end of a disaster and the beginning of something better. It’s all about outcomes, and no one knows what they’ll be” (Saturday 187). Perowne’s fi nal argument, that “the hidden weapons, whether they exist or not, are irrelevant. The invasion’s going to happen, and militarily it’s bound to succeed” (189; emphasis added), also fits suggestively with Tony Blair’s self-defensive evocation, in March 2004, of a typical world-risk society scenario of fear, in which we might “wake up one day” and fi nd that the ghost of the unfound weapons of mass destruction has suddenly materialized “into the hands” of “terrorist groups” and “fanatics” (“The Continuing Threat”). In this perspective, Blair’s conclusive remark that “the key point is that it is the threat that is the issue” (“The Continuing Threat”) is an apparent demonstration of the way danger is constructed within the framework of Beck’s theoretical approach. Even though, in an interview with Lynn Wells, McEwan has recently expressed his profound distrust of the Islamist “death cult” (“Author Interview” 130), Saturday’s engagement with Tony Blair’s public articulation of the discourse of risk and the way this is spread and naturalized through mass-mediated communication and its reverberations in the public sphere does not entail political endorsement. This is particularly evident in the novel’s abrupt, ironic conclusion of the ideological clash between Perowne and Daisy. Echoing once more Ulrich Beck, in fact literalizing, even, his claim that “risk society is provoking an obscene gamble,” forcing people to take decisions “without proper knowledge of the situation” (World Risk Society 78), Perowne and Daisy eventually settle down for what I would call an obscene bet: “My fi fty pounds,” Perowne interjects, “says three months after the invasion there will be a free press in Iraq, and unmonitored internet access too. The reformers in Iran will be encouraged.” To which Daisy answers, “Fine. And my fi fty says it’ll be a mess and even you will wish it never happened” (Saturday 192). By denouncing and deflating the cognitive impasse gnawing at the very heart of the world risk society scenario in this way, McEwan manages to channel and re-inscribe the Iraq War within a discursive framework which turns catastrophist thinking into comedy. On a different level, in laying the protagonist open to charges of cynicism, Perowne’s bet functions as an ironic disavowal of New Labour’s discourse of an “ethical foreign policy” (Cook), and thus helps reposition the official approach to war within a framework which is more unfeeling, but also much more realistic, one still largely governed, as Clausewitz suggests, by modernity’s enduring concerns with power politics and the cost-benefit ratio (Runciman). Finally, Saturday further problematizes the mass-mediated discourse of risk by imaginatively deconstructing and putting the very notion of futurity, the cornerstone on which risk theory ultimately resides, into perspective. This happens through the protagonist’s cultural self-embedding

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in Darwin’s lay religion of evolutionary time, one which succeeds in reconciling the mortal fate of individual human beings with the almost immortal, “imagined” nature of evolutionary life on earth (McEwan, “Science Writing”), and , according to Gillian Beer, even “saw extinction as ordinary and as necessary to evolutionary change” (321), “the outcome of losing one element in a complex interdependent grouping” that “never usurps the organism’s best interests for the interests of others” (323). (In this light, the Iraq War could even be regarded as an ambiguous, tragic masquerade of “artificial” selection, as contrasted with the benign non-reflexivity of the natural one.) Perowne’s acceptance, at the start of the novel, of Darwin’s idea of the grandeur of evolution as a lay “creation myth”—unfolding the timeless spectacle of “beautiful forms of life” continually arising “from physical laws” and “war of nature,” and pitching it against the “brief privilege of consciousness” (56) of individual human lives—also helps to disrupt conventional understandings of linear, teleological time, and hence defl ate the catastrophic rhetoric of contingent risk.10 More importantly, Saturday’s problematic engagement with futurity is exquisitely inscribed in its narrative structure, which virtually replicates, in its characteristically slow-motion, hyper-real mode, what, in an interview with Zadie Smith, McEwan has defi ned as “what it’s like to be thinking. Or what it’s like to be conscious, or sentient, or fatally, only half-sentient” (McEwan, “Zadie Smith Talks” 50). Within this project, far from merely exploiting the topical relevance of the issue of war, McEwan incorporates it as a staggering moment of utter decentering within a larger, more compelling scenario of cultural and imaginative unrest. In the process, it is Perowne’s emotional journey from the “strategist’s map” and virtual theatre of the “Iraqi desert” (Saturday 60) to the bird’seye perspective on his whole personal story and way of life that eventually allows him to open himself up to contemplating “a future that’s harder to read, a horizon indistinct with possibilities” (276). This can only take place, however, after his imagination has reached out to comprise even Baxter—the ultimate, offensive “other”—and mourn the bombs that will inevitably explode in London as much as those of Baghdad. More broadly, Saturday is an impressive exploration of the human “imagining” of risk, a “dark imagining” (39), which is intriguingly suggested to be the result of evolution, the legacy of a hypothetical “survival advantage” in “scheming to avoid” the threats encountered in dreams (39), and which helps us to stage the myriad ways in which our mind (again, in accordance with Beck) interprets life as an unrelenting effort to anticipate and manage imagined futures. As the encroaching of private and public risks, of bordering and intruding, progressively delineates a battlefield where humanity itself is put to the test, Saturday compellingly brings to light the creative potential and ethical probing of the artistic imagination, itself being configured as the ultimate, bond-creating act of

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risk-taking, and the source of thought-provoking imaginaries that prioritize empathy and emotion.

NOTES 1. See, for instance, McEwan’s earlier remark that “behind cruelty must lie a failure of the imagination, of empathy.” (qtd. in Byrnes 106). 2. I have deliberately borrowed this word from the specialist discourse of quantum mechanics underpinning much of McEwan’s work. 3. On the role of literature and a “consciously aesthetic approach” in shedding light on the human side of international relations, see Ward (253). 4. Recent critiques of Beck’s theory, pointing to analytical inconsistencies, include Campbell and Currie; Elliott, “Beck’s Sociology”; Lacy; and Lee. 5. The sweeping role of the media and public discourse in shaping and heightening the perceived reality of risk is one of the main themes of McEwan’s latest novel, Solar (2010). The novel, portraying Michael Beard, a repulsive, ageing scientist who is attempting to revive his former fame and make a fortune by joining the “clean energy” business, provides a bitter satire of the political, scientific, and fi nancial underworld thriving on the current, often uninformed discourses on “climate change.” Featuring both the 2010 Cape Farewell expedition to the Arctic (in which McEwan actually took part) and the Copenhagen Conference of 2009, Solar reinscribes also the issue of climate risk within the grander frame of evolutionary and religious history, while at once deflating the climate change media hype through the thoughts of its protagonist (“Beard was not wholly sceptical about climate change. It was one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news” [15]). Refusing the “wild commentary that suggested the world was ‘in peril’, that humankind was drifting towards calamity” (15), Beard interestingly connects the discourse of climate change to that same vein of end-time thinking that McEwan has recently elaborated on in discussing Islamism (“The Day of Judgement”). Beard’s disapproval of the air of “deluge of frogs,” suggesting mankind’s timeless belief that “one was always living at the end of days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world,” itself “never pitched in the present,” but “just around the corner” (16), is of course relevant to the discourse of risk which is at the core of this study. 6. See, in particular, Groes, “Modernist Consciousness”; Head; Marcus; and Wells. 7. Several critics have highlighted the apparent symbolic links between this episode, international terrorism, and the 2003 Iraq War. See, among others, Carpenter; Michael; Groes, “Modernist Consciousness”; Wallace; and Wells. Byrnes, instead, draws a comparison with the fi rst Gulf War of 1991 (85). Even though they are not directly related to McEwan’s work, the reflections in Martin Amis’ The Second Plane (2008) are worth noting for their linking of Islamist terrorism to issues of masculinity. 8. Lily Perowne’s dementia and Baxter’s Huntington chorea are worrying reminders, in Saturday, of the continuing threat of genetic risk. But in contrast to Beck’s “manufactured” risks, which tend to be represented as sudden and unpredictable, genetic risks are usually approached through the semantic frame of the calculus of “probability,” hence falling within the expert discourse of rational risk assessment underpinning scientific or fi nancial understandings of the category of risk.

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9. The nexus between “doubt/choice” and “ambivalence” resurfaces at the end of this passage to round off Perowne’s argument (Saturday 180–81). 10. McEwan’s interest in evolution constitutes an important thread in Saturday. Baxter is partly excused for his actions because of his genetic disease, and even the different characters and inclinations of Perowne’s children are discussed in terms of genetic randomness. Evolutionism also underpins McEwan’s representation in the novel of the theme of genetic “chance,” a notion that allows Perowne to explain the success of his own children (compared with the abject existence of the young drug addicts he sees in the square or the fate of his attacker) in terms of “the roll of the genetic dice that distinguished a Perowne from a Baxter” (Head 194). More importantly, it informs McEwan’s adherence to an idea of consciousness which, in line with the post-Darwinian vision of evolutionary psychology, traces all human behavior, including culture and ethics, back to the physiological activity of the brain, itself seen as coterminous with the creative imagination. On the way evolutionism is thematized in Saturday, see Head 178–98.

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Lupton, Deborah. Risk. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. Marcus, Laura, “Ian McEwan’s Modernist Time: Atonement and Saturday.” Ian McEwan. Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Sebastian Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. 83–98. Print. Massey, Doreen. “Geographies of Responsibility.” Geografi ska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86.1 (2004): 5–18. Print. McEwan, Ian. “Author Interview.” Ian McEwan by Lynn Wells. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 125–36. Print. . “Beyond Belief.” Guardian [London] 12 September 2001. Web. 11 Jan. 2010. . “The Day of Judgement.” Guardian [London] 31 May 2008. Web. 11 Feb. 2010. . “Dreams, Demons, and a Rare Talent to Disturb.” Interview with Annalena McAfee. Financial Times [London] 1 October 1994. 21. Print. . “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.” Interview with Hellen Whitney. Frontline. Apr. 2002. Web. 11 Feb. 2010. . “Journeys without Maps: An Interview with Ian McEwan.” By John Cook, Sebastian Groes, and Victor Sage. Ian McEwan. Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Sebastian Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. 123–34. Print. . “Only Love and Then Oblivion.” Guardian [London] 15 September 2001. Web. 11 Jan. 2010. . Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Print. . “Science Writing: Towards a Literary Tradition?” Edge 178 (2006). Web. 27 Mar. 2010. . Solar. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010. Print. . “Zadie Smith talks with Ian McEwan.” The Believer Aug. 2005. Web. 23 Oct. 2009. Michael, Magali Cornier. “Writing Fiction in the Post 9/11 World: Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US. Ed. Cara Cilano. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2009. 25–52. Print. Mythen, Gabe. “Sociology and the Art of Risk.” Sociology Compass 2.1 (2008): 299–316. Web. 22 Nov. 2009. Mythen, Gabe and Sandra Walklate. “Terrorism, Risk, and International Security: The Perils of Asking ‘What If?’” Security Dialogue 39.2–3 (2008): 221–42. Print. Norton-Taylor, Richard and Nicholas Watt. “In Six Hours of Testimony, Ex-PM Admits He Should Have Clarified Reports of 45-Minute Claim But Denies Deception.” Independent [London] 29 January 2010. Web. 30 Jan. 2010. Nyers, Peter. “The Accidental Citizen: Acts of Sovereignty and (Un)making Citizenship.” Economy and Society 35.1 (2006): 22–41. Print. Rigakos, George S. and Alexandra Law. “Risk, Realism and the Politics of Resistance.” Critical Sociology 35.1 (2009): 79–103. Print. Runciman, David. The Politics of Good Intentions. History, Fear, and Hypocrisy in the New World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Print. Sen, Aavek. “My City Square: Happiness is a Hard Nut to Crack.” Rev. of Saturday by Ian McEwan. Telegraph [London] 18 Mar. 2005. Web. 27 Oct. 2009. Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso, 1997. Print. Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski. “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Studies in the Novel 39.4 (2007): 465–80. Print. Ward, Ian. “Towards a Poethics of Terror.” Law, Culture, and the Humanities 4.2 (2008): 248–79. Print. Wells, Lynn. Ian McEwan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print. Wilkinson, Iain. Risk, Vulnerability, and Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.

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Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Glasgow: Fontana. 1976. Print. Wilson, Edmund O. “Foreword from the Scientific Side.” The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2005. vii–xi. Print. Wood, James. “On a Darkling Plain.” Rev. of Saturday by Ian McEwan. New Republic 14 Apr. 2005. Web. 27 Oct. 2009 Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: The Hogarth Press, 1925. Print. . “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” 1927. Collected Essays. 4 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1966, vol. 2: 218–29. Print. Žižek Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 1999. Print.

9

The Corporation of Terror Risk and the Fictions of the “Financial War” Nicky Marsh

Lucy Prebble’s 2009 play Enron begins with a party celebrating Enron’s now infamous “mark-to-market” accounting model and remains tightly focused on the company’s fi nances throughout. Some of the play’s most startling moments come as it literalizes the rich figurative registers that facilitated the transformation of Enron from a utilities corporation—“gas and oil: people think . . . trapped wind and Arabs”—into a speculative trading outfit (Prebble 7). Under Rupert Goolds’ direction the market index becomes an ascending and descending choir of human bodies, the company’s burgeoning debt is a red-eyed dinosaur roaming the stage, and electricity traders fight with swinging light sabers. Most momentously of all, the ash of the collapsing World Trade Center towers turns into the shredded accounts of the teetering company as the “belief” that kept the share price flying fi nally falters: “it’d be fi ne. If everybody believed. If nobody got scared. As long as people didn’t ask stupid questions. About what it is keeps planes in the air” (98). The conflation of the two events allows Prebble to signal once more the failure in American idealism that the play reads as both cause and symptom of the Enron story. Such an apocalyptic depiction of the dangers of fi nancial risk captured the mood of both its staging in 2009–10 (as Britain reeled under the debts incurred by the salvaging of its wrecked and bloated banks) and its setting in late 2001 (as the condemnation following the collapse of Enron led its leaders to be dubbed “fi nancial terrorists” by an already-shocked America). Enron is an important example because, as the play’s conclusion notes, the “practices it pioneered have become widespread throughout the business world” (113). These practices include its lavish imaginary registers as well as its lavish imaginary accounting methods: Prebble and Goold parodically illuminate, rather than invent, the vivid figurative languages at the center of their play. Enron’s wedding of “high-risk gambling to the theatrics of capitalism” (Boje et al. 766) are paradigmatic of the performative structures of the new economy, in which organizations are produced by “narratives” and “senior executives spend much of their time acting as corporate storytellers” (Thrift, “Performing” 681). This chapter traces some recent

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histories for these narratives, focusing on what the seemingly ominous parallels between the ubiquitous discourses of “terror” and those of fi nancial risk reveal about the performative resilience of fi nancial speculation, its apparent ability to create itself from nothing and yet also withstand the most devastating of crises. These parallels, I argue, shore up and legitimize some of the more troubling aspects of fi nancial culture while ironically also facilitating a deferment of an analysis of the risks that they involve. The chapter reviews some recent theoretical and popular accounts that engage with the parallels between these very different kinds of risk before examining two novels that have sought to put them into a critical dialogue in very different ways. To examine risk through its figurative languages may make more sense than its embeddedness in the quantitative world of actuarial mathematics initially suggests. Firstly, it is far from clear that our cultural models for risk have very much to do with mathematics at all. John Lanchester, another writer concerned to literalize the abstractions of risk, has made much of our apparently “hard-wired” limitations regarding the subject. Lanchester cites the “now-famous-to-economists example: people will judge the possibility of a deadly flood in North America to be less than the chances of a deadly flood in California. Naming the specific place— with, perhaps, subliminal associations of earthquakes and fi res—triggers something in the brain which makes disaster seem more likely” (Lanchester 120). The associative thinking that Lanchester points to here is crucial to risk and suggests its similarities with metaphor, as both are primarily structured through comparison. Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal definition of metaphorical thinking as “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” could be very easily applied to the assumption that uncertainty or danger are inherently translatable, that the equivalences suggested by costs, benefits, and alternatives can always be found by risk analysis (Lakoff and Johnson 6). Risk is also comparative in that it lends itself to an evaluation of different kinds of dangers, to the assumption that ecological and fi nancial disaster and disease, for example, all share some comparable properties. This comparative structure provides the literary critic with one immediately obvious but crucial tool: as Lakoff and Johnson note of metaphor, “the very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another . . . will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept [metaphor] can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor” (8). Paul de Man best explained this movement in literary critical terms when he described “tropes” as “not just travelers” but “smugglers and probably smugglers of stolen goods at that” (19). De Man is, appropriately, discussing Locke’s notion of gold (it was the gold standard, of course, that protected money itself from becoming subject to these endless deferments of representation) when he notes that the “quicksilver” movement of linguistic tropes is also a process of deferment

The Corporation of Terror 147 and absence, that the object, property, or substance that they describe is liable to “disappear altogether, or at least appear to disappear” (18). The deferment of meaning that the comparative structure of risk facilitates is evident in Ulrich Beck’s influential concept of a world risk society, in which the calculation of risk is integral to the formation of the reflexive agency of late modernity. In 2002, Beck “revisited” his notion of a risk society in order to articulate the similarities and differences between the three primary axes of contemporary risk: fi nancial risk, ecological disaster, and terrorism. For Beck, fi nancial risk and ecological disaster share risk’s Janus-faced profile: they “fit the model of modernity’s self-endangerment,” the “accumulation of ‘bads’” that are tied up with the production of “goods” (Beck 43). They differ from “terrorist activity,” which “is intentionally bad. It aims to produce the effects that the other crises produce unintentionally” (44). Terrorist threats destabilize Beck’s risk society because they exploit the interconnected and comparative structure implied by a risk “society,” releasing the fears that this model is apparently premised upon containing. According to Beck, the “active trust” of “economic calculation” is eroded and “the most horrifying connection is that all the risk confl icts that are stored away as potential could now be intentionally unleashed. . . . Thus the terrorist threat has made everyone into a disaster movie scriptwriter, now condemned to imagine the effects of a home-made atomic bomb . . . or the collapse of global computer networks” (44). Beck’s language, which quickly gives real legitimacy to the imagined fantasies of popular culture, indicates that the logic of conflation suggested by a comparison of such different kinds of risk produces not only a deferment of their meaning but what de Man called catachresis, an excessive or unlikely metaphor that can “dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious of ways” (21). The rational comprehension of economic risk analysis more visibly apparent in Beck’s writing can be contrasted against alternative models that are both more and less critically engaged with the implications of this deferring logic of conflation. More skeptical models of risk include the “culturalist” analysis of Mary Douglas and the critique of governmentality associated with Michel Foucault. Douglas’ work foregrounds the cultural implications of the vocabularies of risk and is highly critical of “contemporary risk analysis,” which recognizes “that the grime and the heat of politics are involved in the subject of risk” while aspiring to “sedulously bracket them off” (11). For Douglas, risk analysis “that tries to exclude moral ideas and politics from its calculations is putting professional integrity before sense. Looking for the wrong kind of purity, it gets enmeshed in the purities it seeks to avoid” (44). Foucauldian notions of biopolitics are similarly highly suspicious of mainstream “risk management,” suggesting that they incorporate “modes of thinking through which the state claims to be working to protect the population from risk” but is actually working to discipline and contain it (Denny 34).

148 Nicky Marsh Yet a third notion of risk, that which is dramatized in Lucy Prebble’s Enron, is, of course, that of the speculative cultures of the financial marketplace in the new economy. This is a model of risk that has an entirely different vocabulary. It perceives risk not as a pre-existing danger that must be insured against or calculated but as the profitable exploitation of what the economist Frank Knight canonically termed “uncertainty.” Risk differs from uncertainty, Knight suggested, because where risk is predictable and finite, “a quantity susceptible of measurement,” uncertainty is not and profit lies in the limitless potential of this unknowability (Knight 19). Stephen Green, for example, has argued that “financial markets have produced risk as an attitude to the future not only to cope with threats but to entrench their systems of wealth creation and epistemological authority.” This is a culturally powerful model of risk, Green suggests, embedded in a set of cultural practices “which operates ‘underneath’ the formal architecture of the markets” and is “manufactured as a means to increase wealth” (Green 81). These are the masculine, high-octane cultures of achievement detailed in the numerous suggestively titled non-fictional accounts of the professional trader, including Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker (1990), Connie Bruck’s The Predator’s Ball (1989), Frank Partnoy’s Infectious Greed (2003), and Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s The Smartest Guys in the Room (2003) (which specifically addresses the rise and fall of Enron). Fiction has been able to explore the catachrestic significance of the metaphors for risk deployed in these cultures, particularly their ability to distance finance from the real. I want to elucidate the very influential forms that the discursive parallels between finance and “terror” have taken before exploring two novels that offer us some insight into the effects of their deployment. In the week following the attacks on New York and Washington of September 2001, it was alleged that the perpetrators had profited from the stock market turmoil they had created, specifically the drop in the share prices of the airlines involved in the attack and the rise in the value of stocks of companies associated with the arms trade. “Before the attacks there was no pattern to this phenomenon,” an interview with a trader revealed in the London Times; ‘the shares that were sold were doing very well and someone was selling them in very large quantities with no real reason. . . . What is more awful than [that they] should aim a stiletto blow at the heart of Western fi nancial markets? But to profit from it? Words fail me” (Doran). By the time another week had passed, the logic of this fearful antipathy had been fully realized. On 24 September, George W. Bush “put the fi nancial world on notice” by announcing a “fi nancial war on terrorism” from the Rose Garden of the White House. This speech militarized fi nancial regulation: “the front lines” of this war of “check books,” Bush suggested, “will look different from the wars of the past.” Yet Bush had also to acknowledge the inability of the US to bring about the international legal changes his speech implied, calling into being a global coalition capable of combating the “global infrastructure that fi nances acts of evil.” In his

The Corporation of Terror 149 inimitable casual way, Bush went on to extend these apparently ad-hoc desires of the US across the sovereignty of other nations, noting that “in Europe, for example, there are probably going to need to be some laws changed in order for those governments to react the way we expect them to.” The connections that Bush made between terror and fi nance have been subsequently critiqued as a form of governmentality. Critics such as Marieke de Goede have argued that the draconian measures following from Bush’s announcement became part of the “legitimation work of globalization post-9/11,” producing “the mirror worlds of the legitimate and the illegitimate (traveler), defensible and indefensible (life), and aboveground and underground (money). The notion of risk is central to the performance of Empire’s borders as it enables a calculative, technological, and depoliticized operation of processes of inclusion and exclusion in relation to, for example, banking, health, or legal services” (de Goede, “Underground” 146–47). As the essays in de Goede and Louise Amoore’s collection Risk and the War on Terror (2008) demonstrate, the contemporary discourses of risk in the US and UK lent themselves to a form of disciplinary power that relies upon the self-regulation of subjects according to definitions of normality and responsibility, inclusion and exclusion. Yet the “underground” economy that Bush was so intent on restricting and regulating was threatening not simply because it contributed to terrorist funds (and whether the bill would have prevented these attacks had it been in place during their planning is still very uncertain), but because it made apparent the dangers in the very things that were most celebrated in neoliberal, neoclassical economics: money’s ability to move freely across international borders, to evade regulation, to remain anonymous. It is notable how close the literal and metaphorical practices used to defi ne terror fi nancing were to the productive rhetorical self-depictions and practices of the fi nancial new economy. Bush was lagging behind this economy, for example, when he resorted to a military language to describe money’s ability to evade national surveillance. Financial traders have long cast themselves as mercenary-like soldiers, bringing their own form of “justice” to those unruly nations seeking to control their economies. Popular accounts of fi nancial traders have noted with satisfaction that “marines came to traders to learn the secrets of making decisions under pressure” because “on a daily basis, traders are at war” (Davis 25). If individual traders are soldiers then trading devices are their weapons: another account explicitly compares futures to “gunboats” and derivatives to the “colt.45 on the western frontier, most useful in a lawless land” (Millman 118–19). Financial traders, the same account notes, “provide the only fi nancial discipline the world knows. They are fi nancial vigilantes. Because governments could not provide fi nancial law and order, traders took the law into their own hands. They sell protection at a price” (xxii). The parallels between both the practices and discursive languages of the “overground” speculative economy and those of the “underground”

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economy also found quite specific forms. The description of the attacks as a “stiletto blow” to the heart of “Western fi nancial markets,” for example, echoes the images of sexualized violence frequently deployed to describe the excesses of that market. Satyajit Das’ popular exposé of derivative trading, Traders, Guns, and Money (2006), supplements the familiar language of military hardware with that of women’s footwear in order to illuminate the complex danger of derivatives. The book likens derivatives trading to Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamously opaque war rhetoric, which didn’t identify the “unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know,” and compares both to “a Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo pair of women’s shoes” in that their excessive desirability lies in the erotic mystery of what can’t be known rather than in their actual value (jacket copy). The possibility that traders should seek to make profits from instances of international unrest and terrorism, a possibility that rendered The Times interviewee without words in the wake of 9/11, was one that was being actively pursued by the US government in the very year that the attacks occurred and was not dropped as an idea until 2003, after it was made public and received widespread public condemnation.1 More generally, as writers such as Ron Whitaker, Susan Strange, Jeffrey Robinson, and Loretta Napoleoni have all made evident, there are close parallels between the inventive fluidity of modern fi nance and the workings of criminal organizations. Loretta Napoleoni’s research on the funding of contemporary terror organizations notes the double-ironies of these parallels in a world where heads of illegal armed organizations “display managerial and entrepreneurial skills,” where “fi nancial acumen [is] more valued than military genius,” and where ostensibly “legitimate banks (such as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International [BCCI]) launder the illegal activities of the Saudi Arabian, American, and British secret services” (55). The parallels between terror and fi nance work in these examples to produce and sustain a quite different interpretation of risk to either the rational decision making described by Beck or the governmentality of George W. Bush. The risks taken by derivatives traders, and caustically damned when emulated by “global terrorism,” are the particular discourses of heroic individualism that sustained the risk cultures of speculative capitalism alluded to earlier. It is the ways in which this celebration of the para-military power of fi nance also signaled a deferment of its responsibilities that I want to focus upon. One important site for the production and dissemination of the heroic self-representations of the contemporary speculator emerged in the popular genre of “fi nancial fiction” that began to appear in the early nineties (see also Marsh ch. 4). These novels, many written by retired fi nancial professionals, such as Michael Ridpath, Linda Davies, Paul Kilduff, James Harland, David Schofield, Christopher Reich, and Stephen Frey, typically celebrate the ability of the “good trader” to defuse the phantasmatic threat of a global economic collapse unleashed by the “bad trader.” This “rogue”

The Corporation of Terror 151 trader suggests the individualization of the systematic and militaristic exploitations of fi nance capital: he is the scapegoat for the money economy that at once demonstrates and assuages its central faults. These novels thus both support and deflect the Marxist orthodoxy, most recently re-stated by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century (1994), which suggests that capitalist hegemony is cyclical and that its third moment, its fl ight from both territory and production, ushers closer its radical metamorphosis and eventual devastation. In such a reading, the rogue trader embodies the destruction that capitalism continues to contain within itself, bringing about the collapse that necessarily follows from the emergence of “free floating capital” (Jameson 251). These novels are important sites for exploring the ways in which the risk culture, which depends upon the creativity of the “risk-worker,” can be maintained. The writing of Michael Ridpath, still the fi rst and most successful of these novelists in Britain, has been consistently defi ned by its attempts to render the complex and detailed processes of brokerage interesting. The opening pages of Free to Trade (1995), Ridpath’s fi rst and most successful novel, for example, are devoted to a detailed account of a single trade. Alongside facts about a bond—“it’s five hundred million dollars, with a coupon of 9 1/4 per cent. Maturity is ten years. It is offered at 99. The yield is 9.41. Got that?”—we are offered contextualizing explanation: “The Swedes were borrowing $500 million through the means of a eurobond issue. They were using Bloomfield Weiss as underwriters. It was Bloomfield Weiss’ job to sell the bonds to investors: the term ‘euro’ meant that it would be sold to investors all over the world. It was my decision to decide whether to buy it” (2). The novel’s opening narrative tension (which, infamously, allowed it to be plucked from an exorbitantly large slush pile) (Pendlebury 3) derives from this decision-making process. We follow the trader as he makes speculative calls to other companies, as he undertakes research into similar deals, as he paces the room and tries to get coffee, as he confers with colleagues. The chapter’s climax comes from his successful influencing of the movement of the market: After two more phone calls I had managed to buy another $15 million at 98.60. That took my total holding to $145 million. I sat back and waited. I still felt tense but this was the tension of the hunter, not the hunted. It didn’t take long. Within two minutes the lights began to flash with dealers bidding for bonds. Their bids rose from 98.60 to 98.75 to 98.90. . . . I slumped back in my chair. I felt drained. It was as if I had been physically beaten up. The tension, the sweat, the adrenaline of the last few hours had left me limp. (14–15) In this instance, a successful trade clearly depends upon the trader’s absorption by the market, a process that is as intuitive and visceral as it

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is intellectual. The trader surrounds himself with a mass of screen-based shifting market information and the process of becoming the market that this entails is bodily: it is a fight, it is a hunt, it is even sex—afterwards he is rendered “limp.” This physical absorption of traders by and into the market has been recently described by sociologists as a “postsocial” relationship. Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger have analyzed the ways in which traders engage with the market as if it were a reciprocal subject with which they can construct a “binding” and meaningful relationship (Cetina and Bruegger 170). This physical relationship that traders experience with markets, they suggest, allows traders to understand their work as a site of productive agency, as constructive of themselves in a profound and creative way. The language of sex and of war that characterizes the intimate reflexive relationship between the trader and the market can therefore be read as not only valorizing the trader as the figure who guarantees market efficiency but also as a creative worker battling to shape and create the market. The tensions between self-interested “noise” trading and marketefficient “rational” trading are thus resolved in these novels in the image of the trader as a heroic artist able to master risk. These contradictions have themselves been recuperated by economic sociologists, who ascribe to traders a form of “hyper-rationality,” combining the practice of an “art which cannot be specified” with the “continuous processing of information” (Abolofia 23). In the wake of 9/11, then, these narratives that valorized the trader as a para-military figure working outside of the frame of the nation-state clearly needed adjusting if not relinquishing. The terrain of Bush’s nationalistic “war on terror” was explicitly extended to “home, school, and work” and included the discourses of corporate America. In September 2003, for example, the then Secretary for Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, “toured the town halls of American in a bid to ‘make the citizen’s security vision a national reality.’” Accompanied by management consultants and IT and software companies, Ridge “urged that ‘in the war against terrorism, citizens are just as important to fighting the war as soldiers on the battlefield’” (ctd. in Amoore 112). This was part of what Louise Amoore has termed the deployment of the “idea of culture as a governmental domain” (113). Yet, as Amoore makes clear, the “normalcy” that was being projected in these discourses of governmentality were those of late capitalism: shopping was a patriotic act and “the very business consultants we now see dominating the homeland security enterprise also trade profitably in ideas for learning to live with risk” (127). Amoore explicitly references the economist Frank Knight when she suggests that “in the incorporation of uncertainty via entrepreneurial risk practices, contemporary management thinking actively ‘embraces risk’” and that in this context “risk practices do not seek prevention, but pre-emption; they do not seek to reduce or limit risk, but to run with it; they are not designed to render safe or secure, but instead to give the appearance of securability” (127).

The Corporation of Terror 153 The ability of the American fi nancial economy to realign its risk-taking identity with this very specific model of patriotism goes some way to explaining its continuing and unquestioned authority in a context in which many of its assumptions would seem otherwise jarring and unpatriotic. A text that suggests something of this plasticity is Christopher Reich’s 2003 novel The Devil’s Banker, which is explicitly concerned with the relationship between the fi nancial industry and Bush’s war on terror. The novel narrates the parallels and distinctions between traders and terrorists in order to clearly sanctify the former by articulating the value of their specific forms of patriotic risk-taking heroism. The novel’s central protagonist is Adam Chapel, a banker turned US Treasury Agent who outwits Marc Gabriel, a banker turned terrorist, rich enough to buy “a two-hundred foot suncruiser, a finca in Ibiza, a chalet in Zermatt” had he not “owned something far more valuable already. A cause” (Reich 127). The orchestrated action of traders against nation-states, the contrarian impulse celebrated by the legendary fi nanciers George Soros and Warren Buffet and damned by leaders from Margaret Thatcher to former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, is now the realm of actual terrorists. Gabriel’s attack on capitalist nations, for example, is evident in the way he trades—he is described as having “bet big with Soros against the pound and rode the back of the Japanese market all the way down” (130)—and is representative of his villainy rather than his acumen. Yet the novel is much more concerned to defend than attack the fi nancial cultures of risk and it does this by contrasting Chapel not against Gabriel—both of whom, as their names suggest, are righteous in their commitment to a “cause”—but against his ostensible ally, the again rather literally named British MI6 agent Sarah Churchill, with whom Chapel falls in love. The narrative’s opening chapters interleave the actions and biographies of the two lovers. Churchill tracks a terrorist burdened with money into the largest “free market on earth,” a Smuggler’s Bazaar between Afghanistan and Pakistan (2). She is fighting a conventionally twentieth-century war and her attempt to capture and interrogate this figure from within the money markets so vilified by the fi nancial war on terror fails. Her cover is blown, she is forced to call in the Special Forces, and a blood bath ensues: “she never considered saying no. Not with a daddy who’d gone ashore with 2 Para at Goose Green in the Falklands and a brother who’d done thirty missions over Baghdad. The Churchills were bred to fight” (27). These events are watched live on the impressive globe-embracing surveillance equipment of the CIA’s counterterrorism unit. As he watches the gunfight Churchill initiated, the head of the unit calls the Foreign Asset Tracking Center (the body announced by Bush in his launch of a fi nancial war on terror) and switches the focus to Chapel’s parallel investigation into the same target. Whereas Churchill is defeated following the literal money, Chapel is shown to eventually succeed in following the more complex paper trails that it leaves behind. The novel’s celebration of the power of US military

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intelligence now incorporates the activities of treasury agents: Chapel is “a quant jock all the way. On the fast track at Price Waterhouse. Partner at 29. National audit manager . . . the new kind of solider. Brains instead of brawn. It’s a different war we’re fighting this time” (19). Churchill’s militarism is anachronistic, misplaced, and dangerous whereas Chapel’s fi nancial discipline, his preference for the “precision of a balanced ledger, its promise of fiscal transparency, its devotion to a world defi ned by generally accepted accounting principles” over the “wild, terminal justice of a hollow-tipped bullet,” is at the core of this renewed fantasy version of US patriotism (33). In Reich’s vision, bankers are the heroes of national intelligence, bringing the principles of security, balance, transparency, and a recognized international order to the battle against the threats of both a sprawling terrorist machine and their less clear-sighted non-American allies—Churchill eventually turns out to be a double agent, acting on behalf of the French. In this novel, the aims of counterterrorism and fi nancial risk management, as Louise Amoore suggests, neatly complement rather than contradict one another. In the process the realities of both can be endlessly deferred. Yet the fiction of this period was also able to critique the ease with which the terms of Bush’s war on terror could be so easily recuperated by the masculine risk takers of the fi nancial industry. Kate Jennings’ 2002 novel Moral Hazard explicitly engages the deferments and absences suggested by risk’s multivalent metaphorical languages. A “moral hazard” is a decision that one takes knowing one doesn’t have to be responsible for its consequences: it encourages dangerous behavior because it disaggregates risks from actions and is the reason that international and central banks often give in defending their reluctance to intervene in times of crises. Joseph Medley and Lorrayne Carrol have demonstrated how politically inflected the term is, noting that it is appropriated from nineteenth-century philanthropy and signals a “deeply held belief in a social structure that profoundly hierarchizes the benefactor/beneficiary relationship” (Medley and Carroll 150). It was used by the IMF in the late 1990s, for example, to justify their refusal to support the East Asian banking systems, whereas it faded from the debate very quickly when American and European banks faced similarly huge problems in the autumn of 2008. Like Christopher Reich, Jennings worked in the fi nancial sector in the late ’90s, (she was, like her middle-aged protagonist Cath, a speech writer) and is a knowing critic of this culture, “whose ethic [is] borrowed in equal parts from the Marines, the CIA, and Las Vegas” (Jennings 11). The novel is steeped in the militarized language for fi nancial trading: it describes the trading floor as “the engine room of a battleship” (62) and even implicitly refers to the fi nancial fiction genre, with a minor character expressing his aspiration to be the John Grisham of the fi nance world and observing that “all the investment banks have CIA or State Department guys working for them. Filled with spooks! Being a banker is a good cover” (98). Yet whereas Reich seeks a language that can sanctify the money economy by refocusing

The Corporation of Terror 155 the threat that its parallels with the underground money economy represents, Jennings explicitly engages with the logic of risk’s endless rhetorical conflations. The front image of the 2003 paperback edition of the novel is of the Manhattan skyline after the destruction of the Twin Towers. The narrative begins in the early 1990s and is immediately explicit about the events leading to its endpoint: “Nick Leeson, the Asian Meltdown, irrational exuberance . . . the dot-com boom, the dot-com bust, the obliteration of the World Trade Center” (5). The attacks on the Twin Towers, which are immediately associated with fi nancial crash, are both entirely central to the novel (much of its dialogue takes place in the literal shadow of the buildings in Battery Park) and yet also entirely absent from it. In the teleology of the novel’s seven-year biblical structure, the terrorist attacks are screened by two other events, and are never again explicitly referred to. The fi rst and most pressing of these alternative crises is the illness of Cath’s beloved artist husband, Bailey, who is suffering from dementia and who will, in a space of seven years, “erode like a sandstone statue, becoming formless and vague” (17). The second, which coincides precisely with his eventual death, is the collapse of a hedge fund that threatens to take large portions of the world economy with it. This event seems a probable reference to the crisis in the US hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which nearly went bankrupt in 1998 and was fi nancially supported by a conglomerate of banks until it fi nally closed in 2000. The conflation of these intertwined narrative strands renders opaque where exactly the moral hazard, the immorality of risk without danger, of the novel’s title lies. It could be in Cath’s relationship with her dying husband; in Wall Street’s relationship with the rest of the economy; or in the US’s relationship with the rest of the world. This uncertainty allows Jennings to speak directly to the different assumptions of responsibility embedded in these different models of risk. Jennings’ novel deliberately uses examples of a variety of risks—terrorism, disease, environmental disaster, fi nancial crash—in order to consider, rather than negate, the different kinds of responsibilities and behavior that they produce. The novel’s politicization of the elisions around these different concepts of risk offers a useful counterpoint in this context, one that lends itself more to the critical vocabularies of Mary Douglas than to those of Frank Knight or even Ulrich Beck. Cath has entered the fi nancial world late in order to pay for her husband’s health care and we share her learning experience as she is tutored in the complicated fi nancial world of derivates by her cynical colleague, Mike, the head of risk management. Mike is eventually sacked for denouncing the enormous risks involved in the massive “gaming contracts” of contemporary economics, specifically those of the failing hedge fund. He warns Cath that the “pyramid” of these fi nances will “be the end of us. That and global warming” (Jennings 56). Mike is a prescient figure. Not only does

156 Nicky Marsh his career echo that of the British bank HBOS’s Risk Manager Paul Moore, who was sacked for suggesting that the bank had taken on too much risk, 2 but his use of the language of environmental catastrophe to describe financial crisis suggests an understanding of both the gravity of these risks and the inbuilt deflections of the banking community regarding them. British MPs at the Treasury Select Committee hearings of 2009, for example, were frustrated by the repeated attempts of bankers to describe the crisis in terms of natural catastrophe as a way of avoiding directly speaking to the failure of their risk management.3 The example of the fictional counterpart to LTCM allows Jennings to acerbically critique these languages and practices of failed risk and riskless risk. LTCM was the hedge fund associated with the Noble prize winning mathematicians Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. Merton and Scholes (along with Fisher Black) were the originators of the Black-Merton-Scholes equation, heralded as a panacea for the fi nancial industry that would eradicate the downsides of risk, transforming “derivatives from hothouse plants to unstoppable jungle vines” (Jennings 54). The collapse in the value of this hedge fund in 1998 provided the popular press (like the Enron bankruptcy in 2001 and the banking crisis of 2007–8) with evidence of the epic hubris of the modern speculator, whose preordained failure is confi rmed by the pathetic fallacy. LTCM was frequently compared to the Titanic, for example (see Maurer 28), and The Economist described its failure as “the stuff of Hollywood disaster movies: fortunes laid waste, proud men . . . cut down to size, giant tidal waves threatening to drown some of Wall Street’s snootiest institutions’ (cited in De Goede, “Discourse” 149). Yet the failure of LTCM has actually since been used to demonstrate the performativity of dominant fi nancial models, whereby the widespread dissemination of their formulae produces the effects they ostensibly predict. The most important study of this kind is by Donald MacKenzie, who notes that “fi nancial markets are not an imperfectly insulated sphere of economic rationality, but a sphere in which the economic and the social interweave seamlessly. In respect to arbitrage, the key risks may be social risks from the pattern of interaction within fi nancial markets, rather than shocks from the real economy or from events outside the markets” (MacKenzie, “Superportfolio” 79). MacKenzie explicitly suggests that “the fi nancial markets changed” in response to the implementation of these fi nancial models in ways that made their “assumptions, which were at fi rst grossly at variance with market conditions, more realistic” (MacKenzie, Engine 256). One effect of this self-fulfilling and social mechanism of risk management was that it hugely amplified any market movement, which meant a guarantee of its own prolific success in good times but also an exacerbation of any downturn to crisis proportions. Cath’s entrance into this community of fi nanciers is contrasted against her entrance into the community of degenerative disease: in both she is a key but irrelevant witness. She is a speech writer at the heart of money’s

The Corporation of Terror 157 spectacle but also “anomalous, near the centre of power but of no consequence” (142; 134). The parallel between these two worlds is strengthened as the dementia sufferer’s loss of memory functions as a metaphor for the damaging short-termism of the money economy. The novel’s painful and moving accounts of dementia provide Jennings with an acerbic language for the fi nance community that, like her suffering husband, has become callous and cruel in its refusal to take responsibility for itself. Jennings’ novel points us most acutely to the failure of a language that can adequately respond to the “spit and cupidity” of the fi nancial community: dementia’s absence of self seems as capable of engulfi ng Cath as her husband. Her response to Mike’s apocalyptic scenario for the money economy, for example, eventually turns into apathy: “to get angry at Scholes and Merton, at myopic quants, at derivatives was as useless as getting angry at amyloidbeta protein. Things are always sundering, shifting, settling: this is the way of the world” (56). Yet it is in their relationship to risk that this parallel between the myopic quants, who make decisions in the fi nance industry, and the amyloid-beta protein that is responsible for her husband’s illness breaks down. Just as the “disemboweled and dismembered” hedge fund is “resurrected”—in the “best tradition of Wall Street, they were saving their bacon. The heck with moral hazard”—Cath chooses to submit Bailey to the euthanasia that he had, as a well man, actively supported (151). Doing what she thinks is right forces her to become both a criminal and a widow: she discusses ethics with the doctor who prescribes Bailey his drugs, but when asked about the risks she is taking she is surprised, considering herself to be “past questions of risk or morality, boxed in, as animal in her instincts” as her husband has become (149). Cath cannot perceive the risks involved in killing her husband because to perceive it as such is to recognize it as a choice, an ambivalence that produces some “good” (149). In her involvement in the fi nancial crisis, however, this situation is reversed as Cath acts legally but without honor. She reports Mike’s account of the untenable risks held by the hedge fund, betraying him, she admits, because she has “begun to buy into the propaganda” (134). Yet the inevitable aversion of this crisis reveals to her not only the impotence of her actions but also the naivety of her assumption that some kind of consequence would follow from this predicted disaster: “To date, no follow-up. Nothing. Nada. As if afflicted with Alzheimer’s, the Fed remains adamant that banks can police themselves. Deregulation rackets along like a runaway train, banking lobbyists clinging to its side, climbing into the cab, waving from the windows, hollering in their exhilaration. Hoo-ha” (153). The image, which reads like a carnivalesque satire of Anthony Giddens’ juggernaut of modernity, is clearly one of exclusion. Jennings’ angry disdain is directed to the self-protective mechanisms of the financial community that was massively enriched by the exorbitant risks that it so successfully displaced onto the national economy. Reich’s and Jennings’ accounts of these languages

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of risk demonstrate, in their antithetical ways, two significant things about the reproduction of this dangerously riskless risk culture. Firstly, these texts point to the fact that this culture is protected not only by the social privileges of its participants but by the immoderately plastic nature of its discourses, which are able to absorb the critiques and events that clearly appear to undermine them. The speculative cultures of financial risk in the new economy are performative not only in that they keep the planes in the air—providing “a command performance whose script (aided by extravagant props and acting) [plays] so well” that “audiences” are “willing to pay the ever-increasing costs of admission”—but because they incorporate into themselves the very languages that might otherwise oppose them (Thrift, “Romance” 243). The language of finance capital, in other words, repeats the tricks of their balance sheets: they place risk elsewhere. The heroic masculine languages of risk that are so ubiquitous in these financial cultures do more than produce the hardened “hyper-rationality” that economic sociologists and cultural geographers have attributed to it: it seems as if they contribute to the ability of this culture to reproduce itself as entirely benign in unlikely political climates and after unlikely economic events. Secondly, it seems as if a wider notion of culture has played an important part in allowing these riskless risk cultures to reproduce this deferred version of themselves outside of the relatively narrow confines of their professional cultures. In very different ways, these texts by Prebble, Jennings, and Reich demonstrate how culture has been an important realm for ensuring the widespread acceptance of these contradictory performances of risk, a site for limiting, as well as enabling, the possibility of a critique. It seems, then, as if we need a broader range of analytical models if we are to understand the powerful cultures of contemporary risk that we are still beholden to: models that are as sensitive to their improbable metaphors as they are to their improbable maths. NOTES 1. In 2001, the research wing of the US military, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, initiated the development of a controversial “Policy Analysis Market,” which was to involve traders predicting the “military activity, political instability, economic growth, US military activity, and US fi nancial involvement,” including “US military casualties, and western terrorist casualties,” for eight Middle East nations (Hanson). 2. The Head of HBOS at the time was James Crosby, who went on to become deputy head at the Financial Services Authority. Crosby only resigned from this post in February 2009 after the allegations from “whistleblower” Paul Moore regarding his warnings of the risks HBOS was taking on (Wearden, Bowers, and Summers). 3. Questioning the current and previous heads of HBOS and RBS on Tuesday, 10 February 2009, the Liberal Democrat MP John Thurso commented with frustration that “every time we get bankers from failed banks appearing in front of us we get the refrain—and I have heard it this morning—that we could not see it coming, it was wholly unpredictable, and it was this great

The Corporation of Terror 159 fi nancial tsunami that arrived out of nowhere. At the base of all this is a failure to calculate, measure, and manage risk and we have seen it before” (House of Commons 238).

WORKS CITED Abolofia, Mitchel Y. Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Print. Amoore, Louise. “Consulting, Culture, the Camp: On the Economies of the Exception.” Risk and the War on Terror. Ed. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede. London: Routledge, 2008. 112–30. Print. Amoore, Louise, and Marieke de Goede, eds. Risk and the War on Terror. London: Routledge, 2008. Print. Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994. Print. Beck, Ulrich. “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited.” Theory, Culture, & Society 19.4 (2002): 39–55. Print. Boje, David M., Grace Ann Rosile, Rita A. Durant, and John T Luhman. “Enron Spectacles: A Critical Dramaturgical Analysis.” Organization Studies 25.5 (2004): 751–74. Print. Cetina, Karin Knorr and Urs Bruegger. “Traders’ Engagement with Markets: A Postsocial Relationship” Theory, Culture, & Society 19.5 (2002): 161–85. Print. Das, Satyajit. Traders, Guns, and Money. London: Prentice Hall/Financial Times, 2006. Print. Davis, Hillary. A Million a Minute. London: Nicholas Brearly, 1998. Print. de Goede, Marieke. “Discourses of Scientific Finance and the Failure of Long-Term Capital Management.” New Political Economy 6.2 (2001): 149–70. Print. . “Underground Money.” Cultural Critique 65 (2007): 140–63. Print. de Man, Paul. “The Epistemology of Metaphor.” Critical Inquiry 5.1 (1978): 13–30. Print. Denny, David. Risk and Society. London: Sage, 2005. Print. Doran, James. “Insider Trading Apparently Based on Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks.” Times [London] 18 Sept. 2001. Web. 2 Mar. 2010. Douglas, Mary. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Green, Stephen. “Negotiating with the Future: The Culture of Modern Risk in Global Financial Markets.” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 18.1 (2000): 77–89. Print. Hanson, Robin. The Policy Analysis Market (and FutureMAP) Archive. George Mason University. n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2010. House of Commons Treasury Committee. Banking Crisis. Vol. 1: Oral Evidence. London: HMSO, 2009. Web. 2 Mar. 2010. Jameson, Fredric. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1997): 246–65. Print. Jennings, Kate. Moral Hazard. London: Fourth Estate, 2003. Print. Knight, F.H. Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921. Print. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Print. Lanchester, John. Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. London: Allen Lane, 2010. Print. MacKenzie, Donald. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Print.

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. “How a Superportfolio Emerges.” The Sociology of Financial Markets. Ed. Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Marsh, Nicky. Money, Finance, and Speculation in Contemporary British Fiction (London: Continuum, 2007). Print. Maurer, Bill. “Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives’ Theological Unconscious.” Economy and Society 31.1 (2001): 15–36. Print. Medley, Joseph and Lorrayne Carroll. “Whooping it up for Rational Prosperity: Narratives of the East-Asian Financial Crisis.” World Bank Literature. Ed. Amitava Kumar. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. 140–56. Print. Millman, Gregory J. Around the World on a Trillion Dollars a Day. London: Bantam, 1995. Print. Napoleoni, Loretta. The Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks. London: Pluto Press, 2003. Print. Pendlebury, Richard. “A £1 Million Blockbuster Born out of Tragedy: Triumph of First-Time Novelist Whose Wife Died in Childbirth.” Daily Mail [London] 24 Jan. 1994. Print. Prebble, Lucy. Enron. London: Methuen, 2009. Print. Reich, Christopher. The Devil’s Banker. London: Headline, 2002. Print. Ridpath, Michael. Free to Trade. London: Mandarin, 1995. Print. Robinson, Jeffrey. The Sink: Terror, Crime, and Dirty Money in the Offshore World. London: Constable, 2003. Print. Strange, Susan. Mad Money. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. Print. Thrift, Nigel. “‘It’s the Romance, Not the Finance, That Makes the Business Worth Pursuing’: Disclosing a New Market Culture.” Economy and Society 30.4 (2001): 412–32. Print. . “Performing Cultures in the New Economy.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90.4 (2000): 674–92. Print. Wearden, Graeme, Simon Bowers, and Deborah Summers. “Sir James Crosby Resigns from FSA.” Guardian [London] 11 Feb. 2009. Web. 2 Mar. 2010. Whitaker, Reg. “The Dark Side of Life: Globalization and International Crime.” Socialist Register 2002: A World of Contradictions. Ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys. London: Merlin, 2002. Print.

10 Waiting for Crisis Casino Royale, Financial Aesthetics, and National Narrative Form Alissa G. Karl

Rogue investor Le Chiffre, the villain of the 2006 James Bond/007 film Casino Royale, is just what his name implies: “the number”; a number; the next typical, abstract, anonymous figure (except for a disturbing habit of bleeding from his eyes) in a saga of fi nancial hell-raising. Premised as it is upon an ongoing battle between the nation-state and an investor run amok, the film proves prescient of the global fi nancial crisis of 2008—a few weeks of massive bank, fi nancial institution, corporate, and even governmental failures and near-misses—during which anyone paying attention was likewise inundated with numbers. Take 30 September 2008 as a singular example. In the US, television networks intermittently flashed a dizzying series of figures, including the mounting 228–205 vote tally as the House of Representatives rejected the fi rst incarnation of a $700 billion fi nancial industry bailout package ostensibly intended to prevent the failure of the nation’s largest banks; the 778 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average; the 8.8 per cent loss in the S&P index; the 9.1 per cent loss in the Nasdaq; and the sudden evaporation of $1.2 trillion from US stock markets (Figure 10.1).1 This on top of the federal government’s $85 billion loan to the American International Group (AIG) and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a fi nancial services fi rm with $639 billion in assets, less than two weeks earlier. The naming of Le Chiffre as such and the seemingly endless numbers spawned by the 2008 crisis enact the character of fi nance capital and its narrative manifestations that I want to explore here; these numeric processions and specters manifest the requirement for fi nancial revaluation that I read as a kind of embedded, imminent crisis within economic and, as I shall demonstrate, textual systems. With its logic of abstraction, interchangeability, and volatility, fi nance capital generates narrative and aesthetic forms that also hinge upon the generic and systemically necessary crisis. In the fi rst section of this chapter, I consider the practice of stock short selling in Casino Royale to detail fi nance capital’s narrative pattern of what I call awaited crisis, which is a counterpart to its requirements of value. I go on to establish how, ultimately, such a narrative form is appropriate to the very state tasked with domesticating global fi nance capital and

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Figure 10.1 The Troubled Assets Relief Program is voted down; the markets plummet in the background. Frontline, Public Broadcasting Service, 2009.

its periodic crises in accordance with the latter’s narrative modalities, and read the 2009 Group of 20 (G20) Summits in London and Pittsburgh as sites where the financialized form of the nation-state is at odds with older models of national sovereignty and indeed with the current imperative to prevent future financial crashes.

BUY HIGH, SELL LOW The stock short sell with which Casino Royale gets underway effectively structures the film around and as a series of crises that the short sell itself proves a useful figure for imagining. After the film’s opening sequence in which Bond is conferred with “00” status, or his “license to kill,” we meet our villain Le Chiffre as he is entrusted with investing a large sum of money for a Ugandan militant group. Le Chiffre is in fact using the Ugandans’ cash to undertake a stock short sell, an investment technique that tries to turn a profit from an anticipated fall in stock prices. An investor does this by buying high and selling low using borrowed (or “shorted”) shares, while betting upon a significant fall in the stock’s price during the interval. After the Ugandans hand over their money, Le Chiffre phones his broker and asks to be shorted (or to borrow, subject to fees) another million shares of Sky Fleet stock. The Ugandans’ money will first be placed in Le Chiffre’s margin account with his broker as a kind of down payment for a fraction of the amount that he is borrowing. Le Chiffre will now sell his borrowed Sky Fleet shares at the going market price and keep the proceeds; he anticipates that after he sells these

Waiting for Crisis 163 shares, Sky Fleet stock prices will fall sharply, which will allow him to keep the difference between the high price at which he sold his borrowed shares and the lower price that he’ll pay to buy back the same number and reinstate them with his broker. What Le Chiffre needs to realize is that a fantastic profit is a radical revaluation—a crisis in Sky Fleet stock, which he attempts to engineer by plotting the bombing of a Sky Fleet plane. The bombing, however, isn’t the only crisis that Le Chiffre’s short sell involves, as both his short sell and the procedure in general encapsulate and indeed amplify fi nance capital’s imperative for revaluation. I’ll argue that the short sell, and in particular the temporal space between the short and the cover where revaluation is anticipated but not yet affi rmed, figure and enact the narrative condition of awaited crisis—a condition in which, as I’ll later explain, the nation-state is likewise posited in the fi lm and beyond. In Casino Royale, crisis is manifest as a narrative format and as a spatial and temporal imagination, and I hope to demonstrate here how various scales and modalities of crisis converge and cohere such that crisis functions as a generalized logic that structures text and nation alike. We often think of crisis as a failure or crash that breaches the outer limits of a particular mode of capital’s operations. In his essential history of economic meltdown, Manias, Panics, and Crashes (2000 [1978]), Charles Kindleberger defi nes fi nancial crisis as “a sharp, brief, ultracyclical deterioration of all or most of a group of fi nancial indicators—short term interest rates, asset prices, commercial insolvencies, and failures of fi nancial institutions” (3); in this orthodox defi nition, crisis is a fairly large-scale affair centered upon fi nancial fi rms and entities, something that we might see in the Great Crash of 1929, the Black Monday crash of October 1987, or the “credit crunch” of late 2008. I’d suggest, though, that the scale of crisis as Kindleberger describes it is also applicable to a longer-run rupture of the progression of capital’s history and the expansion of its territorial frontiers—something like the end of an era of hegemonic capital accumulation as outlined by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century (1994). But where Arrighi tracks capitalism’s historical development over consecutive cycles marked by crises, his model also articulates crisis as capital’s more mundane, normative form. The vacillation of shorter phases of commodity- and fi nance-based capital within the larger cycles that Arrighi describes suggests that not just in spite of, but indeed as a result of systemic crises, “old” methods of capital accumulation and the state authority by which they are bolstered are reworked in “new” conditions. Arrighi describes the history of capital as a “double movement forward and backward at the same time” (80) in which previously dominant economic and political regimes (such as the British or Dutch systems of rule and accumulation) “are repeatedly resurrected as soon as the hegemony that has superseded them is in turn superseded by a new hegemony . . . [often] on enlarged spatial and social foundations” (79). In other words,

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crises don’t wipe out capital’s tendencies but rather catalyze their eventual revival in later forms. Such a history of capitalism and crisis doesn’t move in a line, then, but via what Ian Baucom characterizes as a “variegated sequence of oscillations” (28). Arrighi’s observation that fi nance “signals” crises within prevailing means of accumulation even as it bridges the demise of one phase and the (re)beginning of another is particularly useful for elaborating the second scale or mode of crisis that I want to take up here—crisis as constitutive of fi nance capital’s historical and, as I’ll discuss shortly, narrative forms. Fredric Jameson has described Arrighi’s fi nancial phases as moments in which capital becomes abstract to a “second degree” (“Culture” 251) and functions as a deterritorialized “virus” or “epidemic” that “play[s itself] out, like a fi re for want of oxygen; and [can] also leap to new and more propitious settings, in which the preconditions are favorable for renewed development” (249). Jameson’s biological metaphor for Arrighi’s historical model homes in upon crisis as recurrent, systemically necessary, and, here, simultaneously destructive and generative. We can imagine the “epidemic” of cyclical crisis becoming a kind of living thing in itself, progressive and retrograde at the same time, which by replaying various prior regimes disrupts a linear teleology of capital (one which insists that despite periodic market failures, capital can maintain aggregate growth indefi nitely) and overlays it with a temporal and spatial figure of repetition. In short, crisis can be read as both, and simultaneously, rupturing event and structural imagination, and recently Slavoj Žižek and Naomi Klein have made provocative suggestions about the sustenance of free-market capitalism via crises large and small. Each effectively reads crisis not as an end or outer limit, but as evidence of the dominant ideology’s ongoing, if irrational, efficacy. Žižek characterizes capitalism’s recurrent instability as a “flux of permanent self-revolutionizing” (130) that persists in spite and because of crises and failures for the curious ideological reason that regardless of much professed cynicism, “we presume that [governmental and economic systems] work even though we do not believe in them” (51). Repeat crises become “farcical”—his most prominent example being the 2008 fi nancial crash as farcical replay of the tragedy of 11 September 2001—because they bolster the very liberal capitalist systems by which they were engendered and thus ensure their own repetition. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein’s sustained analysis of what she calls “shock therapy,” or the practice of instrumentalizing and even fabricating traumatic societal disruptions (like war, natural disaster, terrorism, state violence, or economic crisis) to solidify unpopular regimes, including many that espouse radical free market capitalism, posits the crisis as the building block of dominant economic systems and state power. To turn from Pinochet’s Chile, of which Klein performs an in-depth analysis, to Le Chiffre’s short sell, then, is to see the condition of compulsive interruption on a “small” scale under fi nance capital

Waiting for Crisis 165 as synecdochal for a larger system of “big” crashes. I’d suggest that, like Klein’s shock therapy, the short sell not only exploits but demands crisis (in stock value); at the same time, the short sell encapsulates the necessity for continual and often radical revaluation within fi nance generally.

ANY CRISIS WILL DO Where the contention that capitalism proceeds via crisis has been variously theorized, Casino Royale evidences the affi nities between fi nance capital’s modalities of value and the characteristics of fi nancial crashes and panics. More precisely, the short sell and its narrative manifestations in the film register the abstraction and typification of fi nancial crises large and small, and expose these as counterparts to fi nance capital’s regime of imaginary, generic, and mobile values. As the 2008 fi nancial crisis so handily illustrated, fi nance capital’s values are imaginary and abstract in the sense that value “exists” because a group of people has agreed to it, and the system consents to the monetary values of things about which no empirical knowledge need be available (such as in trading on the potential interest from debt or the range of creative derivatives that turned “toxic” once their valuations were reassessed). The monetary value in US dollars of a million shares of Sky Fleet stock “exists,” for instance, because brokers and investors like Le Chiffre consent to it. Although value is collectively imagined, it is binding nonetheless and constitutes the shape of the fi nancial markets and the basis for the exchanges within them. Finance’s imaginary values are also typified—that is, general rather than particular. Under fi nance capital’s logic of equivalence, “real” things live and die by their market values, their singularity de-specified in favor of generic monetary correspondences. So for an investor like Le Chiffre, airline manufacturing is to auto manufacturing is to software engineering is to pharmaceuticals is to investment banking; all could figure the same in his plan to profit from the short sell. Baucom distinguishes fi nance capital’s mode of typification as “actuarial,” where “real” things are assessed by their abstract values (as opposed to “romantic” types that supposedly stand in for actual lost entities that once existed); as Baucom puts it, “the actuarial type endorses the exchange of the ‘real’ for the ‘theoretical’ life of things by avowing the real existence of theoretical abstractions” (46). In this way, Le Chiffre’s plan to blow up a “real” Sky Fleet plane affi rms that the plane stands in for the company’s generic stock price, thus establishing the “real” existence of that plane’s own abstracted value—the generic monetary price of the stock of the company that manufactured it or the company that flies it. In fi nance capital’s logic of value, then, “real” values verify their abstractions and not the other way around, and Le Chiffre’s short sell indicates how disruptions are fundamentally necessary to such conceptual regimes. The “real” plane functions to establish the existence of

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its own abstracted value—the generic and volatile monetary value of Sky Fleet. Instead of primarily reading abstract values as stand-ins for “real” or material ones, fi nance capital’s logic of value appeals to “real” things to validate their malleable abstractions (such as their vulnerable stock prices). Le Chiffre’s short sell demonstrates this tendency within finance capital’s conceptual regimes as the plan instrumentalizes material disruption for the ultimate purpose of abstract revaluation. Ironically, the short sell secures the actuality of fi nance capital’s imaginary and generic values by demanding their volatility and transience. Like all fi nancial investing, the short sell trades upon unstable values that are stipulated as such by those who agree to them at a given point in time. So the legitimacy of an imaginary value of, say, a stock or currency option, is enshrined when investors buy or sell it, and bet that it will change. When the short is covered (when an investor repays the shares that were borrowed from the broker), it is intended that the shares have a new imaginary value, and profit (or loss) is made on the discrepancy between the imaginary value of the same “thing” at two different points in time. The constant revaluation that fi nance capital requires to (re)establish the mobility and abstraction of value itself is laid bare in the tenuous space between the short and the cover. When Le Chiffre claims that he believes not in God, but in a “reasonable rate of return,” then, he espouses this fi nancial worldview in which imaginary values are dislodged and new ones established; such is fi nance capital’s condition of possibility that proliferates through interruption, revaluation, and crisis. And if values are typical—if one stock is hypothetically as good as another to short, and if one commodity is as good as another to acknowledge abstract value—then I’ll suggest that one crisis is as good as another to reproduce fi nance capital’s narrative and historical forms. What I want to underscore is that the characteristics of fi nancial crisis correspond to fi nance capital’s protocols of value more generally, and Casino Royale is marked by repetitive, typified crises that register these very presumptions of fi nancial valuation. In the interval between the fi lm’s short and cover, for instance, Le Chiffre has plotted the bombing of a Sky Fleet plane to precipitate a drop in the price of that company’s shares and thus make his short sell profitable. But there is nothing to distinguish the bombing plot from that of a rogue investor “terrorizing” the stock market to manipulate prices; as interruptions that initiate revaluation, both crises affi rm the volatility of abstract value. The crisis that is awaited between the short and the cover is a typical, not a singular one, since the “content” of the crisis (plane bombing or market sabotage) is effaced in favor of disruption and revaluation themselves and in pursuit of a “reasonable rate of return.” The span of the film, too, is structured as a series of generic crises and interruptions. Bond disrupts Le Chiffre’s short sell and the crises that it initiates, such that Le Chiffre loses his clients’, and his own, money. On the

Waiting for Crisis 167 fi rst day of the poker game at the Casino Royale, the Ugandan militants stage a violent interruption seeking their money from Le Chiffre; on the second, Bond is poisoned and nearly dies. The aftermath of Bond’s victory in the poker game is interrupted by his kidnap and torture, which itself is interrupted by the shadowy operative Mr. White. The dénouement of Bond’s mission to beat Le Chiffre at his own game is intersected by double agent Vesper Lynd’s plot to steal the winnings. The turn of events initiated by Vesper’s scheme is itself cut short by her death. The fi lm’s logic of repetitive crisis even organizes individual scenes, like the eight-minute chase scene across a Madagascar building site near the beginning of the film that is remarkable for its self-referential length and that emphasizes its own perpetuation across a series of crisis moments: Bond and the fugitive fighting on a crane; each dangling perilously from said crane; the initial apprehension of the fugitive in an embassy office. If the high-action chase scene is itself a seemingly climactic moment in the unfolding of the fi lm as a whole, then this one strings together smaller typified crisis moments, which would mean that the big explosion that occurs at the “end” of the scene doesn’t effectively conclude it, but instead propels the narrative into further non-climactic crises. Like the crisis of the short sell, Casino Royale’s arbitrary-yet-necessary crises can be read into the aesthetic space of fi nance that awaits them. The sheer repetition of Casino Royale’s crises untethers them from particularities of the narrative; instead, they can be conflated with one another (as in Le Chiffre’s bombing and/as market sabotage) or switched around. Where Jameson has asserted that fi nancial crises aren’t singularly self-evident but have to be explained after the fact (“Experiments” 109), so goes the typicality of crises here as it is the generic disruptive character of each that makes the fi lm tick and affi rms the fi nancial format by which they are generated.

OF POKER TABLES AND WORLD MAPS At one point in Casino Royale, M complains: “Damn, I miss the Cold War.” She also emphasizes the importance of MI6 apprehending “true believers” who threaten Britain’s security as opposed to “guns for hire” who merely work for them. M’s attitude is indicative of an earlier Bond that, as multiple critics have remarked, operates according to the presumptions of national sovereignty and imperial politics left over from the nineteenth century. We might visualize this geopolitical imaginary as the political world map unrolled in our high school classrooms on which each nation is marked off from its neighbors, has its boundaries filled in with a distinctive color, and is accorded discrete national imperatives. M’s lament for the passing of such good old days registers what Edgar Grande and Louis Pauly term “complex sovereignty,” or our contemporary “struggle to construct global political authority” in a world “where the levers of political control are no

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longer entirely clear” (4). And indeed, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, commentators have been quick to point out that we live in an even “less coherent world,” given the destabilization of globalized capital and its geopolitical order (Altman par. 6; see also Naím). I’m offering here that we can scrutinize the protocols of fi nance and the narrative forms that they engender to understand how the historically contingent coincidence of the nation and national sovereignty with territoriality, causality, and temporality has been reconfigured under contemporary capital, thus generating the new kind of geopolitics that leave M pining for the Cold War. As I’ll demonstrate here, M’s world map model of sovereignty is repeatedly overturned in Casino Royale as the film proceeds via the looping, repetitive crises of finance capital; and where financial aesthetics are embedded in contemporary narrative, so too do they figure in the (re)making of national imaginaries. It is my contention that the form of repetitive, awaited crisis as I have described it previously revises a spatial and temporal national imaginary both in the film and in recent geopolitical-fi nancial dealings. The Bond franchise is ostensibly premised upon a world map model of the nation as sovereign, territorial, and even teleological, and scholarship on Bond texts (both Ian Fleming’s novels and their filmic manifestations) frequently locates them within a geopolitics oriented around such figures of nationhood. For scholars and critics, the Bond texts function variously to delineate racial sovereignty within the confi nes of the nation in demographic flux (Baron); to negotiate decolonization through economic means (Karl); to deploy “phallic power and authority . . . in the service of King and Country” (Bennett and Woollacott 132); to present a modern, composite Britishness to a global audience (Chapman 97); to rebuff Britain’s economic and political decentralization that would imperil “the sanctity of the state” (Marsh 22); or to offer Bond himself as “Britain and Britishness incarnate” (Stock 215). This isn’t to say that the Bond texts are always read as narrowly nationalistic; rather, Bond is commonly situated within and among the spaces of the colored-in political world map. Benedict Anderson has famously articulated the sovereign, territorial national imaginary as a narrative affair in which the nation’s “limited” and “fi nite” (7) spatial contours are conceptualized via the temporal structures of novels and print journalism. Where these generic forms structure a “precise analogue to the idea of the nation” (26) by registering the “steady, onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time” (33), it is precisely such a linear-teleological trajectory from which Casino Royale’s awaited, repetitive crisis breaks. The film’s fi nancialized narrative posits the nation-state as a function of capital’s historical cycles by manifesting national sovereignty as a reactive expectation of the recurrent crises that structure the film itself, and by rendering the nation-state appropriate to the temporality and history of fi nance capital. Indeed, the national spaces that feature in the film register not as distinct and sovereign locations, each a different color on the world map, but as non-linear moments in the recurring, spiraling

Waiting for Crisis 169 history of capital. The British overseas territory of Bermuda, where Bond tracks, beats at cards, and seduces the wife of a Le Chiffre operative, references more than four centuries of global capitalism, from its status as colonial trade outpost to offshore fi nancial center, corporate tax haven, and pleasure center for the elite. Post-communist Montenegro is likewise depicted as a playground for the rich, but is also an economy in transition to full free-market capitalism and heavily dependent upon foreign investment. That Montenegro is a site open to convergences of global capital is figured in the high-stakes international poker game that is staged there in the film; the casino miniaturizes the nation as a space where high-rollers from all over the world come seek profit—none tied to that place in particular, and all free to move on after they win or lose. The fi lm then proceeds to Venice where Bond loses his winnings to a final narrative crisis in the form of Vesper’s betrayal; in its move to Venice, the film loops back to one of capital’s earliest sites, having cycled through its imperial (Bermudan) and contemporary globalized (Montenegrin) moments. Even the fi lm’s brief sojourn to Miami, where Bond interrupts the Sky Fleet bombing staged by Le Chiffre, references national de-specification under contemporary capital. While the bombing drama unfolds at Miami International Airport—a transit site for global personages—Bond also pursues Le Chiffre’s cronies through a museum housing the touring Bodies exhibition, which displays preserved human cadavers in lifelike poses. While the exhibit, which at the time of writing is still traveling to cities around the world, has evoked controversy because the precise identity, origins, and cause of death of its specimens are as yet undisclosed by its promoters, the cadavers are nonetheless touted as generic representatives of the human form itself. 2 Without diminishing the importance of determining whether or not the specimens were the victims of untimely deaths, I’d point out that Bodies’ deliberate anonymity mimics the typified audience in the global cities before which these nameless bodies circulate and emphasizes, as in the geographic nations in which the fi lm is staged, the interchangeability of individual viewers and specimens within the cycles of historical capital. Moving across and through locations and moments in the stages of capital’s history, the film effectively collapses historical time and geographic space under this history: each location is a moment in the ongoing cycles of capital accumulation where a particular formation of capital has rested for a time. Notably, Bond is rarely pictured in transit between disparate locations (the most we see of this in Casino Royale is in his flirtatious train ride to Montenegro with Vesper Lynd, and even this is picked up midway through, revealing neither the journey’s origin nor its terminus). The fi lm instead cuts from one place to the next such that spatial continuity between, and particularity of, the film’s settings is de-emphasized. We might here appeal to the phenomenon that Arrighi, drawing from John Ruggie and others, names the “non-territorial network of capital accumulation” (83),

170 Alissa G. Karl which “constitutes an institutional negation of [the] exclusive territoriality” of the modern, nation-based system of rule (80). While nation-spaces are articulated as such, their singularity and geopolitical efficacy are subordinated to the movement of historical capital across and between them, a procedure that Casino Royale’s narrative format enhances as its repetitive crises accelerate temporal and spatial mobility over the fi lm’s duration. Under the narrative forms of contemporary fi nance capital, then, the nation is not M’s “true believer” prosecuting a sovereign imperative in accordance with its distinctive territoriality; rather, it is a spatial and temporal site that awaits the next crisis whose inception and arrival are beyond its own control. In Casino Royale, the nation is quite literally just another player as Bond and Felix Leiter from the CIA take their places at the card table with Le Chiffre and other high-stakes gamblers. Where the nationstate of M’s imagination can be visualized on a political world map, Casino

Figure 10.2 G20 seating plan. The Guardian, 2 April 2009. Copyright Guardian News and Media Ltd 2009.

Waiting for Crisis 171 Royale’s national configurations correspond more closely to a dinner seating chart for the April 2009 G20 Summit in London (Figure 10.2). Whether or not we literally imagine the G20 as a giant poker game presided over by the heads of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization, this alternative visual schema figures nation-states as interchangeable nodes between which fi nancial transactions pass and bounce. The non-territorial space in the center remains unnamed and unclaimed—the generic, malleable space of fi nance, about to be, or in the midst of being, re-imagined and revalued by crisis.

CRISIS AND EFFECT Yet even as the territorial nation is disarticulated by the awaited crisis, a world map spatial model still works to contain the nation’s temporality along a linear, teleological trajectory—a temporal-spatial imaginary at odds with that occasioned by contemporary global fi nance and the looping, spiraling history of capital and crisis to which it conforms. So where the G20 of late looks like a poker table, it acts (or wills itself to act) like a world map by collectively ascribing causal linearity to crisis and by imagining fi nancial territory as fi xed within determinate spatial domains, even though such discourses of national sovereignty are inconsistent with the notions of value (and by extension crisis) in the fi nancialized narrative formations by and through which the nation itself is imagined. As such, the G20 can be read not so much as an institution or event, but as a collection of iterations that arrest the nation between incommensurate narrative modalities. The Economist magazine broached this very notion when it pointed out in the midst of the 2008 banking and fi nancial crisis that “international fi nance cannot just be ‘fi xed’, because the system is a of tug-of-war between the global capital markets and national sovereignty” (“Redesigning”); indeed, as evidenced in fi nancial editorials on both sides of the Atlantic, the language surrounding the G20 meetings in 2009 simultaneously demands that member nations “act against” the crisis while remaining skeptical about their ability to do so effectively.3 Still, the predominant narrative of the London summit emerged as a clash of sovereign imperatives, with the Germans followed by the French resisting the US strategy of massive stimulus in favor of tighter fi nancial regulation. Similarly, in Pittsburgh in September 2009, the slated agenda of banker compensation and capital requirements for fi nancial institutions was upstaged by an Obama-Sarkozy-Brown triumvirate wagging a collective fi nger at Iran’s nuclear development. On the surface, at least, the G20 still largely presumes a narrative logic of the world map on which separate and sovereign states merge imperatives or assert them against one another. The language of the G20 itself likewise enacts spatial and temporal tropes that render the nation as a bounded entity progressing across time.

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The leaders’ communiqué from the London meeting establishes a vision of geopolitical space and sovereignty in just such a format, where the “domestic regulatory systems” (par. 14) of individual national entities form a composite “global solution” to “global crisis” (par. 2). The communiqué conforms to temporal logics of cause and effect and linear growth that correlate to the spatial imagination of discrete, bounded territories patched together across global totality. Identifying the “causes” of the global fi nancial crisis as “major failures in the fi nancial sector and in fi nancial regulation and supervision” (par. 14) while pledging to “prevent a crisis like this from recurring in the future” (par. 4) through the retooling of those regulatory frameworks, the statement posits the nation as an actor within a set of causal relationships; more fundamentally, historical time itself is narrated as a progressive series of causes and effects, inputs and outputs, reasons and results. With 20/20 hindsight, it seems that the “outcome” of the crisis could have been altered in advance; the recurrence of a crisis of this kind is foreclosed if the nation-state is prepared to “guard against risk across the fi nancial system; dampen rather than amplify the fi nancial and economic cycle; reduce reliance on inappropriately risky sources of fi nancing; and discourage excessive risk-taking” (par. 14). Partnered with an imagination of causal history subject to sovereign national will is the leaders’ mantra of “sustainability,” “sustainable growth,” and “long-term fiscal sustainability” (pars. 3, 10, 11, 18, 25, 26, 27). The same largely holds true in the Pittsburgh Leader’s Statement in which the “Framework for Strong, Sustainable, Balanced Growth” maintains the temporally progressive imaginary of the London communiqué. Both documents would seem to assert that through the prosecution of sovereign will the nationstate, to borrow Anderson’s words, “move[s] steadily up . . . history” (26), taking the economy with it. Despite the articulation of such a national narrative in the face of fi nancial crisis, the actual strategies enacted by the G20 in fact invert the causal story of the nation begetting the economy; instead, they locate national sovereignty within and among the logics of fi nancial markets which operate via presumptions of abstract and generic values that are subject to constant fluctuation and crisis. Among a number of measures designed to bolster the world fi nancial system and the resources of individual nations struggling within it (namely, more “direct fi nancing” through the IMF for developing countries in the form of loans and trade credit), the London G20 supported an additional allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) for developing economies through the IMF (par. 5). Put crudely, SDRs are a kind of IMF Monopoly money—or what the IMF calls an “international reserve asset” that countries may use to supplement their own national reserves. Not currency and not exactly credit, SDRs are rather a “potential claim on the freely usable currencies of IMF members” (“Factsheet”); in other words, countries may trade their SDRs with other countries to obtain usable world currencies. Though quoted in US dollars, the value of an SDR is determined

Waiting for Crisis 173 by the value of a “basket” of four world currencies (the euro, the Japanese yen, pound sterling, and the US dollar) and is calculated based upon daily exchange rates. So while it functions as a national reserve asset, the SDR is a purely imaginary value emerging from the fluctuations of world currency markets. SDRs are effectively poker chips on that market, akin to the ten million US dollars that MI6 fronts Bond so that he can join Le Chiffre’s game, except that Bond’s chips were initially purchased with a usable currency. In the G20’s response to the 2008 fi nancial crisis, the nation is ultimately asserted through the mechanisms of the global markets that traffic in abstract values that are shifting all the time—a logic of repetitive, awaited crisis that the sovereign state is purportedly determined to contain through the application of causality. The G20’s “Special Drawing Rights” strategy of supplying chips to a gambler encapsulates how fi nance capital generates a narrative modality to which the sovereign territorial state has no retort because the state itself is construed according to the logics of global fi nancial and capital markets. The sovereign, iterative will of the state effectively suspends itself in the space between the short and the cover, subject to impending revaluation of all the terms by which it operates. Such a condition can be figured through Bond’s sexuality in Casino Royale: where Bond’s legendary sexual prowess has been read as an analogue for economic, cultural, and racial imperialism (a British Bond quite literally penetrating [all over] the world),4 his genital torture and near-castration at the hands of Le Chiffre renders the nation passive to fi nance as embodied by “the number” and also to the kind of sudden narrative crisis by which Bond is saved (the torture is unexpectedly interrupted by Mr. White).5 Thus where “straight sex” has been aligned with national sovereignty and its progressive temporal prosecution, sexualized torture effectively suspends the nation between the short and the cover and figures its reliance upon the narrative “perversion” of awaiting crisis. Where quite literally Bond’s sexuality is not his own (in torture but also in Vesper’s exploitation of her sexual relationship with Bond), national time and will are subject to the protocols of finance capital such that we can identify a counter-logic to that of imperial and economic sovereignty that is immediately visible in the Bond texts. Like the secret agent at the poker table or the central bank playing the currency markets, the nation is dislodged from sovereign imperative as it is suspended in a temporal logic of awaited crisis and typified as one player among many. And much like a G20 finance minister, Bond chases and barely diffuses one crisis after another, always awaiting a sharp jolt of revaluation but unable to foresee exactly what this will be.

SIZE STILL MATTERS For all of its manipulation of national narrative logics, Casino Royale attempts to reassure us that we are in familiar waters with its fi nal scene.

174 Alissa G. Karl Having located a man involved in the series of crises we have just witnessed, Bond is pictured towering over Mr. White while wielding a semiautomatic gun improbably large for the operation at hand (Figure 10.3). The film’s parting shot is that of the British secret agent reassuring us with the size of his weapon and by extension the potency of the sovereign agency that he enacts. Like the G20’s proclamations and mandates in the aftermath of the 2008 fi nancial meltdown, Bond’s big gun would seem to insist that the nation can dislodge itself from the space between the short and the cover to effect mastery over crisis. I’d suggest, though, that however expertly wielded, its exaggerated size renders this final prosecution of national imperative a self-referential, self-conscious act of iterative will that yet references all that national sovereignty cannot control. One commentator described the perception in the fi nancial world after the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers as dominated by “a sense that there wasn’t someone in control, that the [US] government was reacting instead of acting.”6 Ulrich Beck has indeed proposed that in what he calls “world risk society”—a context of expected-yet-unpredictable risks that reconfigure our presumptions about causality and the geopolitical models that they generate—“national and international politics are, so to speak, condemned to counteraction” and yet “a hierarchy of political action [emerges] in which greater value attaches to proactive than to reactive forms (27). For Beck, then, the state is always a kind of counteractor, albeit one that packages the field of risk and unpredictability as a set of manageable, self-contained figures. I’d offer that such proactive counteraction is the hallmark of the current push to reform the banking and fi nancial industries at the national and international levels: by making the

Figure 10.3 Bond’s big gun in Casino Royale. Copyright 2006, United Artists.

Waiting for Crisis 175 outrageous derivative, the undercapitalized investment bank, or the subprime mortgage the “face” of fi nancial risk, we overlay the fundamental volatility, abstraction, and typicality that are fi nance’s conditions with a causal logic appropriate to the will of the sovereign bureaucratic state. That is, while fi nancial reform may seem less sexy than Bond and his big gun, it is in essence the very same thing. Whether we call it “world risk society” or simply another cycle of global capitalism, our contemporary political-economic milieu would appear to be structured by mixed narrative models of fi nance capital and of the exclusive, sovereign nation that are at times contradictory and at times incommensurate. Obsessively reading the numbers—stock market tallies, employment figures, currency conversions, corporate losses and profits, and countless other indexes of perpetual fi nancial and economic revaluation—we look for signals that we are, to use the bureaucrats’ preferred euphemism for the future, “going forward” as ultimately the nation ought. But in fact that very slavish attentiveness to the numbers may signal our suspension between the short and the cover where we await the next revaluation—and the next crisis.

NOTES 1. For examples of the reporting of these numbers at the time see “For Stocks, Worst Single Day Drop” and “Bailout Plan Rejected”; see also Cassidy. 2. A number of journalists have examined the mystery of the Bodies specimens’ origins. At the time of writing, Premier Exhibitions (the promoter of the exhibit) could not confirm that the specimens were not executed Chinese political prisoners. For a fairly comprehensive account, see Barboza; McCann. 3. See, for example, “Summit of Achievement”; “The Economic Summit”; “Constrained Expectations”; “All for One.” 4. See Bennett and Woollacott (132) and Miller (122–153). 5. That the torture scene in fact appeared in Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale (1953), the fi rst novel in his James Bond/007 series, would suggest that ambiguity surrounding national and imperial sovereignty as embodied in Bond’s sexuality is nothing new; Bond’s sexual vulnerability “from the start” is a provocative reminder that such tension surrounding the narrative logics of the nation extends beyond our own contemporary manifestations of global fi nance capital. 6. Gretchen Morgensen of the New York Times, in “Inside the Meltdown.”

WORKS CITED “All for One: Summiteers are United in a Time of Crisis.” Times [London] 30 Mar. 2009: Business p. 2. LexisNexis. Web. 18 Aug 2009. Altman, Roger C. “Globalization in Retreat.” Foreign Affairs 88.4 (2009). Web. 17 Aug. 2009. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Print.

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Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994. Print. “Bailout Plan Rejected.” Wall Street Journal 30 Sept. 2008: n. pag. LexisNexis. Web. 20 Aug. 2009. Barboza, David. “China Turns Out Mummified Bodies for Displays.” New York Times 8 Aug. 2009. Web. 11 Jun. 2009. Baron, Cynthia. “Dr. No: Bonding Britishness to Racial Sovereignty.” The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. Ed. Christoph Lindner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. 133–50. Print. Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print. Beck, Ulrich. “World Risk Society and the Changing Foundations of Transnational Politics.” Ed. Edgar Grande and Louis W. Pauly. Complex Sovereignty: Reconstituting Political Authority in the Twenty-first Century. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. 22–47. Print. Bennett, Tony and Janet Woollacott. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. New York: Methuen, 1987. Print. Casino Royale. Dir. Martin Campbell. 2006. United Artists, 2008. DVD. Cassidy, John. “Anatomy of a Meltdown: Ben Bernanke and the Financial Crisis.” New Yorker 1 Dec. 2008. Web. 14 Jan 2010. Chapman, James. “A License to Thrill.” The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. Ed. Christoph Lindner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. 91–98. Print. “Constrained Expectations.” Editorial. Times [London] 1 Apr. 2009: editorial p.2. LexisNexis. Web. 18 Aug 2009. “The Economic Summit.” Editorial. New York Times 3 Apr. 2009. Web. 18 Aug. 2009. “Factsheet: Special Drawing Rights.” International Monetary Fund. International Monetary Fund, 27 Aug. 2009. Web. 13 Sept. 2009. “For Stocks, Worst Single Day Drop.” New York Times 30 Sept. 2008. Web. 20 Aug. 2009. “Global Plan for Recovery and Reform: The Communiqué from the London Summit.” London Summit 2009. UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2 Apr. 2009. Web. 12 Sept. 2009. Grande, Edgar and Louis W. Pauly, eds. Complex Sovereignty: Reconstituting Political Authority in the Twenty-First Century. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. “Inside the Meltdown.” Frontline. Public Broadcasting Service, 17 Feb. 2009. Web. 15 Sept 2009. Jameson, Fredric. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1997): 246–65. Print. . “The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism.” The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 95–127. Print. Karl, Alissa G. “Goldfi nger’s Gold Standard: Negotiating the Economic Nation in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2008): 177–92. Print. Kindleberger, Charles P. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. 4th ed. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000. Print. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007. Print. “Leaders’ Statement: The Pittsburgh Summit.” The Pittsburgh Summit 2009. US Department of State, 25 Sept. 2009. Web. 10 Jan. 2010. Marsh, Nicky. Money, Speculation, and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction. London: Continuum, 2007. Print.

Waiting for Crisis 177 McCann, Fiona. “Questions Over Exhibition’s Body of Work.” Irish Times 10 Jan 2010: p. 4. LexisNexis. Web. 14 Jan 2010. Miller, Toby. Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Print. Naím, Moíses. “Globalization.” Foreign Policy 171 (Mar/Apr 2009): 28–34. Print. “Redesigning Global Finance.” The Economist 15 Nov. 2008: 15. Print. Stock, Paul. “Dial M for Metonym: Universal Exports, M’s Office Space and Empire.” The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. Ed. Christoph Lindner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. 215–31. Print. “Summit of Achievement.” The Times [London] 3 Apr. 2009: features p. 2. LexisNexis. Web. 18 Aug. 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso, 2009. Print.

11 Phantasmagoric Finance Crisis and the Supernatural in Contemporary Finance Culture Paul Crosthwaite Specters of value . . . vying against each other in a vast, world-wide, disembodied phantasmagoria. This is . . . the moment of fi nance capital as such. —Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital” (1997)

It was a time of great tribulation. In 2007 and 2008, as global credit markets seized up, venerable banking and insurance institutions collapsed, and stock prices around the world slid and then tumbled, desperate fi nancial professionals sought supernatural insights into the unimaginable disaster that had befallen them. In London, psychics experienced a dramatic surge in demand for their guidance from City workers (Leach; Mayer). In Paris, Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader whose unauthorized market positions would result in losses of €5 billion for the French bank Société Générale and intensify the stress on global markets, turned to clairvoyants in a futile attempt to predict the future. Arrested in January 2008, his fi rst request was not for a lawyer, but for the number of a telephone psychic. Having duly received a remote consultation, Kerviel conceded that he faced a “black future” (Allen). Across the Atlantic, leading US corporations queued to secure the services of Laura Day, another psychic or, in her preferred term, “intuitive” (de Bertodano) and anxious Wall Streeters flocked to the healing hands of the fi nancial planner-cum-Tibetan shaman Larry Ford (Blumenfeld). Among the alleged fraudsters indicted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in the wake of the crisis was “America’s Prophet” and head of the Delphi Investment Group, Sean David Morton, whose claim to have used a “spiritual remote viewing system” to call “ALL the highs and lows of the market giving EXACT DATES for rises and crashes over the last 14 years” persuaded tens of thousands of investors to follow his stock tips, or even, in some cases, to entrust him with their life savings (de la Merced). More generally, the credit crunch was the occasion of a mini religious revival in downtown Manhattan. At the height of the crisis in the autumn of 2008, after the implosion of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, Trinity Church, the neo-Gothic edifice that looms incongruously at the west end of

Phantasmagoric Finance 179 Wall Street (Figure 11.1), reported that congregations were often more than double their usual size (Wills, Rosenberg, and Perone), while extraordinary prayer meetings were held at Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Deloitte, and other institutions headquartered in New York’s fi nancial district (Carnes par. 12).

Figure 11.1 Wall Street, looking west toward Trinity Church (completed 1846). Photograph by Gryffindor, Cc-by-sa-3.0.

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Also fi red by religious fervor, James Bidgood, an MP in Australia’s ruling Labor Party and member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science, and Innovation, made a speech at a parliamentary function that attributed the fi nancial crisis to the wrath of God and argued that the realization of portents identified in the Book of Revelations indicated that the world was “in end times” (Maiden). In Italy, meanwhile, the Minister of Economy and Finance, Giulio Tremonti, announced during an address at Milan’s Cattolica University that the entire sub-prime fiasco had been “predicted” by no less an authority than Pope Benedict XVI in a speech delivered some 23 years earlier (Krause-Jackson and Totaro). These appeals to otherworldly intervention by individuals caught up in the chaos of systemic fi nancial crisis exemplify one of the central paradoxes of the age of global risk: that the most advanced forms of scientific knowledge, technological ingenuity, and administrative expertise bring into being systems and networks that—in their scale, complexity, and potential for danger—heighten a sense of the occult, the mystical, or the divine in everyday life. The processes of modernization are conventionally understood, along lines articulated by the pioneering sociologist Max Weber, as entailing the disenchantment and secularization of a world once suffused by myth, magic, superstition, spirituality, and folk wisdom through the exercise of an increasingly rational, instrumental, and systematizing outlook. As numerous scholars have recently insisted, however, the lifeworld of modernity is at least as mysterious, awesome, and ineffable as the universe contemplated by our medieval and “primitive” antecedents, while the cognitive frameworks they projected onto their environments are often unsettlingly similar to our own.1 As the panorama of zealotry, credulity, and supplication just sketched suggests, the paradoxical tendency of modernization to produce social, economic, and technological phenomena that perpetuate or reinvigorate supposedly archaic belief systems, even as modern knowledge claims relentlessly undermine the philosophical foundations of traditional worldviews, is exemplified in the sphere of fi nancial capitalism. The official ideology of fi nance over the last several decades, as espoused by fi nancial professionals themselves, as well as by neoclassical economists, anti-regulation legislators, and neoliberal pundits, is organized around a model of the economic actor as a caricature of the enlightened, disenchanted modern subject. This idealized figure, termed “homo economicus,” epitomizes an instrumental rationality that unwaveringly maximizes profit or “utility” (the satisfaction derived from the acquisition of goods or services) to the exclusion of all other considerations. Motivated by the succession of booms and busts that have shaken the global fi nancial system since the late 1980s—phases of exchange in which investors’ actions appeared to be anything but rational—scholars in so-called heterodox branches of economics, such as behavioral fi nance, and in other disciplines including sociology, anthropology, politics, and cultural studies, have argued, in contrast, that market

Phantasmagoric Finance 181 participants are frequently driven by the same instinctive impulsions or “animal spirits” (Keynes 161–62) that governed the behavior of our earliest ancestors. In this chapter, however, I want to emphasize how, in fi nancial markets, rational calculation yields not simply to reflex “mania,” “panic,” and “herding” behaviors, but also to manifestations of belief in positively supernatural forces and agencies. My aim, in other words, is to demonstrate that there is more truth than is usually intended in the vocabulary of the paranormal that pervades discussions of high fi nance. In the mainstream media, the architects of the latest fi nancial innovations are routinely described, with a mixture of admiration and suspicion, as “magicians,” “conjurors,” “sorcerers,” “wizards,” “seers,” “sages,” “prophets,” “witch doctors,” “high priests,” and, indeed, nothing less than quasi-divine “masters of the universe.” They seek out “fallen angels” (corporations whose stock is currently undervalued); anticipate the “witching hour” (when multiple classes of options or futures expire on the same day, generating price volatility); distribute “phantom stock” (an incentive for employees that gives them the right to share in their company’s profits without actually owning its stock); and, when it all goes wrong, leave behind a horde of “zombie banks.” In a recent article, Karen Pinkus interrogates invocations of the hermetic practice of alchemy in accounts of contemporary fi nance. She argues provocatively that, since alchemists were “metallurgists, proto-chemists, pharmacists” (3), a genuine fiscal alchemy would be one in which central banks strove to produce valuable matter—coins and bank notes—in the face of market crises. As she explains, however, the use of the word “alchemy” in this context is typically another way of attributing “magical” powers or the ability to conjure “something from nothing” (1) to those who purport to generate wealth by merely “buying, holding, or selling fi nancial instruments,” rather than “dealing with anything material” (3). Pinkus rightly asserts that, “given the gravity of the current crisis, given the degree to which fi nancial instruments are indeed figurative, phantasmagorical, and immaterial, it may be time to take seriously the figurative language with which we operate” (1). However imprecise its usage, “alchemy” is one of many common rhetorical figures that themselves serve to emphasize these very “phantasmagorical” and “immaterial” qualities of contemporary fi nance capital. The ubiquity of the supernatural in discourses surrounding the fi nancial markets attests to the immersion of the fi nancial laborer in a realm of intangible, insubstantial entities—entities which, moreover, often exist only to the extent to which faith or belief is invested in them. If credulity—the conviction that debts will be paid, that assets are worth at least what one has paid for them, that a balance displayed on a computer screen in Tokyo could buy so much gold in New York or so many loaves of bread in London—is finance capital’s very ontological condition of possibility, then we should not be surprised that this credulity often assumes explicitly supernatural overtones. Add, further, the fact that the entities in

182 Paul Crosthwaite whose reality one is obliged to believe have a tendency to act in the most mysterious, capricious, and unpredictable ways, and we have the perfect conditions for a turn to the supernatural. As Jean and John L. Comaroff remark, fi nance capital is rooted “in two inscrutables: a faith in probability (itself a notoriously poor way of predicting the future from the past) and a monetary system that depends for its existence on ‘confidence,’ a chimera knowable, tautologically, only by its effects” (310). The fi nancial world’s “spectral enchantments, its modes of speculation based on less than rational connections between means and ends” result in it being increasingly conceived of as an “occult economy,” an “effort to conjure wealth—or to account for its accumulation—by appeal to techniques that defy explanation in the conventional terms of practical reason” (310). To return to Karen Pinkus’ point, there is, then, a propensity for individuals to take the figurative language used to describe the fi nancial markets all too seriously—to act as if those metaphors of magic, divination, and mystical illumination could be literalized. The Comaroffs continue: As the connections between means and ends become more opaque, more distended, more mysterious, the occult becomes an ever more appropriate, semantically saturated metaphor for our times. . . . But, we insist, occult economies are not reducible to the symbolic, the figurative, or the allegorical. Magic is, everywhere, the science of the concrete, aimed at making sense of and acting upon the world—especially, but not only, among those who feel themselves disempowered, emasculated, disadvantaged. (317–18) While the Comaroffs primarily locate “occult” visions of economics within communities—particularly those in the “developing world”— which fi nd themselves at the mercy of fi nance capital’s volatile movements, I aim to demonstrate the prevalence of such thinking among the agents of fi nancial accumulation in the advanced capitalist economies. Indeed, I will suggest that occult understandings of the markets gravitate particularly strongly around the cities where the model of economic organization widely acknowledged as the “purest,” and most heavily fi nancialized, contemporary manifestation of capitalism—“Anglo-Saxon capitalism”— has its twin poles: New York and London. My argument lends weight, then, to the recognition that existence at the very frontiers of modernity need not dispel, and may in fact foster, a supernatural view of the world. I begin by drawing attention to the widespread, but often concealed, presence of this outlook in the theory and practice of fi nancial markets, focusing on a transatlantic axis between the US and Great Britain. I go on to analyze fictional and fi lmic narratives from the last two decades in which Wall Street and the City of London are presented as sites of haunting, shape-shifting, sooth-saying, and arcane ritual. Through such depictions, these texts open up a dimension of the fi nancial universe that is officially

Phantasmagoric Finance 183 disavowed by hegemonic models of market rationality and efficiency. What they suggest, moreover, by extrapolating to its limits the logic of a system constitutively underwritten by belief in imaginary things, is that fi nance is most itself—its philosophical presuppositions most visible— when its worldview is at its most supernatural. As John D. Caputo writes (with reference to Jacques Derrida), Even the hardest, coldest, most calculating men of fi nance are men of faith, men of credit, who believe in ghosts. They move about in a virtual reality where cash—which is itself, relative to the old mercantile system, but a sign—has all but disappeared, replaced by a stream of molecules, by electronic signals that say that certain monies have been paid or lost, grown or diminished, been transferred or advanced, which everyone believes implicitly. Everyone who is involved in banking, the stock market, in buying options and “futures,” in international currency exchange, in commercial transactions of any sort, must simply believe, trust. When the big players and high rollers start to lose confidence (which means faith) in the market, then the market contracts. When faith ceases to circulate in the economic system, then the circle draws tight, market values fall, interests rates soar, and the market, held the whole while in mid-air by faith, “crashes.” Then the big players, big as they are, sink to their knees and start praying like hell. (168)

TOWARD AN OCCULTURAL ECONOMY OF FINANCE As the weird scenes described at the opening of this chapter suggest, the attraction of fi nancial professionals to supernatural belief systems assumed a new intensity and visibility during the spasms of the “credit crunch.” Such a tendency is, however, a deep-rooted and long-established aspect of the fi nancial markets. Individuals who trade fi nancial securities for a living are known, for instance, to harbor levels of superstitious belief that fly in the face of theoretical models of economic rationality. There is substantial evidence of altered trading behavior on inauspicious dates or during ill-omened months: Friday the 13th and October, with its long history of market crashes (not to mention its culmination on All Hallows’ Eve), being the chief examples (Lucey; Whitfield). Anthropologists and economists who have explored the world of fi nance paint a picture of the trading floor as a space pervaded by belief in fate, karma, mojo, and the power of magical talismans. Futures traders, for example, will refuse to wash their distinctive brightly colored jackets, their socks, or even their teeth while on a winning streak (Zaloom 122). Some have insisted on being buried in their harlequin fi nery, like Pharaohs bearing ceremonial riches into the afterlife (Overdahl par. 7).

184 Paul Crosthwaite Such behaviors cut across a variety of different methodological approaches to the analysis of fi nancial markets, but one such approach appears to be particularly conducive to paranormal musings: “technical analysis” or “chartism,” which attempts to forecast price fluctuations by identifying patterns, cycles, and periodicities in charts of historical market data. Technical analysts constitute a significant minority (estimated at around 10 per cent [Malkiel 127]) of the financial analysis profession, and their methodology underpins many of the most popular advice manuals and computerized trading systems marketed at the amateur investor. The discipline has failed, however, to extricate itself from its dubious origins in early modern astrology (Poitras 250–52). Indeed, the most celebrated technical analyst, the American William D. Gann, placed astrology firmly at the center of his method and attracted a large following between the wars, which persists to this day. Reports from the 1990s and 2000s suggest that astrological thought continues to play a role in a significant proportion of chartist activity, including that of major Wall Street institutions, British high street banks, and City investment funds (Martin; Penman). As the interviews in Andrew W. Lo and Jasmina Hasanhodzic’s book The Heretics of Finance: Conversations with Leading Practitioners of Technical Analysis (2009) reveal, many of the most celebrated exponents of the discipline are notably reluctant to rule out the validity of astrology (172–78). A piece of wisdom attributed to the legendary turn-of the-century Wall Street fi nancier J.P. Morgan is often quoted in these circles: “Millionaires don’t hire astrologers. Billionaires do.” (Morgan adhered to this maxim himself, retaining the services of the astrologer Evangeline Adams, an associate of the English occultist Aleister Crowley and source of the infamous prediction, uttered just two days before the beginning of the downturn that would come to be seen as the fi rst phase of the Great Crash of 1929, that “the Dow Jones could climb to Heaven” [qtd. in Klein 13].) Also widely cited is a remark attributed to Donald T. Regan, a chairman of Merrill Lynch who went on to serve as Secretary of the Treasury and White House Chief of Staff under Ronald Reagan (whose presidential schedule was itself, notoriously, determined at times by consulting horoscopes): “It’s common knowledge that a large percentage of Wall Street brokers use astrology.” Another esoteric practice that abounds among the chartist community is numerology. Ralph Nelson Elliott, a chartist guru whose influence remains second only to that of his compatriot and contemporary Gann, was a keen numerologist who, as outlined in his portentously titled opus Nature’s Law: The Secret of the Universe (1946), based his “wave” theory of price movements on the Fibonacci number sequence (in which each term is the sum of the previous two: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.). One of the best known successors to Elliott is the self-taught technical analyst Martin Armstrong, who, during the 1980s and ’90s, built his small New Jersey-based fi nancial forecasting fi rm into an international operation. Armstrong commanded up to ten thousand dollars an hour for his services as a consultant, gained

Phantasmagoric Finance 185 the ear of leading economic and political players, including central bankers and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was fêted as “Mr. Yen” by Japanese investors, who placed billions of dollars under his control, and was named North American Economist and Fund Manager of the Year by prominent fi nancial publications. All the time, however, he had concealed the fact that the rationale for his system was the supposed power of the mystical number pi or π (approximately equal to 3.141) (Paumgarten 67). Armstrong describes how, upon stumbling across correspondences between pi and a price cycle he had identified, he suddenly saw in his “mind’s eye” that “there was a Geometry of Time itself” (qtd. in Paumgarten 67). His study of market data led him to believe that there is “a hidden order within what would appear to be random chaos” (qtd. in Paumgarten 69). Today, he hypothesizes that the ultimate explanation for the ubiquity of pi, in the markets and elsewhere, lies with the mysterious “dark matter” thought to constitute a quarter of the universe (Paumgarten 79). Like many other technical analysts (Mason 148), Armstrong further detects a deep structural affi nity between market cycles and the complex mathematics of the Mayan calendar (Armstrong 31–32). His announcement, in 1999, of the numerological basis of his forecasting model narrowly preceded an event he had, however, singularly failed to predict: his arrest on billion-dollar fraud charges and subsequent imprisonment. Despite the disclosure of Armstrong’s unconventional methods, and his ongoing incarceration, his ideas continue to enjoy a significant following among technical analysts. Since the revelation that the apex of the American real estate market in February 2007 coincided with a date identified by Armstrong as likely to be of major economic significance, his model has, as a London hedge fund manager puts it, been “everywhere”—“lots of people talk about it” (qtd. in Paumgarten 72). The chartist community likewise continues to place great store by such portentous-sounding phenomena as the “Hindenburg Omen,” a particular conjunction of technical factors on the New York Stock Exchange that is said to augur a major crash. The failure of technical analysis to adequately demonstrate its effectiveness in empirical studies, however, means that many leading economists are as dismissive of its scientific credentials as they are of those of star-gazing—often, in fact, explicitly equating the two. 2 Technical analysis techniques (not to mention the other forms of superstitious trading behavior mentioned earlier) are thus, from an academic perspective at least, consigned to the fringes of the field. As I have suggested, though, the many members of the financial community who continue to practice these unsubstantiated methods, with their mystical overtones, in fact exemplify the most basic ethos of their profession, a profession that would virtually cease to exist were even a segment of its workforce to withdraw from the mass, conspiratorial delusion—the coordinated state of suspended disbelief—which permits entities that are themselves wholly intangible to exist, nonetheless, as recognized, legitimate, and often highly prized objects. Indeed, the integrity

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of the social field as a whole is reliant on the persistence of a shared faith in the capacity of wealth to be at once insubstantial and real. The phantasmal nature of monetary wealth is at the center of Specters of Marx (1994 [1993]), Jacques Derrida’s reading of Karl Marx’s gothic landscape of ghosts, vampires, necromancers, and goblins from the perspective of the age of cybercapital. Derrida begins a key passage of the book by observing that, “Marx always described money, and more precisely the monetary sign, in the figure of appearance or simulacrum, more exactly of the ghost” (45). Traditionally, money possesses “intrinsic” value; the deposits of gold and silver that were for millennia the raw material of coins, for example, have a range of practical applications and hold apparently universal aesthetic appeal. In its transformation into money, however, a fragment of precious metal comes to be constituted less as a material object of utility than as an abstract unit of exchange. “The existence (Dasein) of money, metallic Dasein, gold or silver, produces a remainder”; this remainder is the “vision,” “hallucination,” or “apparition” of exchange-value (45, 46; emphasis in original). The coining of money is a “movement of idealization” that produces “ghosts, illusions, simulacra, appearances, or apparitions” (45).3 A further form of conjuration appears with the advent of paper money. On the one hand, the issuing of paper money constitutes a kind of sorcery through which a flimsy, insubstantial, and virtually useless object becomes effectively identical to a given quantity of precious metal: “when the State emits paper money at a fixed rate, its intervention is compared to ‘magic’ . . . that transmutes paper into gold” (45). On the other hand, however, this magical equivalence between paper money and gold exists only at the level of exchange-value, for paper (unlike gold) lacks all but the most negligible residue of use-value. Thus, it extends money’s “spectropoetic” (45) logic of idealization and abstraction: “This magic always busies itself with ghosts, it does business with them, it manipulates or busies itself, it becomes a business, the business it does in the very element of haunting” (45–46; emphasis in original). As Mark C. Taylor—building on Derrida’s discussion—argues, the monetary system and the wider global economy have, since Marx’s time, grown ever more “spectral” (Taylor ch. 5). Increasingly, money has no material instantiation at all, existing, instead, as mere electronic pulses; nor, since the closure of the “gold window” in the early 1970s, does money any longer possess an ultimate material grounding in its potential convertibility into precious metal. More broadly, the markets in other intangible assets— stocks, corporate and government bonds, etc.—have massively expanded, in the process spawning secondary, “derivative” markets (for such instruments as futures, options, and swaps) whose disconnection from embodiments of use-value is all the greater. Summarizing Marx’s attitude toward ghosts, Derrida writes, he does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else. He believes rather in what is supposed to distinguish them from actual

Phantasmagoric Finance 187 reality, living effectivity. He believes he can oppose them, like life to death, like vain appearances of the simulacrum to real presence. He believes enough in the dividing line of this opposition to want to denounce, chase away, or exorcise the specters. (46–47) Contemporary finance capital shares Marx’s preoccupation with ghosts; unlike him, however, it both wants and needs to propagate belief in them, since, for as long as it succeeds in doing so, these shades and revenants may continue to enjoy a plenitude that exceeds that of the material bodies from which they emanate. I now turn to a series of fictional narratives from the last two decades, in which the propensity of financial professionals to commune with entities that hover between the real and the phantasmal is treated in literally supernatural terms. These texts serve the valuable function of casting into sharp relief a mode of thought that is integral to the world of finance, but rarely acknowledged by those who speak on behalf of it.

FINANCIAL FICTIONS/FINANCIAL PHANTOMS The specifically spectral imagery that preoccupies Derrida in his reading of Marx is dramatized particularly clearly by the 1990 movie Ghost. Early in the film, Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze), a Wall Street banker, is killed in a mugging arranged, it later transpires, by a co-worker whose money-laundering scheme Sam is on the verge of uncovering. “Murdered for money,” as Mandy Merck puts it, “Sam becomes what money is—‘a transient apparition’ [Marx 129], a ghost” (33). Like “the ghostly millions that appear and disappear from [his] computer screen” (Merck 35), Sam’s phantom form is unconstrained by physical barriers, passing effortlessly through solid objects as he roams the streets of New York. At the same time, however, he becomes a skilled poltergeist, capable of manipulating objects at will, just as the insubstantiality of contemporary fi nance capital in no way limits its capacity to shape the “real economy” of labor and consumption. Money plays a crucial role in one of the pivotal scenes of the film, when Sam is able to persuade his grieving girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore) of his ghostly presence by levitating a one cent piece. Merck observes that, “the image of the coin seemingly rising under its own power . . . conforms to the uniquely spectral status that Marx ascribed to the movement of money” (33). I would argue, conversely, that Sam’s attempt to make his fl ickering existence palpable via a monetary object that, while haunted by the specter of exchange-value, also stands as an (albeit minimal) embodiment of real, intrinsic value suggests a nostalgia for grounded presence that is the fate of the revenant and the administrator of digitized, inconvertible money alike. The spectral protagonist of Ghost has a recent counterpart in Patrick McGrath’s “Ground Zero,” one of three gothic tales of New York through the ages published in 2005 under the title Ghost Town. In McGrath’s story,

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a woman is haunted by the spirit of her dead lover, a worker on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, who perished in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. It is, as the psychiatrist narrator of the story remarks, a “sad irony” that the dead man should have “traded in futures” (218), given the gruesome and unforeseeable fate that erases his own future; but the narrative’s spectropoetic transmogrification of the man into an eerie hologram of his former self (“he’s not real, but I’m seeing him” [202], his former lover says) is, much like Sam’s passage to the other side in Ghost, wholly consistent with a career spent exchanging contracts assigning ownership not of any thing, tangible or otherwise, but of the obligation to buy or sell such a thing (stock, bond, currency, commodity, etc.) at a given price at some point in the future—a form of exchange that, in Mark C. Taylor’s words, “becomes increasingly spectral until it is virtually nothing but the play of floating signifiers endlessly recycling in recursive loops that are unmoored from what once was called the ‘real’ economy” (180). Ghost and “Ground Zero” (like other texts discussed later) portray New York, and in particular the downtown fi nancial district, as a distinctly gothic location. A similar impression often surrounds the traditional center of British banking and commerce, the City of London, where soaring glass towers jostle the huddled forms of medieval priories and ancient druidic or Roman relics distinguish the otherwise anonymous facades of commercial buildings, the boundaries of the “square mile” all the time guarded by the forbidding sculpted shapes of dragons and griffi ns (Figures 11.2–11.5).

Figure 11.2 St Helen’s Bishopsgate (founded 1210) with 30 St Mary Axe (a.k.a. “the Swiss Re Building”; “the Gherkin”) (completed 2003) in the background. Photograph courtesy of Stuart Leeds.

Phantasmagoric Finance 189

Figure 11.3 Location of “London Stone,” Cannon Street (2005). Photograph by Fin Fahey, Cc-by-sa-2.0.

These traces of the archaic and intimations of the mystical and mythic within the fabric of the City appear ostensibly at odds with the gleaming, futuristic domains of high fi nance, particularly as they have existed in London since the so-called “Big Bang” of October 1986, a set of deregulatory measures introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government that allowed UK retail banks to set up investment banking operations, permitted foreign ownership of UK brokers, and, perhaps most significantly, marked a decisive shift toward the use of electronic, screen-based trading systems. In fact, however, the gothic presences dotted throughout the Square Mile resonate powerfully with the hermetic environments of the offices and dealing rooms, spaces of arcane ritual, fl icker-lit by streams of electronic market data. Indeed, such a convergence is, for Judith Halberstam, inscribed into the very “logic of capitalism,” which “rationalizes even the most supernatural of images into material images of capitalism itself,” forming a “Gothic economy” (102).

190 Paul Crosthwaite

Figure 11.4 London Stone. Photograph by Joe McGowan, Cc-by-2.0.

This logic fi nds expression, for example, in the novelist and historian Peter Ackroyd’s visionary London: The Biography (2000), where the “devotees of fi nance,” continuing “night and day” with their “electronic activities” and “dealings and transactions” behind “light-sensitive blinds and prismatic blue-green glass,” are said to be weirdly favored by “all the gods and griffi ns of the city,” whose invaluable “protection” they enjoy (766). It is also an element of Nicola Monaghan’s narrative of London in the late 1990s, Starfi shing (2008), in which the protagonist’s professed ability to “hear the dead whisper . . . in the City on certain nights” (167) is of a piece with the powers of intuition that she displays on the floor of the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange, the ironically named LIFFE (“life”). Following the Big Bang of 1986, another major milestone in the fi nancial history of London came in 1988 when construction began on a development designed to transform the dilapidated docklands area in the East End, the Isle of Dogs, into a new business district for the capital’s rapidly expanding fi nancial services industry, a district now known as Canary Wharf. In contrast to the City, Canary Wharf appears, on the face of it, to have erased every trace of the archaic, in favor of a blank, sterile modernity (if not postmodernity). The docklands development is not without its arcane associations, however. According to experts in

Phantasmagoric Finance 191

Figure 11.5

Temple Bar Monument. Photograph by Jon Worth, Cc-by-sa-2.0.

192 Paul Crosthwaite these matters, Canary Wharf is propitiously situated at the intersection of powerful ley lines (Pile 68), while the iconic tower at 1 Canada Square (Figure 11.6), home to numerous international banks and other fi nancial institutions, was, as Peter Ackroyd has noted, explicitly modeled by its architect Cesar Pelli on the energy-channeling form of the Egyptian obelisk (Ackroyd, “Canary” par. 3). The novelist Iain Sinclair draws heavily on such associations in “The Isle of Doges [sic] (Vat City plc),” one of the twelve loosely connected tales that make up his fantastical re-imagining of the late-twentiethcentury metropolis, Downriver (1991). In this piece, an exploration of the “new geography” of London dictated by “the occult logic of market forces” (265), Sinclair and a group of companions gain access to the pyramid at the summit of “Magnum Tower”—“London’s tallest man-made structure: . . . the nearest point to the hand of God” (278)—which, in the text’s alternate reality, is the site of black masses conducted by the Vatican. In a scene that both gestures toward the cosmological origins of the expression “the Big Bang” (Sinclair 283) and, as Roger Luckhurst notes, “literalizes the voodoo economics at work in the City” (Luckhurst 538), an incantatory lecture by the physicist Stephen Hawking and a grisly ceremony presided over by the Haitian spirit Baron Samedi combine to “halt time, wound its membrane, and give [the tower’s occupants] access to unimagined powers” (283). The unearthly forces conjured up by this ritual spiral out of control, however, laying waste to the very sphere of

Figure 11.6 Canary Wharf (1 Canada Square to left of center). Photograph by Dewet, Cc-by-sa-2.0.

Phantasmagoric Finance 193 luminous, electronic exchange over which its instigators had hoped to gain mastery: The red wind was angry. An irreversible prediction. The deck of limey birdsnot screens warned of falling markets, collapse, disaster; and the markets obeyed this failsafe logic. Sell, sell, sell! The wind screamed out of a tumbling fiscal vortex. Unload wheat. Get out of coffee. Dump rubber. Shaft property. Hailstorms of alphabet glitch. The spook tornado swept up everything in the world that was not chained to the ground. (292) In Sinclair’s phantasmagoric vision, an occult philosophy of fi nance, with its zealous faith in the accuracy of its own cryptic insights, has the potential to severely unbalance the markets. Across the Atlantic, the 1980s also saw significant fi nancial deregulation and the development of a range of new fi nancial instruments, fuelling a frenzied boom in market activity that led to the Black Monday crash of October 1987 and the savings and loan crisis of the late ’80s and early ’90s. The psychic derangements engendered by the rhythms of this febrile environment are hyperbolically evoked by Brett Easton Ellis’ notorious portrayal of the serial-killing investment banker Patrick Bateman, whose family is said to own “half of Wall Street.” While Bateman’s crimes are grindingly, relentlessly secular, however, the narrative of American Psycho (1991) yields fleeting glimpses of a lurid netherworld that unites fi nancial avarice, extreme violence, and sacred ritual. In conversation with a private investigator, for example, Bateman is asked whether a colleague whom he has in fact murdered “was . . . involved at all . . . in, say, occultism or Satan worship.” The detective explains that “in New Jersey last month . . . a young stockbroker was . . . arrested and charged with murdering a young Chicano girl and performing voodoo rituals with . . . various body parts’. He adds: “Even though the guy says he’s innocent he still thinks he’s Inca, the bird god, or something” (275). Intimations of zoanthropy and diabolical rites also attend the depiction of New York’s fi nancial world in David DeCoteau’s low-budget horror movie Wolves of Wall Street (2002). Here, an innocent from the Midwest arrives in the big city with hopes of making it as a broker and miraculously lands a job at Wolfe Brothers, Wall Street’s premiere brokerage. The depiction of Wolfe Brothers again conforms to Halberstam’s notion of a “Gothic economy”: here, the stock material of horror cinema functions to emphasize both the recondite character of contemporary financial capitalism and its remorseless competitiveness, its endless “jostling” in Fredric Jameson’s words, “for more intense profitability” (143). The embodiment of an older, aristocratic—even feudal—order, Wolfe Brothers’ premises are ornamented in gothic splendor and house stockbrokers who dispense wisdom to their clients by candlelight from ornately crafted, throne-like armchairs. This

194 Paul Crosthwaite impression of the presence of the residual within the dominant, to use Raymond Williams’ terms (Marxism part 2, ch. 8), is heightened by recurrent shots of Trinity Church, a gothic anomaly amid the clean neoclassical lines and glass facades of contemporary Wall Street. Like technical analysts who dabble in astrology, the brokers at Wolfe Brothers attribute their unerring ability to read the markets to their attunement to the lunar cycle, though this is, of course, because they are (it is strongly suggested) werewolves (budgetary constraints presumably ruled out the visual confi rmation that would have been provided by the customary metamorphosis scene). Initiation into the brotherhood equips the hero with the ruthlessness to succeed in the professional arena (as well as a new liking for red meat), but, faced with the prospect of losing his humanity completely, he is compelled to slay the alpha male, a task for which the sterling silver fountain pen beloved of executives everywhere proves unexpectedly serviceable. The gothic ambience that Trinity Church lends to Manhattan’s fi nancial district is also utilized to significant effect in Jon Turteltaub’s 2004 action adventure National Treasure. The film opens in Washington, DC in 1974 with an elderly man (Christopher Plummer) telling his young grandson, Ben Gates, of how, in the 1830s, one of their ancestors was entrusted with a clue to the location of “a treasure beyond all imagining, a treasure that had been fought over for centuries by tyrants, pharaohs, emperors, warlords.” The treasure was smuggled from Europe by the Knights Templar, later to become the Freemasons, and eventually hidden somewhere in the US. To prevent it falling “into the hands of the British” during the American Revolution, the likes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Paul Revere “devised a series of clues and maps to its location.” Displaying a one dollar bill with its image of the Great Seal of the US, Grandpa explains that “the Freemasons among our Founding Fathers left us clues. Like these. The unfi nished pyramid. The all-seeing eye. Symbols of the Knights Templar, guardians of the treasure.” In the present day, the grown-up grandson, played by Nicolas Cage, follows clues inscribed on the hundred dollar bill and other artifacts, which eventually lead him to the treasure, concealed in a crypt “about five stories” beneath street level, “right under Trinity graveyard.” Burrow around 600 feet north east from this Aladdin’s cave, and, 80 feet beneath Liberty Street, one would hit the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the repository (in early 2008) of about 22 per cent of the world’s official monetary gold reserves (Federal 6), and the location that, until the demise of the Bretton Woods system of fi xed exchange rates and convertible currency in the early 1970s (the period of the film’s opening scene, as Eric Lott notes [120]), played the greatest single role in guaranteeing the value of paper money like the bills scrutinized by Ben and his grandfather. Lott suggests that the loot uncovered by Ben is “something like the source of all value—in a word, a gold standard,” “a less unpredictable standard of value than the floating dollar, that cryptic fetish with which the movie opens” (120). Derrida suggests that, for Marx, “in periods

Phantasmagoric Finance 195 of social crisis” (the American Revolution would be a prime example), “the speculative burying of . . . treasure inters only a useless metal, deprived of its monetary soul (Geldseele). . . . In Marx’s funerary rhetoric, the ‘useless metal’ of the treasure once buried becomes like the burnt-out ashes (ausgebrannte Asche) of circulation” (Specters 46). In National Treasure, while the horde lies interred beneath the graves of Trinity Churchyard (like its Federally administered counterpart a few blocks away), the “monetary soul”—that is, exchange-value—glides freely in flurries of dollar bills and the transmigration of electronic money through the ether. Defying the skepticism of his peers to trace a trail of clues that leads from the cryptic designs of paper money to the glittering bounty buried in a consecrated patch of lower Manhattan, Ben’s quest (in accordance with the ethos of fi nance capital itself) valorizes unyielding faith in the veracity of monetary signs and their capacity to refer back to some ultimate repository of value, no matter how fanciful or arcane that connection may appear. The world of Wall Street converges with another branch of occult lore in Darren Aronofksy’s 1998 science fiction film π (“Pi”). The plot of π bears a remarkable resemblance to the real-life exploits of the technical analystcum-numerologist Martin Armstrong, a resemblance that Armstrong takes to be intentional (though the fi lm was released before he revealed the basis of his model), but which Aronofsky dismisses as mere coincidence (Paumgarten 73). Like Armstrong, Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), the protagonist of π, attempts to use the mystical number of the title to predict the movements of the stock market (for good measure, Max also utilizes the Fibonacci number sequence popularized as a means of technical analysis by Ralph Nelson Elliott). In his explorations of the power of pi, Max remains convinced that there is “a pattern, an ordered shape” behind “the endless numbers” that, in their “maddening complexity,” extend “off into infi nity.” Likewise, he believes that “within the stock market” there also exists “a pattern . . . hiding behind the numbers.” During a visit to the apartment of his mentor and former Columbia University Professor, Sol, Max is chastised in terms similar to those frequently leveled at Armstrong: “as soon as you discard scientific rigor, you are no longer a mathematician, you’re a numerologist.” Max, however, realizes the hope of every financial analyst who has dabbled in the arcane outer-reaches of the profession: his numerological system works, correctly predicting a major downturn in the stock market. More than this, however, a plot strand involving another esoteric tradition—the Jewish Kabbalah—persuades Max that a number printed by his market-analyzing supercomputer, Euclid, is nothing less than the secret 216-letter name of God intoned annually by the high priests in the holy of holies on the Temple Mount before the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD. Having internalized this number, Max is himself endowed with miraculous predictive abilities, becoming capable of foreseeing stock prices before they appear on the ticker, and cognizant that a full-scale global crash is imminent. Once again, mastery of the markets is

196 Paul Crosthwaite shown to be inextricable from mysticism, devotion, and an acute receptivity to the numinous. At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that the predisposition of financial professionals toward superstitious modes of thought assumed a new intensity during the global financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007. This dimension of the crisis has been registered in several narrative texts. In the BBC drama The Last Days of Lehman Brothers (2009), for example, the light, comic tone that characterizes the piece as a whole is abruptly and eerily interrupted part way through when, during a late-night crisis meeting about the future of the ailing bank, a colleague of Chairman and CEO Dick Fuld remarks, over a panoramic shot of the New York skyline, that “it’s like something from the Book of Revelations,” to which Fuld (Corey Johnson) responds by intoning somberly: “And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.” Fuld’s Personal Assistant immediately contributes the subsequent verse: “For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies” (King James Bible, Rev. 18.2,3). Later, in a scene at the New York Federal Reserve Bank, another senior Lehman employee, eavesdropping on a meeting about a possible rescue package for the bank between Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (James Cromwell) and Bob Diamond, President of Barclays, imagines that he has overheard the word “Nebuchadnezzar”; strangely, he insists that this apparent reference to the Babylonian ruler condemned by God to live as a wild animal for seven years as punishment for his vanity “has got to be a good thing.” These weird, discordant intrusions of the language of biblical ruin and divine retribution into a narrative played primarily as farce convey a sense of the apocalyptic intimations in the air as Lehman Brothers collapsed, and their appeal to individuals at the mercy of titanic financial forces they could not control or understand. A very similar atmosphere is captured in a short film written and directed by the London-based Canadian conceptual artist Melanie Gilligan. Crisis in the Credit System was conceived in early 2008—though Gilligan says that “the possibility of a financial crisis [had] been an important topic for me for years” (qtd. in Johnston par. 4)—and made available online at the peak of the credit crunch in the autumn of that year. The film features five employees of a large investment bank who have gathered at a country retreat to develop innovative responses to the mounting global crisis through brainstorming sessions and improvisational role-play. Much more than satirical swipes at the corporate culture of team-building exercises and blue-skies thinking, however, the scenarios enacted by the five colleagues rapidly descend into strange, uncanny terrain, hinting at an unconscious underside of the financial profession structured by atavistic attachments to mysticism, sooth-saying, and prophecy. In their role-plays, they conjure up a mythic world inhabited by

Phantasmagoric Finance 197 financial companies named Babel, Apollo, Excalibur, and Delphi—the latter, in another convergence of fact and fiction, the name of the investment group founded by “America’s Prophet” Sean David Morton. The first session requires a participant to respond with “something unexpected” to a colleague’s concerns about post-crunch job losses. The response he offers amounts to nothing less than an alternate, occult history of finance, in which the greatest crisis of them all, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, was due not to excessive speculation on margin, but to the whims of Lady Luck, a clairvoyant prostitute, who, on the eve of the Crash, announced that she had syphilis, spreading mass panic and despair among the hordes of brokers who had visited her in the hope of improving their fortunes. Another member of the group imagines that he is employed at Delphi Capital as a modern-day oracle, who is “so networked into the system,” “so highly connected to the whole of the market,” that he is able to channel indicators of future market movements, reciting streams of code—like the eerie numerical messages secretly broadcast on obscure radio frequencies—which are deciphered by the company’s dedicated team of cryptographers. Amid the extreme volatility generated by the crunch, however, he begins to pick up signals from “something out there,” some phantasm hovering at the furthest limits of the spectrum. Thus, as he speaks, the strings of digits, acronyms, and decimal points that encode the future patterns of the markets give way to ominous, gnomic fragments—voices from the ether— which seem to augur a cataclysm in which the most vulnerable will bear the consequences of the financial world’s deification of the market: “When the staff of life is a wriggling digit, when necessities are only ours through the market, when all is falling except those at the top, the richest will find the weakest most valuable.” As I have suggested in this chapter, it is not uncommon for workers in the fi nancial services industry to imagine that, like the Delphic oracle brought to life by one of the protagonists of Gilligan’s film, they exist in a state of mystical sympathy with the market. Crisis in the Credit System and the other narrative texts I have discussed, however, do not merely highlight the prevalence of superstition and magical thinking in the fi nancial profession, but also draw attention to the fact that fi nance capital as an entire mode of accumulation is predicated on reverence for the insubstantial, the ineffable, and the phantasmatic. The supernatural dramas offered by various novelistic and filmic treatments of Wall Street and the City, and the supernatural belief systems indulged in by many fi nancial professionals, are both, in their different ways, imaginary, illusory, untrue. Precisely in so being, however, they reveal the truth of fi nance.

NOTES 1. See, for example: Bennett; Comaroff and Comaroff; Dube, ed.; Meyer and Pels, eds; and Pile. For an overview of these debates, see Saler.

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2. Richard Quandt, for example, remarks that, “technical analysis is akin to astrology and every bit as scientific” (qtd. in Malkiel 151), while, for Eugene F. Fama, similarly, “chartist theories are akin to astrology and of no real value to the investor” (57). 3. In fact, Derrida will later insist that there is no originary “ghostly moment” at which exchange-value comes into being, for it is always already a potentiality inherent to any object whatsoever (159–61).

WORKS CITED Ackroyd, Peter. “Canary Wharf Pier.” Royal Institute of British Architects London Dark Waters exhibition web site. 2008. Web. 29 May 2010. . London: The Biography. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000. Print. Allen, Peter. “French Trader Jérôme Kerviel Used Clairvoyants to Predict Future.” Telegraph [London] 15 Feb. 2009. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Armstrong, Martin. “It’s Just Time: The Decline & Fall of the United States? The Global Financial System? Or Capitalism?” Self-published, 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print. Blumenfeld, Laura. “Voodoo Economics.” Washington Post Magazine 7 December 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Caputo, John D., ed. and commentary. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham UP, 1997. Print. Carnes, Tony. “In Crisis, Wall Street Turns to Prayer.” Christianity Today 19 Sept. 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12.2 (2000): 291–343. Print. Crisis in the Credit System. Dir. Melanie Gilligan. 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. de Bertodano, Helena. “Meet Laura Day: The Financial Psychic of Wall Street Who Predicted Global Meltdown.” Telegraph [London] 7 Nov. 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. de la Merced, Michael J. “For Psychic, Suit Came as Surprise.” New York Times 4 Mar. 2010. Web. 29 May 2010. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Dube, Saurabh, ed. Enduring Enchantments. Spec. issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002): 729–1044. Print. Elliott, Ralph Nelson. Nature’s Law: The Secret of the Universe. Privately published, 1946. Print. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991. Print. Fama, Eugene F. “Random Walks in Stock Market Prices.” Financial Analysts Journal 21.5 (1965): 55–59. Print. Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Key to the Gold Vault. 2008. Web. 31 May 2010. Ghost. Dir. Jerry Zucker. Paramount, 1990. DVD. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1997): 246–65. Print. Johnston, Sheila. “Making a Drama Out of a Credit Crisis.” Independent [London] 2 Oct. 2008. Web. 31 May 2010.

Phantasmagoric Finance 199 Keynes, John M. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936. Print. King James Bible with Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Klein, Maury. Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Krause-Jackson, Flavia and Lorenzo Totaro. “Pope Had ‘Prophecy’ of Market Collapse in 1985, Tremonti Says.” Bloomberg. 20 Nov. 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. The Last Days of Lehman Brothers. Dir. Michael Samuels. BBC. 9 Sept. 2009. Television. Leach, Ben. “City Workers Turn to Psychics for Advice.” Telegraph [London] 17 Jan. 2009. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Lo, Andrew W. and Jasmina Hasanhodzic. The Heretics of Finance: Conversations with Leading Practitioners of Technical Analysis. New York: Bloomberg, 2009. Print. Lott, Eric. “National Treasure, Global Value, and American Literary Studies.” American Literary History. 20.1–2 (2008): 108–23. Print. Lucey, Brian M. “Friday the 13th and the Philosophical Basis of Financial Economics.” Journal of Economics and Finance 24.3 (2000): 294–301. Print. Luckhurst, Roger. “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn.’” Textual Practice 16.3 (2002): 527–46. Print. Maiden, Samantha. “Global Financial Crisis an Act of God, Says Labor MP Bidgood.” Australian 4 Dec. 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Malkiel, Burton G. A Random Walk Down Wall Street. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Print. Martin, Douglas. “Money and Metaphysics: New-Age Wall Street.” New York Times 30 Jan. 1994. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974. Print. Mason, Paul. Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed. London: Verso, 2009. Print. Mayer, Catherine. “An Anxious London Flocks to Psychics.” Time 2 May 2009. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. McGrath, Patrick. “Ground Zero.” Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now. 2005. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. 175–243. Print. Merck, Mandy, “The Medium of Exchange.” In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies. New York: New York UP, 2000. 21–37. Print. Meyer, Birgit and Peter Pels, eds. Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Print. Monaghan, Nicola. Starfi shing. 2008. London: Vintage, 2009. Print. National Treasure. Dir. Jon Turteltaub. Walt Disney. 2004. DVD. Overdahl, Jim. “Why Do Traders Wear Trading Jackets?” Futures 1 Oct. 2005. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Paumgarten, Nick. “The Secret Cycle.” New Yorker 12 Oct. 2009: 66–74, 79. Print. Penman, Danny. “City Looks to the Heavens for Answers.” Telegraph [London] 19 Mar. 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. π (“Pi”). Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Artisan. 1998. DVD. Pile, Steve. Real Cities: Modernity, Space, and the Phantasmagorias of City Life. London: Sage, 2005. Print. Pinkus, Karen. “Nothing from Nothing: Alchemy and the Economic Crisis.” World Picture 2 (2008): 1–5. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Poitras, Geoffrey. The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478–1776: From Commercial Arithmetic to Life Annuities and Joint Stocks. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2000. Print. Saler, Michael. “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review.” American Historical Review 111.3 (2006): 692–716. Print.

200 Paul Crosthwaite Sinclair, Iain. Downriver (Or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales. 1991. London: Paladin, 1992. Print. Taylor, Mark C. Confi dence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print. Whitfield, Paul. “Superstition Stalks the Market.” BBC News. 25 Oct. 2001. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print. Wills, Kerry, Rebecca Rosenberg, and Tim Perone. “Praying for Almighty $$.” New York Post 10 Oct. 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2010. Wolves of Wall Street. Dir. David DeCoteau. Regent Worldwide. 2002. DVD. Zaloom, Caitlin. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print.

12 The Green Afterword Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Ecological Uncanny Rebecca Giggs Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense—the creative act. –Kenneth Rexroth, “Disengagement” (1957)

In the many dark gardens of apocalyptic imagination, vestiges of built environment from the present day appear with ominous punctuality. National monuments softened under sea algae, great churches where Kalahari predators cruise the variegated light, iconic road bridges freighted with snow. Just as designers of picturesque landscapes sought to preserve memento mori in the margins of their grounds—a dead tree, a crumbling wall—so too do the authors of apocalypse typically embed recognizable elements of hardscape, derelict or devastated, into their cataclysmic visions. So J.G. Ballard sank the Statue of Liberty in Hello America (1981) and Charlton Heston raged before her barbed crown engulfed by dunes in Planet of the Apes (1968), before the same statue was bombed in Children of Men (2006), beheaded in Cloverfield (2008), frozen into pack ice in The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and fi nally rendered a diminutive, referent-less souvenir in Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey (2009). That apotheosis of end-style: the torch of enlightenment dulls, cracks, falls. Enfeebled, the left-behind are impuissant against the dismantling of symbols—symbols that in any event, have long been divested of their semaphoric capacity. This is the way the world ends. The second law of thermodynamics settles into ideas of things as much as into the physical things themselves, and entropy begins its slow rasp on the tethers between the signifier and the signified. Ravel and unravel, those endless, synonymous days. If I start here, in reference to the trope of the garden, it is a decision with its inception in the fact that I was in a garden when I fi rst read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road (2006). Seated at a table outside, I worked through the book over a series of evenings in a blazing Australian summer. This essay is informed by the experience of reading nature’s fictive collapse from a place where nature appears cultivated and vigorous.

202 Rebecca Giggs The Road explores a distinctly ecological eschatology, leading it to be proclaimed “the fi rst great masterpiece of the globally-warmed generation” by Andrew O’Hagan. In 2008, the novel compelled The Guardian newspaper to include McCarthy in their “50 People Who Could Save The Planet” list, the only writer alongside activists, politicians, engineers, and scientists. Nominating McCarthy for The Road, George Monbiot wrote, “it could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem.” Stephen Lansing, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and the Santa Fe Institute (where McCarthy is a research fellow) makes a connection between the fallacy of “external nature,” “nature as the stage on which the human drama unfolds,” and the novel’s exposition of interdependent ecology. Lansing asks, “what if there was a near-complete breakdown of the complex networks joining humans with one another and with other species? It’s a question that stirs and troubles our sense of who we are.” The Road, then, has been acclaimed for having currency surpassing the fictional, for functioning as a kind of eco-political klaxon, warning its readers that just as nature becomes beset with new types of contingency, so too are human capacities for generating community, security, and empathy correspondingly curtailed. Yet, despite the novel’s weighty environmental credentials, neither the word “green” nor the color it denotes ever appear within its pages. McCarthy fi nds no environmental force beyond the human that might retain the theistic authority to purge or purify the world. Creepers do not overrun the rubble, wild animals do not den in disused public buildings. The Road repudiates the circuits of dread and pleasure, the reader’s schadenfreude, that arise in witnessing nature excoriate the rot of mankind’s influence. In doing so, the novel rejects a key tenet of apocalypse’s teleology: that tribulation prefigures the sweeping renewal of the Earth and the coming of Millennium. In The Road, nature fails to equilibrate after humanity’s end. The world is not reclaimed by plants and creatures. All boundaries between the natural and the non-natural have disintegrated in The Road, a collapse either initiated by climatic feedback loops, or alternately by the subsuming of the anthropogenic into a non-regenerative ecology as the result of a global disaster. The environmental aftermath is distinctly “post-natural,” a world in which the natural and humanity’s industrial trace are fused. Entropy is the incorrect mode to apply, for it is atrophy that has sunk into the substrate of the novel, a degeneration triggered and amplified by the appetites of the Anthropocene age. The Road integrates nature’s derangement with the fragmentation of the social and the psychological. The breakdown of ecological homeostasis in the book is matched by the characters’ inability to calibrate to the end of nature. People fi nd themselves dislocated in The Road, unable to orientate themselves to their surroundings or to the past, in a terrain stripped of nature’s logic. As Lansing and Monbiot point out, McCarthy’s novel

The Green Afterword 203 is more than a jeremiad for the death of the environment or an exploration of the attendant resource stresses such a death must result in. The book bespeaks the end of an ecology of meaning. Surrounded by convulsing geographies of the physical, the psychological, and the representational, The Road asks how we know ourselves through our environments, and to what extent that knowledge is impaired when nature is irrevocably bonded to the anthropogenic. As Fredric Jameson has written of ontology in the time of the post-natural: We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling . . . which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat. . . . The world of the human age is an aesthetic pretext for grinding terror or pathological ecstasy, and in its cosmos, all of it drawn from the fibers of our own being and at one with every post-natural cell more alien to us than nature itself, we continue murmuring Kant’s old questions—What can I know? . . . What should I do in this world completely invented by me? What can I hope for alone in an altogether human age? (608; emphases in original). Unlike speculative literature in the trans-humanist and cyberpunk genres, The Road is not primarily concerned with challenging skepticisms about categories of the natural and the artificial in the “altogether human age.” Antiphonal to Jameson, the book assumes a world where nature and the human are rendered less, not more knowable by the erasure of the border between them. What capacity for hope will be retained, when “every post-natural cell” of ourselves is more “alien to us than nature itself”? In the world entirely of our making, The Road proposes that we will experience ourselves as foreign bodies—forever out of place, but unable to be extracted from the field. This chapter is framed as an exploration of the ecological uncanny in The Road, but from the outset a third concept has interceded in the dialogue between book and theory: the garden. When Bill McKibben presciently articulated the post-natural in The End of Nature (1989)—nature’s perceived separation from the anthropogenic world having been disrupted by atmospheric pollutants and planetary climate change—he surmised that “we have built a greenhouse, a human creation, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden” (78). It is my contention that The Road marks a departure from the greenhouse as the appropriate metaphor for modern ecological threat, prompting a renegotiation of the unsheltered space of the garden. In the stultifying atmosphere of the greenhouse, the gardener retains his numinous facility—selecting for better adaptations, mollifying the extremities of behavior, striving for gemütlichkeit in a closed system. The greenhouse remains an inside that is outside; by extension, a homely place. In The Road, any modality of environmental control is rendered

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defunct. McCarthy debouches his characters, bloodied and disorientated, into a garden of their unconscious design that is by now neither “sweet” nor able to renew itself to a condition of “wild,” uncultivated nature. In an environment where the familiarity of the world is undermined by its transfusion with the human, where nature resists both wildness and domestication in favor of the ecological uncanny, McCarthy asks the impossible of his characters: find the way home. Appropriately, given the tools of ecology, this chapter pursues a web of connections between the conceptual framework of the ecological uncanny, the symbolism of the garden, and the narrative setting of The Road. Having established a defi nition of the ecological uncanny in relation to the postnatural, I undertake a more detailed consideration of The Road’s environment, proposing that McCarthy enacts disorientation on two levels. Within the milieu of the book, disorientation manifests itself in the characters’ projection of a cartographic perspective that seeks to see the world from without, and so to separate the viewer from the ecology being viewed. For the reader, the omission or misplacement of physical elements from the present detaches the text from familiar moorings—although, characteristic of the ecological uncanny, the trace of the present returns to The Road’s environment in other, disquieting ways. These arguments are supported by close examination of three textual devices in the narrative—the sextant, the flare, and the Coca-Cola can. Finally I turn to The Road’s epilogue and the motif of the trout, to conclude that what the book in fact advances is a literature of denaturalized ecological politics—a green consciousness founded not on external nature, but on the internal dissonance of the ecological uncanny. To define the ecological uncanny, it is productive to begin by discussing the concept’s two component terms separately. In its most succinct expression, the uncanny is a psychological and aesthetic category with origins in Freudian psychoanalysis, whereby that which is familiar unexpectedly arises in an unfamiliar context, or conversely, that which is unfamiliar unexpectedly arises in a familiar context. The uncanny is a notion of the uncomfortably strange, an uneasy destabilization of the homely and the unhomely. In his formative essay “Das Unheimliche,” Sigmund Freud codifies the uncanny with respect to its derivation from das heimlich, meaning the “homely” or the “domestic,” with synchronous, if disjunctive, connotations of the “concealed,” the “secret,” and the “hidden.” Das heimlich is what David Farrell Krell calls a “special homonym,” “a primal word, an Urwort, of the Abelian sort” (51).1 Das heimlich contains countervailing charges, so that das unheimlich can’t properly be considered its negation, but is rather a variant of the base word. The homely in the uncanny is always beset with what is latent, the “secreted” thing in that word’s second meaning—ingrown, cached. Ecology shares common ground with the uncanny through the etymology of “home”: “eco-,” from the Greek οἶκος, “house” or “household.” The

The Green Afterword 205 term denotes relationships of habitation between organisms, the configuration of share-affects structured by the distribution of, and interactions among, elements in the environment. Ecology is a network founded on notions of habitat. Stepping back, ecology is fi rst a network of ideas— an apparatus assembled from metaphor that is co-opted by multiple disciplines, inclusive of the sciences. Although ecology cannot be said to have an inherently narrative form (for it prioritizes synchronic complexity over diachronic linearity), ecological discourse is undoubtedly energized by narrativity as a “cumulative directionality toward further becoming . . . speak[ing] not of fi xed and rigid realities but of movement, passage, genesis, and autonomy, of propulsive life unfolding in time” (Corner 81; emphasis in original). Ecology reveals the hidden in the homely by way of bringing into knowledge the systems of the natural—a process that ecology conventionalizes, even as it actively constructs and delimits the form of those systems. Put another way, the discursive power of ecology is to establish the unfamiliar in nature, and then translate it into the familiar by assigning it a place within a causal structure. In the “secreted age” of the post-natural however, the function of ecology undergoes an uncanny reversion. Nicholas Royle notes that the uncanny involves a confusion of liminality, a disturbance of “what is inside and what is outside” (2) and, citing Tzvetan Todorov, that it is “an experience of limits” (18). Paul Carter’s poetic cultural history of agoraphobia, Repressed Spaces, similarly draws attention to spatial concepts of the closed and the open as a priori postulates of the uncanny. Carter asks: “where the distinction between the homely and the unhomely has been rendered meaningless, how can one even think of such things?” (26). The ecological uncanny then, can be formulated as an answer to Carter’s question—a hypothesis for how it might be possible to “think of such things” when the divide between the natural (the outside, the open) and the anthropogenic (the inside, the closed) has collapsed. In the post-natural, where the environment is neither veridically manmade nor patently natural, the discourse of ecology inverts. Ecology works to delineate the familiar—the anthropogenic—in nature, and encode it as unfamiliar. To iterate: in the world entirely of our making, the ecological uncanny is the experience of ourselves as foreign bodies. The secreted, concealed thing in nature is us, and although we secreted ourselves there, the discovery makes us strange to ourselves. Paradoxically, the perception of the ecological uncanny is linked to the uncanny presence of the perceiver within the ecological realm. We are not where we are supposed to be. Everywhere the trace of the human is reflected back to us in nature. Concurrently, although the discourse of ecology identifies the familiar (if dissonant) presence of the human in the environment, the post-natural terrain becomes less familiar than nature prior to its blending with the anthropogenic. Nature’s meaning can no longer be found in nature’s otherness, its familiar independence from the non-natural. The environment

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malfunctions in the “altogether human age” and may, as in The Road, become uninhabitable because of the intervention of the human. To experience the ecological uncanny is to feel engulfed by space without place. Evidence of the human is everywhere, yet is nowhere recognizable. The environment exists in liminality, a terrain fi xed on the threshold between das unheimlich and das heimliche. As is becoming clear, the ecological uncanny has a recursive structure, so that disorientation seems to pervade it at the conceptual level as much as in its application. The loops of reasoning that assemble the ecological uncanny resist reduction to a pithy defi nition. But it is precisely this inability to uncouple the effect of the ecological uncanny from its conceptualization that enables it to activate environmental consciousness in a post-natural subject. Disorientation in the ecological uncanny not only marks the difficulty of dividing the natural from the anthropogenic, it is also symptomatic of the impossibility of extricating self from ecology. To that end, the ecological uncanny is a form of thinking from the environment, rather than simply being another way of thinking about the environment. Ultimately, it is this aspect of the ecological uncanny—the ability to speak of nature without othering it, or excising nature from the self—that The Road so successfully exploits. McCarthy shows that as the nature in which we think falters, it is not just the way that we think about nature that falters; it is also the way we think about ourselves and our connections with one another. The interdependent ecology that Lansing identifies in The Road is one in which the functioning of the internal, psychological world is a direct reflection of the external nature beyond it. Some years after the “clocks stopped at 1:17” (McCarthy 50) a nameless man and his young son stagger in a cauterized and frozen landscape, striving for the sea. Airborne ash from long-smoldering fi res obscures the sun’s light, bringing endless winter and turning the forests into upright cemeteries for trees. Within the fi rst ten pages of the book, the blood-sopped cough of the man foreshadows his impending death, intensifying the vulnerability of the boy, whose future can only consist of being abandoned in the petrifying world or being mercifully murdered by his father. The characters bivouac across a dangerous landscape, hunted by teams of road agents and “bloodcults” that practice cannibalism, sadism, and slavery, while starvation winnows all bodies toward their demise. Non-human life, weather, seasonal change, geological activity, and fundamental biological cycles are all immutably altered in The Road. Macro/ telluric systems and micro/atomic systems both undergo spasms. Fires pyrolyze the chaparral, earthquakes stutter under the continental plates, and the land shows evidence of having been consecutively flooded and charred. The sea has lost its smell and color, river water is “dead” (215), and the nights are cold enough to cut rocks. Species of grassland and shrub vegetation subsist only as hollow ash copies, papier-mâché imitations of their originals in the windless swales. Nature’s amalgamation with the human

The Green Afterword 207 in The Road has caused the environment to denature in the biochemical sense; to particularize into basic elements too simple to support life. “The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities” (93). The Earth is a corpse on which corpses walk, and even decay—with its organic capacity to vitalize new biomes—is frustrated in favor of perpetual senescence. Although nature is made strange in The Road, it is not yet unrecognizable, otherworldly, or supernatural. The air still thins as the altitude increases. Trees topple over when they die. Rain and snow continue to fall from the sky—except that when the snow comes down, it is adulterated with soot and when it rains, nothing grows. Demonstrative of the ecological uncanny, the environment in The Road is always one step off being unambiguously organic or clearly the result of inorganic intervention, resisting clarification into das heimlich or das unheimliche nature. As with all instances of the uncanny, the distance between the difference is short: it is the vague familiarity of nature in The Road that compounds the intensity of the reader’s unease. The man and his son are not seeking a specific location—refuge in a place hermetically preserved in pre-cataclysm condition—but a climate. Of all systems, the sea, that antediluvian baseline, must surely permit the possibility of a return to active nature. So the pair push a cart loaded with scavenged dross upon which their survival depends toward the edge. To the end of the land at the end of the world. The coast portends the division of the anthropogenic from the natural, the separation of the degraded landscape from the animate waterscape. When the protagonists fi nally arrive at the edge, they instead fi nd that the ocean is replete with the same types of maladies that have menaced them throughout their passage. The water is “shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag” (230). The waves “shudder” and “hiss” in an “endless seacrawl,” a futile metronome beating out the end of time. “The ribs of fishes in their millions [stretch] along the shore as far as the eye [can] see like an isocline of death” (237). The sea has become so torpid that it operates in the same descriptive register as the landscape—there is no striking cleave in the topography here. McCarthy creates an ocean that has atrophied along with the land, a slow, sea-like extension of the terrain. Nothing is divided. The edges have been fused. Even in the water, where actual human presence is minimal, evidence of anthropogenic intervention and concomitant denaturing is everywhere. The ocean provides no shelter for nature to wait out the post-collapse environment in The Road. The genius loci of the untouched, unseen place remains human. The Road’s ocean is not an evolutionary “cradle of life,” and offers no prospect of nature reverse engineering the world back up from primordial soup, to mudskipper, to mammal. The man imagines creatures living under the ocean’s photic level—“great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness. Shuttling past like trains” (234)—but fi nds the notion neither reassuring nor likely. Even animals that are native

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to the hypoxic, lightless realms will eventually become extinct, or cease to evolve, in The Road’s insipid conditions. On the desolate beach, the obliteration of the characters slides closer still. Their exposure is heightened when their pistol is mislaid and the boy falls into a fever. His father confronts the very real prospect of the child’s death in his arms, trapped in a littoral that foreshadows no spiritual resurrection and no material cycle of reabsorption into nature. They will die, McCarthy concedes, but death will be nature’s last full stop. Having failed to fi nd clemency of either the temperate or the merciful kind on the shoreline, the disorientation of the characters in The Road becomes absolute. They arrive at their geographical destination, a site that corresponds with the lines on the roadmap they have been following, but the characters remain psychologically and environmentally adrift. The coastline does not divide the post-natural from the natural—indeed the landscape and the seascape seem barely distinguishable from one another in their common degeneration. Here the man despondently conjures up his double, another father who turns to face him from a distant coast, equally displaced and incommunicative. They are “lost to the same indifferent sun” (234). Triangulated by the uncanny doppelgänger, the sun they are “lost to” signifies more than the veiling of the characters behind the new meteorology. The lost sun marks the senselessness of orientation in a world where there is no chance of fi nding a high ground on which to found a home. As ecology is made borderless by the subsuming of the anthropogenic into the natural, it becomes impossible to escape the ecological collapse. “Home” has not been redefi ned or relocated in The Road; it has become an unviable construct. McCarthy situates the last waypoints with which to calibrate the knocked-out environment of The Road beyond the Earth, in the cosmological bodies. Throughout the novel, the man attempts to fi x his location in relation to the recondite presence of the orbiting planets. Rising in the dark, he asks: “Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite” (14). In a voice that might be interpreted as the author speaking directly, or the author ventriloquizing the reader, the characters are shown from the perspective of space: “The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover” (138). Note the “intestate earth” here, another expression for the world’s liminal condition. On one level, these attempts to relativize the position of the characters in relation to objects in the astral terrain underlines the indecipherability of their immediate environment. Where the logic of nature—of biology, chemistry, and geology—is disordered, these appeals to astronomy might be seen as an effort to locate a natural order in physics. No matter what, the world keeps turning. But ultimately, cosmological nature provides no

The Green Afterword 209 psychological reprieve from the post-natural: “the bleak shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark” (193). The cycles of the universe do not infer any renewal or resolution of the world. There can be no appeal to a jurisdiction of physical laws above humankind; the dark matter is indifferent. On another level, the orientation toward astral bodies suggests a cartographic perspective, an attempt to see the ecological from a platform beyond the ecological, so as to map it. Multiple times in The Road the narrative moves to a vertical gradient where the characters look down at themselves from above, or are shown aerially from a point of view that hovers outside the voice of the man (as in “somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes,” quoted earlier). The roadmap that the characters refer to throughout their journey comes to operate as a mise en abyme device for this desire to leave the system and perceive it from without. The boy looks into the map “as if he’d see their small selves crouching there” (90–91), and the man reflects: He thought he knew what that was about. He’d poured over maps as a child, keeping one fi nger on the town where he lived. Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory. Themselves among others, everything in its place. Justified in the world. (194) From somewhere outside the Earth, it might be possible to identify patterns of interaction, and situate where—if anywhere—people are “justified” in the altered ecology. The boy asks his father whether people might have left the planet after the collapse and settled in space (261), or if crows could fly to Mars (166–167), but there is no exterior to the ecology in which the characters move. Their imaginative acts of elevation are a short-term anodyne for their disorientation. Although the characters experience themselves as foreign bodies in the system, they cannot be excised from it. In the recursive logic of the ecological uncanny, they are alienated in the environment because of the commingling of the anthropogenic and the natural, but the environment cannot extract them—cannot equilibrate—for that very same reason. The denaturing backdrop is all-pervasive and in its disintegration, it becomes impossible to separate the human trace either psychologically or physically. In the words of John Muir, “when we try to pick out any thing by itself, we fi nd it hitched to everything else in the universe” (245). The discovery of the sextant on the scuttled boat, the Pájaro de Esperanza (“Bird of Hope”—McCarthy’s irony is razor sharp), encapsulates the failure of the cartographic perspective in the post-natural environment. Here, on the last island of human hardscape, amid the turgid ocean, McCarthy offers up a cartographic instrument—a tool capable of defi ning the exact latitude and longitude of the characters vis-à-vis the celestial bodies that exert their gravitational pull on the text—only to have it abandoned

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by the man. The sextant “was the fi rst thing he had seen in a long time that had stirred him” (243). More than being a cartographic object, the sextant is a navigational instrument—a means of charting a forward course. The inscription on its plate reads “Hezzaninth, London,” proper nouns in a narrative where they are critically endangered, and the only reference to a city known in our present. But in resignation, the man returns the sextant to its baize case and goes back to the beach—relinquishing further attempts at orientation or fi nding “home.” The act of abandoning the sextant represents the impossibility of any bearing linked to the former world in the post-natural setting of The Road, the meaningless of “London” as a signifier when London, as referent, has melded into everywhere else. There is nowhere left to go, and yet the protagonists are condemned to endless wandering. McCarthy compounds the impossibility of orientation when the man retrieves the flare from the boat in preference to the sextant. Although both objects are devices of location, the flare differs in that it is not a means of knowing one’s own position, but of conveying it to others. The flare is a distress signal that only “works” in the presence of a benevolent community of rescuers indebted to civil society, a way of communicating “here I am, find me.” After the characters fi re off a cylinder on the beach for the boy’s entertainment, the vertical gradient is again recalled: They couldnt [sic] see it very far, could they, Papa? Who? Anybody. No. Not far. If you wanted to show where you were. You mean like to the good guys? Yes. Or anybody that you wanted to know where you were. Like who? I dont [sic] know. Like God? Yeah. Maybe somebody like that. (263)

The flare is a means of signaling over the terrain, of rising higher than the system so as to geometrically section it and determine the lost person’s location. But in The Road the flare’s most potent symbolism is in its redefi nition as a weapon (282)—a tool of violence rather than collaborative citizenry or orientation. After he is shot in the back streets of a railroad town with an arrow, the man injures his attacker, perhaps fatally, by fi ring the flare through the window of a house. Having discarded the sextant and accepted a permanent state of itinerancy, the flare has no use-value in its conventional sense. To what safe territory would the characters be restored in a rescue operation, what community remains intact to carry out such an operation, or safeguard the territory? With no hope of fi nding shelter, the

The Green Afterword 211 flare’s missive has transposed to “do not see me.” In disorienting environments of the ecological uncanny, the cartographic signal has become a way of dividing people rather than of bringing them together. When the boy alludes to “somebody like that” in contemplating who the characters might signal to with the flare, he might equally be referring to the reader, who hovers above the page parallax to the God that has disintegrated in the world of The Road. “Do you think your fathers are watching?” McCarthy asks, “That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what?” (209). Like the characters, the reader too is disoriented by the inversions of the ecological uncanny that are displayed in the book’s environment. In the post-natural terrain, the interference with natural processes obscures both the location of the narrative spatially and its temporal placement. The Road’s environment proffers conflicting indicators of time and setting—stretching and distorting the string between the reader’s world and the book. Although the reader interprets The Road’s environment from “outside”—reading from a time where nature retains the capacity to be fecund, diverse, and sensorial—the struggle to orientate the setting of the novel implicates the reader into the broader ecological pretext of McCarthy’s cataclysm. The Road’s collapse touches everywhere and telescopes through every scale, so that it is impossible for the reader to say: “this story takes place somewhere else,” “this story is set a long time from now.” The inability to interpret the novel’s geographical setting or sequester it to a distinct temporal period forms a further loop of cognitive dissonance derived from the ecological uncanny. Logically, the reader’s present should be sometime before the book— consistent with the intent of apocalyptic writing as a narrative meant to simulate the world’s end, so as to forestall it—but the environment’s unwinding in The Road also disturbs the cohesive flow of time. The teleology of ruin, those natural processes of decay, oxidization and erosion, malfunction and unearth anomalous artifacts. Returning momentarily to the sextant: after the reader’s age of real-time Global Positioning Systems and computerized oceanic navigation, the sextant is perhaps an unusual, even unnecessarily sentimental, object to discover on the Pájaro de Esperanza. But if it is unusual, the sextant is not exceptional. The Road is littered with objects risen from deep time: arrowheads and Spanish coins encrusted in verdigris (217), mummified bodies like “latterday bogfolk” (23), pitted iron hardware (290), and dolmen stones (279). The only living plants the characters fi nd are morels—simple, prehistoric saprophytes. It is as if the environment is doing more than breaking down, it is relapsing, peeling back the telluric palimpsest recorded in the ground in uneven degrees. Michael Chabon describes the landscape of The Road as an “unhistoried world,” a landscape without a memory, but it is perhaps better expressed as a demented topography, chronically recalling the wrong kinds of memories in the wrong order.

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Although by definition the uncanny cannot be anticipated, its arrival is often accompanied by, or constituted as, déjà vu—the chilly suspicion of repetition or foreshadowing, as though conventional chronology were somewhere snagged. As Nicholas Royle points out, déjà vu, like das heimlich, is a congenitally antithetical phrase, “signifying at once the illusion of ‘having previously experienced a present situation’ and ‘the correct impression’ of having really ‘previously experienced’ it” (172; emphasis in original). In The Road, the Earth shows signs of early human prehistory—things secreted into the terrain in a time before the reader’s present. While “we were here before,” it is unclear who “we” were. These are traces from a pre-industrial past that have moved inexplicably to the surface; remains that are familiar, but in a landscape of the reader’s near future, are unexpected. The ground seems to undergo a form of spatial déjà vu. Meanwhile, the omnipresent legacy of the reader’s “globally-warmed” present, the coalescence of the human and the natural, cannot be sifted out of the post-natural environment. Grappling with inconsistent indicators of time, the reader is disoriented, unable to accurately project the temporal distance between their present and the setting of the book. The “counterspectacle of things ceasing to be” (293) is not linear, but involves the uncanny retrieval of objects disjointed in time. Amid these found objects, there is one, distinctly aberrant piece of debris thrown into the night garden of McCarthy’s novel: a can of Coca-Cola (22). The soft drink, retrieved from the inner workings of a busted vending machine by the man early in the book, is the only incursion of contemporary popular culture into The Road—an object notable for the capitalization of its label in the nameless, placeless, punctuation-poor diction of the book. Asked what motivated him to include the soft drink, McCarthy remarks that, “it’s the iconic American product. . . . The one thing that everybody knows about America, the one thing above cowboys and Indians, above everything else that you can think of, is Coca-Cola” (Jurgensen). For McCarthy, Coke is, as the journalist William Allen White famously put it, the “sublimated essence of all that America stands for”—a herald of economic expansion, mass production, the fostering of artificial desire, and the democratic consumerism that Andy Warhol so vividly captured in his 100 Coke Bottles prints. But the Coke is a more slippery token than McCarthy allows for. Polyglot moniker, “Coke” needs no translation—it is a hegemonic word, with near worldwide market penetration. The can is as ubiquitous as its brand is nationalistic, a placeless object, infi nitely repeated in the millions of buzzing cold aisles in the millions of convenience stores across the planet. As global trademarks are designed to be, Coke is comfortingly familiar; its appearance in a foreign context, stacked between beverages with oddly synesthetic names like Schwip Schwap and Ramune seems not an uncanny intrusion into the unfamiliar, but simply inevitable. Mathew Ryan interprets The Road’s protagonists as “travesties of the free mobile consumers that are the neo-liberal ideal” (155), pushing their

The Green Afterword 213 shopping cart through a world where sociality is extinct. In the novel, the man likewise compares the initial stage of the collapse to a murderous commerce—“blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble . . . carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell” (192). The appearance of the Coca-Cola can, then, is not meant to Americanize the setting of The Road, but to denote the absurdity, in the post-natural world, of that other “eco-” suffi xed system of home-relationships—economics. Coke no longer signifies free commerce or the “organic” dynamic of supply and demand. The Road takes place in a post-consumption context, where production of any kind is obsolete and consumers are cannibalistically consuming consumers, having consumed the world. There can be no homeliness in the marketplace either. Unlike most literary dystopias, the domain of The Road is not populated by recognizable architectural relics. No grand symbols of human endeavor are desecrated, no great feats of technology are shown to have fallen into ruin. Lady Liberty’s speechless shadow does not cross the path of the characters and the cityscapes through which they traipse are emptied even of allusions to the hubs of contemporary metropolises. McCarthy withholds from the reader any encounter with built vestiges of his or her present. Instead, the book is beset with what Rick Bass has called, in reference to clear-felling practices in the Northern Forest of New England, a “plague of placelessness,” the homogenization of space into a single, collapsed ashland: “One vast salt sepulcher. Senseless. Senseless” (McCarthy 237). As a result of McCarthy’s decision not to include any road sign, notable façade, or structure unique to one area in the book’s setting, commentators have been led to speculate as to its location. The characters are moving southward, asserts Alan Warner; from Lookout Mountain in Georgia, suggests William Kennedy. They are trekking “south-westerly through an unnamed, nuclear-winterized landscape,” Mark Holcomb claims, tacking a few degrees further away. Here might be Knoxville’s Henley Street Bridge, featured in McCarthy’s earlier novel Suttree (1979), Michael Chabon speculates (26). John Snider has the characters striving for “presumably the Atlantic coast, probably the Charleston area.” For Scott Esposito, “spatially, we are back in the Appalachia of McCarthy’s fi rst four novels, but temporally we are someplace we have not yet been: terra incognita.” Certainly, The Road is set in America, archetypically so. As David Ketterer remarks, “all apocalyptic writers might be said to inhabit an America of the mind” (332). The omission of overgrown and ruinous relics from the present in The Road may seem initially to indicate a severing of the connection between the reader’s world and the setting of the text, an effect meant to dramatize the extent of the blow. The blending of space into a ceaseless, undifferentiated badland can be interpreted as a measure of the wholesale stripping of landscape. But for the reader, the environment of The Road is not

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uncoupled from the present by its placelessness. It is precisely because the landscape of The Road is so human that it is so horrific. McCarthy needs no ciphers to assemble his paysage moralisé, for everywhere The Road’s eschatology fi nds the human entirely enmeshed with the ecological. Just as in the garden there is nothing of nature that isn’t shaped by human intervention, in the book even those few, persisting organic systems—rain, snow, the ocean—are suffused with human immanence. Aligning with Jameson, The Road is the fulfillment of the secreted age, the age of the post-natural when “we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defi ned nature for us—its separation from human society” (McKibben 55). Unable to calibrate the spatial boundaries of The Road’s setting, the reader, like the characters, cannot be distanced from the denaturing environment of the novel. If The Road is indeed a “masterpiece of the globally-warmed generation,” it is because through the ecological uncanny McCarthy manages to incorporate his reader into the ecological structure of the book, to imply that the trace of the human in the natural is the reader’s trace too. If “green” is missing from the environmental glossary of The Road, it is not merely because the color has become extinct after the collapse, but because the word is too imprecise for the style of McCarthy’s prose. Counterposing the ratcheted dialogue of the characters and the depletion of the environment are extraordinary thickets of plant names that allude to the conventions of non-fiction nature writing. McCarthy labels ferns, hydrangeas, wild orchids, liveoak, kudzu, rhododendron, ginseng, magnolia, seaoats, may-apple, and pipsissewa—lush common names, even as those plants fail to germinate in the book’s reality, subsisting only as “ashen effigies” (295). The geology of The Road’s environment is articulated with a similarly abundant vocabulary: flint, chert, isthmus, isocline, swale, slough and escarpment—these are words that mark an immersive engagement with the environment and an attentiveness to the minutia of natural variation. McCarthy’s naturalist lexicon is nostalgic even in the context of the reader’s world, where nature inches toward a generic mean most strikingly symbolized by commercial monoculture crops. Although The Road’s environment is denaturing, the book’s language undertakes a process of renaturation, reviving a vocabulary that approaches the exotic when it is contextualized to a setting that lacks biodiversity. McCarthy stacks up these middens of nouns, only to undercut them with the absence of their referents. A litter of nomenclature drifts in The Road, as simultaneously senseless and talismanic as the brand names of products discontinued since childhood. “The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true” (93). McCarthy’s lexicon amounts to more than the “paradox of language undoing the death it deals” (Chabon 25). Although the words remain, in the milieu of The Road they no longer “point home” to their origins. The language of natural history has unfastened from nature and circulates in a purely psychological field, forming its own uncanny ecology.

The Green Afterword 215 Biological names do not function to retrieve the memory of the organisms to which they were attached, but rather to create their own internal networks of signification that magnify the complexity of nature that is absence from The Road’s terrain. In concert, these words speak to the death of a way of understanding nature—a far broader psychological ecology than the extinction of individual species or the narrowing of diversity. In cultivating a naturalist vocabulary that survives the post-natural turn of The Road, McCarthy proposes the inverse question to “how do we know ourselves through nature”; namely, how do we know nature through ourselves. The uncanny preservation of this representational ecology after the “natural” referents are dislodged, demonstrates how environmental consciousness can remain after the end of unalloyed, external nature—mediated productively through language. In the novel, however, this ecology of language (the language of ecology) is always in danger of being pulled apart by disorientation. “The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember” (31). As memory powers down in the post-natural environment, words also disappear. McCarthy opens the possibility of orientating to nature in language, even as the vocabulary of his characters is progressively constricted. To recall Kenneth Rexroth’s quotation prefacing this essay: for McCarthy it is the creative act, in this case the literary act, in which the conservation of the world lies. The persistence of naturalist terminology revives the orientating potential of the psychological relationship with nature that enables that language. A relationship founded on ecological embedded-ness and a physical engagement with nature; inherently, conditions of the postnatural. Language and nature assume a symbiotic dynamic in The Road and although it comes too late for the characters, in the postscript to the novel, McCarthy implies that for the reader there might yet be time. In the fi nal pages of The Road, McCarthy deploys the classic American nature-writing idiom of the brook trout to subvert an allusion to Ernest Hemingway’s short-story “Big Two Hearted River”—one of the “Nick Adams” stories. 2 The percussions of Hemingway vibrate beneath McCarthy’s prose throughout The Road, but here the reference is direct. In “Big Two Hearted River,” the protagonist similarly suffers the post-traumatic stress of an apocalypse—the First World War. Nick Adams journeys through a burnt forest, returning in his mind to the battle-scarred country he has returned from, to arrive at a body of water where his interaction with nature—fishing—alleviates his distress. Unlike the father and son in The Road, Nick is revived by the waterscape. “Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling” (164). In the post-natural terrain of The Road, nature’s porousness to the anthropogenic prevents it from rehabilitating either humanity or the environment as it reconstitutes the self in “Big Two Hearted River.” The dissonant presence of the human trace in nature undermines the ability to reconnect with the self in the denaturing world. But on the threshold

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between the psychological and the environment, in the interplay of language, McCarthy situates hope of orientation: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. . . . On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. (307) These “maps and mazes” are not ensnarled in nature, for the fish have disappeared from the streams—they are “a thing which could not be put back.” Instead, McCarthy orientates the world of The Road to a history of nature in literature, showing that new ecologies of meaning arise from linguistic renegotiations taking place on the border between the psychological and the environmental. In a world undergoing denaturing, language becomes that which cannot “be made right again,” and the environmental, social, and psychological connections that are built through language break up. McCarthy uses the recursions of the ecological uncanny to shift environmental consciousness from a basis in external nature to a foundation on the properties of language. Here it becomes possible to formulate a denaturalized ecological politics that is not premised on the removal of the self out of nature, or nature out of the self. In this respect, The Road is a uniquely ecological novel. In fusing the boundaries between the anthropogenic and the natural, McCarthy permits the psychological inner-world to participate in the ecological outer-world, and shows how environmental conservation is as much concerned with how we speak of nature as with what kind of nature we have left to speak of.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Paul Crosthwaite and Tanya Dalziell for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

NOTES 1. The reference is to Carl Abel’s work on the antithetical meaning of primal words in “Über den Gegensinn der Urworte.” 2. This allusion was fi rst identified by Jennifer Egan.

WORKS CITED Abel, Carl. “Über den Gegensinn der Urworte.” Sprachwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen. 1885. 313–367. Bibliolife, 2009. Print.

The Green Afterword 217 Bass, Rick. “Paradise Lost.” Orion Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2005. Web. 19 Apr. 2010. Carter, Paul. Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia. London: Reaktion, 2002. Print. Chabon, Michael. “After the Apocalypse.” New York Review of Books 54.2 (2007): 24–26. Print. Corner, James. “Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity.” Ecological Design and Planning. Ed. George F. Thompson and Frederick R. Steiner. New York: John Wiley, 1997. 81–108. Print. Egan, Jennifer. “Men at Work: The Literary Masculinity of Cormac McCarthy.” Slate, 10 Oct. 2006. Web. 21 May 2008. Esposito, Scott. “Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession.” The Quarterly Conversation 16 (2009). Web. 9 January 2010. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 17. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. “Big Two Hearted River.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner, 1987. Print. Holcomb, Mark. “End of the Line.” Village Voice 31 Aug. 2006. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2009. Print. Jurgensen, John. “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy.” Wall Street Journal 20 Nov. 2009. Print. Kennedy, William. “Left Behind: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.” New York Times Book Review, 8 Oct. 2006. Print. Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. New York: Anchor, 1974. Print. Krell, David Farrell. “Das Unheimliche: Architectural Sections of Heidegger and Freud.” Research in Phenomenology 22.1 (1992): 43–61. Print. Lansing, Stephen. “Man vs. Nature: The Co-evolution of Social and Ecological Networks.” Oprah’s Book Club. March 28, 2007. Web. 24 February 2010. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. London: Picador, 2007. McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Anchor, 1990. Print. Monbiot. George. “Civilization Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern: Are We There Already?” Guardian, 30 Oct. 2007. Web. 28 June 2008. Muir, John “My First Summer in the Sierra.” Nature Writings. Ed. William Cronon. New York: Library of America, 1997. 147–309. Print. O’Hagan, Andrew. “Saturday Review.” BBC Radio 4. 2006. Audio. Rexroth, Kenneth. “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation.” World Outside the Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth. Ed. Bradford Morrow. New York: New Directions, 1987. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Ryan, Matthew. “Hope Is Critical: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Arena Journal 31 (2008): 151–62. Print. Snider, John J. “Carrying Fire Through the Ashes: A Review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Sci-Fi Dimensions, May 2007. Web. 12 Apr. 2010. Warner, Alan. “The Road to Hell.” Guardian 4 Nov. 2006. Web. 28 June 2008.

Contributors

Paul Crosthwaite is Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University, UK. His publications include Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and articles in Angelaki, Cultural Politics, and Textual Practice. He is currently writing a book on the intersections of aesthetics, critical and cultural theory, and fi nancial markets in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. Lidia De Michelis is Professor of English Culture and Literature at the University of Milan, Italy. She is the author of La poesia di Thom Gunn (1978), “More Worlds in Trade to Conquer”: la cosmografi a mercantile di Daniel Defoe (1995), L’Isola e il Mondo. Intersezioni culturali nella Gran Bretagna d’oggi (2005, 2008), and articles on Anita Brookner, Jackie Kay, Ian McEwan, Rupert Thomson, Andrea Levy, the 1960s, and the rhetoric of New Labour. Her current work addresses the discursive strategies and cultural politics of New Labour, analyzed through a cultural studies and discourse analysis approach, with a particular emphasis on issues of nationhood, identity, and the cultural politics of multiculturalism, and the way these are mirrored in contemporary British fiction. Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media Research and Head of the Department of Media, Film, and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Non-Relational Aesthetics (with Michael Corris) (Artwords, 2008), Art, Time, and Technology (Berg, 2006), and Digital Culture (Reaktion, 2002; 2nd ed. 2008), as well as articles in journals such as The Journal of Visual Communication, Culture Machine, and Oxford Art Journal. Rebecca Giggs is a PhD candidate in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. Under the supervision of Professor Tanya Dalziell, she is writing a combined creative and exegetical thesis. The title of her exegesis is “The Rise of the Edge: The New Thresholds of the Ecological Uncanny” and the provisional title of her

220

Contributors

creative work is “Inside Albatrosses.” Rebecca’s research areas include eco-philosophy, disaster studies, and land-use interpretation. She holds degrees in law and arts with fi rst class honors. Penelope Ironstone-Catterall is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. Her work has been published in Space & Culture, Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, and the Canadian Journal of Communication, and she is an editorial board member for Space & Culture, the Canadian Journal of Communication, and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Her current research project, “From Seasonal Flu to Pandemic Influenza: The Cultural Life of a Virus,” is funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Alissa G. Karl is an Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, Brockport, USA. She is the author of Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen (Routledge, 2008) and articles in American Literature, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. Nick Mansfield is Professor in Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Australia. He is the author of The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Subjectivity and Sovereignty Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida (Fordham UP, 2010), Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York UP, 2000), Cultural Studies and Critical Theory (with Patrick Fuery) (Oxford UP, 2000), Masochism: The Art of Power (Praeger, 1997), and Cultural Studies and the New Humanities: Concepts and Controversies (with Patrick Fuery) (Oxford UP, 1997). He has also published numerous articles in journals including Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Theory and Event, and Social Semiotics. He is one of the general editors of the journal Derrida Today (http:// www.euppublishing.com/journal/drt). Nicky Marsh is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton, UK. She is the author of Money, Speculation, and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction (Continuum, 2007) and Democracy in Contemporary US Women’s Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). She is also the co-editor (with Liam Connell) of Literature and Globalization: A Reader (Routledge, 2010) and (with Peter Middleton) Teaching Modernist Poetry (Palgrave, 2010). Her work has also appeared in journals including New Formations, Feminist Review, and Modern Fiction Studies.

Contributors 221 Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, USA. She is the author of Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (Stanford UP, 2008), The Montesi Scandal, The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome (U of Chicago P, 2003), Picturing Silence: Emblem, Language, CounterReformation Materiality (U of Michigan P, 1996), and Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism (U of Minnesota P, 1995). Her work has also appeared in journals such as Diacritics, Technology and Culture, World Picture, and Arcadia: International Journal of Comparative Literature. Her current project explores the role of the humanities in understanding the threat of climate change. Robin Stoate is a fi nal-year AHRC-funded doctoral candidate in English Literature at Newcastle University, UK. His PhD thesis is entitled “Reading Cyberspace: Fictions and Ecologies of (dis)Embodiment,” and tracks the body in cyberspace as a popular cultural construct—from its origins in cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s to its present day real-world shape in the interface between humans and technologies such as the Internet. His wider research primarily concerns theorizing representations of the body in collusion with contemporary technologies, and how these representations persistently reinscribe discourses of marginalization. He is the co-author of Back to the Future (BFI Film Classics, 2010) and has also published in Dichtung Digital, Feminist Theory, and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Andries Visagie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Afrikaans and Theory of Literature at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. His research interests include contemporary South African life-writing and fiction. He has published on masculinity in the work of Breyten Breytenbach in A.k.a Breyten Breytenbach: Critical Approaches to his Writings and Paintings (edited by J.U. Jacobs and Judith Lütge Coullie). Some of his other articles appear in the Journal of Literary Studies, Current Writing, and Stilet. Molly Wallace is an Assistant Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada. She has published in journals including Contemporary Literature, Symplokē, Cultural Critique, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Her current work puts contemporary US fiction in conversation with UN reports, government documents, popular nonfiction, and film in order to trace the ways in which US culture has responded to the globalization of environmental risk (from atomic fall-out to the greenhouse effect).

Index

A Ackroyd, Peter, 190, 192 Aeneid, The, 62, 67, 69 Agamben, Giorgio, 43, 44, 131 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, 72 AIDS. See HIV/AIDS Amis, Martin, 127 Anderson, Benedict, 168, 172 animals, 2–3, 6, 19, 56–60, 207–08 anxiety, 127, 130, 131, 132; concerning bodily/subjective integrity, 8, 111–24; concerning financial crisis, 178; concerning pandemic flu, 7, 81–92 apocalypse, 98, 128; and climate change, 44; in fiction, 95; and financial crisis, 145, 196; in McCarthy, Cormac: The Road, 201, 202, 211, 213, 215; nuclear, 2, 15, 17–19, 27; “slow,” 26, 27. See also dystopia Arendt, Hannah, 44 Arrighi, Giovanni, 151, 163–64, 169

B Badiou, Alain, 2, 6, 33, 34–36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45. See also event: philosophies of the Ballard, J.G.: Hello America, 201 Baucom, Ian, 164, 165 Baudrillard, Jean, 129 Bauman, Zygmunt, 128 Bear, Greg: Blood Music, 110 Beck, Ulrich, 25, 26, 98, 105, 107, 129, 132, 138, 139, 150, 155; on the discursive dimensions of risk, 4, 24, 27; on world risk society, 8, 16, 22–24, 128, 131, 134, 147, 174; on the “worst

imaginable accident,” 9. See also risk Benjamin, Walter, 2 Beukes, Lauren, Moxyland, 7, 95, 97, 98–99, 103–08 Black Dawn: The Next Pandemic, 85–86, 88–90 Blair, Tony, 8, 132, 134–38 Braidotti, Rosi, 112–13 Brecht, Bertolt, 2 Buell, Lawrence, 20, 24, 25

C capitalism, 121; fluidity of, 110–13, 115–16, 117, 120, 124; global, 7, 95–108; history of, 163–64, 168–69. See also commodification; consumerism; financial capitalism; globalization; neoliberalism Caputo, John D., 183 Cartesianism, 33, 42, 44, 114. See also Descartes, René Casino Royale, 8, 161–63, 165–71, 173–75 Children of Men, 72–73, 201 climate change, 3, 5, 6, 16, 21–23, 26, 67; conceptualizations of, 47, 52, 60, 62–63, 71–74; Heidegger, Martin and, 66; in McCarthy, Cormac: The Road, 201–16; and philosophies of the event, 32–33, 37, 42–44. See also ecocriticism; ecology; sustainability Cloverfield, 72, 201 Coetzee, J.M., 95, 96 Cold War, the, 15–21, 26–27, 167, 168 Comaroff, Jean and John L., 182

224

Index

commodification, 85, 98, 111, 112–13, 124. See also consumerism; globalization consumerism, 7, 97, 98, 99, 101–03, 106–08. See also commodification; globalization contemporary, periodization of the, 16 Crichton, Michael: Prey, 111, 116–20, 121, 122, 123 crisis, 8, 32, 37, 43, 44, 83, 91, 130, 161–77; and criticism, 1–5. See also climate change; financial capitalism; risk Crisis in the Credit System, 196–97 criticism, 17, 23, 128, 146, 201; and crisis, 1–5; and risk, 4–5, 21–25. See also ecocriticism; nuclear criticism cyberculture, 2, 97, 103, 120, 186, 203

D Darwin, Charles, 6, 52–55, 73, 139 Davis, Mike, 32, 92 Day After Tomorrow, The, 72, 201 Day the Earth Stood Still, The, 110 deconstruction, 18, 33, 35, 37, 39–40, 50, 53–54. See also de Man, Paul; Derrida, Jacques; nuclear criticism de Goede, Marieke, 149, 156 Deleuze, Gilles, 33 DeLillo, Don: White Noise, 25 de Man, Paul, 1, 74, 146, 147 democracy, 6, 37, 39–45, 95, 106, 135, 212 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 9, 26–27, 43, 44, 129, 183; “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, 56–58; and concept of khora, 51; and ethics, 55–58; “No Apocalypse, Not Now”, 17- 24, 27; Specters of Marx, 33, 34, 36, 37–41, 44, 186–87, 194–95; and the theory of evolution, 52–55. See also messianism; nuclear criticism; post-structuralism Descartes, René, 50, 57. See also Cartesianism Divine Comedy, The, 62, 67–69 Doomsday Clock, 15–16, 17, 19, 20, 25–26, 27 Douglas, Mary, 128, 132, 147, 155 dystopia, 7, 95–108, 213

E Earth, the: images of, 46–51. See also ecology; globalization ecocriticism, 3, 5, 16, 20–21, 24–25, 201–16. See also climate change; ecology ecological uncanny, the, 9, 203, 204, 205–08, 211–12, 214–16 ecology, 21, 25–26, 46, 54, 69, 70, 146, 147, 201–16. See also climate change; ecocriticism Edelman, Lee, 6, 62, 72, 73 Ellis, Bret Easton: American Psycho, 193 embodiment, 15, 59–60, 81, 105–06, 110–24, 132, 145, 169, 187 Enron, 8, 145, 148, 156 event: philosophies of the, 6, 31–45, 51, 53, 55, 60, 135 existentialism, 2, 96

F Fatal Contact, 85–88, 89 feminism, 2, 17, 111, 114. See also gender financial capitalism: 2007–2008 global crisis of, 3, 4, 8–9, 25, 145, 155–56, 161–62, 163, 164, 165, 168, 171–72, 174, 178–80, 185, 196–97; abstraction of, 112, 121, 161–75, 186; crises of, 8, 156, 157, 161–75; and the supernatural, 8–9, 178–200; ‘viral’ spread of, 112, 164; war/terrorism and, 8, 145–58, 162–63. See also capitalism; globalization flu, 3, 7; pandemic outbreak of, 81–92 Foucault, Michel, 44, 128, 131, 132, 147 Frankfurt School, 2 Freud, Sigmund, 204. See also psychoanalysis Furedi, Frank, 85, 128, 134, 137 futurity: anxious, 82, 83–84, 86, 91–92; and climate change, 7, 23–24, 62, 71, 72–73, 74–75; and contamination, 15; and narrative, 25; and nuclear war, 17, 18–19, 24; and philosophies of the event, 31–45, 51, 53, 60; predictions of, 178, 188, 197; and risk, 5–6, 27, 98, 128, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138–39, 148; and

Index utopia, 106. See also apocalypse; dystopia; risk; utopia

G gender: and bodily/subjective integrity, 110–24; and financial discourses, 150, 152, 173, 175. See also embodiment; feminism Ghost, 187 Ghost Dance movement, 31, 32 Giddens, Anthony, 4, 128, 157 globalization: of crises, 3, 130; and epidemiology, 7, 82, 86–88, 92; history of, 168–69; and homogeneity, 111–13; and national sovereignty, 148–49, 152, 153, 167–75; post-9/11, 149; and South Africa, 95–97, 100, 103; and “time-space compression,” 50. See also capitalism; financial capitalism; neoliberalism Grosz, Elizabeth, 111, 114 Guattari, Félix, 33

H Halberstam, Judith, 189, 193 Haraway, Donna, 111, 113 Hardt, Michael, 2 Harvey, David, 49, 97, 130, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 50, 51, 57, 62, 66, 67, 74, 75 Heise, Ursula K., 4–5, 24–25 Hemingway, Ernest: “Big Two Hearted River”, 215 HIV/AIDS, 3, 7, 87, 88, 96, 99, 102 Hurricane Katrina, 3, 43

I I am Legend, 72 ideology, 4, 7, 33, 41, 72, 129, 164, 180 Incredible Shrinking Man, The, 58–60 influenza. See flu Iraq: public debate over, 8, 127, 129, 132, 134–39

J James Bond film franchise, 168. See also Casino Royale Jameson, Fredric, 98, 130, 151, 164, 167, 178, 193, 203, 214 Jennings, Kate: Moral Hazard, 154–58

K Kant, Immanuel, 1, 56, 57, 203

225

Kerviel, Jérôme, 178 Keynes, John M., 181 Kierkegaard, Søren, 55, 56 Klein, Naomi: The Shock Doctrine, 164–65 Knight, Frank, 148, 152, 155 Koselleck, Reinhart, 1

L Lacan, Jacques, 57, 73 Laclau, Ernesto, 2 Last Days of Lehman Brothers, The, 196 Lehman Brothers, 161, 174, 178, 196. See also financial capitalism Levinas, Emmanuel, 38, 41, 57 Life After People, 73 London bombings, 7 July 2005, 3, 8 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 155–56 Luckhurst, Roger, 21, 192 Lupton, Deborah, 128, 131 Lyotard, Jean-François, 71

M MacKenzie, Donald, 156 Marx, Karl, 37, 39, 186–87, 194–95 McCarthy, Cormac: The Road, 9, 25, 100 McCarthy, Wil: Bloom, 111, 120–24, 201–16 McEwan, Ian: Saturday, 8, 127–40; Solar, 140 n5 McGrath, Patrick: “Ground Zero”, 187–88 messianism, 6, 32, 33, 34, 36, 39–40, 41, 51 millenarianism, 31–32 Mouffe, Chantal, 2

N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 50–51 nanotechnology, 7, 16, 27, 105–06, 110–24 narrative: and crisis, 4, 161–63, 167–75; and ecology, 205; non-narrative, 18–19, 24; in Odyssey, The, 63–64; and order, 62; “outbreak narrative,” 87, 88, 89; and psychology, 127, 129, 139; and risk, 5, 23, 25, 131, 145–46; and sustainability, 72–74. See also futurity National Treasure, 194–95 Negri, Antonio, 2

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Index

neoliberalism, 2, 7, 42, 83, 85, 91, 128, 129, 149, 180, 212, 213 Norris, Christopher, 17, 21, 22 nuclear contamination, 24 nuclear criticism, 5, 16, 17–20, 21, 23, 24 nuclear weapons, 15–20, 21, 22, 26

O Odyssey, The, 62, 63–66, 67, 69

P Perniola, Mario: The Sex-Appeal of the Inorganic, 35 π (“Pi”), 195–96 Planet of the Apes, 201 postcolonialism, 2 post-natural, the, 37, 42, 44, 202–15 post-structuralism, 2, 5, 16–21, 54. See also nuclear criticism Powers, Richard: Gain, 25 Prebble, Lucy: Enron, 145, 148 psychoanalysis, 2, 38, 204

R Reich, Christopher: The Devil’s Banker, 153–54, 157–58 revolution, 33, 34, 37, 40–45 Ridpath, Michael: Free to Trade, 151–52 risk: and climate change, 62–63; discursive dimensions of, 4–5, 21–27, 82, 83–84, 91, 96, 98; etymology of the term, 63–69; and financial capitalism, 145–58, 172, 174–75; global, 8, 16, 22–24, 128, 131, 134, 147, 174, 180; hierarchies of risk exposure, 105, 108; and McEwan, Ian: Saturday, 127–40; and speed, 71; and sustainability, 72, 74–75; and technology, 107. See also crisis; futurity Romano, Claude: Event and World, 6, 33, 36–37, 38, 40, 45 Royle, Nicholas, 205, 212

S September 11 2001, terrorist attacks of, 3, 8; Derrida, Jacques on, 26–27; and financial capitalism, 145, 148–49, 150, 152, 155;

and McEwan, Ian, 127, 128, 129, 131, 134, 136; in McGrath, Patrick, “Ground Zero,” 188; Žižek, Slavoj on, 164. See also terrorism Shildrick, Margrit, 111, 114–15, 119 Sinclair, Iain: Downriver, 192–93 Sinha, Indra: Animal’s People, 25 Stiegler, Bernard, 6, 71, 74 sustainability, 6, 62, 69–75, 172. See also climate change Szeman, Imre, 103, 108

T Taylor, Mark C., 186, 188 technology: Heidegger, Martin on, 62, 66–67; incorporation of into human body, 2, 105–06; photographic, 107; and risk 16, 22, 23, 180. See also nanotechnology terrorism, 3, 8, 104; Derrida, Jacques on, 26–27; and financial capitalism, 145–46, 147–50, 152, 153–54, 155, 166, 188; “War on Terror,” 21, 128–29, 131, 132–34, 136–38 textuality: and crisis 161, 163; nuclear criticism and, 5; and risk 17–22, 24, 25

U utopia, 1, 7, 73, 95–96, 97–99, 100–03, 105–06, 108

V Venter, Eben: Trencherman, 7, 95–103, 108 Virilio, Paul, 3, 125 n7, 135

W Wald, Patricia, 87 Wall-e, 73 Weber, Max, 180 Weber, Samuel, 66–67 Williams, Raymond, 130, 194 Wolves of Wall Street, 193–94

Z Žižek, Slavoj, 2, 41, 129, 137, 164