Description
The paper investigates the imaginative economies and scopic fields of popular culture representations of sudden environmental change. These fictions foreground radical exposure to variants of human extinction. As such, then, texts such as Cormack McCarthy's The Road and Jeff van der Meer's Annihilation can be read as stagings of the question of dwelling with an irredeemable vulnerability. However, such fictions are, essentially, a fantasy of the persistence of the anthropocentric subject: a redemption of vulnerable subjects through parables of their individualist survival of what should have been their end. As such, these fictions expose a two-fold political problematic. On the one hand they act as a way to reassert a particularly anthropocentric understanding of the anthropocene: one that is firmly located in the fantasy of surviving and thriving which dates back to organic and evolutionary metaphors deployed to justify colonialism and imperialism. On the other they avoid a key question posed by the concept of vulnerability: how can radical exposure (to extinction in this case) be mitigated if it comprises a condition of possibility of existence. As such, they avoid the question of dwelling with irredeemable exposure. The latter is, of course, a (historical) fact of life for subjugated, colonised, enslaved, and exploited peoples. As such, apocalyptic imaginaries neglect to address the ways in which worlds have already ended and the lessons such endings could have for a theory of vulnerability and thus reassert particularly western, liberal fantasies of anthropocene futures.
