DATE: 31-10-22
TIME: 12:24
IMAGE COUNT: N/A
TAGS: ?
THE UNIFIED FIELD OF EVERYTHING
“Yes I am paranoid— but am I paranoid enough?”
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“The trouble with being a hypochondriac these days is that antibiotics have cured all the good diseases.” So the writer Caskie Stinnet famously said, a few years before dying of cancer. Hypochondriacs have always been fated to some kind of ironic demise. Living in fear of bodily betrayal, only to engineer sickness of phantom disease in oneself through sheer palpable paranoia. Worse yet— being so consumed with the threat of a disease only to ignore a fatal one creeping up behind you.
Hypochondria, as the late marxist Mike Davis saw it, was one of the invisible tenets of the modernist architectural project. The natural world — vast, cruel and volatile— was the paranoid fixation in question. It presented the prospect of plague and disease even in the industrialise world, which inspired the “quest for the bourgeoise utopia of a totally calculable and safe environment” (1). Indeed most of our cities have “achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature”, but sure enough the dangers of the marginalised natural world have increased exponentially (2). To appeal to the last 12 months on planet earth as evidence: snow in Afghanistan and South Africa; flooding in Northern China, South Korea and Brazil; wildfires in Canada and across Europe; two consecutive days of the highest recorded temperatures in July; or, even more vividly, orcas in the Atlantic tipping over boats. Even the colloquial term global warming has morphed into global boiling— indicating collapse not just exacerbation.
Climate collapse is the ultimate irony when it comes to how we’ve constructed our cities. Historically speaking, conflict is another lens with which we can view how cities are made. The statecraft of fortification in modern cities recalls an irony of similar colour to that of climate collapse. Take America in the post-war era, all the way to the fall of the World Trade Centre for example. As Mike Davis lucidly described in hsi book Dead Cities, Hollywood had become experts in fashioning fictional enemies for The American Republic to fixate over in order to justify forfification. Mars Attacks, King Kong and Invasion USA are only the tip of the iceberg of a genre that is typified by alien invasion. Fears of an arbitrary other and fantasies of heroically defending the soil were injected into the nation’s prefrontal cortex. Jingoism would permeate media high and low like an insidious tumor— creating the perfect lobotomy to perpetuate American exceptionalism.
Having been dubbed the world’s only hyper-power shortly after the end of the cold war— with unprecedented military power and potent spheres of influence— the nation certainly looked like a hypochondriac on the world stage when it continued to find enemies domestically and internationally that didn’t exist. Domestically, Rudy Giuliani reintroduced stop and frisk in New York. A policy that allowed law enforcement fo imagine enemies in the shape of black and brown people. Police officers were given liberties to stop and search citizens on a whim. Internationally, America had found an enemy in the Gulf, whose charismatic dictator stood in the way of its oil prospects. Since then, no research has been produced on the effectiveness of stop and frisk, and America’s most potent symbols for defence and free trade were hit by planes at the beginning of the century. The Americanised city that emerged out of the rubble of the fallen towers was hyper-surveilled and more intent on creating a security state than ever. Now America boasts 25% of the world’s incarcerated people, and has dropped 46 bombs per day on average in the Middle East an the Horn of Africa from 2002 to 2021 (3). A shrill reminder that “when hypochondriacs actually contract the plague of their worst fear, their ontologies tend to be thrown out of kilter” (4).
The natural world is evidently on a fast train to a ground zero of its own. The modern city, however, isn’t just cartesian predictability and soul-crushing rationalism as an antidote to the boogie monsters of nature. It is messy irrational desire rubbing up agains the membrane of our sanitised urban security bubble— or as Rem Koolhaas put it in his prophetic Delirious New York— “the fire of Manhattanism inside the iceberg of modernism” (5). Market pyrotechnics meet static paranoia. Libidinal outrage meet chastity belt. Overabundance meet recession. The ultimate pressure cooker. The artificial wave machine making the oceans “jump inland with a hop”.
The mechanised modernist utopia didn’t just materialise in exactly the terms proposed by the modernist prophets. The late 20th century city remains in the realm of mythology (6). What we’ve got is halfway attempts at it, but nevertheless we inherited its most crucial component: its image— what it represents and how it perpetuates itself. What it does— architecture and its effects— are secondary.
Chief among these significations is human exceptionalism. The idea that man can somehow remove himself from nature or that nature can be manipulated and manicured in service of man. An image driven by fear, desire and the surplus of both. The result? An entirely augmented mammal, almost liberated from his terrestrial default settings, now wiht the ability to shape himself endlessly— haunted only by the spectres of desire and paranoia that science and the market haven’t been able to adequately deal with (7).
The 1974 novel Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon is a cutting satirical exemplar. It is set in a fictionalised London towards the final months of World War 2. It takes on, morphs into, and pastiches, the media of the time: spy thrillers, pinup posters, propaganda posters, soirees and musicals... lots of musicals. All of which make legible the fantasies, fears and images projected into popular imagination amidst the ambience of wartime anxiety.
The book follows the development and wherabouts of a fleet of Nazi bombs called V2 rockets. In the centre of the story’s various tangential plotlines and is a man called Lieutenant Tyrone Slothorp, who works for a secret military organisation that has identified a sinister link between the occurrence of Mr Slothorp’s erections and the location of V2 rocket explosions. Slothorp’s arousal and sexual escapades seem to be cause by, or to cause, missile fire— for reasons later disclosed in the book. Meanwhile, he wades through the swamp of corporate media fantasies that are now indistinguishable from his own.
The secret organisation that Slothorp works for— comprised of statisticians, military specialists, paranormal researchers and psychics— are mandated to a continent-wide investigation of Slothorp’s explosive libidinal prognostications. This unearths a web of paranoia and conspiracy in the already fear-riddled European theatre of war. The other protagonist is the V2 rocket itself, whose upward trajectory and subsequent descent back to earth creates the title of the book: Gravity’s Rainbow. A diagram of desire, paranoia and alienation— a triangle of sadness. The looming antagonist responsible for the stir-up surrounding Slothorp is a homogenous cabal of media moguls, war contractors and industrialists. They are entirely invisible and yet vividly described— and still somehow entirely visible and intangible. The 400-odd ensemble of characters of the book scantily refer to the invisible/visible force as “they”. The omnipresent “They” wield power in all the nauseating ways that would make one man’s arousal equate to rocket fire.
Holding together the novel’s dizzying and divergent castration plots, run-ins with the occult, episodes of nefarious state-craft, seances in the houses of parliament, and paranoid war-time gang-bangs, is one essential Truth: Everything is connected, everywhere, all the time. This Truth is deliberately obscured, even co-opted, by “They” and their markets that break down the unified field of everything into divisible parts that can be ascribed arbitrary value and exchanged interchangeably. “All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few” (9). The lie of modernity that is unravelling rapidly before our eyes is the non-contingency of humanity on the world around it.
Our world, it seems, isn’t too dissimilar from this whodunnit about a man and his weaponised psychic penis.
IDENTITY
“Stop it with your rockets / we’re already on a spaceship”
- Yassin Bey, Breathe
Despite the imminent danger we’ve created, Mark Fisher describes us as being completely docile, to such a degree that our ability to imagine worlds that don’t look like the one we have made or inherited has been severly dented. This state of affairs is aptly called Capitalist Realism (10). Even as we admit that the liberalised market and Western scientific determinism are the architects-in-chief of the climate crisis, we are compelled by our poverty of imagination to mine for shiny answers in the very place that birthed the plethora of climate problems we face. Indeed the private sector seems to be providing many of the widely accepted answers to the climate crisis, and is packaging it as one that can be innovated out of— which is to say as one that has seductive and simple solutions to an otherwise vastly complex web of problems and relationships. This framing of the market as the title contender against the very beast that it created demonstrates that the way we formulate the problem is part of the problem itself. The climate crisis is evidently a fight against pollution that must occur in reality, but the animating forces at play operate in the symbolic realm. It goes without saying that the problem is one of excessive amounts of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere a defecit of available means to sequester it, but the problem as identified above is one more fundamentally associated with a crisis of imagination.
On the contrary, the stage for climate solutions is evidently vast and increasingly diverse. It’s just climate scientists don’t really exist in the popular imagination, their proxy to the public discourse is the work of climate activists who have long been dismised as hypochondriacs, terrorists and extremists. Climate activism takes on many shapes, forms, dispositions and solidarities, who’s ability to ensnare the public imagination against the prevailing media machinery happens at varying levels of effectivity.
Let us for a moment suspend nuance and flatten the diversity of cliamte activism into its most totalised and consumed images: Greta Thunberg and Elon Musk (Time person of the year for 2019 and 2021 respectively). Even as venerated heroes of their respective camps, they’ve both been compressed into increasingly trivial cardboard cut-outs. Greta has become the disenfranchised, infectiously pessimistic, shower-skipping, rabble-rousing youngster who dutifully protects the moral high ground and has brought tree-hugging back into vofue. Elon is now the ever-optimistic laissez-faire technologist, whose poisoning of public discourse and far-right sympathies are eclipsed by his mountain range of money and growing fleet of electric vehicles and fawning incels.
Greta’s is perhaps the more doctrinal approach to the climate, which is to appeal on the global stage to governments to get their acts together in the form of regulating high-pollutng sectors, phasing out fossil fuels and a general doctrine of de-growth, whcih seeks to frame our generation (Gen-Z) as the recipients of a “stolen” future (11). While this continues to get the airtime it deserves, it doesn’t match the real agendas of the hegemony. Need I recount the embarassment that was Cop27, which witnessed more lobbyists pushing back on quotas coming through its doors than national representatives seeking to uphold and protect these increasingly unambitious climate targets. I’ll spare you the details of the failure of the UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement (12). Thi approach relies on the archetype of the young, futureless Gen-Z’s ability to paint an emotive enough landscape of guilt to spur the seats of power to abandon their allegiances to the fossil fuel industry.
Every year Greta is brought before the most concentrated seats of power and decision-making— from the UN to Davos— as a tonic to put out the fire being stoked by our generation. The result is the trivialising of this strain of climate activism. By ensuring that Greta gets her air time and therefore transmitting the impression of a willingness to change, the hegemony, in another rebranding masterclass, can carry on as usual. Guilt is not the animating force Greta intends it to be, but the fuel in the fire of the eco-washing PR campaign of the rich and powerful.
The Musk archetype, on the other hand, argues that climate action can only viably come from government deregulation and an evermore laissez-faire approach to the economy, to allow the private sector the freedom to produce the technology we need to lower our emissions. In this doctrine, species-wide collaboration plays second fiddle to the competitiveness of the marketplace and its technological solutions. Techno-solutionism, as its often called, is highly dependent on systemic stability, and will go to every length to preserve the foundations on which it builds. This assumes that if we just replace all of our current polluting machinery, that the problem is fixed. If we swap out our automobiles, planes and trains with electric alternatives; if we simply rewire our power grid to sexy new renewables then we can keep our urban metropoles and continue perpetuating a man/nature divide. Climate change efforts are sorely misguided if they are about preserving the ways of being of one self-proclaimed singularly complex species.
Nevertheless, Elon and Greta are certainly effective images of identification in the movement, and have certainly captured the largest swathes of public imagination. However, taking stock of the tactics they espouse, Mark Fisher would most certainly say that the veil of capital still obscures possibility. The pair still rely, like most of us, on the democratic processes of the global elite, whose continued failure to keep promises made from Paris and Kyoto is by design. The image of the stable and rational world and of legitimate democratic processes when it comes to climate change— at the risk of sounding conspiratorial— are anaesthetising tonics at best.
TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE?
“You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.”
- Thomas Pynchon, Proverbs for the Paranoids
Fortunately, I say with regret, the stable non-contingent world is crumbling under the undeniable weight of climate collapse being witnessed every day. According to the latest IPCC report, “approximately 3.3. to 2.6 billions people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change” (13). Seemingly one way to bypass the expedience and lie of democratic processes is to pay even a modicum of attention. That same report says that “human and ecosystem vulnerability are interdependent”.
The conversation then must be about the tactics to demonstrate the contingency of the fossil fuel industry on public buy-in, and, interestingly, a stable natural world. Memetic forms of protest are the most visible nowadays. These are forms of protest designed to gatner virality (i.e. the tomato soup thrown across paintings in the National Gallery). These tactics flirt with civil disobedience and sabotage, but their disruption is inconsequential to the main perpetrators of climate change. This is mainly because they are designed to disrupt a status quo and to bring visibility to the issue at hand. They work in part because the mainstream deals almost exclusively in exchanges online. Despite this, these tactics arguably increase docility as the image of the climate activist gets minted into meme-hood.
The crucial distinction is that civil disobedience happens for no audience in particular, and hits the established world where it hurts. It breaks the machinery of normaly and makes vivid the contingency that power has on our buy-in. What better way to demonstrate the fragility of fossil fuel indrastructure and this radical contingency on public buy-in, than to blow up a pipeline. Literally? Literally.
Andres Malm’s book, aptly named “How to Blow Up a Pipeline”, introduces a healthy dose of turbulence to the climate movement (14). Malm’s book critisises climate passivity, making the case for violence and sabotage against corporate interests as a viable and historically effective tactic. He cites the facts that many of the world’s most succesful campaigns for justice fell on deaf ears until civil disobedience fostered.
On the 2nd of September 2020 the UK passed the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. The first of its kind on a national level. The only governmental declaration before it was on the 5th of December 2016 by the city fo Melbourne— the year of its most financially detrimental wildfires. After paying tis lip-service, the UK has effectively turned its back on the Emergency. Since then Exinction Rebellion, the popular climate movement, has been declared an extremist ideology by the UK Terrorist Police, Rishi Sunak did not attend Cop27 and he issued one hundred new Oil and Gas Licenses earlier this year— detonating the country’s climate commitments and letting it be known who the real climate terrorists really are. In this context, blowing up a pipeline doesn’t seem all that unconscionable. Beyond the literal sabotage of corporate infrastrucutre, the ideas that Malm espouses blow a fossil-fuel-industry-sized hole in the machinery of our capitalist realist malaise.
Gravity’s Rainbow is fundamentally about markets “but a far more radical “black” or ur-market where everything is directly exchangeable for everything else” (15). This is also our condition and even dissent has been entered into the ledger. The only viable options for dissent exist in parallel to the indivisable anaesthetising market— not within it. Restoring the sensation of our collective nervous system requires we resist readministering the sedatives of our paradigm. Malm’s advice doesn’t only help us charter a different path, it is also a view to a compassionately contingent future
“The future is already here— it’s just unevenly distributed”
- William Gibson
MARGINALIA:
[3] Nicolas J S Davies. ‘Hey, Hey USA! How Many Bombs Did You Drop Today?’ Progressive.org, 13 January 2022. progressive.org/latestusa-bombs-drop-ben- jamin-davies-220112/#:~:-text=The%20new%20Airpower%20Summary%20data,the%20end%20of%20February%202020
[4] Davis, Mike. Dead Cities Vol 1, The New Press, 2002.
[5] Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. 1st ed., The Monacelli Press, 1980.
[6] Jencks, Charles. Modern Movements in Architecture. Penguin Books, 1973.
[7] Colomina, Beatriz & Wigley, Mark. Are We Human?: The Archaeology of Design. Lars Müller Publishers, 2016.
[8+ 9] Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. Vintage Books, 2013.
[10] Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism (New Edition): Is there No Alternative? ZERO BOOKS, 2022.
[11] Thunberg, Greta. ‘Stolen Future’. Houses of Parliament, 2016.
[12] The Paris Climate Accords is an international climate treaty covering climate change mitigation, adaptation and finance. The Accords was signed in 2015 and has quickly become the most famous and references climate treaty for its scale and ambition. Despite its ambitions, it is increasingly behind schedule. The Kyoto accords are the Paris Accords’ 1997 predecessor.
[13] Naser, Mostafa Mahmud, & Pearce, Prafula. “Evolution of the international climate change police and processes: UNFCCC to Paris Agreememt.” Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Environmental Science, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.422.
[14] Malm, Andreas. How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Verso. 2021.
[15] Murphet, Julian. Join the Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon’s Postmodern epic Gravity’s Rainbow at 50. The Conversation. 27 Feb, 2023. theconversation.com/join-the-counterforce-thomas-pynchons-postmodern-epic-gravitys-rainbow-at-50-19 6657.