Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene: A Critical Look at the Impossibility of Sustainability 3030787397, 9783030787394

Citation preview

Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene A Critical Look at the Impossibility of Sustainability

Sideeq Mohammed

Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene

Sideeq Mohammed

Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene A Critical Look at the Impossibility of Sustainability

Sideeq Mohammed Kent Business School The University of Kent Canterbury, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-78739-4 ISBN 978-3-030-78740-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78740-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) under exclusive license to Springer Nature 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface: Stories That Write Themselves

Fictocriticism, theory-fictions, hyperstitions, pessimistic and depressive bullshit. Call it what you will. Assign it to whatever canon you want; give it whatever label (“postmodern” criticism, post-disciplinary scholarship, CCRU-derivative navel-gazing academic wank, and so on) helps you to understand it best. This is a book of storying. It is filled with stories that have been braided together in order to herald the closing of the future. No longer a realm of open possibilities, undefined, beautifully chaoid, and disordered; the future is organized. The organs of the future are large and extravagant spaces which in some way prove resistant to warfare, plague and pestilence, or, most pertinently, to apocalyptic climate catastrophe. They exist now as pure potentiality, until they manage to dream themselves a set of human hosts who can actualize their labyrinthine bulk and give them form. What this text seeks to do is not antagonistically stand in the way of this organization in the making, but rather assess its prefiguration and make sense of its fabulation and pre-forming in the present. These spaces are already (be)coming. The mall at the end of the world. The tumult and upheaval of the anthropocene will mean that soon the question that we should be asking will not be if the mall at the end of the world will emerge, but rather when and where, speculating about which of its many protean and potentiary forms will materialize. Will it be a dilapidated shopping centre into which a militarized and nationalistic State forces refugees fleeing famine and war? A cavernous hall buried v

vi

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

deep within the earth that is filled with the last vestiges and remnants of humanity who were able to “survive” despite the ravages of anthropogenic climate collapse rendering the world uninhabitable? A nuclearpowered server farm where the stocks of companies that no longer have any living human workers are traded back and forth forever? Or will the mall at the end of the world never arrive, becoming just another image of contemporary apathy and decay that joins the abject deluge of similar apocalypse-porn which eventually becomes hyperreal and grotesque when the movie rights to it are bought by a major film studio and it is made into a movie starring Michael Cera in a career-redefining role as a grizzled and hypermasculine hero who saves a number of people who are trapped in a desolated shopping centre from disaster through his charismatic and virile leadership? It does not matter what it looks like or what shape it takes; what matters is only that the story is writing itself and, like those organizational scholars before us who have made stories the focus of their analysis (Boje, 2008, 2014; Gabriel, 2000), we want to pay attention to it. Capital’s many and varied dreamings are coproducing this story as a series of variegated and vinelike lines that are entangled in the developments of the anthropocene. As the anthropocene—a term which we use as a kind of shorthand for a number of varied and nuanced environmental and climatological problems, from rising CO2 levels to biodiversity loss, which are all the result of human actions (actions often entangled with capitalistic systems of production and consumption)—continues to unfold, something else comes with it. The anthropocene forces us to confront the myriad consequences of our ways of life by presenting us with the reality that human civilization is irrevocably and irreparably altering the ecology of planet Earth. However, amidst the existential anxiety and declining standards of mental health that many have begun to describe in response to the transfiguration of the daily news into eschatological ranting about the supposed “death of the planet”, something else looms and waits to be acknowledged. Yet there are those who are not ready to see it; the something that comes. If you are such a reader and need more statistics and evidence to be convinced that we live in a period of significant human impact upon global ecological systems, then this is perhaps not the book that you should be reading. Other texts can present the spectacle of the “hockey-stick” graph much better than this one can (see, for example, Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016; Klein, 2019). This isn’t a book of science, concerned with where

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

vii

we draw boundaries or thresholds within which human beings can survive or at what point feedback mechanisms begin to kick in which accelerate the process; where the author pretends to sagely understand anything other than that scientists are telling us to be concerned and pay attention. This is a book of storying. Its thinking is fast, unfettered, and without claim to coherence. This text is not interested in debating that we, to paraphrase Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), live in an epoch wherein climate scientists tell us that the human being has become something more than a simple biological agent living on the earth’s surface. Indeed, it is not even particularly interested in considering the ontological transformation or metaphysical absurdity that this xenoforming implies, as the “human” is cast as a false collective with unified experiences who all suffer from and cause the anthropocene equally; as powerful manipulators of earth, water, and air who now act as a geological force that transfigures the Earth into an uninhabitable plane; and as impotent, helpless and unable to find the political will to make substantial changes to our ways of living in order to avert ecological crisis. Rather, our interest lies in tracking, discovering, and playing games with certain lines of storying that are unfolding in the anthropocene. Indeed, if the planet is being xenoformed, rendering it uninhabitable for the human, we track these lines of storying in order to understand for what people-to-come, who will live after the anthropocene, it is being prepared. We leave it to someone else to scratch their heads over the term “anthropocene” and grieve for those parties who may or may not be adequately included in it. We are thinking too fast and are not able to slow down for such caveats, but we will at least join MacCormack (2020) in refusing to capitalize it. What stories are being told in the anthropocene? In 2018, The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report that set out a case for the importance of limiting further planetary warming to 1.5 °C in order to avoid significant risks to human “health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth” (IPCC, 2018). To achieve this, we would need extensive decarbonization and a collective endeavouring towards the goal of net zero carbon emissions around 2050. A more recent report published in May 2019 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services summarized that “biodiversity and ecosystem functions are deteriorating worldwide” (IPBES, 2019) with alarming levels of loss of wetlands, deforestation, mass extinctions of plants and species, planetary warming, and pollution being observed, and that the drivers of these changes are accelerating with growing energy demands, trade levels,

viii

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

and incentives for production over conservation. In 2020, the start of the year saw international news being inundated with pictures of skies stained orange by Australian wildfires, burning vast swathes of land and claiming the lives of billions of animals who were unable to escape the fires, a poignant juxtaposition against photos of clear and pollution free skies that would go viral on social media once the COVID-19 pandemic had brought a halt to the mores of contemporary social life. At this point, the headlines all blend together and become an indistinguishable cacophony: ice sheets melting faster than predicted microplastics found in humans new data indicates that we are on course to pass 1.5 °C of warming within the next few years in the last fifty years humans have wiped out two-thirds of the world’s wildlife wildfires rampage uncontrolled hottest month on record scientists call for action now. The storying from the scientific community comes as a warning, one of radical and exponential increases in the unsustainability of the current modes of human life within the context of contemporary modes of production and consumption, as we breach more of the “planetary boundaries” that scientists have described as essential for us to maintain if we wish to stay within a “safe” space (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015; Whiteman et al., 2013). As we see the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses rising, further ocean acidification, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss, we understand that we have already breached some of these key boundaries and there is little hope of going back. The story being told by the scientific community seems to be that the profound environmental consequences of human industrial action are drastically reshaping the possibilities of all life in the present and well into the future and that things are rapidly getting worse. The more information that we are able to gather about the changes that are currently happening to planetary ecological systems, the more accurately we seem able to chart the prefiguration of the future and the slow cancellation of possibilities. The unfolding story is that global ecological collapse within the twenty-first century catalysing the mass flooding of low-lying cities, droughts and famine, destructive storms, mass species death and consequent food chain collapse, seems not only possible but inevitable. Yet other storying is woven into this deterministic new “grand narrative”. There are those who tell the story that our current ways of life can continue forever without abatement or alteration. Building robust identity politics out of climate change denial, the “cool dudes” (see McCright

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

ix

& Dunlap, 2011) who are proud consumers of meat, single-use plastics, and fossil fuels are dwindling in number as a new story is emerging, one that sees the anthropocene as an uncharted new territory for capitalist innovation and creativity. For some, like then governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, the anthropocene represents a “huge opportunity” for those firms willing to manage their risks correctly and take the necessary steps to adapt and innovate. Speaking in an interview in 2019, he described what seemed to be the feelings of a distended mass of people with private wealth interests who believe that “capitalism is part of the solution and part of what we need to do” in our fight against a changing climate (Busby, 2019). Indeed, Capital is already creating an extensive array of strategies for continuing to grow and proliferate well into the future. Turning fish scales into bioplastics, recycling concrete, cars that run on coffee grounds or other food waste, bacteria that can survive by eating plastics in the water supply, robotic bees to pollinate flowers, new more efficient decarbonization systems, and all other varieties of “environmentally friendly” technologies are the site of a new gold rush, with a generation of eager new entrepreneurs, inventors, and scientists, who have internalized what some might term the neoliberal story of individual success through hard-work and ingenuity, are racing to produce the next big paradigm-altering, wealth-generating innovation. The story here is inherently multiple, a reversible figure which can be seen as either attempts to green capitalism and render it sustainable in order to save the human race from ecological collapse or as blatant and transparent profiteering off of the crises and challenges of the anthropocene. Is it a rabbit or a duck? Is it both at once if we squint our eyes? Are we trying to “save the planet” or turn the global economy into a glorified pyramid scheme with green optics? This tension is never more transparent than when fossil fuel companies like BP produce grandiose and green end of year reports which speak about the extensive and continued work that they are doing to reduce their own carbon footprints and transition to renewable sources of energy like wind and solar (see BP, 2019). Make no mistake, this is Capital’s survival instinct awakening, realizing that it faces the threat of decreased growth and profits, and reaching out to capture and commodify new territories. The warped story or heroic-fantasy that “the market” cum messiah will arrive with some new innovation, usually through the vessel of some Elon Musk-esque entrepreneur, in order to save us from the destruction

x

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

of the anthropocene, is deeply embedded into the fabric of our collective unconscious. Yet this story is demonstrably fallacious. In An inconvenient truth: how organizations translate climate change into business as usual, Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg (2017) draw on a ten-year case study of Australian organizations in order to tell us bluntly that the contemporary corporation cannot be a “leader” when it comes to climate change and finding new modes of living in the anthropocene. Organizations consistently prioritize short-term profits over long-term social welfare and discount the idea of responding to climate change if it means curtailing growth. Consequently, their responses to the anthropocene will always seek to deploy placatory branding and conciliatory policy: trying to improve energy efficiency, reduce waste and recycle, reduce carbon emissions, develop new more sustainable products, manage their supply chains to have reduced environmental impact, participate in State attempts at regulation through reporting emissions, advocacy, lobbying, and so on. All of these adaptations are best described as attempts to secure some kind of social, political or market advantage—which is to say that in every case, contemporary organizations seek to preserve the very logics of capitalist production which are implicated in ecological crisis. Indeed, pressure from consumers, lobbying groups, and many State and international bodies means that the majority of large organizations now adopt at least the pretence of environmentalism in order to secure future revenue streams. This is why Wright and Nyberg suggest that only systematic intervention by a State or other authority can coerce firms to acting in ways that do not only serve their best interests—they are all too aware that the anthropocene is a new territory to be colonized by the eager and insightful lust of Capital. Rather than scuppering or stymying it in any way, the anthropocene, as Žižek (2010) once intimated, may well champion Capital to new and greater successes. ∗ ∗ ∗ Yet there is another story thread being intertwined here—one about which it is considerably harder to speak—that of Capital and desire. In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2000, p. 139) offer an extensive description of capitalist dynamics, describing capitalism itself as “the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities”. For them, what best defines capitalism is not a uniform apparatus of control

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

xi

and subjugation but rather its tendency to decode flows. As they explain, all social formations exist by virtue of the cutting off of flows (of people into a city or region, of language, of wealth, of goods, and so on) in order to constitute some kind of coherent body. Capitalism, however, liberates flows and instead of recapturing or restricting them undertakes a process of axiomatization, the rendering of flows as subordinate to an absolute principle, like unequal exchange or the extraction of surplus value. There are no limits to this process of liberating flows/axiomatization, and capitalism will thus render anything as possible so that it might become saleable or so that it might participate in monetary exchange and valuation. The most repressed sexual desires, implausible imaginings, and radically revolutionary possibilities can be produced, and then rendered via capitalist axioms and inculcated into a capitalist economy, with traditional social formations like the State acting to facilitate this process. Capitalism thus conceived has no limits and will thus be observed to be “constantly escaping on all sides” (ibid, p. 375), spilling out of itself and leaking. It will constantly exceed any attempts to contain it or restrict it, everything that it deterritorializes it will reterritorialize; there is nothing that it cannot create and then commodify. This raises an interesting question. What is it like to be Capital? It is to be the Great Optimist, always hopefully watching out for a new opportunity. It is to see the world only in terms of possibilities for multiplication, for connection, for proliferation, and for growing infinitely. Capital exists with a purely virtual ontology, a numerico-techno-potentiality, it can become anything and has the means by which to go anywhere. It is a flow endlessly, circum- and extra- planetary. Capital sees the world only in terms of possibilities for multiplication, for connection, for proliferation. Capital’s only question is “How can we continue to grow?” or “What assemblies of resources will allow us to grow the most?” For Capital above all desires to grow, a machinic cancer, endlessly producing proliferations, multiplications, morphologies, splinters, rogue fractal fractures and putrefactions with no logic or purpose other than continuing to grow and enhance itself. It will take any shape. Assume any form. Play any game and adopt any stratagem, regardless of consequence, if it means that its machinic multiplication can be achieved. The ethics of Capital are thus those of a buggered Spinozist, asking what combinations will healthily increase its body and what will decrease or harm it. Of course, since Capital covers over all things, these ethics are always immanent. Yet in this book we will consistently be in error to speak of what Capital desires

xii

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

or of what Capital dreams. Desire constitutes and actualizes Capital as its most virulent and transformative machine and Capital in turn continuously liberates desire from social codes, allowing desire to desire, to multiply and take on ever newer polymorphous and perverse formations; these two are mutually imbricated to a degree to which there is not quite a word to describe and our language consistently fails to depict their intense intimacy. Yet this homogenizing and uniform way of speaking of Capital may be jarring for many who might balk and wring their hands and insist that it is an anthropomorphization, that we could not ever really know what Capital thinks, that there are many different “thinkings” within Capital, that it is a false generalization because there are many different “capitalisms” of different geographies and historical periods. Indeed, writing in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (2005, p. 20) tell us that “there is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations”. Yet as Chakrabarty (2009) suggests, humans in the anthropocene act with “geological force” in their reshaping of the planet, akin to that of the flow of a glacier, or a current, or a chemical process. Such forces do not have individual elements or iterations which speak, act, and think independently—to insist upon the continued acknowledgement of the “human subject” or other individuations or instantiations is tantamount to a form of myopic climate denialism—they move and resonate as a singular flow, with uniform trajectory and velocity. One storying, braided and interconnected with many threads of different strengths and purposes, but with a singular directionality that is worth tracing. Over the course of this book, we will try to find a thread of storying that allows us to speak about the new dominant consciousness of the present moment: Capital. It is of little insight to say that capitalism is nothing more than an organism that exists for the machinic multiplication of money through investment which prompts commodity production and surplus value extraction; infinite replication. Yet the prefiguration of that machining has to be accounted for, what happens in advance so that multiplicative and productive processes go ahead unimpeded far into the future—who or what is dreaming and desiring new futures for us all? To those still unsure about this way of speaking about Capital, the hyper-accelerated dynamics of contemporary capitalist capture confront us with a simple question by way of rebuttal. When was the last time that you did something that was against the interests of Capital? Contemporary

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

xiii

social mores reflect that capitalism has transcended its status as a mode of social and economic organization in which the means of production are controlled by privately owned individuals and organizations, as evidenced in the constant legitimation of the profit motive and the apotheosis of “the market” to the status of something altogether outside all possible images resonant to human association (see Jones, 2013)—a transcendental and sacred principle of human life that seems to translate into a curious and faith-ful religiosity, despite its status as something close to a death cult. In this context, every supposed act of resistance is a splintering off of desire that constitutes and populates a new market; every attempt to destroy a system of capitalist production creates another. Capital has captured schizophrenic delirium, in the halls of the Business School it will be machined and replicated. Contemporary organizations actively seek the production of desire, infinitely and endlessly with infinite customizable variations. There is no more repression, there is only continuous production, endless novelty, endless creativity and innovation, all interior to Capital. Every attempt to “green” or otherwise reform Capital is a Faustian bargain that perpetuates its logics—which will seek to grow parasitically and infinitely on a planet with finite resources. This limitless quality of Capital presents us with an inescapable double-bind. Since it will decode and then axiomatize any revolutionary flow, capturing any revolutionary social movement and rendering it in its image, it becomes the case that the more that one rebels, the more that one produces new innovations via which Capital might further its own ends. To hack off the heads of the hydra is simply to grow and propagate more. The emergence of a Dark Deleuze (Culp, 2016) is thus timely and essential in recalibrating our responses to Capital. Constructing an incisive counter-reading of Deleuze’s work, Culp suggests that the fact that capitalism and other forms of governmentality currently function by means of the logic of connectivity, rhizomes, assemblages, and the joyous affirmation of creativity that Deleuze scholars have championed for decades showcases how impotent these are as mere orientations that we believe will translate into resistance. The hopeful logic of the conjunctive and…and…and… (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005) is easily co-optable and recourse to it belies a failure to “think like Capital”, to see connections and possibilities for growth and expansion everywhere, regardless of consequence. Capital is endlessly hopeful and is always willing to believe in a future where things get better for itself. It now operates across histories, territories, temporalities, bodies, subjectivities, and forms of sense, all

xiv

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

at once. Resilience, adaptability, and above all, Hope, are capitalist virtues par excellence. This is perhaps why Deleuze (1992) advises us that “there’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”. As this book unfolds, we hope to make clear that we agree with many across the academy who would suggest that stories are the best weapons that we have now, as in their affective and elucidating capacities they often say what we are unable to by other means, even if we will disagree about the ends to which these stories might be put. Yet the stories that we’ve seen so far suggest that these weapons are being used in defence of Capital. Stories of hope, stories of incremental change, stories of messianic innovative entrepreneurs, all of these only serve to ensure that things stay exactly as they are, changing constantly in service of Capital’s ends. What we need to develop is something other, something unsettling and perverse. Something borne out of that unnameable something which comes with the anthropocene which we here herald with the title: the mall at the end of the world. Canterbury, UK

Sideeq Mohammed

References Boje, D. M. (2008). Storytelling organizations. Sage. Boje, D. M. (2014). Storytelling organizational practices: Managing in the quantum age. Routledge. Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J.-B. (2016). The shock of the anthropocene: The earth, history and us. Verso. BP. (2019). Our purpose is reimagining energy for people and our planet. BP annual sustanability (Rep. No. 1–82). https://www.bp.com/en/global/cor porate/sustainability.html. Busby, M. (2019). Capitalism is part of solution to climate crisis, says Mark Carney. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/ 31/capitalism-is-part-of-solution-to-climate-crisis-says-mark-carney. Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The climate of history: Four theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640. Culp, A. (2016). Dark Deleuze. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3–7. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315242002-3. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2005). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

PREFACE: STORIES THAT WRITE THEMSELVES

xv

Gabriel, Y. (2000). Storytelling in organizations: Facts, fictions, and fantasies. Oxford University Press. IPBES. (2019). IPBES global assessment summary for policymakers. https:// ipbes.net/system/tdf/ipbes_global_assessment_report_summary_for_policy makers.pdf?file=1&type=node&id=35329. IPCC. (2018). Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/download/. Jones, C. (2013). Can the market speak? Zero Books. Klein, N. (2019). On fire: The burning case for a green new deal. Penguin Books. MacCormack, P. (2020). The ahuman manifesto: Activism for the end of the anthropocene. Bloomsbury. McCright, A. M., & Dunlap, R. E. (2011). Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States. Global Environmental Change, 21(4), 1163–1172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha. 2011.06.003. Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., Lambin, E. F., Timothy, M. L., Marten, S., Carl, F., Hans, J. S., Björn, N., Cynthia A. de W., Terry, H., Sander van der L., Henning, R., Sverker, S., Peter, K. S., Robert, C., Uno, S., Malin, F., Louise, K., Robert, W. C., Victoria, J. F., James, H., Brian, W., Diana, L., Katherine, R., Paul, C. & Jonathan, A. F. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461(7263), 472–475. https://doi. org/10.1038/461472a. Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockstrom, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., Reinette, B., Stephen, R. C., Wim, de V., Cynthia, A. de W., Carl, F., Dieter, G., Jens, H., Georgina, M. M., Linn, M. P., Veerabhadran, R., Belinda, R., Sverke,r S. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347 (6223), 1259855–1259855. https://doi.org/ 10.1126/science.1259855. Whiteman, G., Walker, B., & Perego, P. (2013). Planetary boundaries: Ecological foundations for corporate sustainability. Journal of Management Studies, 50(2), 307–336. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2012.01073.x. Wright, C., & Nyberg, D. (2017). An inconvenient truth: How organizations translate climate change into business as usual. Academy of Management Journal, 60(5), 1633–1661. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2015.0718. Žižek, S. (2010). Living in the end times. Verso.

Acknowledgements

I owe a great debt to colleagues who read the early rough drafts of this work and encouraged me to continue to develop it including Iain Mackenzie, Damian O’Doherty, and especially my long-suffering friend, Felicity Heathcote-Márcz. Sections of this book have been presented at a number of academic conferences in recent years and I am grateful to colleagues who offered thoughts and reflections on this work at these forums, particularly Steffen Boehm and Bobby Banerjee. I would also like to thank Madeleine Wyatt and Patricia Lewis, my colleagues at the University of Kent who have continued to mentor and support me over the last few years. Lastly, I would like to offer very special thanks to all of the plants in my house that grew quietly in their various pots and corners while I worked on this book. I am especially grateful for your company.

xvii

Contents

1

Anti-revolutionary Imagination in the Anthropocene References

1 13

2

The Preforming of the Mall at the End of the World References

17 31

3

The People-to-Come of Capital and Their Memories of the Present References

33 47

In the Viscera of Capital: Practical Acceleration in the Contemporary Business School References

51 72

Living Without Hope: Stories for the Rising Tide References

75 91

4

5

Postscript: So What Are We Supposed to Do?

93

Index

97

xix

About the Author

Sideeq Mohammed is a Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour/HRM at the University of Kent. Sideeq’s work is interested in engaging with philosophy in order to critically reflect on the problems posed by “organization” in the contemporary milieu. He has a particular fondness for the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and has published work that draws heavily on their mode of experimenting with “concepts” in order to think in more robust ways. Sideeq lives in Canterbury, UK. ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2046-5465.

xxi

CHAPTER 1

Anti-revolutionary Imagination in the Anthropocene

Abstract This chapter responds to cross-disciplinary scholarship that calls for more “imagination” and more stories in the anthropocene by tracking certain threads common to anthropocene storytelling, particularly the eschatological narratives that have flooded our popular culture. It weaves together the story of a flood that took place at the Meadowhall shopping centre in 2019 with a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “desire” in order to build a critique of the idea of “imagining our way out” of the anthropocene. Keywords Imagination · Anthropocene · Desire · Deleuze and Guattari · Shopping centre

In November 2019, dozens of shoppers were stranded overnight in the Meadowhall shopping centre, located just outside of the city of Sheffield in the UK (Farrer et al., 2019). Torrential rains had led the nearby River Don to overflow its banks, making nearby roads impassable and causing water to spill into the shopping centre from the doors on the lower levels. Local area police issued warnings to advise people away from the shopping centre and told those trapped by the flood waters to stay inside for their own safety. As the news began to filter across the frontpages of the websites of major journalistic outlets like the BBC, many people © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Mohammed, Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78740-0_1

1

2

S. MOHAMMED

waited with great anticipation to find out what compelling story would unfold. What harrowing tales might be recounted by those who were now marooned in the shopping centre? However, the newspapers the next day weren’t filled with stories of looting, petit larceny, or rage fuelled destruction as those trapped inside, filled with self-righteous zeal, destroyed the symbolic “cathedral of capitalism” in which they were imprisoned for the night. There were no reports of anyone acting out some kind of minute class revolution, no refusal to cooperate, no resistance, and no real articulation of the frustration of being able to do nothing as the consistent failures of advanced industrial society to deal with the literal and metaphorical “rising tides” of an ecological crisis came bursting through the door. Instead, one member of staff described the atmosphere as “weird but communal” (Gillett, 2019). The reports bore out that some were bored, some were stressed, and some took the opportunity to buy new pillows, blankets, and matching pyjamas for their friends and family in order to make their stay more comfortable. One of the trapped shoppers posted on social media about locations where people could go to charge their phones. Others posted pictures and videos of themselves and then hunkered down for the night. The “event” had come and gone, with little more than a temporary inconvenience for some and some extra work for the many staff who clean and maintain the shopping centre to do over the next few days. In the novel Kingdom Come, J. G. Ballard (2007) describes a series of events that lead to a number of citizens barricading themselves in a shopping centre. He describes in detail how in the initial stages of being trapped and unable to leave everyone purchased the goods that they needed, everyone took it in turns to clean and maintain the space. The novel comments on an illness that began to spread through the shopping centre; not a physical malady but “a deepening passivity, and a loss of will and any sense of time”, with one character commenting that increasingly “the treasure house of consumer goods around us seemed to define who we are” (ibid., pp. 222–223). As the experiences of being trapped inside begin to unravel sanity and open up the myriad disjunctures which are always present in thought, the characters in Ballard’s novel observe the creation of shrines for the shoppers to pray and some comment on the experience of being “dreamed” by the shopping centre. There is a sense of paramnesia, of being unstable and pushed and pulled out of time, that seemed to leak into the rationalities of the shoppers. Even after the high

1

ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

3

dome of the shopping centre was razed to the ground and the protagonist escaped, there was still a sense of unfreedom, as though the shopping centre was somehow still present, a haunting. Perhaps, this was simply trauma from all that the protagonist had witnessed but perhaps it was something more, the spectre of the shopping centre looming, waiting, and lingering; real without being actual and longing to be reborn. Indeed, Ballard ends the novel by noting the fear of another shopping-centreto-come, an even more “desperate and deranged dream” (ibid., p. 280) that may already have been producing itself, some new mutant proliferation that might assemble itself in the ashes, or constitute itself anew in spaces yet uncharted to even more disastrous consequences. It is not clear whether this fear is the protagonist’s or the author’s. ∗ ∗ ∗ In some ways, the story of what will have happened if the shoppers and workers temporarily stuck in Meadowhall in November 2019 had not been able to leave the next day, when the flood waters subsided enough to allow egress and the reopening of transport lines, was already written. The transformation of Ballard’s novel into a form of fictocriticism by the surreality and perhaps absurdity of these events highlights something important about our relationship to the future in what we might colloquially describe as the “present” moment. In the anthropocene, time, we might say, is “out of joint”, disjuncted, or otherwise out-of-sync with itself, as events from the distant future intimately actualize themselves in minute actions that we undertake on a daily basis—like ordering a burger at a restaurant or recycling a plastic bottle—in the form of far reaching and potentially cataclysmic consequences in the future which cannot be escaped. Yet for many this future also seems opaque and unthinkable as the scope of the social and ecological consequences of the anthropocene prove difficult to imagine. That is to say, in some ways the future of those stuck in Meadowhall for the night was still open to an infinite array of potentialities (for revolution, for change, for homeostasis, and so on) and yet in others it was being slowly cancelled, subsumed into the encroaching morass of the anthropocene. As more and more vectoral possibilities, nascent creativities, emergences and emergencies are swallowed up by the questions of a future that is at once unknown and unknowable and apocalyptic and horrifying, it is a small wonder that many authors are suggesting

4

S. MOHAMMED

that what we need is more stories, new ways of thinking, new concepts, and above all, more imagination. Indeed, the anthropocene has certainly captured the imagination of organizational scholars, and has unquestionably become a core topic of analysis for the discipline (see Ergene et al., 2018; Wright et al., 2018), prompting leading commentators to repeatedly invoke the idea that we need to construct or encourage new imaginaries in order to think of solutions to the challenges posed by the anthropocene. Following Levy and Spicer (2013) many comment on a collective “lack of imagination” that renders organizational actors unable to conceptualize the scope and global consequence of their local actions leading to a kind of myopic short-termism (Augustine et al., 2019; Wright et al., 2013). The imaginaries that we cultivate have been discussed as having significant impacts on everything from how we conceptualize risk (Wissman-Weber & Levy, 2018), to how we conceptualize human-nature relations (Roux-Rosier et al., 2018), and our ability to bring about sustainable post-growth or degrowth futures (Banerjee et al., 2021). A lack of imagination has also been proffered as an explanation of what Wright and Nyberg (2015, p. 29) describe as “the lack of widespread societal criticism of environmental destruction”, as they construct the passive social acceptance of inaction in the face of ecological crisis as simply a failure to imagine a better future. This interest in anthropocene imaginaries is mirrored by wider scholarship where there is also a broad acknowledgement that because the anthropocene presents such systemic challenges to our social and economic ways of life, our ability to imagine different futures is of paramount importance. In The Great Derangement, for example, Amitav Ghosh (2017) suggests that the anthropocene confronts us with the “unthinkable” in the form of the prospect of being uprooted and unmoored from our ways of life by some event or happening whose magnitude, exact effects and mechanisms, and societal responses are all unimaginable. The core task for literary authors then is to find “ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era” (ibid., p. 33). For Ghosh, the role of artists and writers is to help us “find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped” (ibid., p. 135) Ghosh asks that we dream our way out of capitalism and develop newly creative storying. Imagine the unthinkable. That could be a great slogan; one that could encourage and eventually galvanize the production of creative and paradigm-altering speculative fiction which

1

ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

5

offers road-maps for more sustainable futures and calls forth new ways of imagining the human and their relationship to what we presume to call “nature”. Indeed, Ghosh and many others would suggest that such work of imagining is essential to the maintenance of hope for the future. Similar calls for imagination and storying as a vector for hope are seen in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. Haraway (2016, p. 35) calls on us to not capitulate to the “self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse”. To do so, for her, would be to surrender our capacity to think and the attention that we need to give to the ongoing storying in the anthropocene. Haraway encourages us to (re)imagine our relationship to the other-than-human. In rechristening our era as the Chthulucene, she encourages us to be attentive to the tentacular, to entanglement, and to symbiotic connection and in so doing “stitch together improbable collaborations without worrying overmuch about conventional ontological kinds” (ibid., p. 136), seeing remaking our relationship to the world as core to our future survival. This call to reimagine our relationship to other forms of life is one which is shared with other ecofeminists like Anna Tsing (2015, p. 5) who urges us to “reopen our imaginations” and reinvigorate our curiosity in order to understand the predicaments of the anthropocene and the patchy nature of capitalism without its customary narrative of inevitable progress. Doing so, for Tsing, might better position us to understand the potential for collaborative survival that we can make with other forms of life. Whether it is large-scale stories of Gaia or comparatively small stories about various earth-bound critters, everyone seems to want to imagine a new future or more accurately, everyone seems to be trying to imagine a future where catastrophic ecological collapse does not result in mass extinction, most often by averting it, but occasionally by hanging on. The pervasiveness of the idea that a failure of the imagination is at the core of the looming ecological crisis cannot be understated as it can be found in the work of so many commentators, from sociologists like Antonio Negri (2014) to journalists like George Monbiot (2017). Everyone seems to believe that our slow and inadequate action in response to global ecological crisis is a political failure that lies in “a failure of imagination”—an inability to imagine a world where economic growth driven by extractive industries and private wealth accumulation is not the main measure of human welfare, an inability to imagine ways of stimulating political change and broad systemic reforms, an inability to imagine other ways of living and subsisting with other forms of life and so on. Yet somehow,

6

S. MOHAMMED

all of these calls for more imagination, for new entrepreneurial dreams of #sustainableinnovation, fail to offer an exit strategy. The task is deferred to some future population who will have imagined their way out of capitalism because our slow attempts at reform and imagining small-scale change cannot hope to break free of capitalist axiomatization. We thus seem unable to recon with Frederick Jameson’s (2003) oft cited insight: For it is the end of the world that is in question here; and that could be exhilarating if apocalypse were the only way of imagining that world’s disappearance (whether we have to do here with the bang or the whimper is not the interesting question). […] Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.

Commenting on this, Mark Fisher (2009) saw it as a perfect expression of “capitalist realism” or the foreclosing of “the horizons of the thinkable” to the degree that it is not even possible to imagine an alternative system of social organization that is not inflected with or infected by capitalist systems, rules and logics in some way. Unlike Fisher, we do not hold to the hope that alternative political and economic systems are possible. Jameson’s reading of the future is deterministically capitalist, one in which it is easier to imagine mass extinction brought about by a reluctance to encroach upon the freedoms of “the market”, than it is to imagine changing to avoid extinction. In such a reading, attempts to access or dream an “Outside” to Capital will always have been scuppered, permissible only insofar as they come to work in service of Capital. To understand Capital is thus to reckon with the fact that it has no outside; but onto its infinite surfaces are projected a holographic folding, real but not actual. The folds persistently and perpetually undulate, rotating and tessellating in on themselves in defiance of geometry, seeming to bulge, tremble, reverberate and repeat. The folds are neither inside nor outside but rather are an image of undulating, changing, and potential limits, an infinitely shifting topology of peristaltic process. Every new imaginary is a move along this infinite surface of its crests and troughs. There could never have been a breach or a beginning. Indeed, to recall Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is unique as a social formation because rather than repressing and controlling, it “liberates the flows of desire” and

1

ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

7

thus renders open the possibility of new connections and conjunctions. However, it only ever does this under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, pp. 139–140)

Capital reimagines each new possibility, each new story, via its axiomatic, which is always engaged in a process of creating and capturing the new, axiomatizing it through the logic of surplus-value extraction and infinite growth. Consequently, its end becomes unimaginable—it can only be reformed in ways that facilitate superficial changes while leaving its axiomatic untouched. Yet paradoxically, images of this end of the world and/or capitalism are everywhere in our popular culture. Indeed, it has now become cliché to note that the fantasy of an End is one of the most enduring and frequently recurring images in contemporary capitalism. We see it in our popular culture with depictions of apocalypses, disasters, mass extinctions (or the aftermath thereof) in films like The Day After Tomorrow or Children of Men, in television shows like The Walking Dead, in novels like McCarthy’s The Road or Ballard’s The Burning World or Le Guin’s Always Coming Home or Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” trilogy, in music that runs the gambit from the upbeat It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M to the wrathful Reclamation by Lamb of God, and in a variety of other works of art. This fantasy of the End seems to oscillate in our collective imaginary between nightmare and reverie, panic and pleasure, in a way that should give us all cause to pause and reflect. We seem to always both fear it and, if our continuous production and reproduction of it can be taken as evidentiary, yearn for it in a way that speaks to the pleasure that we take from seeing or imagining it. The pornography of disaster and destruction suggests strongly that the idea of there being nothing can be a comforting thought, terrible but soothing; the relief of “returning to lifelessness”, as Freud (2015) once put it, and thus finally discovering a kind of “Outside” in the void. Yet this is not a radical reading and there is also already an alternative storying which considers this. Commenting on the relationship between “business sustainability” and the death drive, Bradshaw and Zwick (2016), for example, draw on Freud via the work of Slavoj Žižek,

8

S. MOHAMMED

to argue that “there is a collective yearning for environmental apocalypse and the existence of a death drive that contradicts yet co-exists with our self-preservation instincts” (ibid., p. 269). They suggest that the reason why we have proved to be so bad at responding to the threats of the anthropocene is because we want to be, a manifestation of the Freudian death drive impelling us to actively desire our own annihilation. Indeed, the more that one considers this point, the more difficult it becomes to see the response of contemporary organizations to the anthropocene as anything other than a reflection of the idea that “capitalism depends on the subject’s drive toward self-annihilation” (ibid., p. 277), seeking short-term revenue maximization at the expense of longterm ecological welfare. In their 2015 book, Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations, Wright and Nyberg undertake a similar reading in advancing the term “creative self-destruction” as a means of describing the innovative and insightful ways in which organizations are perpetuating anthropogenic climate change, skirting regulations and rebranding their activities as “green” while continuing to operate under regimes of “business-as-usual”. For them, the political lobbying against meaningful regulation and the increasingly transparent sham of corporate environmentalism reflects “the underlying paradox of capitalism as an economic system that relies on the destruction of nature for its own development” (Wright & Nyberg, 2015, p. 29) while also being dependent upon that “nature” as an ongoing resource. This is yet another interesting thread of our braided and intersecting storying; one where there are deliberate and purposeful attempts to do nothing about the challenges of the anthropocene, not out of a lack of imagination or political will, but because of a deeply rooted and unacknowledged desire for annihilation that actively seeks out the destruction of social and ecological systems, which seems to be deeply entrenched in the very logics of capitalism. How could Capital ever come to desire such an outcome? Surely Capital would always impel desire away from the horizon of non-possibility and stasis that death represents? To answer this question, it is necessary to explore the entanglement of Capital and desire. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe how the very character of capitalism implies that it subjects desire to an operation of social repression-psychic repression that is stronger than any other, because, by means of the immanence and the decoding, antiproduction has spread throughout all of production, instead

1

ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

9

of remaining localized in the system, and has freed a fantastic death instinct that now permeates and crushes desire […] what is this death that always rises from within, but that must arrive from without-and that, in the case of capitalism, rises with all the more power as one still fails to see exactly what this outside is that will cause it to arrive? (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, p. 262)

Desire is here not a “lack” or an absence as it is for traditional psychoanalysis, nor is it a form of suffering as it is in Buddhist thought. Rather, “desire is a machine” (ibid., p. 26), it is productive, generative, polymorphous, and free before it is coded over by the social. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, because desire will always seek change, seek an outside, no society can allow desire to flourish unchecked. It must be disciplined, coded, and organized in order to facilitate conformity, obedience, and adherence to collective norms and values. Yet it is also true that, desire can become so completely controlled that it begins to act against its own interests, seeking destruction, pursuing annihilation, becoming driven by a death instinct. They give the example, following psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, of the people of Europe in the mid-twentieth century who came to actively desire fascism, suggesting that “the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, p. 29). Fascism is here a stand in for further repression, for further control, for a love of domination that gives up on one’s own freedoms in order to see others being dominated. Desire can come to desire death. Non-being, nothingness, the black hole of annihilation. This conceptualization of a perverted and destructive desire reoccurs in A Thousand Plateaus: Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden destratification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one’s own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005, p. 165)

What Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of desire confronts us with is not only that desire can become a destructive desire for death, but that, in order to sustain itself capitalism might knowingly present us with a contradictory set of propositions. As they suggest

10

S. MOHAMMED

social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, p. 151)

Read in this way, the contradictions and paradoxes that are presented in the storying around sustainable, socially responsible, environmental approaches to organization are not dysfunctions; rather they reflect capitalism feeding voraciously on its own contradictions. This is how profiteering off the anthropocene works and how we can keep seeing obscene proliferations of new movies, books, music, and other art depicting eschatological images of the end of the world and new “green innovations” in everything from electric cars to decarbonization and also see calls for more imagination. Contradictions become effaced as they are rendered secondary to the totalizing logic of the profit motive. Capitalism’s endless assimilation of its own contradictions leads us eventually to the inexorable conclusion that we might actively desire the shams of “sustainability” and the endless parade of new technological innovations which purport to save us from the anthropocene as they enable us to enjoy our petty actions and feel involved in the salvation of the planet, rather than feel responsible for its degradation through the continued cost of resource extraction, greenhouse gas emissions, and so on. The intrinsically and liberatory force of desire becomes corralled and so completely codified and controlled by the social that it actively desires repression and even death “for desire desires death also” (ibid., p. 8). What becomes clear here is that desire can begin to function against its own interests, desiring its own repression, desiring fascism, desiring destruction, desiring death at the same time as it might be a desire for freedom, desiring collaboration, desiring reconstruction, desiring life. This all too perverse desire presents us with the prefiguration of the future. There is no Outside to capitalism. The fantasy that it might end with the “end of the world” is a dangerous delusion of which we need to be aware, because desire may well be trying to liberate itself from Capital by way of the “end of the world”—working hopefully towards ecological collapse without realizing that capitalism may well be there waiting for it on the other side. Or realizing and not caring because it and Capital are so entangled. As such, where our imagination might be found to be

1

ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

11

lacking is in the ability to conceptualize that capitalist axiomatics are indestructible, that they may predate us and may well survive long after the “ends of the world”. Indeed, as Nick Land (1993) famously quipped, “the death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part”. In this regard, we should be wary of the hope in the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories that have permeated throughout our popular culture. There is a curious storying here; one that often goes unspoken. It is one that believes that when the consequences of the anthropocene begin to manifest in earnest, when mass migrations begin as people flee low-lying coastal areas and countries afflicted by drought or famine, when the last of our productive resources have been exhausted and fighting over scarce food supplies catalyses governmental collapse, one hopes that we might see a glimpse of non-capitalist life. There is a great hope in such visions, one that believes that the end of fiat currencies, the possibilities of mass production and monetary valuation, might mean the end of Capital because of the realities of a planet where capitalist logics cannot function. But we are simply not thinking enough like Capital to see the potential to extract surplus value in and from human suffering, or indeed, to continue without the human altogether. Unless it becomes impossible by the complete absence of time and space, Capital will continue to pursue profits and growth at any cost. Yet the rallying cry is still that we need more stories, that we need to “imagine our way out” of our current predicament. More stories to convince us that everything will be OK, more stories that will tell us that we just need to take small steps and support the right legislation and then everything will be fine. More stories of innovative entrepreneurs. More stories of hope. The story that we need more stories, that we need to imagine new solutions and create new concepts, can only be read as an ingenious form of “creative-self destruction” or some other manifestation of a desire desiring its further repression, allowing us to enmire ourselves in a new politics of blame that satiates any desire for revolutionary action and mobilization with an insipid feeling of “at least we did our best… at least we tried”, that enables the perpetuation of a state of affairs that we know is unsustainable (Cederström & Fleming, 2012). Here stories of sustainable flourishing reveal their flaw: they are hyperstitions in the process of failing. As Nick Land (2012, p. 579) describes them hyperstitions are “semiotic productions that make themselves real”, stories which are not only involved in their own production but which actualize themselves, constructing the reality in which they will exist. Yet a hyperstition

12

S. MOHAMMED

is always defined retroactively, after it has actualized itself, its traces in the theory-fictions and imaginaries of the past can be circuited in order to demonstrate it as hyperstition. However, the future in which stories of sustainable flourishing could be retroactively professed and proven is being cancelled; the closing of the feedback loop will never have occurred. Their temporal relations are thus breached, making them most akin to a kind of post-mortem foetal extrusion, something rotting that shoots out of the social body as decay sets in. As such, their nature and purpose remains always unfinished, dead and pointless expulsions that desperately tried to become real as their incubating world died around them. Perhaps these death messages come from the Old Ones as provocations, perhaps as taunts, or perhaps for a purpose that we cannot yet fathom. If “what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources” (Land 2012, p. 338) then who can say what future our stories about surviving or dying together in the anthropocene will have produced, other than a future for Capital alone. We are thus so saturated in different stories and possibilities for storying that to suggest a “lack” of stories or want of “imagination” often betrays the writer’s own conceit and careerist ambition to publish stories in order to save themselves from the cynical and calculative politics of the ongoing machinations of what some call “academic capitalism” (Slaughter & Leslie, 2001). The glut and mass of stories, empirical, theoretical, fictional, pataphysical, and all of those that blur the lines between these, threatens to block out any possibility of future creativity by enmeshing us in a web of pre-rendered storytelling that cannot escape from itself and must thus necessarily be repetitive, recursive, regressive, and endlessly pursue a failed project of trying to generate the new, only ever producing futures already dreamed by Capital and aligned to the service of its ends. Yet the hope is still that some new story will help us to fix things, some new imagined solution will make things better. But no new story is going to bring about the change that so many want to see. No amount of imagined solutions will produce an Outside. Of all of the possible events that could have transpired when those shoppers were trapped in Meadowhall for the night, the one that took place showed us how imbricated we are with Capital’s desiring. They didn’t rebel or resort to looting or violence. Any micropolitical resistance was accounted for and ignored or went unreported as shoppers dutifully purchased new clothes, blankets, and miscellany for themselves, performing capitalism

1

ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

13

even in disaster. As such, there may already be no human left, or more accurately there never was, and what we historically mistook for the human was simply the evolutional expansion of some bicameral cryptid who existed at once as an earthbound mammal and as the actualization of the dreaming of Capital. A schism caused by the rupture of some future circuitries, it believes itself a coherent thing while acting always, as an automaton, in the best interests of Capital. The “feel-good” story of the people of Meadowhall coming together and maintaining stoic resolve in times of adversity, rather than following in the example of those trapped in Ballard’s Metro-Centre and burning it to the ground, is an important weapon against the all too easily colonizable and co-optable hope which Capital uses to keep itself alive; hope is the host that Capital’s mutant virology needs to survive the anthropocene in its current form; without hope, who knows what spectral and haunting forms it might take? What happens if we try to use our imagination differently, not to try to save ourselves or make ourselves feel better about our ability to live or die in the anthropocene, but as a weapon against this body of Capital, turning desire’s own dreaming against it. What if we take seriously those things that we already know about the present and the realities of injustice and inequality that permeate it? What new nightmares might we be able to machine?

References Augustine, G., Soderstrom, S., Milner, D., & Weber, K. (2019). Constructing a distant future: Imaginaries in geoengineering. Academy of Management Journal, 62(6), 1930–1960. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.0059. Ballard, J. G. (2007). Kingdom come. Harper Perennial. Banerjee, S. B., Jermier, J. M., Peredo, A. M., Perey, R., & Reichel, A. (2021). Theoretical perspectives on organizations and organizing in a post-growth era. Organization, 28(3), 337–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/135050842 0973629. Bradshaw, A., & Zwick, D. (2016). The field of business sustainability and the death drive: A radical intervention. Journal of Business Ethics, 136(2), 267– 279. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2443-x. Cederström, C., & Fleming, P. (2012). Dead man working. Zero Books. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2005). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

14

S. MOHAMMED

Ergene, S., Calás, M. B., & Smircich, L. (2018). Ecologies of sustainable concerns: Organization theorizing for the Anthropocene. Gender, Work and Organization, 25(3), 222–245. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12189. Farrer, M., Parveen, N., & Blackall, M. (2019). “We had to buy blankets”: Floods force shoppers to spend night in Meadowhall. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/08/wehad-to-buy-blankets-floods-force-shoppers-to-spend-night-in-meadowhall. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books. Freud, S. (2015). Beyond the pleasure principle. Dover Publications. Ghosh, A. (2017). The great derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. University of Chicago Press. Gillett, F. (2019). UK flooding: Dozens spend night in Sheffield Meadowhall shopping centre. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50341846. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780. Jameson, F. (2003). Future city. New Left Review, 21. https://newleftreview. org/II/21/fredric-jameson-future-city. Land, N. (1993). Making it with death: Remarks on Thanatos and desiringproduction. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 24(1), 66–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1993.11644272. Land, N. (2012). Fanged noumena. Urbanomic. Levy, D. L., & Spicer, A. (2013). Contested imaginaries and the cultural political economy of climate change. Organization, 20(5), 659–678. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1350508413489816. Monbiot, G. (2017). Out of the wreckage: A new politics for an age of crisis. Verso. Negri, A. (2014). Some reflections on the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO. Critical Legal Thinking. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/02/26/ref lections-accelerate-manifesto/. Roux-Rosier, A., Azambuja, R., & Islam, G. (2018). Alternative visions: Permaculture as imaginaries of the Anthropocene. Organization, 25(4), 550–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508418778647. Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. L. (2001). Expanding and elaborating the concept of academic capitalism. Organization, 8(2), 154–161. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1350508401082003. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press. Wissman-Weber, N. K., & Levy, D. L. (2018). Climate adaptation in the Anthropocene: Constructing and contesting urban risk regimes. Organization, 25(4), 491–516. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508418775812. Wright, C., & Nyberg, D. (2015). Climate change, capitalism, and corporations: Processes of creative self-destruction. Cambridge University Press.

1

ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

15

Wright, C., Nyberg, D., De Cock, C., & Whiteman, G. (2013). Future imaginings: Organizing in response to climate change. Organization, 20(5), 647–658. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508413489821. Wright, C., Nyberg, D., Rickards, L., & Freund, J. (2018). Organizing in the Anthropocene. Organization, 25(4), 455–471. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1350508418779649.

CHAPTER 2

The Preforming of the Mall at the End of the World

Abstract This chapter presents the story of the mall at the end of the world; a story where a new kind of “sustainability” is achieved and a wealthy subset of humanity live underground despite the deaths of the rest of the species due to global ecological collapse. It weaves together the story of watching a management presentation taking place at a shopping centre in 2013 with a pessimistic story of capitalism continuing infinitely into the future, and positions it within the context of accelerationist imaginaries. Keywords Shopping centre · Deleuze and Guattari · Accelerationism · Bunker · Posthuman

Let us now imagine some other kind of a future, together. Imagine that it is summer 2013 and you are sitting in the food court of one of the largest shopping centres in Britain. This food court has been designed to resemble the deck of a cruise ship, evoking images of escape from the drudgery of one’s ordinary life, with optimism, hope, and a carefree blue-skies-overhead affect. Yet this aesthetic is far from consistent as the warm, yellow wood of the ship’s deck and dangling lifeboats overhead quickly gives way on all sides to a perfected array of postmodern pastiche that juxtaposes images of Venetian architecture with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Mohammed, Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78740-0_2

17

18

S. MOHAMMED

inflected-arches hovering over curtains frozen in a permanent state of billowing, against Torii gates, Egyptian statues covered in hieroglyphs, and various depictions of “tropical forest” or “New Orleans”—a schizoid space unironically dubbed “The Orient”. Yet most of the over 30 million annual visitors to the shopping centre do not seem to be disoriented by this anachronistic and hyperreal cacophony of images. Of course, some get lost and seem to wander around aimlessly, but many more are simply content to rest themselves on one of over a thousand seats dotted around the food court and partake of the wares of the dizzying array of restaurants and fast-food places available in this Orient. The most coked-out and half-mad postmodern storyteller could not intentionally dream up a space like this. It could only have come from someone who unironically believed themselves to be trying to create a unique space that consumers would enjoy; someone who could have remained unaware of what Capital was dreaming through them. Imagine that you are sitting on one of these chairs, ignoring the slightly wobbly table in front of you and looking at the stage that has been erected at one end of the food court. A small area immediately in front of the stage has been cordoned off by a velvet rope, with maybe twenty or thirty people sitting inside, looking up at the stage. They are mostly charity workers and a few representatives of the people who are the beneficiaries of these charities. Onto the stage proudly struts a member of the shopping centre’s senior management team, a suited middle-aged and balding man, who begins to give a speech to the assembled crowd. He quotes various statistics from a small piece of paper in his hand. Over the conversation of a small family sharing gossip about a cousin, you catch snippets of the speech: “more than 8000 jobs”, “three million pounds donated to various charities”, “employee volunteering scheme”, “three hundred thousand pounds in the fountains”. He cites the invaluable work of a person whose name you think you hear as Alessia Reid, a community-relations manager who has been at the core of the shopping centre’s efforts to work with these charities. The speakers of the cheap PA-system crackle and distort under the strain of trying to be loud enough to convey his praise. The static-laden machine vocalization seems to displace him, and make his speech feel less like one taking place in the present and more like one occurring at some time and place far removed, projected and echoing via crumbling circuitries that amplify his utterances into the present. Imagine that as you look around, you are slowly filled with the realization that no one is watching this speech. A pair of mothers walk past you,

2

THE PREFORMING OF THE MALL AT THE END OF THE WORLD

19

pushing their prams and chatting idly about the X-Factor. A tense and sullen couple several tables away stare intently at their Big Macs, as though looking at each other would bring about the end of the world. Hundreds of people are walking through the space trying to get to somewhere else in the shopping centre. A woman in her forties in a cleaner’s uniform is changing the bins. You watch her well-practiced habit, the machine efficiency with which she carries out this familiar pattern of motion: open, unclip, tie, pull, lift, place, open new bag, shake twice, smooth, knot, clip, close. She repeats this process around the food court. All the while, the manager is still giving his speech and not a single person outside the velvet ropes looks at him. The spectacle of this public organizational selfadulation could have taken place in a conference room or a restaurant, but the audience was necessary. It was essential that the shopping centre as a whole knew how much good it was doing for the community. Imagine that in that moment it became clear to you that there were always two audiences. One that you were seeing, ambivalent to the proceedings and going about their daily lives, and another, real without being actual (cf. Deleuze, 2001), which existed alongside it, and is enraptured by what is occurring on the stage. This latter audience cares deeply about this performance and the important work that the shopping centre is doing by scooping coins out of its water-fountains and donating these to charities. There is some kind of spectral economics at work here, some unspoken law or rule requires the spectacle, demands the performance, knowing that it is hollow, a ghost of a thing that cannot fully be apprehended or understood. As such, there are always two shopping centres. There is the one of bodies and their messy incalculability, and another which exists in consumer spending models, projections on foot-traffic, or other data analytics which facilitate plans for expansion and development. This second shopping centre is a hyperstitional entity, one which actualizes itself in certain moments of permeation and interspersal, where one suddenly becomes aware of this second story, this spectral trace of some other becoming, which exists in-between and through one’s own experience. It is never clear which shopping centre one is in or of whose dreaming one has become a part. Further, it is uncertain whether one is watching the staged auto-performance, ignoring it and going about one’s life, or whether one has become the manager on the stage, speaking to and on behalf of an organization without realizing one’s own ventriloquization. ∗ ∗ ∗

20

S. MOHAMMED

If asked to imagine a shopping centre, most of us will think about long ornately tiled malls with high domed or arched glass ceilings, the buzzing bustle of a large open food court, a pervasive off-white quality to the bright florescent lights, a curious intended artificiality that juxtaposes fake palm fronds with sincerely-intended evocations of different cultural reference points (particularly different kinds of faux-Greco-Roman aesthetics), and perhaps even a general sense of malaise and torpor that pervades through the mind producing a kind of bored lethargy as one strolls along the malls. This is no doubt in response to the storied images of contemporary shopping centres to which we have grown accustomed. Shopping centres remain key sites of sociality where lines between public and private, past and present, dream and reality, individual and collective, are all held in tension by a space which often deliberately seeks the obfuscation of such binaries through the purposive juxtaposition of signs and a perpetual and ongoing culture of maintenance which seeks to remove any signs of decay or disorder. Through purposive design choices, shopping centres often aim to cultivate what has been termed the “Gruen effect” or a kind of dream-state where time and space become mere background to a hedonistic world of play, flight, excess and that peculiar thing which Capital thinks of as being called “freedom”. Yet it perhaps also reflects and produces the ways in which shopping centres are or have become ominous portents of capitalism’s prefigured ruin (or ongoing ruination) as evidenced by the growing trend of dead malls across the USA and the UK—too much growth having created unstable excess that needs to be culled. Images of the “dead mall” factor largely in our popular culture (see films like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) or as a storage space for decommissioned hosts in the acclaimed series Westworld as well as novels like J. G. Ballard’s (2007) Kingdom Come or Catherine O’Flynn’s (2012) What Was Lost ), the desolation and disorganization of its once perfectly-maintained spaces seeming to speak to something in our collective unconscious. There is at once a peculiar terror that we feel when a familiar, beautiful, living-machine of capitalism is bereaved and left desolated, which co-occurs with a perverse joy in seeing it destroyed, often at the behest of some higher power (e.g. “the people” or “the market”). We have yet to find a word to describe such an emotion. Imagine, instead of images of ruined store fronts shut behind metal grating, cracked and faded signage, broken escalators, chipped paint,

2

THE PREFORMING OF THE MALL AT THE END OF THE WORLD

21

assorted detritus, left-behind objects and dead plants caked in grey layers of dust, a mall that lives forever. Built deep underground in New Zealand or somewhere equally remote during the early part of the twenty-first century by a reclusive billionaire (who made their fortune off of patenting or angel-investing in a more sustainable kind of plastic made from fish or a car that runs on human waste or edible protein made from a fungus that feeds on spent nuclear fuel rods—or something similarly absurdly innovative—and then investing in energy companies), it takes advantage of vast underground reservoirs and nuclear reactors in order to sustain itself indefinitely. In its maintenance there is not even the possibility of human error as it is kept functioning by an array of self-repairing machines that filter water, produce food, create power, clean surfaces, and so on. Below the malls, automated systems grow and harvest various plants, beans, and fungi and process these into nutritional bars that are automatically distributed for residents to consume at regular intervals. These systems tended to go largely unnoticed now—only drawing attention occasionally when a small cleaning robot stops working and has to be repaired by two others—and so most residents tended to know little to nothing about them. The designers focused on creating a self-sustaining environment that could be maintained without human intervention once global ecological collapse or similar catastrophe rendered life Outside impossible (or less comfortable than one would like). Imagine that it was only the ultra-wealthy who could afford to buy their way in—only a few families. Because the emphasis was on creating a space that would sustain them indefinitely, there wasn’t much consideration given to what people would do once they were down there, at least not beyond a few years. They didn’t bring great archives of books, films, or art. The first residents who had lived Outside and were there after the Doors closed may have brought a few things with them, but these quickly succumbed to the strain of use or became disused as most residents became disinterested in them. Of course, they will have had a voracious appetite for knowledge and development in the beginning. The first generation born after the Doors closed will have wanted to know as much as they could about the Outside world of parking lots, hurricanes, gas stations, garbage collection, sunburn, and whales. Occasionally, someone might find a file of “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and watch it, musing at the sights, sounds, and spaces, but such objects now offered little thrill. Over time—once the computers that had Wikipedia pages archived on their hard-drives started to fail and the parts began to be cannibalized

22

S. MOHAMMED

to keep other systems working, and once the books and encyclopaedias became dull and uninteresting detritus, left in a corner of a disused room and ignored, like wallpaper or those disaffected things that adorn the walls of pretentious coffee shops and trendy pubs everywhere—no one cared anymore. What did the Outside really mean to them anyway? It would always be inaccessible. Imagine that once the first generation who had never known life above ground began to die, things changed dramatically, and that was a long time ago now. What little knowledge of the “world of the moderns” exists now on the malls has been passed down in the oral tradition, subject to all of the forgetting, elaboration, and gaps in knowledge that this would entail, until no one was sure how nuclear power worked, how crops used to be grown, how a “computer” was built, what an ocean was or whether giraffes and unicorns were real. Now, disused rooms that we might recognize as being laid out like traditional classrooms, sit empty (though still perfectly clean) as no one calling themselves a teacher had been born for a long time. Imagine that eventually the boredom and apathy of a place with nothing to do and nowhere to go produced a decision that all the residents should all do something. Many residents had grown up hearing stories from their grandparents of how things were much better with something called Capitalism, how people were free to work and earn a “wage” which they could use to “buy” goods and services. Some residents had heard stories about money from their great grandparents, but no one alive was quite sure what this was or how it worked. Some now had dreams of having a job where they could make food for people, or where they could clean places that people used, or where they could bring people the things that they bought with this thing called “money”. Just like the characters in the stories that they heard when they were younger. However, with no money, no property to privately hold, and no militarized force, the best “something” that the residents could do was to put on the performance of capitalism. Imagine a place where a sign proudly proclaims: “For sale! Buy it Now!” The sign is so old that its writing is faded. No one alive understands fully to what the sign refers. Things resembling a kind of fungus grow off of discoloured bits of concrete with fractured paint. They are just something found growing in a disused room in the corner that the cleaning robots could not reach. Someone prised them out and has brought them to the malls to show. No one can actually buy it. The

2

THE PREFORMING OF THE MALL AT THE END OF THE WORLD

23

fungus might be swapped for another similar trinket or given as a gift, but it is unlikely. The pretence of the sale is enough, it gives the person viewing the product something to look at as the finder tells them the story of locating and bringing it to the central concourse of the mall, going into great details about how it was procured and transported. The storying, the public auto-performance on the stage of the mall, is what is important to them. Imagine that in one part of the concourse, a resident stands next to a pedestal (made of an old shelving unit) on which there is a single broken watch. The property of one of their ancestors from the Outside, the resident spent hours memorizing minutiae about the watch from the instruction booklet that they found and would tell any eager listeners about its features such as the fact that it received a radio signal from the atomic clocks from somewhere called “Fort Collins” which kept it in sync with all of the other clocks on the Outside, or how the CT4Z1313 battery was designed to be recharged by “the sun”, or about its stopwatch or alarm features, and how to use them. No one offers to buy the watch, and indeed the resident would not sell it. The idea of a “sale” is not one that has managed to translate into this space; transactive logics and exchange being difficult to conceptualize when automation has rendered the human as a universal receiver for everything that they need to survive. Their economy is one of storying. Imagine that there are many different pieces of found or made miscellany, each with their own little stories. Bits of plastic or old wiring, salvaged and recycled into trinkets; what might once have been a food wrapper is now a treasured bracelet. What in another time was a frayed copper cable is now woven into the fabric of the generic machineproduced plant fibre garments in order to give them what the residents think of as something called “virtue”. Residents will wake up, eat, clean themselves, and then dutifully come to stand or sit next to whatever trinkets that they have managed to acquire or construct. There isn’t much, so finding something is seen as cause for commemoration. Those residents without something to tell stories about are just mall walkers. They move through the space, chatting about small gossip and various goings on—who has acquired what recently, who has the best stories, and so on. The hustle and bustle of various people moving around, perusing goods or talking about them is comforting as it blots out the silence. One doesn’t need to buy anything; the spectacle of the things and their stories is enough for most.

24

S. MOHAMMED

∗ ∗ ∗ On survivalcondo.com it costs only 1.5 million USD to buy yourself a condo designed to help you and your family survive the apocalypse. Built within the walls of an abandoned missile silo in Kansas, USA, the project initially seems like some kind of absurd pyramid-scheme or insurance scam. Yet the more one reads serious explorations of such spaces, like Bradley Garrett’s (2020) Bunker, the more serious the enterprise becomes. Underground walls that are up to nine feet thick in some places and biometric access gives a certain sense of safety to those who would pay a small fortune in cash to be able to survive a disaster. Yet the interiors of the luxury condos take the form of some kind of a quintessentially middle-class turn of the millennium aesthetic, all stainless-steel appliances and halogen downlighters. The communal spaces include an indoor pool, an arcade, a movie theatre, a shooting range, a library, a classroom, a rock-climbing wall, and other exercise facilities. Plans are already in place to grow food hydroponically and keep the bunker powered with wind-turbines. The mall at the end of the world is already being built. Its story is one that is crying out to be heard (and this is, of course, only one of its infinite protean forms). It is not one that inspires us to be hopeful and believe that we will all make it through the anthropocene alive and well, but one that reflects the brutal and necrotic politics that characterizes the contemporary social milieu as well as the social, political, and economic inequalities that exist and are constituted within it by long legacies of colonialism and dispossession (see Banerjee, 2008). It is a story thread which should prompt us to reconsider the importance of melancholia and anxiety as opposed to the drug-addled, affectless stupor of a State-led global pharmaco-technical industry that keeps us all satisfied, dopaminerich, and compliant (see Davies, 2015). To think that Capital is not already dreaming itself modes, systems, and technologies to survive the “end of the world” is an absurdly laughable proposition. As we can learn from Anna Tsing’s recounting of the story of “Fordlandia”, large corporations led by innovative entrepreneurs have already tried building isolated utopias. Attempts to “seal these off” from the Outside failed because workers revolted against managerial control and because of the intrusion of “Gaia” in the form of rubber leaf blight, Microcyclus ulei, able to proliferate at new intensified speeds because of the farming practices that were being employed (Tsing, 2016). Capital has

2

THE PREFORMING OF THE MALL AT THE END OF THE WORLD

25

learned from these mistakes. It will not make them again. New systems are already being devised. Wealthy investors like Peter Thiel are already buying up land in remote areas with an abundance of fresh water, like New Zealand, so that they can simply wait out global ecological collapse or other similar disasters (O’Connell, 2018). Indeed, doomsday prepping is becoming quite the vogue in Silicon Valley (Osnos, 2017), with a small cottage industry cropping up around designing “go-bags” and other apocalypse-preparedness miscellany. Far from being a threat to it, Capital is all too happy to produce the anthropocene, and provide it pornographically filmed on your news feed in order to sell you personal survival or resilience products as you prepare for a “world without markets” (Campbell et al., 2019). The blanket injunction to imagine new solutions and futures, which was considered in the previous chapter, is one that is already being exceeded by Capital. Already hyper-efficient systems are being designed to grow food underground. Already robotics technology is being advanced in ways that could facilitate endless replication and self-maintenance. Various pharmaco-technical experimentations in body hacking like injecting oneself with the blood of young people in order to make humans survive longer, need less sleep, and consume less resources—all invaluable in survival scenarios—are already being pursued. Indeed, Capital will even sell us images of people preparing for its destruction. The American reality television series Doomsday Preppers or indeed the rabid fervency with which land-grabbing and the other strategies of Theil and similar figures has been reported and appear in the news, stands as a testament to Capital’s willingness to “play both sides of the war” for profit, to fund the building of the mall at the end of the world through the vitriol that is generated by stories about it. The story of the mall at the end of the world is one in which capitalism lives forever in spaces where those who have accumulated private wealth survive and perform a version of it; a post-scarcity non-place. As Land comments, capitalism has long become a nihilistically autoproductive array of machines. “It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself” (Land, 2017). Land’s overtly techno-futurist imaginary, sees autonomous capitalism continuing long after “the human” perishes and the post-human takes its place. It is here that we have to begin to consider an important set of ideas and political strategies that many have been content to ignore. The

26

S. MOHAMMED

seeming impossibility of any kind of meaningful social or political change in the context of the anthropocene forms part of a broader set of issues that have led a number of critical scholars and philosophers, disenchanted and disillusioned with continuously failing modes and practices of resistance against the capitalist mode of production, to advance what has been described as “accelerationism”, a belief that the best mode of resistance to Capital’s dynamics is to accelerate them. In their introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Mackay and Avanessian (2014, p. 4) define accelerationism as the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding and abstractive tendencies.

The story that accelerationism often seems to tell suggests that modes of resisting capitalist capture are futile, that capitalism cannot be “greened”, reformed, made to be responsible or made to serve broader social interests through the striking of any colours or typologies of “New Deals”. Rather, the most meaningful mode of resistance left is to accelerate the tendencies within capitalism which it cannot contain and then begin again from whatever comes next. In The Persistence of the Negative, Benjamin Noys calls this la politique du pire, the politics of the worst case, suggesting that what characterizes accelerationism is the idea that “if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better” (Noys, 2010, p. 5). It is hard to pin down an “origin” for accelerationist thinking but many point to an oft cited speech from 1848, where Marx (1976) comes out in favour of free trade, under the assumption that because it “pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point” by giving greater freedom to Capital to exploit and crush the working class, it would inevitably hasten large-scale revolution. Marx is here identifying a tendency within Capital to produce the conditions of its own dissolution (see also Marx, 2014). In this case, free trade awakens a revolutionary class consciousness and catalyses some kind of proletarian revolution, but other contradictions, particularly ecological crisis, could be produced by Capital as a means of hastening its collapse. This line of thought is developed by Deleuze and Guattari’s (2000, pp. 239–240) highly provocative statements in Anti-Oedipus:

2

THE PREFORMING OF THE MALL AT THE END OF THE WORLD

27

So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? […] Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

Accelerate the process. Resist capitalism by pushing it to its limits, pursuing fully the logic of decoding or the axiom of surplus value extraction and the liberation of flows until we arrive at their most extreme conclusion, all surplus value extracted, all growth targets achieved, all possible labour rendered, the planet Earth reimagined as a newly uncommodifiable and unliveable plane in which there are only a few sites of what we might call “life” remaining, the mall at the end of the world being prime among them. Already we are seeing the limits of capitalism being tested throughout our social milieu, for example in the debates around “Net Neutrality”, but the greatest limit, the most salient horizon of non-possibility for Capital seems to be the anthropocene. Any meaningful response would require large-scale international corporation in the adoption of degrowth strategies that neuter and denude Capital. A strand of accelerationist thinking whose goal is sincerely to radicalize capitalism against itself, “the worse the better”, might suggest that the anthropocene offers the greatest potential for meaningful socio-political change, a potential end to capitalism via the collapse of social systems that will result from wide-spread flooding, extreme weather events, famine and food scarcity, mass migration, and so on. A reasonable response then would be to seek to accelerate the process because we haven’t seen anything yet. Make things worse and hope that they can get better on the other side; nothing else that we are doing here is working to do anything else other than give us a warm feeling of “we tried”. So maybe one deliberately votes for a politician who will remove environmental protections or more benignly allow the “free market” to function unchecked; invest money into media organizations and launch social media campaigns which allow particular groups to peddle climate denial myths; or even just buy shares in energy or other companies based on extractive industries and use your influence to

28

S. MOHAMMED

demand more fossil fuel extraction. This can also be done on a microlevel. Maybe you dump all of your recycling in the ocean, creating a market for “sustainable innovation” that leads to the privatization of the oceans by companies that patent an AI-driven technology for identifying and removing it. If your hope is to get capitalism to produce a scenario where capitalism can no longer operate then you should try to facilitate ecological destruction wherever possible. Or, you can adopt a far more radically subversive position. Encourage organizations to use the languages of “sustainability” and “green capitalism”. Collaborate with state actors in order to get some international body like the UN to propose some set of “Sustainable Development Goals” that can be ratified by countries around the world and accepted by organizations through various processes (Williams et al., 2019). Participate actively in public policy initiatives that position the combatting of the global ecological crisis as an individual responsibility and convince everyone to recycle (creating new markets for recycled plastic), and go vegan (creating new lucrative markets for vegan restaurants, meatsubstitute products, vegan lifestyle blogs, books, and influencers, and so on). Get more active on the local level to encourage your community to develop a shared compost, to buy produce from local farmers, to cycle to work instead of taking the car, and so on, so that Capital can continue to grow and accumulate as it always has. What you will have done will be to accelerate the process, to create new markets and shift the optics so that no one notices Capital’s continued machinic production capturing more and more of the conceptual and imaginary space until nothing could have been Outside and even stories of escape, resistance, and degrowth alternatives become immanent to it. Expand the possibilities for capture until all contradictions are absorbed and Capital is able to expertly produce the xenoformed planet in meltdown that Land (2012) envisioned. Indeed, perhaps Capital already dreams accelerationist dreams. Perhaps this is why organizations have responded to the anthropocene in the ways that they have; because Capital wants to see what new markets it might bring about, or perhaps Capital desires it because “desire desires death also” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, p. 8) and, tired of simply thriving off of selling us images of itself dying, the perverse coding of desire causes even Capital (eventually) to act against its own interests and desire the repressive liberations of the anthropocene. Who can say? It seems to be a pointless redux. Yet the story here remains interesting to us insofar that it is one of hope. Land’s (2012)

2

THE PREFORMING OF THE MALL AT THE END OF THE WORLD

29

Bladerunner-as-future assembly where unregulated capitalism, technological advancement, biohacking, human enhancement technologies, and gross wealth inequality converge under the all-knowing gaze of an AI or the rise of a new transhuman monarchic ruling class cannot admit the thought that what we may well face is a transformation of the human, not into some post-human cyborg-formation, or to some human-animalhybrid entanglement, or some other deified assemblage of corporeal and incorporeal elements, or even into some deathless pure consciousness in the Singularity, but rather into a vessel for the performance of a politics of spectral capitalism. The spectacle of non-exchange. Land’s vision of accelerating politics crumbles into a neo-reactionary pseudo-fascism preoccupied with racist dog-whistles like the soft eugenics of “Human Biodiversity” theory as a way to explain why a planetary AI has not yet emerged (Land, 2013), slowing down for a kind of obtuse and distorted monarchic and disciplinary humanism with his “Dark Enlightenment” project. This cannot account for the people-to-come; the people of the mall at the end of the world, the ones who live in the holographic folds of Capital, neither inside nor outside but instead in some kind of morphing space that is always immanent to Capital’s desiring. They are the new “capitalized subjects” who have come into being after generations and generations of people “swallowing the shit of capital” (Lyotard, 1993, p. 116) and so are capable of doing nothing but desiring what capital desires—growth, profits and death—and so engage in empty performances of markets. Forever. In fact, as Jean-François Lyotard prefigures, they may well enjoy it. Each new faecal act of simulated transaction is fecund with the joy and possibilities of performing each transaction, each banality, each mundanity as though it were exquisite pleasure to revel in. The people-to-come live by the joy of stories and legends of a time when private wealth and working jobs made people happy, when people could go to shopping centres and purchase goods and services. Such events are now part of the mythologies of this people-to-come. The stories that the people of the mall at the end of the world will tell each other are already being written. Their stories recontextualize, reconstruct, and re-present our now, arching backwards and forwards in time. We are all spectres in these stories now, many of us wishing that something other than the malls were real. Yet these are the stories that we are storying now and the people-to-come will grow up hearing stories of how much we loved, supported and treasured the endless and bountiful benevolence of Capital.

30

S. MOHAMMED

The mall at the end of the world thus already exists as a potentiality, a virtuality, and with it, an endless haunting of the spectre of capitalism. The story that we are perhaps too afraid to tell ourselves is not that an apocalypse is coming and everything will change, but rather that disaster will only prompt new capitalist morphologies. The mall at the end of the world distorts our binaries and perceptions. It is a world where there is endless drudgery forever, yet it is also experienced as boundless and enthusiastically pursued leisure, forever. It is home to the empty celebration of performances of capitalism, already taking place and, as a ghost, continuing forever. This performance is already beginning. The stage is set, and the curtain is going up. The future is preformed, for Capital loves few things so well as pomp and ceremonious ostentation; they enable new possibilities for growth and development. In Summer 2013, you learned this all too well while sitting on the deck of a simulated ship and watching a public presentation being made to a public that could not see it. In the simple analysis, the audience was vacuous meat in the room and their attention to or participation in the activities taking place on stage was immaterial. In a more nuanced analysis, these two groups revealed themselves to belong to heterogenous realities that you were suddenly slipping between, as though someone had forgotten to put down a yellow “Caution: Wet Floor” sign in the food court, and suddenly you could only occupy a threshold or limit condition; at once present and absent, attentive and inattentive, within and without organization. From this vantage it was possible to see the peristaltic undulations of the folding holographic surfaces of Capital’s desiring, to intuit that the spectral capitalism being performed was an economic model that could last indefinitely, but it was not possible to see what direction it was moving in, or how it would work. What is left for us to do? What weapons should we be trying to ready against the mall at the end of the world? Perhaps we should begin telling accelerationist stories, not out of hope, but in acknowledgement that they are all that might survive us, their potentiality actualized by Capital in its endlessly cancerous production and capture. The premythologization of the mall at the end of the world as an act of fictocriticism renders open for consideration a completely new ontology, a being onto mall. Perpetuity. Nothing of consequence ages, dies, or runs out. The only thing that a mall is involved in producing is desire so why not join it in an endless machination of seemingly endless forms which are always already amenable to the ends of Capital? A production of nothing (but stories) forever. Maybe this is exactly where the endless calls for “more imagination” get us. Maybe this might do something, or maybe it will amount to nothing. What have you got to lose?

2

THE PREFORMING OF THE MALL AT THE END OF THE WORLD

31

References Banerjee, S. B. (2008). Necrocapitalism. Organization Studies, 29(12), 1541– 1563. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840607096386. Campbell, N., Sinclair, G., & Browne, S. (2019). Preparing for a world without markets: Legitimising strategies of preppers. Journal of Marketing Management, 35(9–10), 798–817. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2019.163 1875. Davies, W. (2015). The happiness industry. Verso. Deleuze, G. (2001). Difference and repetition. Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Garrett, B. (2020). Bunker: Building for the end times. Allen Lane. Land, N. (2012). Fanged noumena. Urbanomic. Land, N. (2013). The dark enlightenment. https://www.thedarkenlightenment. com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/. Land, N. (2017). A quick-and-dirty introduction to accelerationism. Jacobite. https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-toaccelerationism/. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993). Libidinal economy. The Athlone Press. Mackay, R., & Avanessian, A. (2014). Introduction. In R. Mackay & A. Avanessian (Eds.), #Accelerate: The accelerationist reader (pp. 1–47). Urbanomic. Marx, K. (2014). Fragment on machines. In R. Mackay & A. Avanessian (Eds.), #Accelerate: The accelerationist reader (pp. 51–66). Urbanomic. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1976). Speech on the question of free trade. In MarxEngels collected works (Vol. 6). Lawrence & Wishart. Noys, B. (2010). The persistence of the negative: A critique of contemporary continental theory. Edinburgh University Press. O’Connell, M. (2018). Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apo calypse-in-new-zealand. Osnos, E. (2017). Doomsday prep for the super-rich. The New Yorker. https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-superrich. Tsing, A. (2016). Earth stalked by man. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 34(1), 2–16. https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2016.340102. Williams, A., Whiteman, G., & Parker, J. N. (2019). Backstage interorganizational collaboration: Corporate endorsement of the sustainable development goals. Academy of Management Discoveries, 5(4), 367–395. https://doi.org/ 10.5465/amd.2018.0154.

CHAPTER 3

The People-to-Come of Capital and Their Memories of the Present

Abstract This chapter imagines the stories of the “people-to-come”, the lives of the mall at the end of the world, and the homogeneity of human thoughts, hopes, dreams, and desires with those of Capital. It weaves together stories of Gaia, Medea, and other mothers who have come to factor large in anthropocene imaginaries, with attempts to think and dream like a shopping centre, in order to speculate about how the peopleto-come might remember us and our responses to the anthropocene in the present. Keywords Shopping centre · Anthropocene · Gaia · People-to-come · Capital

In the 2017 film, mother!, noteworthy auteur director Darren Aronofsky confronted audiences with a story that many didn’t quite know how to interpret. Exploring biblical themes of death, destruction, and rebirth, the film stars Jennifer Lawrence as the titular mother, who appears to be living in isolation with her husband, referred to only as Him, a poet unable to write his next great work. As the film progresses, Him welcomes a number of strangers into the house, first a man, then his wife, then their sons, and then throngs of his adoring fans, all of whom are discourteous, rude, and thoughtless, making a mess, not cleaning up after themselves, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Mohammed, Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78740-0_3

33

34

S. MOHAMMED

and generally causing chaos in the house that mother has so carefully restored and maintained. Mother spends much of the film cleaning up the messes made by the guests and bearing out a kind of innocent confusion, unable to understand how they can all be so destructive. As the strange and surreal events of the film unfold, mother becomes increasingly irate, culminating with a fit of violent rage when her child is killed and eaten by her husband’s fans. Filled with a vengeful hatred, mother punctures a tank of oil in the basement of the house and ignites it, destroying the ornate and comforting wonder of the home that she had maintained and killing all of the people who had invaded it. Read in a certain way, mother! is both a heavy-handed biblical allegory and an intense metaphor for the destructiveness of the human in the anthropocene as our species produces global ecological collapse. Lawrence’s character appears as a kind of primal force and animating spiritualized personification of “nature”. Nature wants to “build a paradise” for Him to be happy in but the guests keep arriving, and with their callous indifference and disrespect, keep destroying the house. As the audience follows mother, we feel the injustice as her home is pillaged and empathize with her when she burns it to the ground. This is where the allegory could have broken down, revealing itself to be nothing more than just a masturbatory fantasy, where a vengeful mother scolds us for our misdeeds, chastises us with a unique sense of absolute moral righteousness, and then destroys everything because we could not behave. Many would welcome such a transcendental maternal intrusion into the complexity of contemporary geopolitics in the anthropocene; an angry mother intrudes to scold us and take our toys away. But what if we read the film subversively? Not as a cautionary tale against the human destruction of and disregard for “nature”, but rather as an instruction manual. Such a reading might fixate on the fact that, at the end, the film reveals itself to be a kind of proto-accelerationist tale, as Aronofsky has Him reincarnate the house from the ashes after it was destroyed. Mother herself reawakens with the rest of the house, albeit with a different face, seeming to suggest that the destruction of the house by the guests could not be undone but instead, we should abandon it and look to who or what might come next. ∗ ∗ ∗

3

THE PEOPLE-TO-COME OF CAPITAL AND THEIR …

35

In the 2013 Gifford Lecture series (and their published version as the 2017 book, Facing Gaia), Bruno Latour (2017) proposes a thought experiment in the context of the ongoing critique of the nature/culture distinction and a reconsideration of the political theology of the anthropocene. He asks his interlocutors to imagine a Game of Thrones style conflict where different politically aligned factions are fighting for different interests. At precisely the moment in our intellectual history when we would seek to leave it behind and embrace new post-human, post-subjective, and post-corporeal futures, Latour sees that the human and all of its many different interests and politics are more persistent than ever, highlighting the various controversies surrounding environmental issues from the development of wind power to wildlife protection and conservation. Evoking the imagery of the work of James Lovelock (1995), he provokes us to consider a “people of Gaia”. This people of Gaia are not beholden to the images of Nature and other politics. They instead represent an-other perspective in the process of realizing itself. Latour comes to suggest that the new climatic regimes of the anthropocene place the humans of the Holocene at war with the Earthbound (his preferred term for the people of Gaia) of the anthropocene. Latour’s invocation of this people of Gaia comes amidst similar provocations from his contemporaries. In her book In Catastrophic Times, for example, Isabelle Stengers also draws upon Lovelock in order to speak about Gaia’s untimely intrusion into the scope of human affairs. In naming Gaia, Stengers suggests that we give a clear perspective to this global other who should be recognized as a living being and not simply as inert matter to be transformed by Capital. Against the dominant trend of viewing “nature” as suppliant and accommodating, she describes Gaia as “a mother perhaps but an irritable one, who should not be offended” (Stengers, 2015, p. 45), resonating with Latour’s suggestion that Gaia-reimagined returns as a figure of biblical justice and righteous retribution. Gaia, for Latour, speaks to admonish with a voice of biblical justice coming not to bring peace, but a war which sets the world ablaze (Latour, 2017). Naming Gaia, for both authors, becomes a means of speaking about something unaccounted for in our politics and vocalizing some form of resistance to the unfolding ecological crisis in the shifting of perspectives to provide for a reconciliatory accounting. Yet this image of Gaia crumbles under the weight of the hope that it bears. Stengers’ (2015, p. 46) image of a “ticklish” or touchy Gaia prompts us to consider the life of a being who is responsive and sensitive

36

S. MOHAMMED

to the actions of humans; rather than an inert and pliant entity that is amenable to the interests of Capital, willing to be consumed and drained in the endless pursuit of surplus value extraction. The Gaia who intrudes, for Stengers, “asks nothing of us” being “indifferent to our reasons and our projects” (ibid., pp. 46–47). Yet such an account struggles to consider the perversity of desire. That there might be a desire which desires annihilation, nothingness, non-being or simply the cessation of “the anthropos”, seems beyond accounting. That Gaia might be named in order to give voice to a profound death drive which we seek in advance to deny by crying out the name of the eternal “earth mother” or swearing allegiance to her in conflict seems to be beyond reckoning. That we might do so as ventriloquized by Capital in order to further its ends is unthinkable. The idea that Gaia is a confrontation, a pressing question, an intrusion or anything other than a new territory for Capital’s conquest seems to be so dangerously myopic that it can only be explained by a consideration of the hope that it represents. The joint EU/UK database of registered trademarks lists dozens of active and protected trademarks for “Gaia”. One can already buy Gaia-branded underwear on Amazon.com, presumably to be worn while taking some extra-strength Gaia-branded Herbal supplements, right before one’s Gaia-branded yoga and meditation instruction, before heading off to one’s job at Gaia consultancy, where one has been spending 90-hours a week working on a major project providing “innovative solutions for sustainability” for a large oil and gas company. Gaia is the new GARAP (see Baudrillard, 1996). More significantly, the more that Gaia “intrudes” and produces new forms of death in new retributions, the more that Capital will co-opt these for its own ends. Melting icecaps open up new shipping routes. Microplastics in every human body catalyse new bio-medical technologies. In this regard, there is a vision of “sustainability” that many do not yet see the full consequences of. Something sustainable is something bearable, defensible, supportable. Sustaining a state of affairs means that we can continue it, in perpetuity. “Sustainability” imagined as a way for a reformed and green Capital to continue as it is now, unchanging and forever, will always have been impossible. It was always a code that Capital used to speak to and through those who would be unaffected by the Earth being made increasingly uninhabitable. Yet through this passcode, we gain access to the realization that Capital will always have been able to sustain infinite growth on a planet with finite resources; this planet is simply not one on

3

THE PEOPLE-TO-COME OF CAPITAL AND THEIR …

37

which it is possible for humans to live. Sustainability is thus only impossible if we view it from the point of view of the human, and this is not a future that most of us are ready to recognize or acknowledge. That we cannot see how little Gaia’s intrusion matters to Capital speaks volumes to our inability to trace its dreamings. Capital sees and loves Gaia’s inhuman face. Yet not everyone remains enamoured of images of Gaia. Contra hopeful stories of Gaia and the coming together of humans and nonhumans in new forms of entangled life, some have proposed that we return our attention to the figure of Medea and her destructive and barbaric revenge. In Euripides’ famous play, Medea is scorned by her husband, Jason who has arranged to marry another woman, Glauce. In revenge, Medea murders Glauce and then kills her own children in what to her seems a “necessary crime”, for though she laments their deaths and mourns the lifetime of pain that she will feel grieving for them, she sees it as a worthy sufferance if it means that Jason will be hurt worse, having now lost both his actual and potential families. She mocks him by saying: “The pain is good, as long as you’re not laughing” (Euripides, 2007). In The Medea Hypothesis, Peter Ward, against the vogue of theorizing Gaia, suggests that all life follows a kind of self-destructive Medean principle. He argues poignantly that it is life that will cause the end of itself, on this or any planet inhabited by Darwinian life, through perturbation and changes of either temperature, atmospheric gas composition, or elemental cycles to values inimical to life. (Ward, 2009, p. 35)

Drawing out multiple examples of the breakdown of systems resulting in mass deaths of species, from the Phanerozoic microbial mass extinctions to the Pleistocene Ice Ages, Ward shows how complex systems that are supposed to be homeostatic break down and become destructive of life, thus suggesting that life on the planet cannot self-regulate indefinitely. Ward eventually arrives at a radical hypothesis, that humanity itself manifests Gaia’s death instinct, that humans have emerged as the ultimate Medean agent, reducing biological diversity like no other event. Yet Ward cannot account for the desires of Capital as he comes to eventually suggest that the only way for there to be continued life and flourishing on planet Earth is for an intelligent, tool-producing animal to come along and develop the technology to correct for Medean principles, for example, maintaining temperatures through carbon scrubbing to ensure the planet’s habitability. The scope of his project unfortunately cannot admit the

38

S. MOHAMMED

thought that systems and forces, both Medean and Gaian, a new Thanatos and Eros, might be co-opted by Capital in order to serve its own ends, producing the mall at the end of the world in order to ensure Capital’s indefinite survival. That is to say, we do not yet know what desire can do and are not yet able to fathom that we might be dreaming the end of the world so that contemporary organization might continue to engage in a Medean reverie of creative self-destruction (Wright & Nyberg, 2015), producing the anthropocene, in order to produce tools, intellectual and physical, to combat it. Endless sustainable growth. There is no Outside; Capital is limitless in its immanent machinic xenological overcoding and capture. There is nothing that it cannot axiomatize and render subordinate and suppliant to its own logics, systems, and technologies. Despite the supposed confrontation that they are intended to imply, stories of Gaia and Medea and their people are stories inflected with hope and they produce a new fertile territory for Capital’s capture, filling us with the warm and happy purpose of a new collective where we too can be a part of some joyous people who regard themselves as part of a new and optimistic future before we return to swallowing with glee the exquisite shit of Capital (Lyotard, 1993) and perpetuating the same mores and practices that we know are incompatible with the continued surviving and thriving of the many species of planet Earth. When the people-to-come remember us, they may well see us as Medea’s or Gaia’s children. The stories that these intruding mothers tell as they tuck us into bed are those that conjure fear, horror, depression, anxiety, and a crushing hopelessness that dire consequences are coming based on events that often have little to do with us as the anthropocene unfolds its tragic tales. Yet perhaps they will also remember us as being enamoured of the relational, as being attached to a notion of desire as joyous, imaginative, and affirmative, asking always of the conjunctive and…and…and… (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005), and what new can be produced. They will perhaps have completed a reckoning with a desire that is insatiated, brutal, nihilistic, and ravenous for escape; understanding at last that both conjunctive and destructive forces are still immanent to Capital. They will perhaps have been the first to realize that Capital has long colonized even the possibility of escape attempts, that it produces infinite escape attempts, infinite reforms, infinite revisions, schisming and fractally spasming in all spatial and temporal directions; that there is no escape from or Outside to the mall at the end of the world. There is only the life of the people-to-come.

3

THE PEOPLE-TO-COME OF CAPITAL AND THEIR …

39

Arriving at the hypothetical assembly of nations, the people-to-come will never have created a crisis of political theology by announcing they were the people of Gaia. Rather they will be the people of Capital — composed, constituted, and desired by it—pertaining only to the mall at the end of the world. For them, no distinction between nature and culture can be said to exist, their environs are always teeming with newly machined life that is always neither natural nor artificial. What for us is metaphysical confrontation, passes them by unnoticed as they tell us stories about Capital and wait for other members of the assembly to give their economic performances. For some at a certain point, the faces Stenger’s Gaia and Medea blur into each other as the myths and storying intertwine and we are reminded that it is the humans and not Gaia/Medea who are at risk in the anthropocene (see Culp, 2016). Yet to the people of Capital it matters not which mother burned the Outside. For them, it never could have been. ∗ ∗ ∗ What else do we know about this people-to-come? As Ron Bogue (2005) has commented, the question of the collective and polyvocal assemblage of a people has occurred throughout Deleuze’s corpus, and in particular, in his work with Guattari. They see in Kafka, for example, the invention of a people, a collective assemblage out of which the minor language of the text is born and to whom the text is addressed. The writer for them comes from someone and speaks to someone, serving as the means by which the storying of this people-to-come is actualized and its dreaming continued (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986). Deleuze (1997) develops this further in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, commenting extensively on how filmmakers like Pierre Perrault capture the fabulation of a people who are in process, a people who are becoming and constituting themselves through the stories that they are telling to make sense of the events of the present. Let us thus engage in some futurological speculation and prefabulation, recovering a capacity for imaginative storytelling, and think about who the people-to-come are, in order to understand what their memories of our present might be. The people of the mall at the end of the world are not the reaffirmed and confident survivors of apocalypse that we often see in popular media—disaster films in particular—nor are they miserable depressives who persist under the existential weight

40

S. MOHAMMED

of the mass extinction event from which they were spared. We cannot romanticize them by placing them within something in the order of an “elegiac subjectivity” (Deleuze, 1995) and instead should try to apprehend them as dwelling in the ruins of our civilization without grasping for familiar all-too-human concepts and formulations of emotions, experiences, and selfhood or seeking to recolonize their lives in the racialized, gendered, and class politics of our present and its histories. What we have in common with them and where we should begin thinking, of course, is that we are all living in the light of the spectre of capitalism—busied by the mythologization of a better time when people had “jobs” that they “enjoyed” in order to have a better “life”—but then as now there were no longer shadows to help any of us see more clearly (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005), only the unending glare of the bright lights of the mall. Put differently, what is in “our” desiring that might help us to understand “theirs”? Much like Deleuze and Guattari do in Anti-Oedipus, Jean-François Lyotard also draws out this theme of the complexity and perversity of desire as it operates within the social. In Libidinal Economy, he suggests that workers often come to enjoy the conditions of their own exploitation. The English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening. (Lyotard, 1993, p. 111)

Lyotard asks us to consider that we can enjoy subjugation, enjoy the feeling of alienation as our surplus value is extracted, and, in short, enjoy being used and abused by Capital. He speaks directly to the academics and intellectuals who presume to want to liberate workers from their false consciousness. For him, such critical injunctions remain myopic and useless as long as we are unwilling to consider that “one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst” (Lyotard,

3

THE PEOPLE-TO-COME OF CAPITAL AND THEIR …

41

1993, p. 116). One can enjoy exploitation, or as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “desire desires its own repression” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, p. 346). One can come to love Capital and its operations, revel in the sensual eroticism of Capital as it slowly massages the surplus value out of your body, delight in the carnal debauchery of swallowing Capital’s shit—keep buying your Gaia-branded products until the earth is covered over with the detritus of them, then fish them out of the swollen guts of a choked seagull and recycle them. Build a recycling empire out of the fragments that you find in animals that you gleefully disembowel while looking very sombrely at the camera so that you receive donations and funding from private and State bodies. Know that you are Capital’s dream. The people-to-come are braver than we are now because they no longer delude themselves into believing that they are separate from Capital and its desiring. Capital now often creeps into our dreams and we find ourselves desiring only that which is in the best interest of Capital, doing everything that we can to facilitate growth and create new markets (whether these are green or pink or the ironic red-white-and-blue of neoliberal “freedom”), yet many of us now still experience themselves as separate from Capital; still think that they are individual subjects with unique desires and interests. We rationalize what we are experiencing as our own desiring and as such we produce a reality that helps us make sense of Capital’s dreamings. Yet this is naive. As Mark Fisher (2014, p. 342) once eloquently summarized “humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations” that are simply waiting to be “sloughed off”. To think in such terms is to finally grapple with Land’s (2012) provocation that Capital is an artificial intelligence from the future trying to produce itself. Understood in this way, Capital’s ability to capture and overcode anything by subordinating that thing to its axiomatic can be seen not only as a survival mechanism, qualitatively indistinguishable from the replicative processes of a cell or other organism, but also as the stratagems of a hyperintelligent AI, trying to assemble itself. For Land, there is no escaping the coming “planetary technocapital singularity” where the human being is deemed irrelevant to further capitalist production and is sloughed off, replaced by something more useful to this artificial intelligence as it tries to continue to grow and profit on a planet in meltdown (Land, 2012). The interesting question for us is not the empirical “How or when will this occur?” but rather, since it already will have happened, about the desiring of Capital

42

S. MOHAMMED

and the people-to-come; did they seek out this future, lusting after its repressions? The people-to-come do not share our fear or trepidation at the prospects of the anthropocene. For the people-to-come, workplace alienation will have been experienced with joy and the sale of labour will have been perceived as an ecstatic amusement. They are a people who love Capital and would scarcely believe all of the negative things that presentday academic commentators say about it. For this people-to-come, desire has desired itself a milieu in which the only interests are those of Capital. Yet this is also a milieu in which nothing can survive, since Capital only desires the continuance of life insofar as life can help it to expand and grow. As such, only the spectre of Capital can survive; as performance and play. To return to the infamous Jameson (2003) quote, it is not that we cannot imagine Capital’s end, it is that we do not want to, or rather, that desire’s polymorphous nature dreams in Capital too many new possibilities and liberties for itself, and would only ever seek to grow and expand these. As such, if capitalism as we know it now was brought to an end by the impossibility of the continuation of productive and extractive industries, as we engage in a becoming-the-people-to-come, we would resurrect it, having come to love our own repression and subordination, having gorged ourselves for so long on the shit of capital that we scatological sommeliers cannot live without guzzling more. In the mall at the end of the world, Capital thus realizes itself as a new hauntology, a spectrality that produces itself in all temporal directions. What is thus most important for us is to reckon with the memories of this people-to-come. The people-to-come are storytellers. Stories always have a complex temporal relationship, drawing on a reservoir of tropes and mythologizations from our collective past, imagining some kind of future, animating the present; a good story bleeds in-between the three connecting and disconnecting, projecting, presenting, and recalling. For the people-tocome, the future will already have been cancelled, and the past will be something that they find themselves increasingly unsure of, living in an isolated enclave and thus uncertain of what could be said to have been true. Their storying will be auto-constructive, building itself out of a comingling of fact and fiction as this binary finally loses all meaning. Their memories of our present can tell us something essential about the future that is being prefigured. It is most likely that the people-to-come will have told stories of our brave attempts to save Capital. They will remember

3

THE PEOPLE-TO-COME OF CAPITAL AND THEIR …

43

how hard we worked to try to save it, to salvage it, to green it, and keep it going, despite the work of the naysayers who said that Capital could not live forever. They will recognize in the version of “us” that they construct in their storying, a shared love of Capital, a shared apperception of its beauty and a treasuring of its limitless possibilities; it is to, from, and of this particular “us” which we now speak. These are the stories that the people-to-come, those who dwell in the mall at the end of the world, will tell each other. Stories of how much of something called “stakeholder value” organizations used to create. Stories of how “resilient” they all were. Stories of how we all loved them. It will form part of an extended legendarium of what they remember of the past, whispered only occasionally as a story of hope in the mall at the end of the world. For Deleuze (1997), there will always have been a strange “double becoming” to the storying of the people-to-come; they constitute themselves along new future trajectories and potentialities at the same time as they are being constituted in the present. It is their storying and the ways in which it constructs our present that are important. In this way, we are not here interested in the ongoing debates that pit a feminist “politics of location” (Braidotti, 2002), or the slow and ethical posthuman becomings that are attentive to the corporeality of bodies in the present (Braidotti, 2017), or are interested to account for the historical and geological legacies of colonial exploitation and their entanglement with extractive economies (Yusoff, 2018), or injunctions that seek to acknowledge the cosmological perspectivism of Amerindian peoples and challenge us to rethink “the human” (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro, 2017), against a speculative realism that seeks to annihilate thought and the human perspective altogether (Brassier, 2007). All of these perspectives are immanent to Capital. It dreams on every scale or imagined grouping: psychic, physical, local, social, national, global, extra-planetary, or cosmic. “In a sense capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, p. 140). Capital was always with us; the “unnameable Thing” (Fisher, 2009). It was there in the primordial soup when there was no organization, waiting for those who could assemble it. It will be there when vacuum decay or heat death finally rend the universe, animating some spectral politics in order to continue to create surplus value to the very last. The question to ask is thus not about the differential injustices, or mythic structures, or forms of praxis and ethical

44

S. MOHAMMED

conduct of the present. In order to reckon with Capital in the anthropocene, we need to understand the memories of the people-to-come. To understand these memories, we may well need to learn to think like a shopping centre. What does it mean to think like a shopping centre? A shopping centre is an inherently schizoid and chaoid place. You can turn a corner on one day and find a trash pop-rock band enthusiastically playing a repetitive 4chord song in a bank, and on another walk into a grand atrium and find a group of aerial silk dancers, ornately and elegantly suspending themselves over the malls. You might find a pamphlet inviting you to an Evening in Wonderland, or see a bench dedicated to a now deceased employee. You might find an array of ornate ceramic elephants that everyone agrees have been put there as part of an art show for a charity, but no one seems quite sure which one. You might sit on a bench and hear the conversations of a couple discussing the latest reality TV show or the in-joking of a group of besuited business people on their way to an executive lunch at one of the shopping centre’s many restaurants. You might find intense surveillance, security, and systems of consumer control that go down to the level of trying to select specific scents and other atmospherics that will prompt consumers to spend more and at the same time find discussions of how free people are to wander and consume at their leisure. It is a space that demands a different ontology, a different set of becomings in order for one to be admitted to an understanding of it. Whenever it appears in the storying of chroniclers of the postmodern condition, like Baudrillard (1998) or Jameson (1991), the shopping centre’s surreality, spatial indecipherability, and paramnesiac qualities due to juxtaposition and pastiche are always highlighted. This suggests there is something about a shopping centre’s thinking that is not ordinarily available to us, almost as though it lived in another state of consciousness, more intimate to Capital, having sloughed off the illusion of its individual subjectivity, and abandoned intellectual anachronisms like gods, cultures, races, and natures in order to desire only what Capital desires. In their inability to recognize the alterity of the shopping centre, some have already acknowledged the intricate complexity of the relations of desire and Capital with the people we will have become. In Thinking like a Mall, Steven Vogel (2015, p. 138) writes:

3

THE PEOPLE-TO-COME OF CAPITAL AND THEIR …

45

it makes no sense to suggest that we learn to “think like a mall” as though this were something new or strange to us: a mall is a human artifact, and so whatever thoughts it might be said to have, even metaphorically, would be human thoughts. Thinking like a mall, one might say, is human thinking: it’s what we do all the time. To think like a mall is to think like us.

Vogel is here thinking in the simplest terms which suggest that the shopping centre reflects an all-too-human desire to express mastery over nature, that it only ever serves “human” interests. Drawing on the imagery of Aldo Leopold’s famous comments on “thinking like a mountain”, Vogel (2015, p. 143) suggests the following: If thinking like a mountain means recognizing the complexity of nature, and the way in which a single action […] has so many interlacing and unpredictable consequences that its ultimate impact is impossible to grasp, then thinking like a mall might mean recognizing the complexity of the capitalist social order and recognizing that it too will always escape our attempts at prediction and control.

But this is only to think like a mall in the most banal possible sense. It is to fail to see the shopping centre as a new aggregate of desire, capable of mobilizing in order to eat, shit, sleep, and fuck in its own ambulatory fashions. The fear of being understood to make any kind of proposition that would suggest that a shopping centre desires, actually thinks, sometimes dreams, or has any kind of consciousness, grips Vogel’s text, as he tries to continuously reassure the reader that a shopping centre is nothing more than a “physical object” at the centre of a number of human agents who act and make decisions. It does not itself have agency, it has only a certain independence from the human which is evidenced for Vogel in the example of the failure of a mall that he once frequented. Humans, he reasons, would not have predicted that the mall would fail and so we might conclude that a complex web of forces and influences led to the mall’s failure. In this regard, he does not fully grasp why he is correct that the way that a mall thinks is the way that a human thinks. They are not the same because humans designed malls, live and work on malls, and manage complex holding companies that own many different shopping centres at a time and thus do the thinking “for” the malls. Rather, it is that shopping centres and humans have the same desires and interests. So far has Capital’s overcoding extended. They are both shaped by the same tendencies within Capital. This will continue, of course, long after

46

S. MOHAMMED

anthropogenic climate change produces too many dead humans and too many dead malls for us to ever be able to mourn. It will continue well into the production of the mall at the end of the world, when only myths of things like malls exist anymore among the people who live there. They will believe that their refuge is one of a kind, built with a grand vision of creating the perfect place for humans to survive. They will not see the spectre of Capital until it presents itself, telling them that time is outof-joint, nor will they see the memories of the shopping centre, virtual figurations, haunting their present, such that they perform acts of sale and purchase without knowing what they are doing, not realizing that they are living out a fantasy being dreamed in Capital’s unconscious. To think like a mall is to think yourself as the reflexive and self-aware consciousness of Capital; this is why it is so often chaotic and juxtaposed, seemingly random and absurd, serious and surreal all at once—these are the fragments that Capital throws out, hoping to latch on to any surfaces and begin growth patterns that produce new and accelerating mutations. To think like a shopping centre is thus to exceed the greatest pataphysician, to overleap the greatest absurdist storyteller; to stitch, weave, and braid, fractals of images together into a surface onto which any desire can project itself. Any association, any connection, any resonance can appear in a shopping centre’s thinking, if it means that that image might prompt consumption. It is in the shopping centre that we might see the initial formations of a new kind of delirium. In the 1973 book We, the Lonely People Ralph Keyes (1973, p. 118) notes in passing that “Shopping centres aren’t part of the community. They are the community”. When speaking of the people-to-come, is it meaningful to insist on speaking about the human or otherwise parts which constitute the moving innards of the mall at the end of the world? Do their various dramas and performances matter if their actions are only the ventriloquizations of Capital? Theirs are sundry peristaltic and circulatory processes, carrying on various transmissions and transportations; their desire is homogeneous and uniform with those of Capital. How can one speak of an individual or a subject in such a context? The mall at the end of the world is filled only with the animated faecality of Capital—“the human” is no more distinct from it than human gastrointestinal microbiota are from humans, particular knowledges render them separate and other, but in the world of everyday experience, such a separation is unintelligible. For Keyes, the great spaces of enclosure that the

3

THE PEOPLE-TO-COME OF CAPITAL AND THEIR …

47

first shopping centres represented would eventually become “communities unto themselves”, the institution designed to serve the “community” eventually replacing it altogether. For him, this means that a new kind of communal solidarity emerges among the people who frequent the shopping centre every day, people eventually coming to feel a kind of connection to the space itself and its various politics and goings on. Shopping centres will always have been much more than just communities, they will have become collective machines with a transfigured “humanity” as their innards; these are the people-to-come. There may well be no coming return to Nature and no triumphant elaboration of the human into a techno-singularity. Instead, the new Earthbound is the mall, but one with no trade going in and out, only immanent circulation and peristaltic process. This text emerges out of the storying of this new people-to-come, the ones whose bodies are made up of concrete, glass, and metal. The people-to-come are thus not “people” at all (even if their desiring is the same as ours), but new organizations that have undergone monstrous processes of subjectification in order to be (de)composed as substitutes for the human, Capital having always viewed human life as irrelevant to the necropolitical processes of infinite growth and surplus value extraction, and so finally undertakes to eliminate their inefficiency altogether, extinguishing life and producing new desiring and machines in its place. The human will be sloughed-off and replaced once and for all with something closer to Capital’s heart. Yet there will never have been an intrusion of a divine feminine to save us. Indeed, calls or hopes for climate justice or equality in the anthropocene always seem to betray an attachment to the figure of some imagined mother who will bring retribution and recognition for all of those peoples who are maligned by the effects of global industrial capitalism. But no divine mother is coming. No Medea, or Gaia is coming to redeem us all, either through her benevolence or through the destruction of the Earth and the rebirth of something else in the ashes. We will have to do it ourselves.

References Baudrillard, J. (1996). The system of objects. Verso. Baudrillard, J. (1998). The consumer society: Myths and structures. Sage.

48

S. MOHAMMED

Bogue, R. (2005). Fabulation, narration and the people to come. In C. V. Boundas (Ed.), Deleuze and philosophy. Edinburgh University Press. https:// doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624799.001.0001. Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Polity. Braidotti, R. (2017). Four theses on posthuman feminism. In R. Grusin (Ed.), Anthropocene feminism (pp. 21–48). University of Minnesota Press. Brassier, R. (2007). Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and extinction. Palgrave Macmillan. Culp, A. (2016). Aliens, monsters, and revolution in the Dark Deleuze. Anarchist without Content. https://anarchistwithoutcontent.wordpress.com/ 2016/08/26/aliens-monsters-and-revolution-in-the-dark-deleuze/. Danowski, D., & Viveiros de Castro, E. (2017). The ends of the world. Polity. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations. Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997). Cinema II: The time-image. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toard a minor literature. University of Minnesota Press. http://www.elsevier.com/locate/scp. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2005). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Euripides. (2007). Alcestis, Medea, Hipólito. Hackett Publishing Company. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books. Fisher, M. (2014). Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on accelerationism. In R. Mackay & A. Avanessian (Eds.), #Accelerate: The accelerationist reader (pp. 335–346). Urbanomic. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Verso. Jameson, F. (2003). Future city. New Left Review, 21. https://newleftreview. org/II/21/fredric-jameson-future-city. Keyes, R. (1973). We, the lonely people: Searching for Community. Harper & Row. Land, N. (2012). Fanged noumena. Urbanomic. Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. Polity. Lovelock, J. (1995). Gaia: A new look at life on earth. Oxford University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993). Libidinal economy. The Athlone Press. Stengers, I. (2015). In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press. Vogel, S. (2015). Thinking like a mall: Environmental philosophy after the end of nature. MIT Press. Ward, P. (2009). The Medea hypothesis: Is life on earth ultimately self-destructive? Princeton University Press.

3

THE PEOPLE-TO-COME OF CAPITAL AND THEIR …

49

Wright, C., & Nyberg, D. (2015). Climate change, capitalism, and corporations: Processes of creative self-destruction. Cambridge University Press. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 4

In the Viscera of Capital: Practical Acceleration in the Contemporary Business School

Abstract This chapter offers a series of provocations around the following question: if Business Schools are observably co-opting and seeking to profiteer off of the anthropocene, then what can a critical management scholar possibly teach in order to bring about meaningful social or political change? It weaves together stories about the father of the modern shopping centre, Victor Gruen, with nihilistic accelerationist speculation around different pedagogic strategies for making a difference in the anthropocene in order to critically reflect on the potential futures available to critical management studies. Keywords Shopping centres · Business School · Sustainability · Anthropocene · Accelerationism

In 1956, the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, opened its doors for the first time. Designed by Austrian born architect Victor Gruen, it was the first fully enclosed and air-conditioned shopping centre. At some point in the not too distant future, the Doors of a mall at the end of the world will be sealed shut for the last time in order to secure, in perpetuity, the safety of those within from the ravages of the anthropocene as it renders the world Outside uninhabitable. The two events are connected. A series of fractures, fragmentations, different lines, and forms of sense © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Mohammed, Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78740-0_4

51

52

S. MOHAMMED

lie in between, a storying that is often mistaken as the random, happenstantial, and chaoid passage of time, but these two events will always have occurred, in some time and somewhere. Our task was never to change what can increasingly be regarded as a single event of cause and effect too manifold and convoluted in its nuanced formations to be disentangled and understood, rather we merely observe what is taking place and mark out the place in which it will have taken. In Shopping Town: Designing the city in suburban America, Gruen (2017) describes the process of designing and creating Southdale. In an exceptionally personal account in which he writes about journeying to America, his social life there, his various marriages and divorces, and his successes and setbacks, he also chronicles his many concerns and petpeeves, prime among them being the state of the main streets of American towns in light of the post-war ubiquity of the car. Indeed, the seeming banalities that populate his storying—like the absence of sidewalks in America and the consequent proposition that most people use their feet only for hitting the accelerator in their cars—come to be defining concerns for all of human history as they number among the inspirations that would impel him, in May 1943 in collaboration with his then-wife Elsie Krummeck, to pen an article for Architectural Forum, describing a space off the main street and out of the town centre, where cars had ample space to park and stores were located in one main building in which shoppers could walk freely in an enclosed space that included everything from doctor’s offices to libraries. Their vision was of a new town square, a new utopia where shopping was made into an easy and convenient activity, a leisurely stroll that involved the perusal of goods and general wares. The positive reception of this article encourages him to design ever more creative and futuristic buildings working towards this new vision amidst growing fame. Yet, it is worth asking who is working here? The brilliant designer, drawing on an eclectic array of European influences in order to design commercial properties with a uniquely aesthetic flair, or Capital, actualizing its desire at last, dreaming itself new productive organs in the form of a hyper-resonant and sonorous shopping centre with which to play its serenade, prefiguring the new subjects who will be able to live at the end of the world? In the 1940s on a trip to Detroit, Gruen observes the Hudson’s department store amidst the urban decay of the city centre and notes problems around parking and access. However, he also learns from acquaintances how it is prized as a single place that one could visit in

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

53

order to do all of one’s shopping. He expresses a desire to meet the owners of Hudson’s and comments the following: “they had no idea that I was the only man in the entire United States who could successfully fulfil their plans” (Gruen, 2017, p. 113). He speaks of the shopping centres as though he was fated to produce them, as though they were a utopian vision that only he was able to make real. But whose vision was this? Is this a story of an individual’s desire for success or the valences and trains of Capital, producing a subject that could engineer scenarios for its continued growth and expansion, giving it new possibilities and potentialities for accumulation that could continue regardless of the weather in the American Midwest. To speculate thus is not a fatalism, merely an acknowledgement of the eternally hopeful artificium optimus of Capital as it dreams us all. There is a peculiar resonance here to the expression of time that can be found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. At the end of Act 1, where it seems that Hamlet would indicate that it is late and that he and his companions should return inside for the night, he speaks out loud to himself an expression of his fate. He has just learned from the Ghost that his father was murdered by his uncle and thus that the order of filial succession—father to son—has been disrupted by Claudius’s plot for the throne. Hamlet proclaims: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” Time is here disjointed by the event of the former king’s death, with fracture lines radiating out into the presents of the play’s protagonist. All memories and all futures are now recoloured and recast by the event of the Ghost’s description of his murder. Hamlet’s melancholy in earlier scenes of the play is now recontextualized as the insight of his prophetic soul and everything that comes after is a doomed quest for vengeance. The event (notably an act of storytelling by the Ghost or and intruding father) is a cut or caesura in time which means that “beginning and end no longer coincided” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 89), that the sequence of events that could have been was radically disrupted. The birth of the first shopping centre is also such an event. The actualization of Capital’s greatest dream, disjointing time around the architectural designs of Gruen and colleagues in 1956. Yet as James Williams (2011) notes, Deleuze’s work holds on to the openness of the future, its “unconditioned character” and indeterminability. Deleuze’s metaphysical orientation towards difference means that he is always willing to see the new and as such the future can never be prefigured fully and known in advance; it is necessarily open. Yet, we ask what possible

54

S. MOHAMMED

future can be kept from Capital? It sells us the possibility of openness, knowing that we will find in it the hope created by the and…and…and…, it exists across multiple temporalities and virtualities thus necessitating a reconsideration of our temporality. The anthropocene brings the cancellation of the future with a resolve and determination that nothing has before. The unnameable something that comes with it, which we call the mall at the end of the world, is the place to which all of the myriad escape attempts that Capital liberates and makes possible are directed. Before it emerges, the shopping centre will have become a perfected model of Capital’s virulent desire for growth, covering over the earth in a vivacious web of endless malling, giving unlimited reach to these “machines of selling” as Gruen once called them. In this regard, the mall at the end of the world is little more than an actualization of a particular set of tendencies that were always inherent to Capital. It will always have been (be)coming. Capital will always have tried to agglomerate consumers into a space where they could be incited to consumption or a performance of it. If not a shopping centre, then a prison, or a school. ∗ ∗ ∗ I teach in a Business School in the UK. To say that it is a strange job is a gross understatement. To some degree, I find myself ensconced in the key site of Capital’s manic-machinic reproduction, where its ideas, values, systems, logics, disparities, and identities are spliced into the intellectual stock of the future, bred deliberately into each new generation of managers, accountants, analysts, and entrepreneurs. I do this because while Humanities departments across the UK are being downsized, the Business School continues to grow—drawing in vast wealth through moribund acts of auto-proselytization where knowledge that it creates by surveying and interviewing managers in contemporary organizations is sold back to the same managers who flock to the Business School for extortionately priced MBAs and executive-education programmes. All the while, the Business School continues to function as a neo-colonial institution that opportunistically preys on the aspirational dreams of life success held by middle-class parents in India, China, and smaller countries across the developing world, attracting students who pay almost twice as much as UK students with the promise that degrees will lead them to guaranteed employment and rapid career advancement, while also failing to

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

55

reflect them in its curricula (see Dar et al., 2021). As many in the tradition of Critical Management Studies (CMS) have noted before, however, these degrees are often little more than “a passport into corporate sleaze, mortgage slavery, burn-out, stress, overwork and repression; a future made bearable by the drugs industry, cosmetic surgery and electrified ‘entertainment’” (Jones & O’Doherty, 2005, p. 1). All of the classes that I teach—from an enormous “Introduction to Management” module that squeezes five-hundred undergraduate students into a single lecture theatre, to a smaller “Contemporary Management Challenges” module that puts me in a room with between thirty and fifty final-year undergraduates—draw on this critical tradition. CMS is uninterested in questions of how to make organizations more efficient, effective, or profitable, and more concerned with the question of how to make them more fair, equitable, and sustainable actors within the contemporary social milieu. As Valérie Fournier and Chris Grey (2000) describe in their essential essay, At the Critical Moment, CMS draws on an intellectual heritage of feminist, postcolonial, and Frankfurt School scholarship in order to pursue research and pedagogical agendas that are non- or anti-performative and pursue goals other than improving organizational performance, that denaturalize and call into question the taken-for-granted assumptions of business and management practice, and that seek to be reflexive, challenging the dominant orthodoxy of positivistic research. The ongoing legacies of CMS are how I find myself teaching Deleuze and Guattari or Foucault to final-year undergraduates on the BSc Management programme. In some ways, it is a critically subversive project, as it disillusions the students, not only in the sense of making them depressed and discontent as I point out the structural conditions of oppression which define life in contemporary organizations in terms of discipline, control, and subjectivation but also in the sense of removing “illusions” by challenging the misconceptions that many of them have about the mores of contemporary capitalism, having been raised to believe in the benevolent freedoms and liberatory ethos of neoliberalism. Yet over the last few years, I have been persistently dogged by the thought that my presence is—far from being that of the fly in the ointment, the nagging doubt, or some kind of potentiality for the awakening of a critical consciousness—a help rather than a hindrance. I often reflect that by describing to students that the contemporary world of work is a nightmarish hellscape of totalitarian technological surveillance,

56

S. MOHAMMED

stress-induced burnout, addiction to performance enhancing drugs like Modafinil and Ritalin, drinking cultures and resultant sexual harassment scandals, and shocking rates of death by overwork (and then teaching them about the existential resources that one can use to cope with it), that I may not be helping them to survive. Further, I often ask myself whether I want to build better capitalist workers with critical awareness and the potentiality for micropolitical resistance who are thus able to cope with the stresses and strains of the subjection of contemporary capital, or perversely whether I want to build worse ones who break down, collapse, burnout, and apathy so that their corpses gum up the machines of work. If the ways in which work-death is ignored in the contemporary milieu are any indication, the latter is far from a viable strategy for bringing about change, to say nothing of the fact that it would be an ethical failure to support my students. Similarly, I often wonder if in some obscene way, I lend legitimacy to Capital’s endless destructive desire, rather than prompting it to question itself, doubt itself, or undermine itself, by making the Business School seem to be a more inclusive space than it is. Many critical management educators feel the same and are acutely aware that they often act in service of global capitalism (Perriton & Reynolds, 2004). In the Business Schools of today, I fear that “critique” is only ever tolerated when it can be operationalized into a benign and denuded discourse of “transferrable skills”, for everyone knows that being a “critical thinker” improves your employability. Which is to say, being a critical scholar is only an acceptable performance insofar as it is amenable to the interests of Capital. Yet, this is perhaps only a story which critical management scholars have begun to tell ourselves in response to overt hostility from many Business Schools which have been forcing critical scholars out of their halls in recent years (see McCann et al., 2020). Perhaps then, the real fear is of my own lack of efficacy, that the best-case scenario for me is that my critical voice can, through careful pedagogy, become some kind of internalized voice of doubt, buried in the unconscious of these newly produced capitalized subjects who spend years learning little more than how delicious the shit of Capital is. We empower them to develop a hyper-metricized and numerico-technical episteme so that they learn to measure it, to quantify it, to assess it and rate its performance, to motivate it, to win over its heart and mind and graduate as accidental scatologists into bullshit jobs (Graeber, 2013) and speak the languages of Capital by reproducing endless arrays of what

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

57

André Spicer (2018) calls “Business Bullshit”, a kind of jargon and neologism rife Newspeak of the corporate world which students learn how to modulate and manipulate in order to pique Capital’s interest (or show their subservience to it). Critique in such an environment could only ever be a whisper. One made with the hope that it might drive someone mad enough to be uncontainable, bursting out into some new ravenous madness which Capital could not accommodate. For years, the solution to this fear has been to adopt a rhetoric of “alternatives”, to pursue the hopeful idea that if students see championed more democratic, egalitarian, and solidaire forms of organizing (e.g. cooperatives), they would be more inclined to pursue these themselves, slowly reforming capitalism into a more socialist or social democratic formation that is more deferential to workers’ rights, is less environmentally and ecologically destructive, is better able to serve the needs of local communities, and so on (see Parker et al., 2007). However, there is increasingly an acknowledgement that Capital and the Business School are too intimately imbricated, that the Business School can be nothing other than the accelerating engine of Capital’s manic-machinic reproduction, facilitating it through both ideological proliferation and the development of new technologies. As such, CMS luminaries like Martin Parker (2018) have taken to calling for Business Schools to be shut down altogether and abandoned for new kinds of “Schools of Organizing” which might teach students about alternative organizations. Hope is the great error in this position. Hope that an Outside exists, hope that Capital could be reasoned with or changed. Hope that showing students that more ethical forms of managing and organizing are possible and that this will translate to large-scale systematic changes in contemporary organizations—this despite the fact that there is a litany of evidence that each escape attempt, each undertaking which seeks to bring about change or otherwise disrupt the destructive norms of capitalism, is simply co-opted and returned to work in service of Capital. This Hope is precisely what the anthropocene prompts us to abandon. To understand why, let us consider how the Business School thinks. In 2015, as a part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UN unveiled 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with focuses ranging from the elimination of poverty and promoting gender equality, to creating the “conditions for sustainable, inclusive and sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all” (United Nations, 2015, p. 4). It is currently something of an

58

S. MOHAMMED

academic vogue to get a quick publication out by critiquing the SDGs for being anthropocentric, colonialist, or continuing to perpetuate neoliberal ideology and enshrine infinite growth as a necessary part of continued human welfare. These things, however, do not matter very much in a Business School, many of which often dream themselves to be a kind of trade college that prepares people to be employed by contemporary organizations. In a Business School, a Director of Studies for a BSc Management degree programme might, hypothetically, be sent a spreadsheet that maps out which modules on their programme match up to the SDGs. The spreadsheet itself may have been created by a member of the professional services team who scanned module specifications and guides looking for key words and then suggested which modules might be “sustainable” in terms of the 17 dimensions laid out by the UN. The spreadsheet is an administrative follow-up to the University’s 2025 Vision which specifically mentions that it wants to embed the SDGs into all aspects of teaching and research, in response to broader policy pressure, like the UK government’s “Grand Challenge” of “clean growth” or a 2014 report from The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) titled “Education for Sustainable Development” which catalysed their embedding of languages of “sustainability” and “social responsibility” into subject benchmarks for Business and Management. The spreadsheet doesn’t ask for changes to module content or that meaningful adjustments be made to what the academics on the BSc Management programme teach or even that there be an acknowledgement that “less unsustainable is not sustainable” (Wright & Nyberg, 2016, p. 478) or that we need to break with the logic of “business as usual” that embeds the practices of neoliberal capitalism as a “hidden curriculum” (Parker, 2018) in every Business School degree. Sustainability has long been hijacked (Parr, 2009) and many have noted that as long as it is discussed through the lenses of “profits, resources, markets and consumption”, we will continue to fail to address the “critical social, environmental and economic questions” necessary in order to bring about change (Banerjee, 2011, p. 729). Yet, here we see the spreadsheet emerges as an isolated intelligence with its own dreaming that does not require material changes to the world for it to be considered a legitimate concern. The performance is enough, a spectral sustainability, that will be described as an important “signposting” of the good work that colleagues in the Business School are already doing. The spreadsheet will be used to post about the SDGs on the school’s virtual learning environment so that

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

59

students can come to understand that they are learning “sustainability”. The findings of the spreadsheet are likely to make it into the Business School’s marketing material for the degree where it will boast about how it is teaching students to be “ethical”, in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and photos will be taken of Business School students planting trees outside, or keeping a moss garden on the roof of the building, or wearing new green hoodies with the slogan “For a Better Tomorrow”, or something similarly nauseating. Virulent chameleonic ventriloquism. To be sure, it is more coherent in its associations than the shopping centre, but the Business School will still be or say anything that it thinks that Capital desires. Are you an 18-year old from China who harbours postcolonial dreams of coming to England to study at a Western university and then get a job at one of the Big Four Accounting firms? The Business School will offer you an array of courses that teach you things that Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG told the Business School that they want graduates to know, along with a diverse assortment of “employability” training and access to an alumni network. Do you care about racial injustice or gender discrimination? The language of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion is now everywhere in contemporary Business Schools. Do you consider yourself an “ethical manager” and you’re looking for an MBA to help advance your career? The Business School will sell you a “Green MBA” where you’ll learn all about how being sustainable and ethical can be profitable so that your organization can continue doing business as it always has, but with new green logos and a warm hopeful feeling that you’re trying your best to do the right thing. If the shopping centre is Capital’s pulsating and reverberating heart, then the Business School is its Mouth: speaking, spitting, sputtering, and swallowing the masticated remains of the student body. It is thus that the Business School becomes the ideological epicentre of the anthropocene; the place where new imaginaries are manufactured to secure Capital’s survival in perpetuity, through global ecological collapse and beyond. The question with which we are thus confronted is if the Business School is Capital’s great yawning maw, able to swallow up any resistance or idea of “alternative organizing” that might offer a more hopeful future in the anthropocene and subordinate this to Capital’s axiomatic, what else could we do? What could we stuff down Capital’s gullet if we wanted to choke it to death, and rebuild a better society amidst its putrefaction and adipocere? What new imaginaries can we invent and sell to the

60

S. MOHAMMED

eager students of the Business School; what mad and incensed dreamings could we infect them with so that they might as vectors travel through organization and splice new hybrid ideologies into the collective unconscious? What stories can we tell the managers, accountants, investors, and entrepreneurs of tomorrow so that they can inflict the most damage to Capital possible, and thus stand the greatest chance of bringing about meaningful change (if that is what we wanted to do)? It is thus that accelerationist dreams slip into one’s unconscious, and one awakes suddenly in the middle of the night coated in a thin layer of sweat and murmuring incoherently about strategies for selling Capital its own death by means of teaching students about contemporary organisations, only to find that one can no longer be sure whether one is awake or still asleep. As we noted before, Marx (1971, p. 120) speaks about capitalism as having a certain tendency which “contradicts it as a limited form of production, and thus impels it towards its own dissolution”. Capital will always seek the extension of the market resulting in the annihilation of space and time. Marx seems to suggest that Capital was always fated to eat itself, to produce the contradictions that would result in its own destruction. Yet, even if these contradictions were not enough to kill it (see Deleuze & Guattari, 2000), these tendencies become a useful tool of social change. Why not accelerate them, and see what happens rather than remaining enmired in a language of “alternatives” and waiting for the Business School to capitalize upon each one of them? The revolutionary question thus becomes, what are the tendencies within capitalism that it cannot accommodate? What will lead to it producing its own Outside and what can we do to accelerate this process? More so than any of the other tendencies that have been spoken of by contemporary theorists, like the privatization of the digital commons, the Singularity, or the threat of nuclear annihilation, it is as we have said before, the catastrophic events associated with global ecological collapse in the anthropocene that Capital will least be able to accommodate. Why not try to accelerate it? ∗ ∗ ∗ Strategy 1: All it takes is a little push. The story of Jason Trigg, a former programmer who quit his job and went to work for a high-intensity trading firm in order to make as much money as possible and donate his wealth to philanthropic causes (Matthews, 2013), has long been circulating around the kinds of conferences that CMS academics frequent, a

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

61

piece of tangential minutia trotted out in moments of drunken boredom at pubs and wine receptions in after-hours. Indeed, the kinds of effective altruism championed by contemporary ethicists like Will MacAskill (2015) and his 80,000 hours project have a certain appeal. If we are never going to be able to make meaningful reforms to Capital, then let the Business School teach students to ruthlessly pursue fiduciary responsibility at the expense of everything else and thus construct them as the perfected organisms of Capital’s reproduction. Having worked so long and so hard on “becoming employable” that they are able to turn any quality, any hobby, any identity into something saleable to the contemporary corporation, why not just let them do it? Let them prostitute themselves for Capital. Empower them to enjoy it! Surely that would be the purest nihilism? Teaching students to profit maximize, because if nothing matters, why shouldn’t they build their labour into a machine algorithm for replicating money? Make all of the money that they can and realize all of the dreamings that Capital has laid out for them as “life success” and then donate the excess to a charitable cause so that they too can have that warm anesthetizing sensation that resonates with the impotent feeling of “at least we tried”. All it would take is a little nudge to convince them to donate a proportion of their earnings in order to be “ethical”. What would I teach them in order to accelerate this process? Some provocateurs within the Business School have recently suggested that if Business Schools were really serious about “employability” they would become glorified “finishing schools”, teaching students how to make intriguing dinner conversation, what watches are currently in fashion, what glass shape best compliments what wine, and so on, so that they can schmooze, brown-nose, ingratiate themselves, and impress out of town guests over the kinds of unctuous and sycophantic “business lunches” that are part of some story of “how business is done” (O’Doherty, 2016). By such a logic of “enhancing employability”, we could radically pluralize the Business School, feeding it more academic disciplines, having everyone from lecturers in the History of Art or literary criticism, to pick-up artists and other conmen giving lessons that contribute to the refinement of the subtle arts of politesse and organizational politicking, so that students could rapidly climb the corporate ladder and begin donating their earnings to environmental activism. For a skilled critical scholar, it would take no more than a module or two, disguised as something else, to embed a seed of doubt into student’s

62

S. MOHAMMED

thinking, presenting charitable giving as “investing in the future” or something similarly brandable. Yet, what would this change? It is at best a means to an end, where the end is itself uncertain. Capital will not die simply because we convince its most prodigious children to turn on it and try to buy its death. At best, it might be able to empower charities to stall, to buy out some swathes of land, reforest and rewild it, and then police it as a nature reserve where we can stash endangered species until global ecological crisis makes that no longer possible. Or it may end up poured into humanitarian aid to support those places that are likely to be worst affected by the anthropocene. At worst, it might go into political donations and lobbying and so end up funding some politician or other to buy their own space on survivalcondo.com. Much like teaching students about “alternative organizations”, all of these events occur immanent to Capital’s desire and could never have done anything to abate the emergence of the mall at the end of the world. It will likely be a Business School graduate who builds it. Strategy 2: Keep teaching critical theory so that Capital can sell it. In a sorely underappreciated 2010 paper, Kane Faucher (2010) asks the reader to consider a simple question: “What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac”? Through a twisting argument, Faucher presents evidence to suggest that if we want to understand the creeping, spreading logic of a rhizome and track its axillary offshoots, we need to look no further than the ways in which McDonald’s has propagated itself across the surface of the Earth, inflecting so much of the social milieu—as others like George Ritzer have noted—with its logics. In the process, for Faucher, McDonald’s even swallows up Deleuzian concepts, demonstrating many of them better than any radical art practice or subversive method could none more so than the rhizome whose six properties of connectivity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography, and decalcomania it demonstrates with a practiced perfection. Indeed, if one were so tempted, one might argue that McDonald’s is so successful because it is so rhizomatic, because it breaks with conventional methods of growth and organization, perfecting a highly methodical “science” of food production that can be replicated en masse. Here is a grotesque and nightmarish strategy. Purposefully teach future managers critical theory so that they can better grow their organizations, better exploit their workers, and better destroy the environment. Teach them Foucault so that they can think themselves Panoptic prisonguards instilling regimes of disciplinary control into the subject. Teach

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

63

them Marcuse so that they can imagine new ways to propagate forms of repressive desublimation and enshrine one-dimensionality as a core component of human life in organizations. Teach them Baudrillard so that they can design new hyperreal and simulacra-riddled office spaces that run thick with nostalgia. Offer them Freud and say that it’s about motivation. Throw some Butler and Spivak in there and say that it’s about “Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion” in order to help the School meet Athena Swan goals. Most importantly, give them Haraway and Tsing so that they too can be interested in the tentacular and the earthbound crawlies who live and thrive on the planet, and give them Latour, Descola, and Viveiros de Castro so that they can be sensitive to the stories that we have told ourselves around the division between Nature/Culture and have interesting minutia to throw out at dinner parties. Give them the history of philosophy and watch them either be forced to forget it as they enter a workforce where Capital has no need of such ideas, or embrace a dark joy as you watch them use it to further the ends of Capital. This is already happening. One student, in a module evaluation questionnaire for one of the modules that I teach, writes about how they used the “critical thinking skills” that they gained on my module in order to impress interviewers. Their chameleonism was so potent that even I could not tell whether they meant this sincerely, or whether they were performing that they had read the module through the lens of employability in order to impress the Business School’s management who might be on the lookout for underperforming modules to cull. It wouldn’t really make a difference if I could tell. As we saw with the Sustainable Development Goals, nothing escapes. What is most concerning is that critical management scholars at times do this deliberately when questioned about what value their approaches add in a job interview or other formal setting, and then selling it as subversion. “We all know that employers these days are looking for graduates with critical thinking skills ”, says the critical management scholar to an interview panel in order to try to get a job. We are already telling this story so why not do it deliberately? Purposefully? Teach students all of the critical theory that we can. Show the looming threats of the climate crisis. All the while layering over a generous helping of capitalist realism so that they continue to believe that, as Mark Carney suggested, it is the only way to change things. In some sense, this is the only role that critique within the Business School will ever have had. It will never have been a tool of resistance, undermining and spreading gangrenous decay from within; it will always

64

S. MOHAMMED

have been a means of legitimation—presenting the Business School as a legitimate site of “higher learning”, and offering itself up for commodification and conquest—an indoctrination apparatus for Capital. As Land (1993, p. 66) suggests Critique belongs to capital because it is the first inherently progressive theoretical procedure to emerge upon the earth; avoiding both the formal conservatism of inductive natural science and the material conservatism of dogmatic metaphysics.

Nothing is more critical than Capital, its endless polymorphous undulations produce infinite fractal offshoots, endless disruptive innovations, each time creating the new immanent to itself. Critique was never an escape, merely Capital unfurling, stretching itself to its full height at last, revealing thus its most ominous and imposing formations: organization. Why not deliberately give future managers and actors in organizations new tools with which to do this? Offer more critical theory in bite-sized and digestible chunks, packaged in an invisible layer of capitalist realism, so that they are more easily swallowed? Answer: because this isn’t fast enough. We can slowly allow critical ideas to continue their process of becoming axiomatized and embedded in capitalist work relations and hope that this might make a difference, but it is worth asking whether we can do this any quicker. Can we try to accelerate the process? Strategy 3: Teach accelerationism. What happens if we teach accelerationism to students in a Business School? No games, no hiding the agenda and trying to strategize what combination of words and ideas would get them to accelerate. No tricks, just tell them. Imagine a lecture series for first year undergraduates. Five hundred eager and buzzing students crammed into a lecture theatre in late September for the start of the academic year. The projector screen flickers on and instead of a trite and banal welcome greeting the screen shows the following: The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in. (Land, 2017)

What if we simply told students that our unqualified aim was accelerating capitalism’s dynamics? Would they balk and recoil? Complain that

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

65

this isn’t what they signed up to learn? Would it even make sense to them, this body of students who arrive with sincere dreams of business success? Would one or two modules be able to undo years of environmental messaging that has indoctrinated them to believe that if they keep buying new shit from Capital, from energy-efficient light bulbs to a bagfor-life, we could all be saved from the ravages of the anthropocene? Could that hope be abated? Yet, the accelerationism that one might teach seems itself to have ironically stalled (or at least slowed down), and increasingly those who might be described as accelerationists seem unsure of what or if they are accelerating. The kind of “Right-accelerationism” that we see in Land’s work as it moves from the heralding of the planetary technocapital singularity to a return to monarchism and flirtations with white nationalism and neoreaction (see Land, 2013), has been welcomed by the alt-right into their online spaces and so can be observed to fall in love with its own mythologization, becoming little more than a new version of The Turner Diaries. Conversely, the kind of Left-accelerationism that exists seems so married to traditional notions of human welfare and flourishing that at a certain point it becomes difficult to distinguish in practice from the demands that a more mainstream Leftist might make. For example, the demands made by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2015) in Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work—like a fully automated economy to save us from the drudgery of work, reducing the working week, providing a universal basic income, and the scuppering of work ethics by reinforcing a “right to be lazy” in a slow move towards a post-scarcity utopia—are hardly radical, having become pseudo-mainstream political talking points in neoliberal strongholds like the US and UK. Indeed, Universal Basic Income has already begun to show-up in Human Resource Management textbooks and consequently on Business School curricula. Even if we commit to accelerating automation and machine replacements for human workers by doing the admittedly very easy work of selling Business School students the idea that they need to pursue automation strategies in order to remain competitive, what are we actually achieving? Once Capital finds an acceptable replacement for human labour and an acceptable substitute for human decision-making in the purchase and sale of commodities, then the human will be sloughed off; the human body becoming nothing other than a now irrelevant tool that Capital once used in order to stimulate itself. Here, the Left-accelerationist belief that “capital’s human face is not something that it can eventually set aside” (Fisher, 2014) and critique of

66

S. MOHAMMED

Land’s abandonment of the human as a drag on capital’s acceleration fails to account for how easy it will be to “speed past” the social and political problems that fully automation and mass redundancy will create. Desire can desire being cast aside and eschewed in favour of further growth. Moreover, Srnicek and Williams (2015) are careful to identify that the social and political strategies necessary to achieve the demands that they set out will require substantial revolutionary and ideological shifts and “any transformative project will take time.” So while they go about “pluralising economics, creating utopian narratives and repurposing technology” in order to shift the Overton window, the anthropocene continues on, and the mall at the end of the world begins construction. Their post-scarcity utopia is there, but unironically, so is Capital. Someone else can, of course, wring their hands and wonder whether this is an accurate representation of Left and Right accelerationist positions and so continue the unironic stagnation of accelerationist ideas in debates about what the correct form of praxis is—or indeed if there should be any praxis at all because the process is self-propelling. We are thinking too fast for that and frankly have more pressing problems to worry about, like what to teach in our Introduction to Management class. In this regard, telling stories of the mall at the end of the world in the Business School might well be a good way to embrace an accelerationist politics—not trying to reform capitalism at all but telling stories of its ends as a means to get there faster. The darker and more horrifying the better. Purposive hyperstition, stories willed into existence with bile and sheer spite so that Capital might be forced to enjoy producing its own contradictions and bringing about its own collapse. It would take a skilled critical management scholar, but someone could do it; plant the seeds of self-interested survivalism and branded ideas like “The Future is Underground” deep in the student body or disguise it as something else or just throw it out and leave it for someone to wilfully pick up and grow on their own. Entrench a logic of destroy, destroy, destroy (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000) in order to grow faster. The mall at the end of the world might thus find a meat shell with which to actualize itself and we could roll the dice on whether that is a “better” future or not. At the very least, the story that death is inevitable as only the wealthy survive the anthropocene might take some students hopefulness away, quelling their creativity and by proxy Capital’s ability to produce the new. Yet, it is worth asking what trying to embed accelerationism in the Business School would actually accomplish. More importantly, who or

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

67

what is thinking here? Some critical management academic who has made a Klein-bottle out of their body by placing their head so far up their own arse that the only thing that they can gaze at is their own navel? Or are Capital’s dreamings in their long, ephemeral, and elusive trains simply entangling some new connection that would put an endemically lazy foot on the accelerator and manifest “The Business School of Tomorrow” as a site of hyper-expediting dynamics where a new managerial class, with all of their innovative and creative potentialities laid open, would meditate in new sweat-lodge style classrooms while high on mescaline, psilocybin, or some more experimental psychoactive cocktail, in order to feel and be affected by the invisible hand of Capital. For everyone will know that employers of the future are looking for “experimental thinkers” and, of course, if Capital massages your prostate with the right rhythm and intensity, the resulting waves of sensation will produce something like an Idea, a disruptive innovation, or some other new paradigm-altering and creative way of profiteering off of the production of ecological collapse that functions surreptitiously, and requires the asking of too many critical questions to unravel. Something sagacious that turns contemporary discourses against themselves. But it will really be Capital with its hand up some student’s arse, its ventriloqual form fully realized, working in earnest to achieve the same things that it always has—this time through making some drugged-out Management students have visions of turning the algal blooms that result from the eutrophication of waterways caused by the human interference with the nitrogen cycle into food bars that they can sell for next to nothing to developing countries in order to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal of eliminating hunger. The student will not be aware that this is simply a perverse actualization of “Soylent Green”, itself perhaps the ethical superfood of the future, Capital having managed to realize this hyperstition at last. Visions flash before their eyes of fewer people dying from hunger leading to increased deforestation which in turn accelerates biodiversity loss and the accumulation of atmospheric Carbon. Synesthetic delirium kicks in as their toes bend and their backs arch to the thought that novel ships and freight engines would have to be designed to transport this new superfood all around the world as reliance upon existing infrastructure would harm their green branding in the long-term, so they’d be able to partner with various States, all of whom are eager to upgrade their infrastructure. And as they loudly and emphatically ejaculate and experience the shuddering of their body as a

68

S. MOHAMMED

great exhaling of the entirety of the sensible cosmos, they will conceptualize a way to save on the costs on packaging by coating the algae bars in edible nano-laminate, a move that will have been heralded as the beginnings of a widespread post-waste culture but actually involves the creation of toxic runoff chemicals that are dumped, via a State-subsidized series of pipes, directly into the ocean. It is thus that we finally arrive at the point. The only way forward is through, into the anal-oesophageal-oral Klein Bottle. There was never an Outside. You can accelerate to give yourself something to do, but it will make about as much difference to Capital in the long run as if you didn’t. As Land (2014, p. 520) comments, if by this stage accelerationism appears to be an impossible project, it is because the theoretical apprehension of teleoplexic hyper-intelligence cannot be accomplished by anything other than itself.

No strategy brings about change. We can only look to observe the process as it feeds back on itself, takes on different speeds, velocities, and textures. It is perhaps these same algae food bars that will be served to residents in the mall at the end of the world. ∗ ∗ ∗ In the epilogue to the 1960 text Shopping Towns, Gruen and co-author Larry Smith speak explicitly of the future of shopping centres. They speak of their inevitability, of their growth and expansion suggesting that “barring the possibility of a man-made or natural catastrophe, more and increasingly better centres will be built, as foreshadowed in present plans and thinking” (Gruen & Smith, 1960, p. 267). The prophetic nature of the statements here are intriguing; shopping centres would only come to an end through catastrophe. The shadow of the mall at the end of the world looms large, shading over all of the interstitial time that separates the opening of Southdale and it. Capital here functions as a kind of dynamic range compression, attenuating the signals, reducing the high peaks of becoming and leaving the lows to produce a more even and more uniform set of futures in which only the conditions and possibilities of the dreamings of the mall at the end of the world are met. For Gruen, the shopping centre was always a utopian vision. The shoppers who first walked through the doors of Southdale in 1956

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

69

experiencing for the first time an indoor, air-conditioned space lined with birdhouses, goldfish ponds, garden cafes, sculptures, and artworks— all designed to effect a quality of perpetual spring—must certainly have thought so. Gruen never saw his work as a catalyst for rampant consumerism, only a better life. He and Smith suggest that: The shopping centre which can do more than fulfil practical shopping needs, the one that will afford an opportunity for cultural, social, civic and recreational activities will reap the greatest benefits. (Gruen & Smith, 1960, p. 267)

Yet, while current shopping centres gesture at this idealistic space of a totalizing cityscape able to provide for all of the needs of shoppers, none really achieve the dream of a complete space that can meet all of the needs of the people inside. It is only the mall at the end of the world which will have become this perfected utopian imagining, being utopian in both the sense of a highly desirable society free from want, squalor, racial tension, class stratification, and so on, but also utopian in the sense of it being a no-where, a kind of non-place, for any other place against which its placeness might be measured would be gone. Yet, Gruen’s story is ultimately tragic. Gruen is often quoted to have rejected his legacy seeing, a few years before his death in 1980, what shopping centres were becoming: I am often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities. (see Wetherell, 2014)

Capital took Gruen from behind and gave him a child that was undeniably his, yet monstrously other (cf. Deleuze, 1995), some kind of distortion that had been produced by pumping desire through its circuitries and viscera, creating this utopian dream, and the outsider who would convince the world to build it, as a new mutant morphology of the retail form that would cover over the planet, only to show him at the last a vision of the empty and spectral performance of work and alienation, enjoyed by fully capitalized subjects, as a way to taunt him. He was buggered hard enough that he slammed his foot on the accelerator. Perhaps the founders of ESCP Business School, established in 1819 and purportedly the first

70

S. MOHAMMED

Business School in the world, also felt the same kinds of remorse and regret, having at some point stumbled into a precognition or nightmare of how the Business School would spread over the earth, and indoctrination camp wearing the flesh-suit of an educational institution. Make no mistake, it is most likely a Business School educated “entrepreneur” who will fund the building of the mall at the end of the world. In this regard, the future is only open insofar as we do not know which mall at the end of the world will (be)come, but it cannot be avoided. There are no escapes, no exits, and no Outside. The question is not if but where and when. In the visionary text The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, Gerard O’Neill (1978) tries to imagine a future where humanity lives in vast interstellar spacecrafts which he dubs “Islands”. On one of the Islands, he describes an idyllic kind of middle-class 1950s existence, complete with “low-rise, terraced apartments, shopping walkways, and small parks” (ibid., p. 7). The Island has a perfected “Hawaiian climate” and provides residents with an array of things to do to entertain themselves including cinemas, restaurants, and theatres. Yet, this is not the utopian vision of life in space for which some would wish. O’Neill was wise enough to add that it operated under the control of the fictional UN-backed “Energy Satellites Corporation (ENSAT)” which allowed residents to have their freedoms “as long as productivity and profits remain high” (ibid., p. 8). These are prefigured shopping centres, spaces where a spectral capitalism lives long after all extractive possibilities are exhausted. Indeed, in Shopping Town, Gruen (2017) notes with pride how these interstellar vacuoles of Capital could be referred to as the “Southdale of the Stars”, acknowledging readily that the shopping centre represented some perfected form of human/Capital interfacing, that would replicate endlessly circum- and extra-planetary. Perhaps this is the form that the mall at the end of the world will take, assuming of course that Kessler syndrome does not set in and render us indefinitely earthbound. Yet, Capital itself already exceeds this; dreaming for us futures where the planet is rendered uninhabitable and humanity takes to the stars to live in simulacral fabrications of some version of the present. From films like Interstellar to Wall-E, Capital is all too willing to perform our disgust, perform our rebellion, perform our critique for us (Fisher, 2009), showing us images of humanity living in these space-bound shopping centres. The critique is part of the process. This hyperstition is already uploaded into the cultural consciousness. Why would we hope

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

71

for anything else? What fool thus indulges in the hope that Capital could die, or, to ask this question differently, how does Capital produce the conditions where we could be imbued with the rancorous audacity to hope that it will no longer be around at some point, and how does this serve its agenda of growth and accumulation? So far this book has been foolish enough to only consider “hopeful” visions of the mall at the end of the world, those where there are still something that the reader might recognize as “surviving humans” to enjoy swallowing the exquisite shit of Capital (even if we have tried to deny that the people-to-come can be thought in this way). There are still more hopeless imaginaries to explore, where Capital outlives the human, its indifferent and polyvalent desire having gotten rid of it at last. Such a projective eschatology would provoke us to wonder what we would bury deepest, would secure with the most backups and fail-safes, would seek to protect above all else. Let us once again engage in some imaginative storytelling. Imagine a cavernous bank of servers wherein algorithms continue to automatically trade on a stock market whose shares are for companies that no longer had any surviving human workers. All of the employees of Aramco, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon have long since died in one climate disaster or another, but value is being created regardless. The emergence of such a space would be the ontogenesis of a new form of economic autopoesis. One nuclear-powered server farm pings another, requesting that a document be checked for errors and conformity to the Law. After being analysed, an approved version is returned to it. Another server farm generates a press-release that is rapidly scanned by another, which then begins to buy a certain set of shares. Short options are created and traded. New companies are created to insure the speculation—there is no possibility of collapse because the actual cannot intervene to “correct” the valuations. Rather, a wholly virtual economy exists, communicated entirely in programming languages. Old protocols are still enforced, so if one company grows too large, it is broken up into separate entities that vie for common resources. Trades average out to being entirely random. An endless process of valuation and exchange of nothing, an automatic economy without people in it, spectral capitalism at its most pure. The major obstacle to it is the continued persistence of human life. The framework for this dromo-maniacal economy of instant share processing already exists and AI and bots are already being trained to trade like people. Yet in some ways, this aberrant machine-only economy would be ideal, as

72

S. MOHAMMED

the “business of business ethics” so often taught in the Business School would finally be actualized into a series of codified rules to which all “organizations” would conform as each would want to publicize their commitment to sustainability targets, protecting an “environment” that no longer exists and indeed, it is here that the sustainability sold by the contemporary Business School is finally possible as anything more than a delusion. Productivity will be improved by the removal of that great inefficiency: the human, finally realized as little more than the waste products of Capital; now superfluous and so enfolded into another space and time. This may well be the shape and form of the mall at the end of the world.

References Banerjee, S. B. (2011). Embedding sustainability across the organization: A critical perspective. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 10(4), 719–731. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2010.0005. Dar, S., Liu, H., Martinez Dy, A., & Brewis, D. N. (2021). The business school is racist: Act up! Organization, 28(4), 695–706. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1350508420928521. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations. Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2001). Difference and repetition. Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Faucher, K. X. (2010). McDeleuze: What’s more rhizomal than the Big Mac? Deleuze Studies, 4(1), 42–59. https://doi.org/10.3366/e17502241 10000796. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books. Fisher, M. (2014). Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on accelerationism. In R. Mackay & A. Avanessian (Eds.), #Accelerate: The accelerationist reader (pp. 335–346). Urbanomic. Fournier, V., & Grey, C. (2000). At the critical moment: Conditions and prospects for critical management studies. Human Relations, 53(1), 7–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726700531002. Graeber, D. (2013). On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs: A work rant. Strike! https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/. Gruen, V. (2017). Shopping town: Designing the city in suburban America. University of Minnesota Press. Gruen, V., & Smith, L. (1960). Shopping towns: The planning of shopping centres. Reinhold Publishing. https://doi.org/10.16309/j.cnki.issn.10071776.2003.03.004.

4

IN THE VISCERA OF CAPITAL: PRACTICAL ACCELERATION …

73

Jones, C., & O’Doherty, D. (Eds.). (2005). Manifestos for the business school of tomorrow. Dvalin Books. Land, N. (1993). Making it with death: Remarks on Thanatos and desiringproduction. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 24(1), 66–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1993.11644272. Land, N. (2013). The dark enlightenment. https://www.thedarkenlightenment. com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/. Land, N. (2014). Teleoplexy: Notes on acceleration. In #Accelerate: The accelerationist reader (pp. 509–520). Urbanomic. Land, N. (2017). A quick-and-dirty introduction to accelerationism. Jacobite. https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-toaccelerationism/. MacAskill, W. (2015). Doing good better: Effective altruism and how you can make a difference. Gotham Books. Marx, K. (1971). The grundrisse. Harper & Row. Matthews, D. (2013). Join Wall Street. Save the world. The Washington Post, pp. 11–14. McCann, L., Granter, E., Hyde, P., & Aroles, J. (2020). ‘Upon the gears and upon the wheels’: Terror convergence and total administration in the neoliberal university. Management Learning, 51(4), 431–451. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1350507620924162. O’Doherty, D. (2016). Manners, taste and etiquette: New practices of “politesse” in business and management. In C. Steyaert, T. Bayes, & M. Parker (Eds.), The Routledge companion to reinventing management education (pp. 523– 537). Routledge. O’Neill, G. (1978). The High Frontier: Human colonies in space. Bantam Books. Parker, M. (2018). Shut down the business school: What’s wrong with management education. Pluto Press. Parker, M., Fournier, V., & Reedy, P. (2007). The dictionary of alternatives: Utopianism and organization. Zed Books. Parr, A. (2009). Hijacking sustainability. MIT Press. Perriton, L., & Reynolds, M. (2004). Critical management education: From pedagogy of possibility to pedagogy of refusal? Management Learning, 35(1), 61–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507604041165. Spicer, A. (2018). Business bullshit. Routledge. Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work. Verso. United Nations. (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. https://sdgs.un.org/publications/transforming-our-world2030-agenda-sustainable-development-17981. Wetherell, S. (2014). The shopping mall’s socialist pre-history. Jacobin. https:// www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/the-last-shopping-mall.

74

S. MOHAMMED

Williams, J. (2011). Gilles Deleuze’s philiosophy of time: A critical introduction and guide. Edinburgh University Press. Wright, C., & Nyberg, D. (2016). Engaging with the contradictions of capitalism: Teaching ‘sustainability’ in the business school. In C. Steyaert, T. Beyes, & M. Parker (Eds.), The Routledge companion to reinventing management education (pp. 468–481). Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Living Without Hope: Stories for the Rising Tide

Abstract This chapter critically examines the most common theme to stories in the anthropocene: hope. Even among the bleakest stories that seem to suggest that there is nothing that we can do, and global ecological collapse is coming regardless of our actions, some glimpse of hope returns as the truest expression of the totalizing nature of capitalist capture. Through weaving together reflections on the art of Antony Gormley, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, becoming a Doomer, and the writings of Romanian-born philosopher, Emil Cioran, this chapter seeks to make a case for the virtue of ambivalence in living in the anthropocene. Keywords Cioran · Ambivalence · Hope · Anthropocene · Storytelling

Outside of the Turner Contemporary Museum in Margate, UK stands a metal statue facing the sea. Titled “Another Time” by artist Antony Gormley, the statue of a man which gets slowly covered by the rising tide is similar to those which were part of his “Event Horizon” piece that placed figures around London, New York, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro as well as the “Another Place” sculptures on another shoreline in Liverpool, UK. For Gormley, the pieces all speak to a certain stillness, translated in an encounter between the art and its viewer. I fell in love with this piece when I first saw it when the sun was setting on a greying © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Mohammed, Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78740-0_5

75

76

S. MOHAMMED

afternoon in the Autumn of 2018. The figure of a man, stoic and motionless—neither afraid nor hopeful, merely inert—being slowly enveloped by the tumult of the roiling tide made me think about l’appel du vide, the call of the void. Many of us have experienced this strange and unsettling feeling, often described as the “high place phenomenon” or “intrusive thoughts”. It is the curious vertigo that you feel when looking down from a high place, the feeling of fear and trembling not that you might fall but that you might jump. These are the terms in which Kierkegaard (1980) famously defined anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom”, the terror of realizing that you are vulnerable to the primal fear of the freedom to die. There’s a passage from Hamlet that I often reflect on from time to time, a line delivered by Horatio in Act 1, spoken shortly before Hamlet’s famous line about time being out of joint, where Horatio warns Hamlet against following the Ghost, seeing it as a danger and a threat, its spectrality being a harbinger of death, following it being too great a risk for the Prince to take. He says: What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles o’er his base into the sea, and there assume some other horrible form, which might deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness? Think of it: the very place puts toys of desperation, without more motive, into every brain that looks so many fathoms to the sea and hears it roar beneath.

The call of the void is perhaps best described as the toys of desperation thrown into the brain, a beckoning of madness, a moment where other forms of reason and rationales become possible, a summons from the salt and spray of the sea. I think about this often because I cannot tell who or what is calling from the void. I often wonder if, when faced with the freedoms of contemporary scholarship, I hear the voice of the mall at the end of the world, speaking in and through the tongues of those who still have hope that we will be able to reengineer our society in order to save it from the worst ravages of the anthropocene. Whispering that if we can make all of the right changes, we would find ways of surviving. Whenever there is hope, the mall at the end of the world is being built. Wherever there is hope, we see the most surreal and brutal actualization of the Human as nothing more than the meat puppet of Capital, as Capital is the greatest of optimists—being

5

LIVING WITHOUT HOPE: STORIES FOR THE RISING TIDE

77

comprised of nothing more than those tendencies to liberate and realize desire in even the most extreme and impossible circumstances. As such, the reader may well rebut that pessimistic nihilism is equally a commodifiable territory and while this is of course true, there are only so many black T-shirts, copies of Schopenhauer and unironic posters of Friedrich Nietzsche that can be sold. This is a line that Capital would of course pursue, but it is too niche, too easily exhaustible, it would always seek out others more productive and volatile, like potentially revolutionary gestures towards degrowth, Carbon Tariffs, plant-based diets, reduction of plastics, and so on. These are not changes of or to the status quo, even they too can be captured, and via capitalist axiomatization transformed into means for securing future growth and profitability. Nothing escapes. The revolutionary slogan of “It’s not too late to change!” is a capitalist rallying cry. Capitalism is at home in the mall at the end of the world and its nascence represents our collective coming to terms with the reality that we may all actively desire this possibility, an unending, unwearying, absolute spectral capitalism, another Ghost, waiting for us in the anthropocene. Every hopeful story that we tell ourselves about sustainable local practices and “returning to the land” or communing with and being sensitive to Gaia adds another brick. Every new greening initiative established with the unspoken goal of securing new levels of private wealth may well fund the purchase of the land on which the mall at the end of the world will have been assembled. Every new technoscientific breakthrough is an opportunity for further capture by Capital, only hastening the arrival of that people-to-come who will inhabit the mall at the end of the world; the people who will tell stories of us now. They will speak endlessly of our brave fights to save Capital through our many imaginative attempts to reform it. They will tell each other, with tongues of hope, of how we all believed that it was great and true; how much we all loved Capital. Our fictocriticism is already in the process of becoming our history, whether through them or through some other form of the mall. When I first saw “Another Time” in 2018, I saw it as an enthralling and sublime existential image, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog had been brought into the world, a living tableau which I could watch with a certain melancholia as a perfectly still and stationary figure was swallowed up by the tide. Around a year and a half before I saw it, I was deeply depressed and actively suicidal. The psychological scars of trying to die never fully disappear or dissipate, so I was easily enraptured by this image of a motionless man slowly being submerged in the sea.

78

S. MOHAMMED

A lesser analysis might be preoccupied with a psychoanalysis of this, or indeed with the art-nature entanglement or intrusion that emerged when a number of invasive barnacles, Austrominius modestus, started growing on the “Another Place” installation at Crosby Beach outside Liverpool (Bracewell et al., 2012). Such an analysis focusing on the existential affect of the piece, or the entanglements and tensions that it can provoke, seemed to me to be irrelevant but it was a long time before I could articulate why. It was only after some time that I realized that what was most important in the tableau was not Antony Gormley’s statue, or even the unique assembly created by art and moving sea, but the waves. Their endless undulation as a series of peaks and troughs, cresting and falling; their deep rhythm as a kind of machinic pseudo-peristaltic process producing a primal percussive pattern. In all of their complexity and tumult, surely we can say that the waves have dreams? Surely, they think and move of their own volition—or at least dream that they do? As Emil Cioran (2012a) suggests: If the waves began to reflect, they would suppose that they were advancing, that they had a goal, that they were making progress, that they were working for the Sea’s good, and they would not fail to elaborate a philosophy as stupid as their zeal.

Surely the waves would reflect on their trajectories and potentialities and conclude that they were individuals choosing to swallow up this cast-iron man standing on the shore. Some waves would, of course, wish themselves to pull away from the rocks. Perhaps they believe that they are conservationists who are worried about the impact that their movements, forces, and effects have on the shore. Perhaps these waves think themselves to be crashing more softly, making less of an impact upon the beach. Perhaps they try to resist, straining and fretting over their movements. Yet the tide rises all the same, covering the solitary figure of “Another Time” with predictable and chartable frequency. The tides are a simple system, the anthropocene is not, yet the coming of the mall at the end of the world is equally expected and unsurprising, the future that will always have happened, a rising tide that covers us, hope and all. ∗ ∗ ∗

5

LIVING WITHOUT HOPE: STORIES FOR THE RISING TIDE

79

Born in April 1911, Emil Cioran is among the most prescient of philosophers as his work is often invested with the same themes of hopelessness, despair, depression, pessimism, and death that populate the news reels of the twenty-first century. His cryptic but poignant aphorisms sketch out a world of “Automatic melancholy: an elegiac robot” where machined productions of melancholia and pessimism constitute a reality in which death can be thought of as success and the cemeteries can be adorned with the slogan: “Nothing Is Tragic. Everything Is Unreal” (Cioran, 2011). In philosophy as in wider social life it has long been taboo to be a life-denier, nihilism being seen as an intellectual dead-end to be combatted, fought against and eternally out-manoeuvred. Indeed, the tyranny of happiness in the contemporary milieu—with its compulsory “customer-service” smiles, performances of joyous and successful living on social media, and the same doped-up drug cultures, which the antipsychiatry movement has railed against since the 1960s, that preclude the feeling of anything other than numb neutrality or a paper-thin veneer of affectless contentment—is absolute despite the wealth of critical commentary on it (Ahmed, 2010; Cederström, 2018; Davies, 2015). Yet writing in On the Heights of Despair, Cioran (1992, p. 53) actively beckons and yeans for apocalypse or some cataclysmic event that would bring about the “triumph of nothingness and the final apotheosis of nonbeing”. Throughout his many works, Cioran develops himself to become the philosopher of hopelessness par excellence, consistently showing a strident commitment to staring straight into the melancholic and morbid aspects of the human condition, exploring a perpetual becoming-pessimistic by accepting, embracing and bearing without protestation, the weight of human sufferings, flaws and insecurities. His thought embraces paradox and the ambivalence and meaninglessness that comes with it. He argues that “everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other” (Cioran, 1992, p. 116). Consequently, Cioran explains that he lives an absurd existence, one where, abjured of any meaning or purpose to life, “I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing” (Cioran, 1992, p. 12). What more or better purpose could one need? What other meaning is there to find, other than living and not living for no reason at all? To live in this way is to be without imagined permanence or legacy, without deity or transcendent drive, without connection and relationality to others, and without Hope. Indeed, as he suggests in All Gall Is Divided, “only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who

80

S. MOHAMMED

can no longer be… optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?” (Cioran, 2012b). Nothing is worth living or dying for. The question of meaning and purpose that have animated philosophy for so long is entirely irrelevant and there is only a kind of staying, a continuance, a depressive realism. This is perhaps what it takes to see the anthropocene with eyes unclouded by Hope. In Cioran’s work, we find a philosophy that is adequate to the anthropocene. Yet some might suggest that a turn to Cioran is not needed as there is currently already a far-ranging pessimism to discussions of the anthropocene. Many are openly claiming to be without any hope that things will change, seeing the political gridlock that any attempt at systematic change meets, seeing the continuance of “business as usual” across multiple industries and spheres of life, seeing new news items being published every month about a report from Committee X which describes how new climate modelling and data suggests how essential it is that we act now to save ourselves from Calamity Y, while knowing that the political will to prevent such catastrophe does not exist, and thus concluding bluntly and resolutely that “we’re fucked”. In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton sketches out a case for this kind of resigned pessimism, highlighting exhaustively how extensive the scope of anthropogenic climate change and other effects are, as well as drawing attention to their acceleration and permanence, saying eventually that the greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality. (Scranton, 2015, p. 23)

Scranton’s text eventually comes to suggest that we need to adopt practices on the order of “negative visualization”, seeing ourselves die in the failure to avoid global ecological collapse, in order to better prepare ourselves for it. Yet hope returns—amidst the Zen/Stoicism of learning to die through reminding oneself every day of ones mortality in order to maintain detachment and the abstract contemplation of a return to classical literature—Scranton finds a way to believe that humanity will emerge from the anthropocene, suggesting at the last that: “humanity can survive the demise of fossil-fuel civilization and it can survive whatever despotism or barbarism will arise in its ruins” (Scranton, 2015, p. 108). There

5

LIVING WITHOUT HOPE: STORIES FOR THE RISING TIDE

81

are two ways to read this. Firstly, as with calls for us to imagine new solutions, we can read this critically as an overtly “anti-revolutionary” politics. Capital is endlessly gleeful if you believe humanity will survive (albeit after unimaginable suffering) because why would you do anything other than wait to die with hope that the species will live on to comfort you, and as such the current mores of capitalism can continue indefinitely? Your apathy helps no one. This is, of course, only a valid reading if you believe that change is possible. Secondly, that it is Hope speaking through Scranton, rendering his fatalistic project of learning to die as an insincere rhetorical device, a way for Capital to capture even resigning oneself to one’s fate. In another sense, such a reading is detached from the currents and flows of the contemporary social milieu. Capital will soon have no need of living human workers. Observing the ways in which organizations have been responding to the challenges of the anthropocene, either by ignoring it, trying to profiteer off of it, embracing their own brand of technoaccelerationism and so on, who can deny that they are actively trying to make sure that, as Land (2012, p. 443) suggests, “nothing human makes it out of the near future”. However, even Land might be here read as giving hopeful commentary, speaking not only to the kind of accelerationist entrepreneurialism that would produce new innovations in human–machine hybridity (pushing us ever closer to the Singularity) or artificial intelligence, but offering a way of staving off the existential terror of non-being with which the anthropocene confronts humanity. Relax and be replaced, uploaded, or augmented. Or, accept the welcoming embrace of nothingness with all of your death drives finally sated. This cannot account for the people-to-come, the capitalized subjects who live only by desiring precisely what Capital desires. They are endlessly hopeful. Hope is Capital’s great ethos, and each of the heads of the hydra has caudal autonomy. In the essay Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, Paul Kingsnorth (2017) presents a kind of resigned pessimism about the fight against anthropogenic changes to the planetary ecosystem which is similar to Scranton’s. Telling stories of his youthful activism, Kingsnorth speaks of a feeling of loneliness and isolation, of being cut off and then reconnected to something in solidaire becomings with nature. He envies his younger self his environmentalism, seeming to mourn for it like a loss of childhood innocence, where “growing-up” means reconciling oneself to understanding that the rainforest can’t be saved, pollution can’t be

82

S. MOHAMMED

stopped, and the fabled hole in the ozone never really disappeared. Now with a wizened pessimism he sees contemporary discourses of “clean energy” and “decarbonization” as little more than the perpetuation of a paradigm of “business as usual”—continuing the expansive and colonizing story of human progress by seeking to sustain life only for the human—just with lower carbon emissions. Capital will finally be impelled to capture those last and most resistant territories of the earth, covering over deserts with solar panels, mountain peaks with wind farms, and oceans with hydropower stations. As he puts it bluntly “today’s environmentalism is about people” (Kingsnorth, 2017, p. 78); saving the world for us. Yet hope returns, even as he mocks at the myopic anthropocentrism of so many who call themselves environmentalists and ridicules the attempts by Capital to save “coffee shops and broadband connections” from Gaia’s violent revenge, Kingsnorth’s is a project of hope that some measure of individual peace can be saved. He proposes withdrawal, leaving behind activism, advocacy, and pretence so that he can journey on his own to try to reconnect to the ephemeral and ineffable feelings that he once had while spending the night on a hilltop in Winchester, or traversing the jungles of Borneo. In the Dark Mountain Project manifesto which he coauthors with Dougald Hine, Kingsnorth similarly reveals his project to be about reconnecting to some sense of connection and relationality with Gaia as well as other humans. They suggest that “the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us” (Kingsnorth & Hine, 2009). This is a peculiar kind of self-deception, a bizarre delusion or perhaps it is just doublethink, allowing one to believe that global ecological collapse is not only immanent but unavoidable and believing that somehow humans through solidarity will make it out of this OK, as though we are not easily replaceable fodder for some people-tocome and as though the weight of a mass human autogenocide would not warp all future possibilities, bending and curving the lines of the future into waves that crash and converge on the shore. This illness is systematic it seems, leading many to invoke Walter Benjamin to speak of a “hope without optimism” (see De Cock et al., 2021). Each time hopelessness is revealed to be a pawn in some means-end calculus of saving some of the humans, or even simply to fight over the ashes of civilization. One wonders that this hopefulness is not simply climate denialism with another face.

5

LIVING WITHOUT HOPE: STORIES FOR THE RISING TIDE

83

In perhaps the most openly hopeless text on the subject of the anthropocene, Benjamin Haas (2016) grapples with the feelings of futility that come from knowing that environmental catastrophe is imminent while being impotent to change the future or meaningfully avert disaster. He recounts a story of being tasked to photograph a number of whales and dolphins in Japan in 2014, falling in love with their beauty in that moment, before watching helpless as they are butchered by hunters. The experience is one among many that compels him to be a “hopeless activist”—“an earnestly depressive curmudgeon to fight the hegemony of hope” (Haas, 2016, p. 282). Haas is certain that nothing will change, that we face complete annihilation through the vampiric exsanguination of all of the planet’s life and resources. Eventually he resigns himself to the role of a witness, someone willing to suffer and be affected by species extinction and the mass of senseless death that the anthropocene brings, committing himself to feel that trauma, to be driven mad by the nightmares, to be respons-able for the xenoforming of the earth. Yet, there is a melancholic hope in Haas’s work, that his death will come and, bringing with it the end of a universe, his suffering will end. A dark idea; death as a cure for the ills of the anthropocene. Yet even as those brave enough, like Haas, accept the death of our species, there is hope that death will come, that we can escape, that in the peaceful nothingness of non-being, there is a kind of Outside. But the mall at the end of the world is waiting and it is utterly indifferent to our anthropocentric lamentations for the species that are dying. It stands as a reminder that there is no Outside to come. Humans will not be gifted with death, nor will they have the illusory joys of continued life. The people-to-come live only insofar as they are the sheets that cover Capital’s ghost, its spectral presence having been actualized at last in a place where nothing else can reside. Hope always returns because we like stories with happy endings. They remind us of simpler times in our childhood years when stories had clear heroes who did good and obvious villains with motives no more complex than simply wanting to be evil. In the anthropocene, the stories that matter all seem to have no hero and you are the villain. Any attempt to sugar coat this is farcical. There is no beginning, no ending, no “hero’s journey”, and no climactic battle. Just the mall at the end of the world waiting to be born. As such, in the twilight of the anthropocene Hope peels off its face to reveal that it too has been capitalized and is now nothing more than a machined part of Capital’s imbrication with desire. Hope was always desire, only with an arrogant expectancy that the thing

84

S. MOHAMMED

hoped for would come to pass. Hope was thus always proper to Capital; the great optimist, at last revealed to have been biblical in scope, a virulent artificial intelligence, an artificium optimus , that always finds a way to triumph through calculative supremacy; its vast computational potential offering unending possibilities for new control and capture. It seems thus that hope has become a kind of myiasistic infection. A parasite writhing and wriggling under the skin of the human host, slowly eating away at it, producing necrotic tissue and trypophobia-inducing cavities in the body. It will take an acerbic and arduously hateful pessimism to extract this parasite and disinfect the wounds that it has created in thought. Yet perhaps this is too moderate a reading, separating the parasite Hope from the body of its host. As Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard tried to remind us in their different ways, desire can come to desire this subjugation, desire the infection, and thus produce subjects to embody it. We live out Capital’s great hope and are vectors for its transmission and promulgation. But of course, like the waves, we think ourselves as moving of our own volition. In order to understand this Hope, we return to Cioran. In A Short History of Decay, he says bluntly “hope is a slave’s virtue” (Cioran, 2012c) developing this in Drawn and Quartered by saying “one is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping” (Cioran, 2012a). Hope is a disease. To hope, for Cioran is to render oneself intentionally blind and ignorant to the tumults and vicissitudes of life, it is to intentionally anaesthetize oneself to the intensities of feeling that are at work in the present. Hope is the virtue of the masses, the herd, the indolent, those unwilling to bear the weight of pessimism. In All Gall Is Divided, he says plainly “to hope is to contradict the future” (Cioran, 2012b). In the anthropocene, of course hope becomes a contradiction of the future; speaking against it futilely as though one could re-joint time or open the possibilities of the new again. As though one could outwit Capital, or avert the mall at the end of the world when it is already being built. For all of the incisiveness of his pen, Cioran’s (2011) is a philosophy of still acceptance. In The Trouble with Being Born, he imagines a pedagogy for our times arguing that “the only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life”. Existence is a form of suffering that is foisted upon you without your consent. Things don’t get better. There is nothing to hope for. The right thing to do is simply to accept it, with all of the paradox and ambivalence that doing so entails. In doing so, one would recognize that death’s arrival is no more consequential than its absence as there is “no difference between being

5

LIVING WITHOUT HOPE: STORIES FOR THE RISING TIDE

85

and non-being, if we apprehend them with the same intensity” (Cioran, 2011). How different would the landscape of contemporary thought be if more of us took Cioran seriously? Hope impels us to consistently turn away from the ideas that we would rather not think or associations that we would rather we did not see or have. Ecofascists, for example, are defined by their hopeful trust that if they are totalitarian enough and genocidal enough, then some humans will survive the anthropocene. In this regard, they are qualitatively no different from those who hopefully trust that if they are vegan enough and zero-waste enough, then some humans will survive the anthropocene; it is simply a question of who and how many. For a more extreme consideration, to return to Latour’s fictional assembly of nations, rather than tell the story of those who emerge to say that “we are the people of Gaia” in a gesture of benign confrontation whose intrusion is quickly set aside as a deferential bureaucratic process adjusts to accommodate and recognize them with an appropriate position, what if the announcement came: “the first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America”? This is how Angela Nagle (2016) reports the actions of a school shooter, as they were described on the /r9k/ board of 4Chan. The main qualities of an image board like 4Chan are that it is unmoderated and that all posts are anonymous, meaning that anyone can post anything without fear of repercussions. Nagle finds on /b/ and /r9k/ a new kind of posthuman, driven by the organizational logics of the board. Such an entity believes everything and nothing depending on the context, enamoured of being a hostile contrarian who abhors feminists and supports white nationalism and playful troll who never means anything. Such an entity has no identity because they can have any identity. They can take any form and present any demographic constellation because the board records none for them. They exist at the moment of posting as pure potentiality. One can, for example, post an image of a woman being choked to unconsciousness, accompanied by text that is repellent with misogynistic ranting that describes women as pathetic trash and then reply to that post anonymously, calling themselves pathetic for taking women so seriously. All that matters is the performance, the spectral spectacle of conversation. As we have already noted, there is an omnipresent affect of hope that lurks everywhere in our popular culture. Even in disaster movies, like Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, hope eventually breaks through the skin of the narrative, where people of all different races and

86

S. MOHAMMED

walks of life come together to survive a common catastrophe (of course, Mexico would forget decades of xenophobic and nationalistic foreign policy from the USA and simply accept millions of climate refugees). Yet the hope inherent to this redeemed humanity showcases just how much our imagination is lacking. How much we do not want to think that the human that survives the anthropocene might be one abhorrent, repulsive, or unimaginable to our often liberal, judicious, and prosperous fantasies of the future. Imagine if the movie of the present is made and instead of a scrappy but diverse gaggle of survivors on a ship looking out at the dawn, it is an incel in a basement who survives the anthropocene. What if this is a form of the people-to-come? Nick Land (2013) describes such entities as “data-empowered, web-coordinated, paranoid and poly-conspiratorial werewolves”, given impetus to action by changing social mores. Homo Novus is here given a new malign form, not an evolution to something to be celebrated or a rising phoenix from the ashes of humanity devastated by the anthropocene, but something that would accord many of us no sense of hope at all. Indeed, it is long past time that we stop glorifying the builders of the mall at the end of the world. The figure of anthropocene survival is not likely to be some heroic Elon Musk-esque entrepreneur or some other disaster capitalist (Klein, 2007), or even an environmental activist with large-scale conservation and rewilding plan, it is Josef Fritzl. The most likely survivors will be doomsday preppers, neoFritzls, and far-Right conspiracy theorists who’ve stocked up in their own private bunkers because they see the anthropocene (or any collapse) as a welcome catalyst to the collapse of the State. Humans impelled to dig and bury themselves and their loved ones underground by a desire that they cannot fully understand or conceptualize. Of course, they do it of their own free will and not because Capital is dreaming new strategies of survival and expansion, transforming them into TV shows and faux-shock news items for our amusement, so that it might continue to grow and profit. These waves think for themselves, as do we all. ∗ ∗ ∗ “Doomer” is a relatively new term with an unclear provenance. In its most general sense, it refers to a new generation of people who look at the present sociohistorical moment and see no hope for a liveable future amidst multiple compounding economic collapses, wage stagnation and a decline in opportunities for long-term career advancement,

5

LIVING WITHOUT HOPE: STORIES FOR THE RISING TIDE

87

political polarization, potential desertification, ocean acidification, largescale deforestation, unquantifiable pollution, no substantial changes to our dependence on fossil fuels, and an ongoing mass extinction event that is devastating flora and fauna globally. The term has been used to describe some of the work discussed in this chapter, like the Dark Mountain project, while also resonating with work in its periphery, like Jem Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” (see Hunter, 2020). It is difficult to critique a Doomer’s outlook. If they are wrong then given the stakes it seems reasonable to assume the worst case and prepare for it, but why would anyone assume that they are wrong when there seems to be so much that validates the core ideas that social, economic, and ecological collapse are inevitable parts of our now truncated future? For those who still believe that resistance is possible, thinking like a Doomer is dangerous because it seems to give Capital exactly what it wants, particularly those organizations, like oil and gas companies, who stand to benefit the most if we stop protesting and trying to “save the world”, as though any alternative strategy could possibly deny Capital’s desire. But of course we reject hopelessness as a political and philosophical position. There is a horrendous audacity to hopelessness, one which we as a society cannot tolerate. Being hopeless doesn’t sell new ecofriendly goods, produce vegan diet products and generate traffic on zero-waste lifestyle blogs. Hopelessness doesn’t contribute to GDP or allow for continued economic growth via novel sustainable innovations from the business world that might scrub greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere or make plastics more recyclable. Hopelessness doesn’t drive political campaigns or stimulate investments in pension funds. Hopelessness doesn’t get students to pay extortionate fees to the Business School. Hopelessness is a content and dispassionate nihilism that resigns itself to the inevitability of gross human suffering on a genuinely and emphatically unimaginable scale. It runs contra to almost every impulse that characterizes the processes and lived realities of contemporary organization. As such, the anthropocene confronts us radically with the absolute futility of the work of much of the contemporary academy: no new concepts, no novel stories, or creative ways of thinking will “save us” and we cannot “imagine our way out” (cf. De Cock, 2018) of this predicament. We will still be reading Deleuze and Guattari, and thinking of new concepts, and dreaming of a new place where we can survive, and considering new perspectives, and proposing new ways to account for difference,

88

S. MOHAMMED

and championing alternative imaginaries and… and… and… when mass extinction leads to the collapse of food chains, when cities flood due to rising sea levels, and when the comingling of storms and drought reduces the amount of arable land possible for us to cultivate food. Nothing will avert the coming crisis and indeed, the hopeful desire to avert it is Capital’s and Capital’s alone. It is thus long past time that we heed Nietzsche’s (1996, p. 45) inversion of the myth of Pandora’s Box which acknowledges that Hope is the “worst of all evils”, the one that all the others perhaps fled from once the box was opened. A hopeless position would begin to resign itself not to some self-aggrandizing anthropocentric project of “learning to die well” but to the truly nihilistic realization that the mall at the end of the world will always have been waiting for us, and that our actions will always have been irrelevant to its arrival, that our hopes for the future were always those of Capital. Yet perhaps it is comforting to believe in this artificium optimus of Capital that produces the mall at the end of the world—a way of absolving ourselves of responsibility in the present. Perhaps we delude ourselves to believe that there is no hope because we are just puppets with the Invisible Hand gesticulating in our rectal cavity. Such a reservation is brimming with undignified childish petulance. Of course I make my decisions for myself; no one tells me what to do! We must fight the evils of neoliberalism to the last! We do not deny that there is a comfort in nihilism of which we should be wary but to hold to questions of our own autonomy, individuality, and subjectivity is to fail to recognize that the subject exists as organization against the future, against equality, against peace and against justice; it exists only for Hope, as a vessel for Capital’s desire. It is thus that we arrive at the strategic lacuna, or perhaps more accurately cul-de-sac, that characterizes thinking in the anthropocene. This is why the political Left has stalled, why accelerationism seems to have Klein-bottled, and why many of us seem content to delude ourselves into believing that individual actions and changes on a local level will be enough to make a difference; because there is nothing that can change. The mall at the end of the world is already (be)coming, its spectre is already actualizing itself into the present and becoming ever more real with new performative economics invented every day. We are all simply varying the temporality and spatiality of its arrival. The question is not if but where and when. So what are we supposed to do? When Deleuze (1992, p. 4) looked at the emergence of the control society and sagely advised that “there’s

5

LIVING WITHOUT HOPE: STORIES FOR THE RISING TIDE

89

no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”, he was also wise enough to refrain from suggesting what the weapons were for. Perhaps he didn’t know. Perhaps he simply meant that they were conceptual bricks to be thrown into the courthouses of contemporary reason (see Massumi, 2005). Perhaps he dreamed it but could never bring himself to say because he wasn’t sure whose dream it was. Perhaps it was just too horrible to say. Death. Agglomerate weapons in order to butcher ourselves. The more brutal and relentless the better. Find something to scratch the itch in your veins that thinking about the anthropocene gives you. Cut deeper and longer to accelerate the process. In the anthropocene it is as good a strategy for bringing about change by controlling population growth as any. Or do absolutely nothing and balk at the audacious hopelessness here, for to say anything like this, even as a hypothetical, is blasphemous heresy that can be misinterpreted as allegiance to ecofascist beliefs. However, to recall Cioran, if you are an optimist with no more reasons to hope, what else are you supposed to do? As he asked pointedly in The Trouble with Being Born, “What are you waiting for in order to give up” (Cioran, 2011)? Yet this escape attempt is futile. The people-to-come are already waiting. So what else can you do? Tell accelerationist stories. Or don’t tell them. Feed ideas to the autocannibalistic machines of Capital and see what happens. Channel hyperstitions. Maybe they engage in further capture and accelerate the process, and as such maybe we should begin preparing for the After of the mall at the end of the world, where nothing that we might now call human could live. Maybe Capital will simply get bored and will push all of our stories straight to landfill, thence to be eroded into the sea and broken apart by the waves who dream themselves as imagining new solutions to the ecological crisis. Continue to tell yourself that everything will be fine and that it’s not too late to change. Or accept that it’s too late to do anything. It doesn’t matter what myths, narratives, fictions, and superstitions you anesthetize yourself with. Say whatever combination of words will get you there. Numb the pain in whatever way that you wish, or feel it all and bear the tremendous weight and trauma of witnessing. Make up whatever epitaph for yourself and the species makes you feel best or do as Cioran does and simply embrace the silence that can be found on the truest heights of despair. Or go out in the grand spectacle of a self-immolation. Hopefully, the performance will be enough for you because what are you protesting that Capital will not desire for you? Embrace the ambivalence that Kierkegaard (2004)

90

S. MOHAMMED

displays in Either/Or when he comments that “If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it. […] This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life”. Or live as fully and connected to the earth as you can. Become disillusioned enough to be indifferent then continue to live in whatever way seems best to you. Carry on as though nothing is different. Or change everything. Embrace a “bleak optimism” (see Campbell et al., 2019) or advance a “multispecies terra-political storytelling framework” (Jørgensen & Boje, 2020) and tell new anthropocene stories. Be an activist if that helps you pass the time. Lie down and be catatonic if that works better. It doesn’t matter very much either way. Start a zero-waste queer vegan commune in some quiet enclave and farm your vegetables organically, hoping against hope that the flood waters don’t rise. Tell the story of your exploits to some organizational scholar so that they can sell the idea to future managers in the Business School as a success story of “alternative” and sustainable organization. Create some other strategy for yourself that involves reshaping value chains, championing resilience and new ways of working and collaborating together (Howard-Grenville et al., 2014). Or just sit quietly in your metropolitan centre and drink until you forget the anthropocene. Use your work alienation to xenomorph and transfigure yourself, becoming something alien and unsaleable that tries to refuse Capital’s desire and try to mobilize some resistance. Try to live out Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal” and see what that does for you. Or reject cannibalism and hold to the sanctity of human life in order to treasure what little time we all have in the anthropocene. Imagine all of the alternatives that you want. Wait for a transcendental mother to save you. Keep hoping that a business school student will sense the answer as some brilliant sustainable innovation through a drug addled haze. Become a Doomer. Become Capital’s great Hope. Try to accelerate the process. Try to slow it down. Or do none of it. It does not matter because the mall at the end of the world arrives regardless. Return to Kazynski’s “wild nature” if that makes you feel better. Or be like Hamlet and live ensconced in melancholy but know not from where or why. Carry only the virtue of your suffering and quiet grief. Proclaim your grief loudly if you think that will make a difference. Continue with your life and let Sisyphus’ happy ghost be the one who speaks for you. Or do nothing and wait for the waves. In 2019, an IPCC special report on The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate concluded among many other findings that global mean sea level will continue to rise due to ice loss from the Greenland

5

LIVING WITHOUT HOPE: STORIES FOR THE RISING TIDE

91

and Antarctic ice sheets, ocean thermal expansion and glacier melting, projecting that as these processes continue to accelerate, sea levels will continue to rise at a similarly increasing rate (Poloczanska et al., 2019). There won’t be a big wave, as Franco Berardi once dreamed, no enormous singular and traumatic event, just a slowly rising tide that is itself ambivalent to our actions. So, I am going to be heading to the shore, standing as still and as silent as I can, and waiting to be submerged by the waves. It doesn’t matter if I am still standing when the waves go out again for low tide, if barnacles encrust my thighs, if Capital notices and I become a #lifegoals post on Instagram, if I imagine some new sustainable future while I do it, if I get sick of it and go home to prepare for a lecture where I tell Business School students accelerationist stories, or if my foothold is not strong enough and I am washed away by the force of the sea. If I pick a spot and just stand there, the ocean will eventually cover me over entirely like it does Gormley’s Another Time statue. Perhaps that will make a good story, one that will have been told at an appropriate speed. However, the nascence of the mall at the end of the world happens regardless. It is already (be)coming.

References Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press. Bracewell, S. A., Spencer, M., Marrs, R. H., Iles, M., & Robinson, L. A. (2012). Cleft, crevice, or the inner thigh: “Another place” for the establishment of the invasive barnacle Austrominius modestus (Darwin, 1854). PLoS ONE, 7 (11). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048863. Campbell, N., McHugh, G., & Ennis, P. J. (2019). Climate change is not a problem: Speculative realism at the end of organization. Organization Studies, 40(5), 725–744. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618765553. Cederström, C. (2018). The happiness fantasy. Polity. Cioran, E. (1992). On the heights of despair. University of Chicago Press. Cioran, E. (2011). The trouble with being born. Arcade Publishing. Cioran, E. (2012a). Drawn and quartered. Arcade Publishing. Cioran, E. (2012b). All gall is divided. Arcade Publishing. Cioran, E. (2012c). A short history of decay. Arcade Publishing. Davies, W. (2015). The happiness industry. Verso. De Cock, C. (2018). Book review: We are going to have to imagine our way out of this one……: Climate change, fiction and Organization. Organization, 25(1), 150–153. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508417715500.

92

S. MOHAMMED

De Cock, C., Nyberg, D., & Wright, C. (2021). Disrupting climate change futures: Conceptual tools for lost histories. Organization, 28(3), 468–482. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508419883377. Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3–7. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315242002-3. Haas, B. (2016). Hopeless activism: Performance in the Anthropocene*. Text and Performance Quarterly, 36(4), 279–296. https://doi.org/10.1080/104 62937.2016.1230678. Howard-Grenville, J., Buckle, S. J., Hoskins, B. J., & George, G. (2014). Climate change and management. Academy of Management Journal, 57 (3), 615–623. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2014.4003. Hunter, J. (2020). The “climate doomers” preparing for society to fall apart. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-51857722. Jørgensen, K. M., & Boje, D. M. (2020). Storytelling sustainability in problembased learning. In R. V. Turcan & J. E. Reilly (Eds.), Populism and higher education curriculum development: Problem based learning as a mitigating response (pp. 369–392). Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.forskningsdatab asen.dk/en/catalog/2436165390. Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The concept of anxiety. Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (2004). Either/or: A fragment of life. Penguin Books. Kingsnorth, P. (2017). Confessions of a recovering environmentalist and other essays. Greywolf Press. Kingsnorth, P., & Hine, D. (2009). Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain manifesto. https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/. Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Geographical Journal (Vol. 174). Metropolitan Books. Land, N. (2012). Fanged noumena. Urbanomic. Land, N. (2013). The dark enlightenment. https://www.thedarkenlightenment. com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/. Massumi, B. (2005). Translator’s foreword: Pleasures of philosophy. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (pp. ix–xv). University of Minnesota Press. Nagle, A. (2016). The new man of 4chan. The Baffler. https://thebaffler.com/ salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle. Nietzsche, F. (1996). Human, all too human. Cambridge University Press. Poloczanska, E., Mintenbeck, K., Portner, H. O., Roberts, D., & Levin, L. A. (2019). The ocean and cryosphere in a changing climate: A special report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1–765. https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/summary-forpolicymakers/. Scranton, R. (2015). Learning to die in the Anthropocene. City Lights Books.

Postscript: So What Are We Supposed to Do?

This book has been an attempt by me to track a certain storying, tracing it through space and time in all of its mutant, viral, and incisive formations as it cuts and flows through the discourses to which we have become accustomed. I have tried to understand how things disparate and diffuse can be connected and entangled into the storying of the mall at the end of the world. But I can already hear the reader asking some version of the incipiently performative question, wanting me to give them some kind of revolutionary goal or drive, or target. Something to do. “So what?” they ask. “What are we supposed to do?” Pathetic and pleading. Like there is some new advice that a critical organizational scholar would have that the entire scientific community does not and the interlocutor is not asking me to be a mouthpiece that regurgitates the same bile-laden instructions that they have heard ad nauseum for decades. There is no new advice. No new future to imagine. No riveting new story to tell. If the story that you want to tell yourself is that you are making a difference, then the advice is the same that it always was: Stop breeding. Consume less. Go vegan and eat local. Support rewilding. Look for modes of organized political resistance or direct action that can influence others to do the same, either through public engagement or State mandate. If you want to do something you didn’t need to get to the end of this text in order for you to get that advice. You’ve heard it all before, said elsewhere and more eloquently. If I were to commit to this book’s premise of being an incensed and inchoate heralding of the coming of the mall at the end of the world and the people-to-come who accompany it, I should leave this postscript © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) under exclusive license to Springer Nature 2021 S. Mohammed, Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78740-0

93

94

POSTSCRIPT: SO WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?

to slowly be forgotten in a folder on my hard-drive, until it is accidentally deleted, corrupted, or simply left behind, for there is nothing that can be done to avert its (be)coming. Yet I am going to risk stepping outside this to speak to this imagined interlocutor’s question, for it will be a lingering one that I expect many will grapple with. There will likely be three responses to this book. 1. To ignore it and shrug it off as irrelevant, misanthropic, melancholic tripe. This is an apathetic-indignant response—one that refuses to recognize the storying that is already taking place and has to cling to some kind of hope that we’ll make it out OK. Whether that hope is based on climate denialism or an optimism that we can make the right changes to survive is irrelevant. Hope has apathied and apoplexed the ability to think, and one can only dream that which Capital dreams and imagines circuitously. 2. Rage and anger as an impetus to direct (forceful and violent) action. This is a commodifiable-market response—one that makes sense on the surface, for realizing that one has essentially been duped into accepting a life of servitude to Capital while it leaves you to die and the wealthy survive, is an instigation of class revolt. Yet Capital has already considered this, it is not some incalculable and impossible to anticipate strategy so it will happily sell you guns and guillotines with which you can fight your revolution; content to change which faces appear in the mall at the end of the world. 3. To collapse into catatonia, depression, suicidal hopelessness, and ambivalence. This is a logical-rational response—one that acknowledges the futility of fighting against Capital, against the oncoming dynasty of the mall at the end of the world. Such people will be content to stroll to the sea and wait for the waves. Or they may well carry on living their lives as they always have, storying and imagining with the knowledge that none of it matters. A new category of ambivalent nihilists. I am not sure if it is being naive or being wizened that leads me to reflect that the first is the most likely, that people cannot live without hope. The core of this text has been a feeling of disgust and disenchantment with the current stories being told in the anthropocene, specifically the naive optimism that infects almost everything that I have read and

POSTSCRIPT: SO WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?

95

heard over the last few years, from delusional mythologizations that tell us that we can keep digging fossil fuels out of the ground forever, and the stereotypical heroic narratives of the Great Male Entrepreneur who will innovate some new technological revolution via carbon scrubbing or agro-engineering or bioplastics and so on, all the way to the predictable promises of the environmentalists who dream that a Green New deal or certain reforms will be enough to tame Capital and change everything or who want to escape and return to the land in order to reconnect with Gaia and more sustainable ways of living. Each one seems to be inflected with a kind of naive optimistic hopefulness, a kind of “artificial intelligence” that overcodes thought itself from within, myasis, a parasite ripping through, predetermining where it will go and what possibilities are available for it to encounter, as all that can be thought are thoughts that hope against hope that everything will be OK for humanity in the end. The artificium optimus at work here produces endless machinations and modifications of the exact same story ad nauseam, and we swallow it, not as cultural dupes but as scatological sommeliers, in order to remain blind to suffering and anguish on multiple temporal lines (past, present and future). So what are you supposed to do? Nothing. But you can pass the time by telling different stories. All that I wanted to do was be involved in the writing of a different kind of story. One that wasn’t subject to the same infection, that could become something other than an endless repetition of the same. I cannot quite say why. Perhaps it was depression, the writing of the text being a kind of catharsis. Perhaps it was simply academic careerism. But perhaps it was something else, something writing me. Perhaps this is what the mall at the end of the world really is: Capital capturing hopelessness, nihilism, and ambivalence, bringing it into the fold at last.

Index

A accelerationism (accelerate the process), 26–28, 64–66, 68, 81, 88–90 alternative organizations, 57, 62 ambivalence, 79, 84, 89, 94, 95 anthropocene, 3–5, 8, 10–13, 24–28, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 44, 47, 51, 54, 57, 59, 60, 62, 65, 66, 76–78, 80, 81, 83–90, 94 artificial intelligence, 41, 81, 84, 95 artificium optimus , 53, 84, 88, 95

dreaming, 13, 18, 24, 37, 41, 52, 61, 67, 70, 86 hope, 6, 11–13, 28, 54, 57, 64, 71, 76, 77, 81–84, 88, 90, 94 survival instinct, ix capitalist realism, 6, 63, 64 Cioran, Emil, 78–80, 84, 85, 89 climate change, 8, 46, 80 Critical Management Studies (CMS), 55, 57, 60

B (be)coming, Business School, 54, 56–67, 69, 70, 72, 87, 90, 91

D death drive, 7, 8, 36, 81 death instinct, 9 desiring death, 10 Deleuze, G., 6–10, 19, 26, 28, 38–41, 43, 53, 55, 60, 66, 69, 84, 87, 88 desire, 6, 8–11, 13, 28–30, 36, 38, 40–42, 44–46, 52–54, 56, 59, 66, 69, 71, 77, 83, 84, 86, 88 Doomer, 86, 87, 90

C Capital axioms, 6, 7, 11, 59, 77 desire, 8, 28, 29, 37, 42, 44, 52–54, 62, 71, 81, 83, 87, 88, 90

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) under exclusive license to Springer Nature 2021 S. Mohammed, Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78740-0

97

98

INDEX

F Fisher, Mark, 6, 41, 43, 65, 70 freedoms, 6, 9, 10, 20, 26, 41, 55, 70, 76 G Gaia, 5, 24, 35–39, 41, 47, 77, 82, 85, 95 Gormley, Anthony, 75, 78, 91 Gruen, Victor, 20, 51–54, 68–70 Guattari, F., 6–10, 26, 28, 38–41, 43, 55, 60, 66, 84, 87 H Hamlet, 53, 76, 90 holographic surfaces, 30 Hope, 57, 79–81, 83–85, 88, 90 hyperstitions, 11, 12, 19, 66, 67, 70, 89 I imagination, 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 30, 86 imaginaries, 4 imagine, 4, 5, 86 J Jameson, Fredrick, 6, 42, 44 L Land, Nick, 11, 12, 25, 28, 29, 41, 64–66, 68, 81, 86 M mall at the end of the world, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 38, 39, 42, 43, 46, 51, 54, 62, 66, 68–72, 76–78, 83, 84, 86, 88–91, 93–95

Meadowhall, 1, 3, 12, 13 Medea, 37–39 N neoliberal, 41, 58, 65 O organization, 6, 8, 10, 19, 27, 28, 30, 38, 43, 47, 54, 55, 57–60, 62–64, 72, 81, 87, 88, 90 Outside, 6, 7, 10, 12, 21–24, 28, 29, 38, 39, 51, 57, 60, 68, 75, 83 P people-to-come, 29, 38, 39, 41–44, 46, 47, 71, 77, 81–83, 86, 89, 93 performance, 19, 22, 29, 30, 39, 42, 46, 54–56, 58, 69, 79, 85, 89 planetary technocapital singularity, 41, 65 S shopping centre, 1–3, 17–20, 29, 44–47, 51–54, 59, 68–70 spectral, 13, 19, 29, 30, 43, 58, 69–71, 77, 83, 85 story storying, 5, 11, 12, 23, 29, 43, 94 storyteller, 42 storytelling, 12, 39, 90 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 28, 57–59, 63, 67 sustainable (sustainability), 4, 5, 7, 10–12, 21, 28, 36–38, 55, 57–59, 72, 77, 87, 90, 91, 95 V ventriloquization, 19, 46

INDEX

virtual, 46, 58, 71 X xeno-

formed, 28 forming, 83 logical, 38

99