Apocalypsis Cum Spiralis
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Curling
In the early morning of the 8th of December 2009, just before dawn, early risers across the northern part of Norway witnessed a gigantic spiral cloud, lit up by ground-based lights, filling a large patch of the dark skies.
The Russian defence ministry eventually claimed responsibility for the effect, caused, they said, by a test missile that had become destabilised in flight and left the spiral trail.
Photographs of the phenomenon show an effect uncannily similar to the patterns of a strange spiral-mania that engulfs a small town in Junjio Ito’s manga ‘Uzumaki’.
These engulfing spirals are referenced in Mythogeography as a pattern of growth and transformation, visible at work in the formation of sheep horns and tightly packed seedheads. With cells as their constituent parts, the spirals emerge from the multiplication of the cells, each new cell growing at the same angle of departure from the previous one. Change from repetition, instability in what is fixed. The pattern in the Norwegian sky is pleasingly geometrical and yet the missile is ‘spiralling out of control’.
Default paranoia
To what extent should such accidents – mixing cultural, natural, military and social agencies - inform our understanding of the future of human agency?
Are these moments special critical affordances, accidental prompts to human thinking (prompts that might be acted upon), equivalent to those spectacular natural phenomena (eclipses, etc.) that might once have been commonly interpreted as having divine agency or esoteric encoding?
This ideo-eco-politics looks less absurd through the lens of popular culture. The strategy of the 9/11 terrorists was the same as that of the aliens in ‘Independence Day. In the US, government agencies responsible for ‘homeland security’ came to think the connection might be a direct one and called in Hollywood action-movie screenwriters to suggest what form the next attacks might take.
Working in security
If we turn that process on its head and assume that someone listened to those screenwriters (taking the approach of George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘The Hollywood History of the World’: ‘maybe those technicolour epics aren’t such a bad source of basic historiography?’), then what can we read from the procession of apocalypse movies and TV shows? ‘Deep Impact’, ‘2012’, ‘Flood’, ‘The War of the Worlds’, ‘Survivors’, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ – all these movies and programmes present catastrophe (in contrast to a Gnostic catastrophe like that of Alex Proyas’s ‘Knowing’) as opportunities for political, social and even familial reconstruction. Both Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek have recently pointed to the exploitation of disasters – economic and political – as the motors for capitalist reconstruction, driving a new kind of capitalism that rather than being threatened by its crises has learned not only to live with them but to rely upon them as the means to its reformulation and modernisation, a kind of revolutionary capitalism.
If there is any validity in this, then close observation of what now happens in Haiti should reveal some sign of the interfaces of revolutionary capitalist politics, popular culture and natural disaster. To what extent is the ‘securing’ of the airport at Port au Prince, the (apparently) painfully slow establishing of an aid distribution system and the apocalyptic narratives of looting and criminality (whether true or not) host to, and the entertainment-accoutrements of, a ghost agenda? How far can an explicit military ‘shock and awe’ approach to ‘regime change’, with all its attendant diplomatic and security pitfalls, be replaced by one built around responses to natural (or combination natural/social) disasters and informed by existing pop-cultural narratives?
Postapocascript
The post-apocalyptic movie is more complex, and often more progressive than ‘2012’ and its ilk (despite the liberal intentions of Roland Emmerich and others), as it has to imagine what the consequences of post-politics might be. One of the latest examples is ‘The Book of Eli’ – on one level it is banal (invincible semi-superhero, comic-style cinematography, rolling Tanguy bleakness) and yet that banality is a wink to the audience, a nod to the things hidden in plain sight. It’s a piece about mobilities, about travelling and then stopping, about the essential role of disruption and the value of anachronistic objects and institutions in an economy of mobilities (petrol, disloyalty, etc.). These anachronisms – text, book, library – place a torque upon the hypermobility of the nomads-by-opportunism, trip up the Marvel-lous fantasy of the endless quest (by ending it). There is no great profundity here, but a simple tale of how disruption to remain radical (like revolution within the revolution) must soon disrupt itself.
The anachronistic stasis of libraries, books, etc. is more than soon-to-be-retro-cool, it is the anchor that jerks on the next turn of the spirals and keeps them geometrical, a resistance that produces each new cell at a common angle to what has gone before. It is the sameness in difference that makes some part of what is going to happen at least probable, but not plannable. It is the repetition that makes the curve, the organisation of creative “out of control”. And it is why ‘The Book of Eli’, for all its dumb-ass violence, is an exemplary opencast and curling mindscape, as geometrical as Norwegian skies.
Crab Man
January 2010
Curling
In the early morning of the 8th of December 2009, just before dawn, early risers across the northern part of Norway witnessed a gigantic spiral cloud, lit up by ground-based lights, filling a large patch of the dark skies.
The Russian defence ministry eventually claimed responsibility for the effect, caused, they said, by a test missile that had become destabilised in flight and left the spiral trail.
Photographs of the phenomenon show an effect uncannily similar to the patterns of a strange spiral-mania that engulfs a small town in Junjio Ito’s manga ‘Uzumaki’.
These engulfing spirals are referenced in Mythogeography as a pattern of growth and transformation, visible at work in the formation of sheep horns and tightly packed seedheads. With cells as their constituent parts, the spirals emerge from the multiplication of the cells, each new cell growing at the same angle of departure from the previous one. Change from repetition, instability in what is fixed. The pattern in the Norwegian sky is pleasingly geometrical and yet the missile is ‘spiralling out of control’.
Default paranoia
To what extent should such accidents – mixing cultural, natural, military and social agencies - inform our understanding of the future of human agency?
Are these moments special critical affordances, accidental prompts to human thinking (prompts that might be acted upon), equivalent to those spectacular natural phenomena (eclipses, etc.) that might once have been commonly interpreted as having divine agency or esoteric encoding?
This ideo-eco-politics looks less absurd through the lens of popular culture. The strategy of the 9/11 terrorists was the same as that of the aliens in ‘Independence Day. In the US, government agencies responsible for ‘homeland security’ came to think the connection might be a direct one and called in Hollywood action-movie screenwriters to suggest what form the next attacks might take.
Working in security
If we turn that process on its head and assume that someone listened to those screenwriters (taking the approach of George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘The Hollywood History of the World’: ‘maybe those technicolour epics aren’t such a bad source of basic historiography?’), then what can we read from the procession of apocalypse movies and TV shows? ‘Deep Impact’, ‘2012’, ‘Flood’, ‘The War of the Worlds’, ‘Survivors’, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ – all these movies and programmes present catastrophe (in contrast to a Gnostic catastrophe like that of Alex Proyas’s ‘Knowing’) as opportunities for political, social and even familial reconstruction. Both Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek have recently pointed to the exploitation of disasters – economic and political – as the motors for capitalist reconstruction, driving a new kind of capitalism that rather than being threatened by its crises has learned not only to live with them but to rely upon them as the means to its reformulation and modernisation, a kind of revolutionary capitalism.
If there is any validity in this, then close observation of what now happens in Haiti should reveal some sign of the interfaces of revolutionary capitalist politics, popular culture and natural disaster. To what extent is the ‘securing’ of the airport at Port au Prince, the (apparently) painfully slow establishing of an aid distribution system and the apocalyptic narratives of looting and criminality (whether true or not) host to, and the entertainment-accoutrements of, a ghost agenda? How far can an explicit military ‘shock and awe’ approach to ‘regime change’, with all its attendant diplomatic and security pitfalls, be replaced by one built around responses to natural (or combination natural/social) disasters and informed by existing pop-cultural narratives?
Postapocascript
The post-apocalyptic movie is more complex, and often more progressive than ‘2012’ and its ilk (despite the liberal intentions of Roland Emmerich and others), as it has to imagine what the consequences of post-politics might be. One of the latest examples is ‘The Book of Eli’ – on one level it is banal (invincible semi-superhero, comic-style cinematography, rolling Tanguy bleakness) and yet that banality is a wink to the audience, a nod to the things hidden in plain sight. It’s a piece about mobilities, about travelling and then stopping, about the essential role of disruption and the value of anachronistic objects and institutions in an economy of mobilities (petrol, disloyalty, etc.). These anachronisms – text, book, library – place a torque upon the hypermobility of the nomads-by-opportunism, trip up the Marvel-lous fantasy of the endless quest (by ending it). There is no great profundity here, but a simple tale of how disruption to remain radical (like revolution within the revolution) must soon disrupt itself.
The anachronistic stasis of libraries, books, etc. is more than soon-to-be-retro-cool, it is the anchor that jerks on the next turn of the spirals and keeps them geometrical, a resistance that produces each new cell at a common angle to what has gone before. It is the sameness in difference that makes some part of what is going to happen at least probable, but not plannable. It is the repetition that makes the curve, the organisation of creative “out of control”. And it is why ‘The Book of Eli’, for all its dumb-ass violence, is an exemplary opencast and curling mindscape, as geometrical as Norwegian skies.
Crab Man
January 2010