The Rhetoric of Dystopia

The Rhetoric of Dystopia

Prophecies and Provocations in the Anthropocene

Christopher Carter

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Names: Carter, Christopher, 1974– author. 

Title: The rhetoric of dystopia : prophecies and provocations in the anthropocene / Christopher Carter. 

Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The Rhetoric of Dystopia develops an idea of “emergent metalepsis” that describes the uncanny moments where fictive texts anticipate material events, blurring the boundary between the storyworld and the world of reception. Christopher Carter situates this rhetoric within debates about the Anthropocene, highlighting the irony whereby our most trenchant self-analyses become mass commodities”— Provided by publisher. 

Identifiers: LCCN 2024021398 (print) | LCCN 2024021399 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666941487 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666941500 (paper) | ISBN 9781666941494 (epub) 

Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Rhetoric. | Dystopias in literature. | Fiction—21st century—History and criticism—Theory, etc.

Classification: LCC PN98.E36 C38 2024  (print) | LCC PN98.E36  (ebook) | DDC 809/.9336—dc23/eng/20240522

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024021398

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024021399

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Beth

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Traumatic Displacements 1

Chapter 1: Dystopian Literacies: Writing in Worlds Gone Wrong 25

Chapter 2: Roquentin’s Nightmare: Fantastic Spaces and Failed Individuation 49

Chapter 3: Limit Cases: Youth on the Border 77

Chapter 4: Eating Our Own Crimes: Food Horror in the Anthropocene 101

Chapter 5: Out of Time: Kairos and the Post-Apocalypse 129

Conclusion: Unsure Horizon 155

Bibliography 175

About the Author 203

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Nicolette Amstutz, Director of Editorial at Lexington Books, who has guided me through two books with the press. She has the kind of eagle-eyed tenacity that is rare in even the best editors, and it is a joy to collaborate with her. I also appreciate Marianna Papastephanou’s reader report, which helped me see the manuscript’s scholarly contributions while providing wise organizational tips. Tom Prasch provided a similarly helpful analysis that nudged me to clarify key points while streamlining my prose. Their attention to specific passages, and their ability to situate them within the larger arc of the argument, are hallmarks of good writing instruction. I appreciate the focused lessons.

I also learned a great deal from Daniel Floyd, who gave me notes on conceptual definitions and coherence across chapters. More specifically, he drew connections between dystopian discourses and conspiracy rhetoric while offering keen observations on the history of migration narratives in the U.S. Jay Arns was an equally welcome ally, directing my attention to the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and its potential links to Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Thanks also to Tony Scott, who encouraged my early ideas for the book and challenged me to articulate its value for literacy studies. I enjoyed our conference panels at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference and the Conference on College Composition and Communication, both of which enhanced my thinking about writing in the Anthropocene.

Longtime friends Lynn Lewis and Michelle Holley expressed genuine enthusiasm about the project, offering reassurance about its broader aims as well as specific sub-arguments. More than that, they reminded me of the value of compassionate listening. Laura Micciche did the same, hosting “Taft Faculty Write” events where people from varied disciplines could compose together and share their progress. Those sharing-sessions taught me that writing processes are endlessly diverse, and that we can always benefit from our peers’ time-tested techniques.

Like Laura, Russel Durst has been a topnotch colleague throughout my time at the University of Cincinnati. He is among the most curious people I know, and always ready with a good story. Perhaps he thought retirement would mean a break from mentoring, but I haven’t permitted that. His counsel is addictive, and it helped me finish this book.

Ann Gakumo gave me room to see the project through, allowing me to balance research and administrative responsibilities during 2022–2023. Our time as Co-Chairs of UC’s General Education Committee has been wonderfully productive, and I couldn’t imagine a better teammate in the effort. Without her partnership, I would have had neither the time nor the energy to write.

Whereas compassionate colleagues gave me space to draft, my family gave me the motivation. My mother, Patty Carter, kept my spirits up and my focus steady. My sister, Kelly Sperry, asked brilliant questions that renewed my excitement about ecocriticism. Her whole family—Robert, Ellis, Rhett, Eames, and Tess—supplied the fun when I needed it most. We miss my father, Phillip Carter, who would have loved to watch the family grow.

My deepest gratitude goes to Beth and our children, Jonah and Ben. They were more excited about this book than anything I’ve written before, and they recommended lots of texts along the way. They comforted me through the rough spots and celebrated the little victories, applauding the completion of each new chapter. They keep me going. No acknowledgment could be enough.

Finally, thanks to Bella, my Lhasa Poo and stalwart writing companion, who sat on my lap through every word.

Introduction

Traumatic Displacements

Before we see the first images in Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion, we hear coughing. An off-center shot of Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) abruptly fills the screen, her face damp and pale, a greenish light cutting in from the airport walkway behind her. She snacks on communal peanuts in the lounge, then pays for her drink with a credit card. The camera tracks the relay from surface to surface: Emhoff’s fingers to the card to the bartender’s hand to the digital register, soon to be touched by other employees. Over the next three minutes, the story cuts to characters in Hong Kong, London, and Tokyo, all visibly sicker than Emhoff. A pulsing score accentuates the sense of something on the move.

Onscreen spaces further signal relentless travel as we duck in and out of airports, airplanes, ferryboats, buses, trains, taxis, and elevators. Everything the characters touch becomes lively—phones, cups, doors, railings, pens, file folders. Incidental contact and routine acts of affection become doom-laden. Lighting, sound, and cinematography provoke our fear before Emhoff and her cohort know their predicament, but as the opening montage leads to unexplained deaths in far-flung regions of the globe, panic ensues in the storyworld. Doctors link the deaths to a novel virus with no known antidote. Frontline workers in hospitals, groceries, and public services contract the disease at terrifying rates. Facemasks and hand sanitizer proliferate as contact tracing becomes a necessity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls for social distancing. Schools close. And all this in a film that premieres eight years before COVID-19 becomes world news.

Contagion thus exemplifies a specific strand of dystopian narrative in which plague decimates unprepared populations. This strand features a materialist emphasis on the vibrancy of presumably inert things, rendering the physical environment a distinct threat to those who have presumed to control it. In an era of anthropogenic global heating, such narratives acquire an unnerving urgency. They exist as part of a genre that has long situated humanity in conditions of peril and decline, manifesting variously as nuclear winter, infertility, and technological innovations turning maliciously sentient. Related dystopian scenarios find the mass of humanity beset by the ambition of the few, with authoritarian regimes subjecting people to ubiquitous surveillance and thought control, guarding information and historical resources so as to suppress rebellious ideas. Such regimes often criminalize journalistic integrity while instituting brutal punishments for breaking with state-sanctioned orthodoxies. Marked by fear and paranoia, these societies manage affect by using and confusing chemical and media-based sedatives. In their more sensational forms, they establish regular windows of lawlessness to release pent-up energies. In subtler instances, they involve the near-total domination of life by the workplace.

In these quieter versions, and sometimes the more spectacular ones, dystopian premises may edge alarmingly close to the experiences of their audiences. Although the effect may be uncanny, it should not be altogether surprising, as the components of the genre tend to derive from lived conditions rather than totally breaking from them. Dystopian narrative, in the words of Peter Stockwell, is a “displacement of our reality” instead of a “disjunctive” substitute (211). As a displacement, the narrative repositions the existing variables of our reality, pressing them into new configurations. Amplifying Stockwell’s claim, Jessica Norledge holds that

by presenting believable future worlds that offer distorted visions of the author’s environment, dystopian architexts work to alter readers’ perceptions of the real world through the often-satirical refraction of recognizable present-day referents, in terms of specific objects, characters and broader thematic concerns. (11)

This satirical intensification invites us to confront actually existing forms of ecological deterioration, climate shift, lingering radioactivity, technocracy, policing, authoritarianism, labor exploitation. By magnifying extradiegetic tendencies, these stories prophesy headlong movement toward social and material catastrophe.

Inducing audiences to recognize this movement, and to consider how to redirect the process or apply the brake, constitutes part of the work of dystopian rhetoric. Such rhetoric runs across any number of forms and media, coursing through cinema, fiction, drama, poetry, graphic novels, and on into the work of journalists and theorists. The imaginative work of envisioning the dystopia or “bad place” (from the Greek dus and tópos) extends to news, social media, and documentary as people use the available means of persuasion, and the available evidence of distress, to anticipate a range of unwanted futures. This imaginative work illustrates rhetoric’s historical association with moving an audience, with touching the emotions, enlivening the intellect, and inspiring action. Such movement relies in part on what Kenneth Walker terms “material-semiotic symbolic practice” (4), though the efficacy of such practice will be “radically contextual” and dependent on situational contingencies that are evolving, intricately distributed throughout ecological systems, and irreducible to human agency. Dystopian rhetoric may summon audiences to evade or forestall predicted scenarios, or to address the injustice of already-existing conditions, but the response or uptake proves difficult to calculate.

Material-semiotic symbolic practitioners not only lack control of uptake, they cannot even be sure how and where rhetoric will travel. It wanders and proliferates, adapting to ever-changing exigencies and the affordances of contemporary media. Jennifer Nish observes that “the rhetoric that moves us is itself moving, circulating, and transforming” as it flows through “the relationships that connect us to one another and to the ideas and structures that shape our world” (xi). Dystopian rhetoric arises from and helps to condition this flux, at once responding to and articulating public anxieties. Its more resonant instances proceed with the rhizomatic intensity of the opening scenes in Contagion, racing across platforms and geopolitical boundaries with once unthinkable speed. And its more durable instances traverse decades, going from book to film to meme to comic form and back again.1

Such processes expose the limitations of human-centered conceptions of agency, defying prediction and intentionality while depending on extrahuman channels and networks for their range of influence. But they also give material expression to human politics, suggesting that no matter how demonstrably rhetoric exceeds personal will, it still constitutes a crucial mediator of interpersonal negotiation and a key constituent of social relations. This mediation comes to the fore in Jay Dolmage’s definition of rhetoric as the “strategic study of the circulation of power through communication” (3). The emphasis on strategic study suggests investigating how varied forms of dialogue reproduce or revise structures of authority and resources, and how the resulting insights might be operationalized. A rhetorical approach to dystopia might consider, then, how renderings of corrupt or diseased places magnify Norledge’s “recognizable present-day referents,” indicating the unsustainability or undesirability of those trends. It might also address how existing configurations of power work to absorb or neutralize the critique, thereby manifesting dystopian currents in the realm of reception. It might mean asking not just what dystopian textuality is but what it does, what designs it has on its audience, what world it intimates beyond or against the one it explicitly conveys.

In framing particular worlds, dystopian rhetoric calls into being a response to those worlds and thus endeavors to enroll the audience in a specific form of collectivity. While working as a conduit for power, it simultaneously constitutes modes of group identification. David W. Seitz and Amanda Berardi Tennant trace this conception of “constitutive rhetoric” to the Sophists, “who appreciated the contingent nature of knowledge and the constitutive power of language (the capacity of speech to call reality into being)” (109). If we expand our resources beyond speech and language to include image, motion, aurality, and multimodal interchange, we might recognize their contribution to shared affects and public identities that “can subsequently foster conditions for persuasion” as well as “political action, or the defense or challenge of some authority” (109). David W. Seitz and Amanda Berardi Tennant describe the constitution of identity as arising through juxtaposition, the sense of unity coming from contrast with some troublesome other or obligatory exterior (112). Dystopian rhetoric might cast that other as an intrusive government, a despotic police force, a corporate behemoth, a totalizing religion, a corrupt scientific or medical establishment, a repressive educational system, a docile and unwary citizenry, or some combination of such people and institutions. Or, as with Contagion, the antihero might be an extrahuman agent that threatens institutions en masse.

Sensitizing its audience to such a threat, Soderbergh’s film plays a small but notable role in a constitutive process where we recognize, or at least consider, our vulnerability to this viral alterity. Beyond its references to the CDC, social distancing, and its vision of economic deadlock, it dramatizes people’s pained separation from loved ones, and the harrowing experience of witnessing their decline through glass partitions. It depicts scientific visualizations tying the virus to bats and pigs, and it prefigures speculation about the disease being a biological weapon. The film includes anti-maskers who become belligerent when asked to cover their mouths, it highlights the spread of conspiracy theories and false cures, and it figures wealth as a buffer, however imperfect, against contamination. It features a villain that is at once everywhere and nowhere, stealthily attacking the respiratory system. Kevin C. Moore attributes this foresight in part to the research of screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who consulted infectious disease expert W. Ian Lipkin, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, and science journalist Laurie Garrett when crafting the script (2). But even the film’s early reception has an unnerving quality in hindsight, with Anthony Fauci publicly praising its realism before going on to lead the Coronavirus Task Force (Moore 2). Although dystopian rhetoric often fosters collective identity by conjuring a constitutive threat, it is uncommon that a work of fiction would rhyme so tightly with coming events in the extradiegetic sphere.

The interplay of Contagion with an actual pandemic constitutes what I call emergent metalepsis, as its audiovisual rhetoric crosses the boundary of the storyworld to become enmeshed with the real-time, nonfiction narratives that attend daily experience. This concept posits an interplay among narrative registers, describing those unsettling yet instructive moments when imaginative works channel how we narrativize or story everyday life. It indicates leaky borders between those registers, between creative world-building and workaday routine, fiction and news, invented and lived culture. The idea of culture itself fuses the invented and the lived, with rhetoric constituting its varied publics, enabling their communication, keeping the process of world-building in motion. When dystopian displacements of our reality or satirical refractions start to appear predictive, we might remind ourselves that the ingredients for those displacements are already at hand, and that the metalepsis involves synthesis and intensification rather than clairvoyance.

Such recognitions become especially significant in the era of the Anthropocene, a narrative framework that announces humanity’s geological and climatological impact in the form of industrialization, nuclear experimentation, and the waste that attends those processes. Part of that narrative’s emplotment involves humanity driving global heating to the point of the species’ own extinction, with the short-term economic interests of a relative few speeding the decline of the whole. That narrative hovers in the background of dystopian imaginings, motivating many recent examples while yielding an interpretive lens for older ones. In Debra Hawhee’s analysis, the COVID-19 experience hones the edge of the Anthropocene thesis, “mingling with and providing new lessons for climate communicators” while producing the sense “of one crisis temporarily carried into another” (Sense 108). In one way, the collision previews a coming crisis that will interrupt and threaten human lifeways the world over. In another way, it insists that such a future is already here. “The very temporal gap between the now and the very soon seems to have been fading away,” writes Mario Vrbančić; “dystopia is not something coming but is taking place right now” (32). In still another way, the specter of the Anthropocene kindles the affect of belatedness, the traumatic urge to mend the irreparable. That feeling of being behind, of desperately trying to preclude an already-unfolding calamity, motivates the focal texts in this book while grounding its distinct chapters.2

Delayed Recognition

The Rhetoric of Dystopia assembles dystopian rhetorics that express anxiety about ecological and social disasters that are already in process, and that are rooted in systems of industrialization and corporate-capitalist globalization that long precede the rhetorics’ presumably speculative tendencies. Many of those narratives reflect a cumulative toxicity that develops so gradually, or masks itself so effectively as routine, that its hazards do not always register as such. As the book depicts a historical aggregation of harms, along with an unrealizable drive to intervene at points that have already elapsed, it distinguishes itself from analyses that link dystopian projection to management of collective affect. Rather than affording us an imaginative cushion against coming adversity, the narratives instead reflect a traumatic urge to set right, in retroactive and hence impossible ways, a corrupted succession of environmental and political developments. That urge may hold out prospects for improving present circumstances, and for ameliorating harms-in-progress, but it comes with a paradoxical sense of delay, of being hopelessly overdue.

This unease intuits a state of emergency that is immediate and constant rather than prospective. In that way, its logic differs from that of Richard Grusin’s Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11, which construes the abundance of apocalyptic imagery in twenty-first-century culture as preparatory conditioning. The images function, in his estimation, “to maintain a low level fear in the present and to prevent a recurrence of the kind of tremendous media shock that the United States and much of the networked world experienced on 9/11” (4). Such premediation does not amount to prediction, as it is “not about getting the future right” (4). It is instead about circulating an array of narratives that serve as a collective psychological buffer, creating the “feeling of assurance that there will not be another catastrophic surprise” (48). A material-semiotic practice of preemption, premediation moves western publics into a state of readiness, guarding against the profound disempowerment that comes with being caught unaware. It constitutes a collectivity grounded in national security, which names not just a military-industrial ideology but an affective condition.

Narratives of rampant pathogens from Stephen King’s The Stand to Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare to Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak all focus attention on such security by calling it into question, emphasizing the speed with which poorly understood diseases can ravage whole populations. A standout sampling of the genre, Contagion lends a double meaning to the rhetoric of viral dystopia, at once taking the idea as its subject matter and giving it a second significance in its marketing and circulation. Moore maintains that “Contagion could hardly be a clearer specimen of a representation displaying premediation,” as distributors timed its premiere to magnify existing forms of apprehension: “Although the film tracks a deadly pathogen rather than a terrorist threat, the film’s release date of 9 September 2011—almost exactly ten years after the attacks on New York and Washington—could hardly have been coincidental” (3–4). The film’s material-semiotic work has an extradiegetic, intertextual, and historical character, as it draws on traditions of public memorialization for its power. And although fascination with many movies dies out swiftly amid the swell of new content, Contagion saw a second surge of interest with the arrival of COVID-19. “When millions of people were forced to stay home around the world during the initial coronavirus lockdowns,” Moore writes, the movie “was trending strongly on streaming video services”: it ranked “in the top-10 on iTunes for several weeks, competing with new releases in winter and early spring” (1). If we keep Grusin’s argument in mind, we might attribute the resurgence to a desire for mental and emotional preparedness, as a disconcerted and grieving populace sought dramatizations of worse to come.

The rhetorical constitution of a wary public aims more to mitigate the impending blow than to evade it altogether, presuming its general inevitability if not its specific form. In Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, E. Ann Kaplan expands on Grusin’s theory of premediation, interpreting it as an indicator of what she terms “Pretraumatic Stress Syndrome,” where “people unconsciously suffer from an immobilizing anticipatory anxiety about the future” (xix, 11). She shares Grusin’s view that 9/11 disturbed U.S. citizens’ self-assurance, prompting an outpouring of popular narratives meant to guard against the next affront. Scenes from Roland Emmerich’s pre-9/11 Independence Day contain scenes that “look uncannily like images seared in our minds” from the New York and Washington attacks (29), but such instances were not ubiquitous enough to create the requisite emotional shield. Although there was initial squeamishness about disaster narratives in the wake of the events, the early twenty-first century would yield such fare as Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, Abel Ferrara’s 4:44: Last Day on Earth, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and another Emmerich film, The Day after Tomorrow. With the growing fear of climate change in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, Kaplan also notes an upsurge in stories about vengeful, antihuman environments, with instances of killer flora in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening and malicious skies in Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter. Such texts respond to a deep-seated dread of coming adversity, reaffirming the concern yet doing little to counteract its immobilizing tendencies.

Yet treating the adversity primarily as a thing of the future proves misleading. In discussing Hurricane Sandy’s effects on the Manhattan power grid, Kaplan notes the storm’s exposure of people’s profound and unreflective dependence on electricity. Drawing parallels with plumbing and sanitation, she links our routine reliance on infrastructural conveniences to what Christopher Bollas terms the “unthought known,” or the unconscious acceptance of our bond to fallible systems.3 In times of upheaval, the customarily unthought forces itself into awareness. Dystopian narratives often amplify the shock of such recognition, showing how people assimilate the lessons thrust on them by disaster, and in Kaplan’s language, helping humans attempt “to make sense of and find ways around the global catastrophes already in process” (12). The idea that the events are “in process” is telling, and suggests that pre-traumatic stress might be figured instead as an unfolding reaction to current circumstances. Granted, Take Shelter serves as a forceful example of pretrauma, with its protagonist warning his skeptical community of a massive—perhaps even extinction-level—storm on the horizon. But for that character, environmental disturbance is already happening as clouds turn monstrous, birds fly in otherworldly formations, and rainfall includes droplets of motor oil. On one hand, the scenes play as dreams and hallucinations; yet on the other, they suggest his hypersensitivity, the “unthought known” becoming apparent to him before it does to his wife and the rest of the town.

As the protagonist brings news of coming destruction, he proceeds with a kind of desperation, as if his attempt to intervene were already too late. In that way, Take Shelter projects an affective field akin to those in Iliana Vargas’s “Seed,” Hayao Miyazake’s Princess Mononoke, and Tlotlo Tsamaase’s “Eclipse Our Sins,” which display a ravaged Earth retaliating against its tormentors—lively material rhetoric at its most rancorous. In Tsamaase’s short story, characters recognize that “our evilutions are running through Mother’s bloodstreams” and that the environment is taking retributive measures: “We have become foreigners to Earth, and it has turned xenophobic.” The sense of people experiencing the climatological consequences of their destructive routines is hardly confined to fiction, however, and hardly limited to future circumstances. “Reports of extreme weather events are now routine,” observes Kaplan, “as are discussions of climate denial or scientists’ reluctance to speak out passionately about their discoveries” (143–44). The evidence of atmospheric destabilization presents itself with mounting frequency and power, bringing intense heat, wildfires, cyclones, droughts, floods, tsunamis, and smog to sites around the globe. Yet the accumulation of evidence sparks responses that reject human accountability for the problems, threatening public backlash against those who gather the data.4

The robust effort to delegitimize the science indicates the immensity of its implications for energy companies, food and beverage enterprises, clothing producers, and the range of multinational businesses that produce heavy greenhouse gas emissions. But as people try to ensure those industries’ profitability by working to diminish or eliminate environmental regulations, Kaplan senses a kind of self-deception in their defensive rhetoric. More specifically, she registers an underlying concern about what diminished ecological protections will mean for young people: “most parents realize that their children, rather than themselves, will suffer the worst consequences of what their generation is allowing to happen. Even if they don’t consciously think about such dangers, unconsciously they know” (44). The idea that they unconsciously recognize worsening conditions for their children returns us to the “unthought known,” or the form of understanding that exists despite a lack of deliberation or direct articulation. Dystopian narratives often expose this repressed knowledge by centering on the issue of degraded inheritance, with instances such as Donald Bason’s Gone Too Quickly and Chinelo Onwualo’s “What the Dead Man Said” representing Anthropocene turmoil as a fraying bond between generations. While placing an unmanageable burden on youth, environmental injustice also hits women, people of color, and impoverished regions with particular force. Speculative fiction may emphasize those trends, but the inspiration is longstanding and extradiegetic.

To insist on those extradiegetic sources is to affirm once again Stockwell’s designation of dystopia as a “displacement of our reality” rather than a break with it. This displacement works, in many cases, to communicate the otherwise unthought and thereby uncover the conventional operation of power. As the circulation of power denotes rhetoric in action, dystopian world-building generates a counter-rhetoric by exposing, satirizing, and sometimes reimagining the flow. Kaplan reaffirms Terry Eagleton’s view of science fiction’s “elsewhere” as a “reflection on where you are,” and she focuses on dystopian rhetorics that aim to fend off certain futures. But a narrative elsewhere may also have more immediate resonances, affording critical perspective on what already exists. The Rhetoric of Dystopia concentrates on texts in multiple genres that perform precisely such material-semiotic work, displacing our reality in ways that lay bare its climatological and geopolitical ills, its environmental inequities, its contrasts of abundance and deprivation. At times, the texts achieve those purposes by depicting fantastical settings and situations, exaggerating the tendencies they critique. At others, the projected worlds look much like our own.

Situated within the cultural rhetoric of the Anthropocene, those worlds advance a widespread counter-rhetoric while simultaneously harboring unease about its efficacy. Even narratives that precede Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer’s introduction of the Anthropocene descriptor now tend to unfold within its discursive parameters, with climate fiction by J. G. Ballard and nineteenth-century novellas by H. G. Wells taking on fresh relevance. Such texts feed a feeling of delayed recognition—the sense that, by the time we became cognizant enough of our geological impact to name it, we had already set in motion our own demise. The stories thus take on the character of a lament, expressing advance grief for an inevitable departure.

But they also capture the experience of collective trauma, which involves an effort to allay an insistent perception of disorder. That perception arrives in ways so unexpected, so jarring, that they resist articulation after the fact. They demand our attention, but no story suffices to ease the dread they produce. “From a clinical point of view,” Kaplan explains, “trauma can only be known by its belated return in symptoms such as nightmares, phobias, hallucinations, panic attacks. No event, then, is inherently traumatic; it only becomes so in its later symptomatic return” (24). Long before the nomenclature of the Anthropocene, the sense of humanity as a force of planetary scale has haunted visual artists and writers. From the post-apocalyptic detritus of Peter Blume’s The Rock to the nuclear Armageddon of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, from the “blood-dimmed tide” of William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” to humans orbiting a desolated Earth in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, storytellers have been reckoning with the grimmer implications of technological and economic progress. Those reckonings do not equate with nightmares or hallucinations, which arrive without warning and defy conscious crafting. But narrative does afford a means of attempting to order the confusion, of reaching after equilibrium however belated the endeavor. Trauma names the narrative drive.

The Rhetoric of Dystopia thus shares Grusin’s focus on coping with shock, on trying to regain composure after a bewildering blow. But where he foregrounds the effort to make sure no future arrives unmediated, I emphasize the ongoing attempt to process the past while absorbing the blows that keep coming. News of the irreparable—deforestation, loss of biodiversity, habitats vanishing with climbing temperatures and melting permafrost, marine life dying with rising oceanic acidity and the proliferation of microplastics—brings successive jolts to humanity’s faith in its own durability, urging us to craft a different story but already doubting its plausibility. Where Grusin sees premediation as constituting preemptive publics, or populations who have seen it all before, Anthropocene dystopias amplify the sense of being always behind.

Such belatedness does not lead inexorably to despair, however, as trauma tends to produce recursive attempts at intercession rather than acceptance. Acceptance, oddly enough, may better describe the psychic objective of premediation.5 Osahon Ize-Iyamu captures the self-soothing logic in “More Sea Than Tar,” his narrator reflecting that “if I can just desensitize myself enough, maybe it will feel less painful when the inevitable happens.” With trauma, however, the pain subsists, keeping the sense of urgency stubbornly, horribly fresh.

Nested Disasters

Intimations of human extinction characterize scholarly discourses as much as popular culture, creating a rhetorical through-line that extends across registers. Writing in summer 2019, Walker observes that “we are currently on a path above 4 degrees Celsius of warming by century’s end, and even if we immediately institute all of the Paris climate agreements, we are likely to get 3.2 degrees of warming, which inaugurates the collapse of the planet’s ice sheets” (xv). He fears devastating repercussions much sooner, which would likely bring an end to “many species, many worlds, by the time say my five- and nine-year-old children are my age—in their late thirties—and at the rate we’re going, my children may never have grandkids” (xv–xvi). Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks read such concerns as endemic to Anthropocene theory, making the point in ways that recall both earth science and blockbuster cinema: “humans have always had an impact on the earth. It’s simply that this impact has now reached geologic proportions, with humans now affecting climate on the same scale as meteors and volcanic eruptions” (166). In such scenarios, people do not so much inhabit the Earth as slam into it, foul its atmosphere, set its surfaces boiling. Where the blockbuster often shows humans triumphing over natural disasters, the figure of the Anthropocene allows no such distance between people and nature. Humans, in the aggregate, are the natural disaster.

This critically reflexive framing prompts a desire both to represent the problem in material-semiotic fashion and to resist its grim certainty. The representations often come in hyperbolic form, as the ashy mists of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or the endless deserts of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s “Dune Song,” a world so dry fire is forbidden. “The Anthropocene appears to us as a dystopian image of a devastated landscape,” Vrbančić remarks, a “wound in the environment” (38). It is already too late to prevent the wound, though focal characters adapt to it, trying to heal what they can or at least limit the worst effects. The efforts are typically halting and confused, for trauma does not manifest as a “linear, steadily progressing process, finishing in the theology of narrative closure; it is constantly recoiling at the edge of the void” (Vrbančić 38). Sometimes the attempt at healing makes things worse, as when atmospheric engineering produces a new ice age in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, or when the creation of advanced genetic technologies initiates a pandemic in Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper’s Vesper. Such outcomes bear out the traumatic cycle: in trying to manage the harm, we re-enact it different forms.

The desire to disentangle ourselves from the cycle, and thereby to disidentify with the catastrophe, fuels the production of dystopian narrative and related forms of Anthropocene discourse. And the persistent unfulfillment of that desire helps produce the exigency Hawhee describes in A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis Is Changing Rhetoric. In that book she argues that “one intensifier (climate) is altering another kind of intensifier (rhetoric)” in ways that are visceral and collective, with the “sense” of urgency referring at once to embodied, emotionally charged knowing and geographically distributed awareness (2). While linking these processes of intensification, she calls up Thomas Farrell’s designation of rhetoric as “the art, the fine and useful art, of making things matter.”6 That definition coheres with our previous considerations of rhetoric as a material-semiotic practice that “moves” in affective and spatial senses. Whether the Anthropocene will prove a viable or durable descriptor in the earth sciences is as yet unknown, but the idea brings intensity to considerations of humanity’s planetary impact—an intensity that derives from Earth’s expressions of distress. These tangible and linguistic rhetorics constitute publics dedicated to preserving livable conditions, though the connotations of the Anthropocene as a geologic epoch signal the encroaching limits of human habitation. The sense of urgency comes from confronting those limits, “recoiling at the edge of the void,” or if not the void, the prospect of a radically posthuman condition.

The prospect of that condition makes things matter in perplexing and insistent ways, as the sense of permanence gives way to inklings of departure. We pay uncommon attention to the withering of other species and presumably stable topographies, not just acknowledging but identifying with those processes. Ed Roberson captures the impulse in “To See the Earth before the End of the World,” writing of spectators “grabbing at the chance” to witness catastrophe first-hand. People are “chasing glaciers,” he remarks (3). Once, “watched ice was speed made invisible,” but now the poetic persona detects “a subtle collapse of time between large/and our small human extinction” as the disappearances of ancient icebergs “overlap our lived time” (3). The rhetoric of epochal death constitutes a public whose members feel rushed, grabbing and chasing after things that are vanishing, craning their necks for a glimpse of the “crash scene of species extinction” (3). This scene commands our attention as global heating puts over one-third of the world’s plants and animal species at risk of disappearance by 2050 (Center).

Despite the tendency to treat disaster as spectacle, people sometimes find inspired ways to comment on such scenes. Hawhee finds an example in the “Unglacier Tour,” which in 2019 mounted a memorial service for Ok, an Icelandic glacier that died approximately twenty years before. Participants left a plaque on a nearby rock which read: “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it” (45). This epideictic rhetoric shows people starting “to see themselves as future ancestors,” Hawhee reflects, “humans whose actions now matter with greater intensity later” (43). This combination of memorialization and future orientation exemplifies what she regards as perhaps “the most important imaginative habit to cultivate in the context of climate rhetoric: the ability to hold open multiple timescales, and to do so simultaneously, in the present” (26). A Sense of Urgency encourages stories that situate themselves in deep time, considering how the material rhetoric of far-removed pasts ripples through current experience, and how today’s actions may linger in distant futures. If we place her work in conversation with dystopian world-building, it calls up not just the centuries-spanning narrative of Lana Wachowski, Tom Twyker, and Lily Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas, but the layering of eons in Richard McGuire’s Here. As with McGuire’s effort to visualize, in graphic novel form, a single plot of earth across billions of years, and to situate a transient humanity within that story, Hawhee invites both our profound humility and long-range accountability.

This accountability anticipates a world that goes on without us. The very idea of the Anthropocene projects such a world, for as Claire Colebrook argues in Death of the PostHuman, it “deploys the idea of human imaging—the way we have already read an inhuman past in the earth’s layers—but does this by imagining a world in which humans will be extinct” (28). We conceptualize that condition “through images in the present that extinguish the dominance of the present” (28). Making recourse to dystopian visuality, Colebrook finds examples in “the figure of a frozen Sydney opera house, a London where Trafalgar Square is desolate, layers of rock distorted through a camera lens that is not the point of view of any body, an underwater Manhattan, or a sunlight so bright it would destroy the eye”; these tropes “indicate an era or epoch that has begun to sense, if not have a sense of, a world without bodies” (28)—or at least human ones.7 Stanley Kramer envisions this future at the conclusion of On the Beach, Steven Spielberg at the end of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. In Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E, humans have evacuated the planet seven hundred years before the narrative proper, leaving robots to determine the prospects for return. Return and revitalization do occur, though the movie demonstrates family-friendly fare grappling with the rhetoric of ecocide, gradually reassuring audiences that it is not too late to save human life on Earth. Belatedness motivates the story, even when that story temporarily relieves the anxiety. On the Beach and A.I. offer no such comfort.

Those narratives dramatize the species engineering its own demise, displaced in one instance by nuclear fallout and in others by advanced robotics. They express the traumatic desire to intervene once the point of productive intervention has past, and they imply broadly shared responsibility for the movement toward self-destruction. Roy Scranton produces a similar logic in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, maintaining that “the enemy isn’t out there somewhere—the enemy is ourselves. Not as individuals, but as a collective. A system. A hive” (85). The outcome of this smoothly distributed participation, the book suggests, is smoothly distributed ruin. But where the Anthropocene topos emphasizes our common accountability for ecological deterioration, it often evades the questions of who contributes most to climate change and who suffers its worst effects. It thus reports on human self-destruction while advancing an undifferentiated image of the human. That indifference masks a whole range of problems, including how the U.S. and China consolidate economic power by exploiting fossil fuel resources while numerous island and African nations experience the most damaging results of those processes. In countries such as Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan, drought and flood cycles exacerbate problems of food insecurity, sanitation breakdown, and disease while destroying farms and other means of subsistence. The Marshall Islands faces the threat of complete submersion within this century.8 Climate scientists underscore such disproportionate impacts by describing a system of “free riders” and “forced riders” where leading polluters rarely feel the full effects of their routines (Glenn Althor, James E. M. Watson, Richard A. Fuller).

So even as the concept of the Anthropocene signals collective self-destruction, its scope makes it easy to miss the asymmetrical forms of violence that characterize the epoch. Its “end of the world” metanarrative arises as the historically privileged feel their own longevity threatened, underplaying the kinds of sweeping destruction that have unfolded across its time span. Both Kathryn Yusoff and Andreas Malm associate corporate-capitalist freedoms with extractivist projects that steal indigenous lands and exploit Black labor while poisoning those groups with the aftereffects. Malm further locates disproportionate burden in the spread of COVID-19, alluding to Stuart Hall when describing race as “the modality in which the pandemic was lived” (439). Before 2020 was out, Black people were already proving “nearly three times more likely than whites to contract it and nearly four times as likely to die”—partly because they more often lived in high-density areas, worked outside the home, used public transport, and lacked sufficient medical resources (440). As sensitive as Anthropocene discourse has been to contagion, it exhibits a certain analytic indifference due to its concentration on coming extinction, forgetting the inequities of power and vulnerability coursing through the history of the Anthropos.9

The crash scene of species-level destruction thus misses embedded disasters along the way, and ones that are still very much in progress. In Hawhee’s depiction of climate change as an intensifier, she counters under-specific metanarratives by stressing how the transformation “pulls in and worsens other crises and problems,” which include public health emergencies, “racism and racial disparities,” and “social and economic inequalities” (3). She challenges activists, analysts, and concerned publics to make the inequalities matter in their assessments: the climate intensifier demands a reciprocal intensification of movements for social-environmental justice. Walker participates in that intensification by focusing not only on victims of extreme weather events but those who contribute most consistently to those events. Disputing the common-sense rhetoric of “natural disasters,” he describes them as “historically produced through human choices” (7). Framing them as wholly natural has permitted industrial polluters and government proponents of corporate deregulation to disclaim their accountability for widespread illness and rising temperatures as well as their responsibility to assist the stricken. Or if they do assume such responsibility, they do so for a fee, working to “normalize precarity” while profiting from its consequences (7).

For a growing population, normal precarity has become an unlivable condition, forcing them to seek relief by crossing into other, unwelcoming spaces. Life-threatening weather, drought, and disrupted rainfall patterns that affect crop yields all push people from their homes. “Human beings pour over the borders by the thousands,” Walker laments, “fleeing from war and the ravages of climate change in Central America” (xvi). Those immigrants, along with others in regions across the globe, face militarized exclusion and deadly violence when attempting to find refuge. As “immigrant women are detained in tents and raped” and “screaming children are separated from their mothers,” Walker remarks that “none of this is new” and none of it is distinct from the problem of global heating (xvi). The convergence of those concerns motivates dystopian narratives such as Remi Weekes’s His House, Daniel Sawka’s Icebox, Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher’s Sanctuary, and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre. Their stories of young migrants who experience exhaustion, incarceration, and drowning may be fictive, but they mirror so closely our daily newsfeeds that they feel like documentary. They seem almost to record rather than displace or intensify reality, affirming once more Norledge’s view that dystopia derives from “recognizable present-day referents.” As the scrim between fiction and referent thins out, the affect of belatedness takes on heightened specificity.

Emergent Metalepsis

As we saw with Contagion, not only do fictional trauma-stories regularly read like nonfiction, they sometimes foreshadow real events in strangely specific ways. Whereas Soderbergh’s film delivers one such moment after another, the television series The Handmaid’s Tale does so less frequently but with similarly chilling effects. Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, the tale unfolds amid an ecological disaster that has produced mass infertility, leaving a slender percentage of people capable of reproduction. Panic in the U.S. leads to an overthrow of government by the theocratic sect Gilead, which plans to enslave fertile women to grow the families of its military patriarchs. At the outset of the show’s second season, we learn that the coup involved a surprise attack on Congress. As central character June Osborne arrives home to the news coverage, her husband relays the details: “It’s the Capitol. Twenty or thirty guys with machine guns just started shooting from the gallery seats. It just happened.” As June looks on in disbelief, he reports that “they don’t know how many were killed. It’s a lot.” She tries to shield her small daughter from the reporting while working out the implications of the attack. If the audience tuned in for the first season, they already know the outcome: that June will become handmaid to an architect of the uprising.

The episode first ran on April 25, 2018. Less than three years later, an actual paramilitary group led an insurrection at the Capitol, aiming to block the transfer of presidential power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. At moments like these, multimedia objects take on a weird, retrospective liveliness, as if they were attempting to warn us. Such effects arise repeatedly with dystopian artifacts: quarantine and border chaos in Albert Camus’s The Plague, a megalomaniacal forty-fifth president in J. G. Ballard’s Hello America, a similar figure threatening nuclear war in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, an orange haze akin to wildfire footage in Denis Villenueve’s Blade Runner 2049, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In, and Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen. Grusin would likely interpret these instances as examples of premediation, Kaplan of Pretraumatic Stress Syndrome, as fixating on possible futures helps us manage their arrival. Yet we might see them instead as rhetoric in the sense Dolmage outlines, works based in the study of power circulation, synthesizing tendencies that already existed at the time of their creation. Traumatic confrontation with a history of public health crises, authoritarian leaders, and extended fire seasons amid global heating all supply ready premises for critical storytelling, and they all evoke abuses of governmental and economic power. The long persistence of hard-right coalitions in the States also lends plausibility to visions of paramilitary insurgency, and all the more so with the election of a xenophobic nationalist as president.

The seemingly predictive character of pop culture artifacts like The Handmaid’s Tale calls forth the narratological operation of prolepsis, though it anticipates events beyond the storyworld as well as within it. In Narrative Discourse, Gérard Genette defines prolepsis as relating “in advance an event that will take place in the future” (40). A dystopian example occurs at the opening of Ballard’s High-Rise: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months” (12). Ben Wheatley’s film version depicts Laing in a bloody dress shirt, slacks rolled up like a castaway, roasting his meal on a spit. In both renditions, we recognize that no matter how refined the subsequent images of Laing and his neighbors, and no matter how promising their initial interactions, things will end badly. Other dystopian stories may not project outcomes so directly, opting to hint at later developments rather than provide explicit revelations. In the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, for example, the detective assigned to eliminate rogue humanoids (or replicants) has a vision of a unicorn—a slow-motion fantasy that at first feels extraneous or merely atmospheric. At the film’s conclusion, however, a fellow cop leaves an origami unicorn for the detective to discover, indicating that others know his visions and perhaps even share them. The implication, which aligns nicely with the movie’s noir aesthetic, is that the man’s mental images have been programmed, that he is himself a replicant, and that he embodies the thing he has been hunting. Such an interpretation figures the daydream as a kind of foreshadowing that gains clarity with repeat viewings.

This foreshadowing stays within the realm of the narrative diegesis, telegraphing developments that will unfold in the dream-space of the screen. Not all developments respect those limits, however. Genette describes instances in which a story transgresses the implicit barrier “between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (Narrative Discourse [1980] 236). He classifies this sort of transgression as metalepsis. Liviu Lutas notes that in Narrative Discourse Revisited Genette expanded the definition beyond “telling” to include any media representations that deliberately cross “the threshold of embedding.”10 The emphasis on deliberation indicates a controlled crossing in which, for instance, Art Spiegelman’s anguished narrator in the comic Maus reflects on the commercialization of the story he relates, contrasting his artistic and financial successes with the book’s renderings of Holocaust-induced trauma. A cinematic example occurs in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, which finds a pair of sociopaths checking in with the audience to gauge its satisfaction, and even rewinding the narrative to regain authority once their victims prove craftier than expected. In both instances, traversing “the threshold of embedding” permits unconventionally direct commentary on the politics of reception.

But, as we have seen, metalepsis does not always conform to the guiding voice of a narrator. Sometimes it arises in an unstructured manner from the interplay of intradiegetic and metadiegetic planes, the storyworld previewing developments in the material sphere and the material sphere recasting fiction as uncanny projection. Just as rhetoric tends to move in unruly fashion across spaces and situations, it moves between “the world of which one tells” and “the world in which ones tells” in ways that productively confuse the two. I refer to this movement as emergent metalepsis, as it defies a centralized, organizing agency and it coalesces over time. It involves a dynamic crossover between stories, imagined worlds channeling and leaking into the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves, the ways we make sense of daily experience. In framing stories as key to that experience, I follow Grusin’s emphasis on the “real” as “thoroughly enmeshed with networks of social, technical, aesthetic, political, cultural, or economic mediation” (3). Those networks are themselves thoroughly enmeshed with stories, depending on them for their influence and longevity. Such is not to equate the real with fiction, but rather to situate it within a welter of contending accounts, the changing mix of which shapes our local, provisional perspectives.

As that mix of narratives interacts with movies, novels, poems, and other genres, we should avoid conceptualizing dystopia as unfailingly fictive, always on the side of fantasy. Ruth Levitas reminds us that “neither predictions of the nuclear winter nor fears of the consequences of the destruction of the rain forests, the holes in the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect and the potential melting of the polar ice caps are primarily the material of fiction” (195). Echoing Levitas, Gregory Claeys remarks that “the adjective dystopian implies fearful futures where chaos and ruin prevail. So there are non-literary, empirical usages of the term” (Dystopia [2016], 5). When writing It Can’t Happen Here in the early 1930s, Sinclair Lewis needed only consult world news for “non-literary, empirical” instances of fascism, and he transposed them to the U.S. context rather than envisioning a distant future. The novel’s central character, Buzz Windrip, promotes traditional values and extreme nationalism while reducing Congress to an advisory function, criminalizing detractors, and placing many in concentration camps. Octavia Butler included a similarly authoritarian president in Parable of the Talents, assigning him the slogan “Make America Great Again” twenty years before Donald Trump claimed the phrase for his own presidential bid. Although the sequence of events appears to show life imitating fiction, Ronald Reagan had already incorporated the mantra into his White House run in 1980 (Smithsonian). Its associations with jingoism, white privilege, labor exploitation, and suppression of dissent were established in the dystopian real before Butler further exposed those problems in her creative work.

Butler and Lewis were, like many dystopian world-builders, students of the circulation of power through discourse. And just as they imported lessons from first-hand observation into their fiction, Atwood did the same with The Handmaid’s Tale, condensing theocratic ideology and backlash against women’s reproductive rights into the principles of Gilead. The power relations she satirized in the 1980s linger forty years later, expressing themselves not just in the January 6 insurrection but in protests against governmental regulation of women’s bodies. At a Salt Lake City event in late 2021, a demonstrator wore the iconic red cloak and white bonnet of the handmaid while holding a sign that read “Make Atwood Fiction Again” (Paighten Harkins). In such moments we see the novel “displacing our reality,” entering into it and reshaping its contours, providing a shorthand for complex political positions. We also encounter a form of emergent metalepsis in which the book, and the material culture it sparks, come to comment on the work of the post-Trump Supreme Court, which would overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. The grounding of that commentary in a Reagan-era novel, which itself amplified and excoriated the antifeminist discourses of the period, shows a cultural penchant for traumatic recursion, an obsessive tendency to aggravate unhealed wounds.

Gilead represents the particular wound that is gender inequity in the U.S., but it also situates this trauma in a context of ecological distress. The Anthropocene throws White patriarchal hegemony into totalitarian survival mode. Similar premises underlie Children of Men, Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, and Takashi Doscher’s Only, all of which feature militarized surveillance and control of women’s bodies in times of reproductive breakdown. To revisit Hawhee’s ideas, we see one crisis “carried into another,” the prospect of species decline intensifying the rhetoric of embodied power hierarchy as White men struggle to continue making the world in their own image.

The whiteness of the enterprise is readily apparent in the series version of The Handmaid’s Tale, with Gilead’s leadership exhibiting markedly homogeneous racial identity. Children of Men, Future Home of the Living God, and Only all mount a challenge to White futurism by centering on BIPOC pregnancies, though those narratives also show White authorities pursuing such threats and locking them down. The fusion of racism with ecological disaster characterizes pandemic stories as well, with Outbreak tracing its virus to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Contagion to a bat in a Chinese rainforest. The infected bat drops a bit of banana into an animal pen, and its virus mutates when mixed with that of a feeding pig. The chef who prepares that pig at a Macau restaurant shakes hands with Beth Emhoff, who, as we have seen, is the first to display symptoms. The creepily metaleptic dimension of that origin story emerged shortly after the onset of COVID-19, which Trump labeled the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” (Guardian). Despite its vitriol, such language should hardly have been surprising. In Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics, V. Jo Hsu traces the long history of anti-Asian sentiment in the States, observing how the COVID era found “an uneasy public” expressing fear “toward those deemed perpetual threats to the nation” (Hsu 190). The resulting violence, Hsu explains, was “not new but an escalation of the nation’s pre-existing conditions” (190). Reality imitates fiction which imitates reality, the dystopian through-line demonstrating an inability to break the traumatic circuit.

The durability of that circuit indicates the difficulty of addressing a troubled history or finding a narrative cure for a collective condition, especially when a large portion of the collective denies the condition. Grusin contends that we attempt to buffer ourselves against systemic blows by anticipating them through varied media formats, with books, news, movies, and games all working together to absorb the force. Those media function, in his estimation, “to prevent the future by premediating it—to make sure, in some sense, that the future never happens” (58). By the time the disturbance manifests in spaces outside the page and screen, we have already encountered it so often that it feels like the past. And the affect of pastness affords the sense of security, of having withstood the ordeal, and the assurance of never being caught unaware.

While acknowledging the psychic drive Grusin describes, I doubt the efficacy of preemptively relegating unwelcome revelations to the past. Instead, I consider the traumatic past as the thing that haunts, that insists on its presence in the here and now. Movements to control women’s reproduction and racist paternalism have not remained safely behind us, nor has the maligning of Asian Americans. Such rhetoric is a “pre-existing condition.” Contagion seems at first to participate unthinkingly in this xenophobia, rehashing the old idea of an infectious other transmitting disease to the U.S. Yet a closer look reveals that construction equipment from Emhoff’s company disturbed the bat’s local ecology, setting the animal on its uncharacteristic path to the farm. In that way, the film implicates Western exploitation of the biosphere even as it appears to produce an Asian scapegoat. But neither the portrayal of poorly regulated capitalism nor the toying with racist stereotypes premediates the COVID era in a way that dampens its impact. Rather, they signal gnawing repetition compulsions that cross freely between fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and news.

Breaking the Circuit

The movement across narrative registers shows how Anthropocene anxieties enter into creative culture, and how corporate capitalism lives out the cautionary visions it inspires. As I show in the coming chapters, the cruel prophecies of dystopian rhetoric reflect a recurrent failure to heed our own warnings. They also distill the feeling that, by the time we recognize the social and ecological damage we have done, the procession toward self-destruction cannot be reversed—slowed, perhaps, but not re-routed. As students of “the circulation of power through discourse,” writers and filmmakers and other multimedia artists attempt to disrupt that deterministic framework even as they acknowledge its commanding hold.

That hold gains strength from people’s tendency to treat social and environmental ills with the same things that cause them. If, as Hawhee argues, climate change is an intensifier that enlivens another intensifier—that of rhetoric—the effect often involves doubling down on historically damaging practices rather than counteracting them. Chapter 1 of this book relates such traumatic behavior to the idea of literacy, describing how authoritarian regimes attempt to regulate or outlaw it when their dominance comes into question. From the novels of Ray Bradbury and Erdrich to the drama of Samuel Beckett to the cinema of Reed Morano and Yorgos Lanthimos, protagonists struggle to preserve the materials of communication even as the concrete conditions for dialogue waste away. As actual book bans spread across varied U.S. locales in the 2020s, dystopian representations of literacy suppression take on a disturbingly metaleptic quality.

The permeability of registers continues into the second chapter, which details how dystopian spaces embody the material rhetoric of individuation, convincing people of their distinction from “nature” while normalizing their competition for limited resources. Focusing on J. G. Ballard’s and Ben Wheatley’s high-rises, Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer locomotive, and Boots Riley’s strategically segmented workspaces in Sorry to Bother You, the chapter shows how the built environment inhibits social and ecological forms of identification, favoring a form of alienation that regards itself as personal accomplishment. Chapter 3 frames this divisive logic as not just architectural but geopolitical, manifesting as armed border maintenance in works such as Sanctuary, Icebox, and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. All those works tie the constitutive rhetoric of nationalism to the harassment and imprisonment of young people, playing variations on Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” where the perceived stability of the city depends on the hidden misery of a child scapegoat. When competitive individualism and national fortifications speed processes of self-destruction in chapters 2 and 3, dystopian publics tend to reinforce the very boundaries, and bolster the same regimen of privatization, that produce the crisis.

A related story takes shape in chapter 4 as agribusiness and agents of the food industry respond to adversity by promoting and sometimes forcing additional consumption. Advocating what OreOluwa Badaki calls “critical food literacy,” the chapter examines how scenes of dystopian dining reflect structured divisions of resources while showing the inventive ways people cope with food shortages or inadequate nourishment. From Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green to Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh to Marina de Van’s In My Skin, that coping takes the form of cannibalism and sometimes even self-consumption, mixing what Lorna Piatti-Farnell calls “food horror” (2) with a critique of alienation under capitalism. Chapter 5 finds such alienation lurking in activist discourses for ecological renewal, creating a paradox whereby rhetors plead for change while declaring that any intervention already comes too late. Concentrating on the graphic novels Gone Too Quickly and Here, the chapter highlights how dystopian and eco-conscious texts both express and subvert the ancient trope of kairos—which, while it holds strong associations with right timing and judicious matching of rhetorical modes and exigencies, also frames timing according to the interests of dominant groups. While Gone Too Quickly subjects those interests to critical scrutiny, Here asks what it means to be responsible to more-than-human futures, collating “multiple timescales” in ways that anticipate Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency.

Juxtaposing timescales in ecologically attuned ways means committing to forms of livability that will outlast us. It involves taking action against global heating for the good of our species and those with which we cohabitate, but it also requires engaging in epochal thinking, recalibrating our ethics for a world that continues in our absence. If dystopian rhetoric has a role to play in that revision, it is not as a means of premediation, of preparing ourselves psychologically for the next outrage. Nor can it be fixated on belatedness in ways that promote inaction. Still less can it involve the continued commodification of apocalypse—the reproduction of a market where, in Vrbančić’s anxious estimation, “dystopias prosper and multiply in the time of the end of time” (32). A dystopian construct in its own right, such a market fuses Anthropocene trauma with the necropolitics of contemporary capitalism. As with Roberson’s “To See the Earth before the End of the World,” it finds us gawking at “the crash scene of species extinction.” Breaking the traumatic cycle does not mean looking away, though it does require a material-semiotic symbolic practice that defies human exceptionalism and the logic of absolute conclusions. It requires responsibility to distant, unknowable timescales, those forms of radical alterity that rouse our imagination without conforming to it.

Notes

1. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale exemplifies this cyclical movement across varied formats, as does Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in the form of the Blade Runner franchise.

2. The sense that rhetorics of conservation and preservation “come too late” also informs the discourse of political organizations such Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion (Anna Friberg, “Disrupting” 2). As Friberg analyzes these groups’ persuasive techniques, she shares Erik Swyngedouw’s discernment of a millennialist tendency in climate activism (2).

3. Kaplan addresses the “unthought known” on xvii of Climate Trauma. Bollas’s original language appears in The Shadow of the Object: Psychology of the Unthought Known.

4. The critique of climate change denial is an urgent one, though at times it disregards the range of rhetorical opposition ecological activists face. Rob Nixon argues that rather than always engaging in outright denial, oil and coal companies work to ensure that, “in the public’s mind, the jury remains permanently out, so that irresolution rules” (39). When not cultivating doubt, some stakeholders engage in what James Brooks and Leah Wingard call an “ecomodern stance” that promises reduction of environmental harms without posing a real threat to the dominance of fossil fuel industries (2). Brooks and Wingard find this approach in the public discourse of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Secretary General Mohammad Sanusi Barkindo and Biden Administration Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm (9, 11).

5. I am grateful to Daniel Floyd for our exchanges about premediation, and his suggestion that if images of injury work to soften the impact when the injuries actually arrive, they might invite a certain callousness or indifference.

6. Hawhee refers to Farrell on page 3 of A Sense of Urgency. The phrasing first appears in his “The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural Delirium” (470).

7. Other examples of big-city ghost towns occur in Shinsuke Sato’s Tokyo of Alice in Borderland and Danny Boyle’s London of 28 Days Later. While Sato’s images appear in a television series and Boyle’s in a movie, depictions of largely abandoned urban spaces run throughout games such as Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, Tim Cain’s Fallout, and Andrew Prokhorov’s Metro Exodus.

8. Descriptions of global heating’s impact on these countries appear in Bashir Mohamed Caato, The Conversation; International Rescue Committee; John D. Sutter; World Food Programme; Abay Yimere.

9. With these inequities in mind, Dustin W. Edwards encourages researchers to consider “who gets to be a human under the sign of the anthropos” (486).

10. Lutas 151. Genette broadens the theory of metalepsis in the interval between Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited, opening it from narrative fiction to diverse forms of representation in the follow-up book (88).

Chapter 1

Dystopian Literacies

Writing in Worlds Gone Wrong

J. G. Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World depicts Earth in the year 2145, almost entirely flooded in the throes of catastrophic warming. The planet has taken on a tropical climate, with habitable land existing mainly at the poles. Ballard’s central character, Robert Kerans, participates in a scientific project that aims to catalogue conditions in the mostly submerged city of London. Pirates soon wreck his expedition, however, and the social microcosm that inhabits the ruins of Leicester Square teeters between violent authoritarianism and complete breakdown. In the late stages of the book, a wounded Kerans escapes the city and takes refuge in a crumbling apartment house. Before resuming his journey, he converts his handgun into a composing tool: “At last he tied the crutch to his leg again, and with the butt of the empty .45 scratched on the wall below the window, sure that no-one would ever read the message: 27th day. Have rested and am moving south. All is well” (198). Turning the weapon against its designed purposes, he writes too late to avert disaster, too late to do anything other than assert his own existence, addressing a reader he knows will never come.

The reflexive attention to writing and reading, and what effects they might have amid environmental and social disintegration, constitutes a motif not only in Ballard’s fiction but a broad array of dystopian cultural artifacts. It appears in Ray Bradbury’s and Margaret Atwood’s fiction as the criminalization of literacy, and later, in Octavia Butler’s and Louise Erdrich’s novels, as the journals of dissident protagonists. It involves tending the local library in Reed Morano’s film I Think We’re Alone Now (2018)—despite there being no one, or almost no one, left on Earth to visit it. There exists in all these works, and in others I consider in this chapter, a sense that literacy matters at the end of things. In sanguine moments, such works hint that writing may have a restorative character, serving as part of a strategy for sustaining species-level endurance. The bitterest of the narratives, however, casts that sort of optimism as mere nostalgia, suggesting that our attempts to communicate, like Kerans’s, come too late to save us.

The fascination with literacy arises in dystopian artifacts just as the conditions for good-faith interchange are vanishing. To use the parlance made prominent by Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, artists have a penchant for “writing about writing” when they write about widespread disaster, foregrounding the idea of rhetorical engagement even as time for dialogue is running out. The Drowned World crystallizes the impulse by depicting an effort to make meaning amid the destruction, with Kerans turning the gun around and seeking to express himself despite dismal prospects for an audience. The scene prefigures the explosion of theoretical works on the Anthropocene a half-century later. These texts clarify the urge to document the disaster while wondering simultaneously about the futility of the archive.

That potential futility results from the concomitant breakdown of social and biospheric accords, with political discourses and ecosystems alike becoming too hot to inhabit. Both forms of erosion signal the effects of free-market hegemony that naturalizes struggle for resources, favoring deregulating practices that generate competitive advantage no matter how detrimental to animals, plant life, waterways, or the atmosphere. Wendy Brown describes that hegemony with In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, arguing that when early theorists of neoliberal epistemology framed it as a guard against fascism, they missed how it would permit corporate and governmental agencies to fuse their agendas in the name of unfettered enterprise. This fusion yielded “the project of dismantling and disparaging the social state” in the interest of what Brown calls “responsibilized individuals” (29). That project

reached an institutionalized crescendo in the Trump regime, where government agencies designed to steward social welfare in the domains of health, human services, education, housing, labor, urban development, and the environment are headed by those committed to marketizing or eliminating, rather than protecting or administering these goods. (29)

As these agencies came under attack by their leaders, portions of the U.S. population cheered the process while combining “moral righteousness with nearly celebratory amoral and uncivil conduct” (2). In the years after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building, Brown’s qualifier “nearly” has a quaint timbre, underplaying how the tropes of dystopian fiction have come to dominate the news cycle. Appropriately enough, those tropes include scenarios where characters only trust news that reinforces their existing beliefs.

Such characters also tend to embrace proudly nativist rhetoric, confusing xenophobic egoism with the pursuit of individual liberty. Their perversely collective emphasis on autonomy masks the ways that market freedoms favor the already wealthy, reinforcing racial, gender-based, geopolitical, and normate power relations while insisting that those divisions can be overcome through singular acts of will. In so doing, the neoliberal endorsement of “responsibilized individuals” can help us interpret the valuation of literacy in western cultures, while also affording a way to assess its persistence as a concern in dystopian worlds. Krista Bryson provides context in her work on digital literacy narratives, explaining that “because of American entrenchment in individualism, the pervasiveness of the bootstraps mentality, and psychological processes that push us to seek order and causality in our world, western society continues to be invested in the belief that literacy is a guarantor of success in all areas of life” (255). This implicit guarantee of success informs what Harvey J. Graff calls the “literacy myth,” or the faith that reading and writing aptitudes, and a fluency in the dominant communicative codes of a given social sphere, allow responsibilized individuals to prevail over socioeconomic limitations. In authoritarian futures, governments police literacy because they fear its power to overthrow the social order, and protagonists perform illicit acts of writing, research, and textual preservation to help realize that fear. In such worlds, producing and safeguarding texts often signal the desire to protect critical thought against systems that cast it as treacherous or irrelevant. As efforts to ban books spread across the U.S. in 2023, surpassing the previous year’s cases by 20 percent and breaking American Library Association records, sixty- and seventy-year-old works by Ballard and Bradbury appear alarmingly prescient.1 But the urgent and necessary attempt to counter contemporary censorship need not confuse access to literate materials with automatic social mobility. To do so is to keep the literacy myth intact.

Even as that myth proves misleading, we must be careful to distinguish it from cavalier self-deception. As Graff makes clear, it is a myth because it exists

apart from and beyond empirical evidence that might clarify the actual functions, meanings and effects of reading and writing. Like all myths, the literacy myth is not so much a falsehood but an expression of the ideology of those who sanction it and are invested in its outcomes. (Literacy [2010], 20)

Upcoming sections of this chapter itemize those ideologies as they appear in dystopian prose and cinema. The first of those topoi concerns the historical value of composing, which the retired English Professor Faber condenses in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are” (82). He thereby implies that by recording human missteps, we will learn to avoid them in the future. The second topos associates writing with the cultivation of analytical thought, which enables resistance to orthodoxy while permitting subjects to linger in uncertainty. From Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth to Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, authoritarian social arrangements sustain themselves by restricting such thought.

A less common strain within dystopian narrative proffers self-conscious critique of the liberatory power of literacy, thus aligning with Faber’s qualification of his faith in textual archives: “when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off” (Bradbury 1951, 82). Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) even suggests that literacy can help to normalize authoritarianism, as the British elite undertakes a cloning project to harvest life-saving organs for the wealthy, and then attempts to pacify the cloned subjects with a boarding school environment focused on classic literature and art. Such texts raise concerns about our awareness of literacy’s mythic character: if we recognize that reading and writing are not necessarily liberatory, and may even participate in the reproduction of inequity, how might this generate a productive self-consciousness about the historical purposes of literate praxis? In asking this question we might avoid, along with Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1935), the aestheticization of our own demise.

What Fools We Are

With the media prevalence of melting icecaps, raging wildfires, drought, polluted waters, antidemocratic governance, white supremacist coalition-building, rollbacks of reproductive health care rights, and wars of aggression and conquest, we only need look to the daily news for stories of disaster. But by juxtaposing those evolving concerns with works of the imagination, many of which have become cultural touchstones and appeared in multiple modes, we can accentuate the persistence of such concerns while specifying their intersections with the politics of literacy. We can observe how scenes from those texts visualize recurrent social and environmental tendencies, how their purportedly futuristic scenarios draw on unresolved psychic tensions in the world of the audience, illustrating cycles of longstanding, collective trauma rather than picturing something sheerly prospective.

In Bradbury’s reflections on Fahrenheit 451, he expresses a wish to intervene in traumatic behavior at the same time that he counsels against moralizing. “I’m a preventer of futures,” he writes, “I’m not a predictor of them” (Bradbury, “Audio” 195). Yet the prevention must, in his view, be indirect: “I don’t want to set out to influence people. I don’t want to set out to change the world in any self-conscious way. That way leads to self-destruction; that way, you’re pontificating” (Bradbury, “Audio” 195). The character who comes closest to self-aware literacy instruction is Faber, whom Bradbury designates as the conscience of the book.2 When Faber praises books as reminding us of our foolishness, he describes them as “Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal’” (Bradbury, Fahrenheit 82). He links them to historical attunement, arguing not just that the book-burning government is working to destroy memory and obscure its own tracks, but that the inattention to the past allowed the regime to take over: “We could use the honest rage of those historians who haven’t written a line for forty years,” he maintains, while noting that “firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord” (Bradbury, Fahrenheit 83). In those lines we hear the author’s desire to prevent futures, or disrupt ongoing situations, in which ill-informed publics are the norm, and we also feel his reverence for literacy as a brake on despotic drives.

François Truffaut’s 1966 film version of Fahrenheit 451 and Rahmin Bahrani’s 2018 movie both emphasize those drives while associating them with suppression of historical thought. Both pictures feature book burnings as public spectacle, both include the circulation of drugs that dull memory, and both portray social arrangements that encourage people to spy on each other.3 Truffaut draws strong visual links between the firemen and the Gestapo, and depicts them as determined to incinerate the very idea of books: “we burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes—that’s our official motto.” Yet certain firemen find themselves tempted by the objects they destroy, eventually joining the resistance movement they once vowed to subdue. In Bahrani’s version, the resistance devises an operation called OMNIS that aims to embed all extant volumes in a strand of DNA. While that technology is being perfected, activists endeavor to memorize and embody specific books before all physical copies vanish. “I am Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon,” one of them proclaims, her choice resonating powerfully given recurrent attempts to ban that novel in the States. In 2023, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye ranked among the country’s most prohibited texts (Lisa Tolin). Another rebel declares, “I’m James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time”—a book still banned, along with Morrison’s, in various school and public libraries five years after the movie’s release (Lynzee Mychael).

Yet Bahrani’s film spares not a moment on how such books counter the fascist ideology that dominates the world of Fahrenheit 451. Nor does it consider what kinds of political action the books endorse beyond reading. Truffaut’s movie avoids that question as well, concluding with rebels crisscrossing in a snowy wood, reciting their texts, talking past each other in ways that hardly seem conducive to social movement solidarity. The characters embody the sort of myth that, according to Patrick W. Berry, has “been used to manufacture a rhetoric that positions literacy as the great hope, a magical actor capable of transcending social, material, and economic problems” (4). As in Brave New World, Bahrani’s firemen repress that magic for fear of its “deconditioning” possibilities (22). But how that deconditioning might destabilize tyrannical governments, or help dismantle the cultures of white supremacy that Morrison and Baldwin excoriate, goes without answer. The idea that producing and interpreting texts will alone solve such problems is part of literacy’s systemic “violence,” to use the language of J. Elspeth Stuckey. Worse yet, distinguishing the literate from the illiterate has exacerbated the material inequities that the myth pretends to surmount.

Whatever their limitations, variations on Fahrenheit 451 afford us prospects for teaching about the violence of literacy, whether that means suppressing historical thought or regulating language standards to maintain socioeconomic distinctions. Recognizing those forms of violence demands that, just as dystopian texts warn against the erosion of history, we take a historicized approach to our topic. Amy Wan provides multilayered context in Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times, framing literacy as part of a “mass strategy to shape citizenship” throughout the twentieth century (3). That strategy becomes especially apparent in times of perceived crisis in the U.S., whether involving intense immigration in the teens, labor unrest in the twenties, or the resurgence of those concerns in later decades. As in Bradbury, policing literacy sometimes means placing potentially dissident readers under surveillance: anti-Communist tendencies during and after World War I, for example, meant that “immigrants who were ‘too literate’ were often seen as suspect, their literacy a sign that they might be bringing radical ideas to the United States” (Wan 62). But the techniques of regulation have typically been subtler than that, appearing in school and workplace contexts as language standards that favored some demographics while disempowering others.

Such regulation means reifying codes of power while specifying through omission and “correction” which discourses hinder access to cultural and economic capital. More broadly, it yields a mass strategy where ideas of literacy and citizenship “operate together to persuasively categorize, sort, and credential individuals” (Wan 15). This credentialling proceeds in tandem with what Deborah Brandt calls the rising standard of literacy, where cultural expectations change as marginalized groups attain previously exclusive aptitudes. Wan captures the rise with a stark contrast: “in 1917, evidence of literacy was being able to write your name and answer a handful of questions, while today’s DREAM Act sets the bar at college success for those who do not wish to serve in the military” (36). Both ends of her historical spectrum involve apprehensions about immigration, and both support her view of language standards as ways “to reorder, redistribute, and recalibrate” during periods of anxiety (37). The history of submission to the violence of literacy depends on it not being perceived as violence at all. Those who lack power and resources, the logic runs, can improve their position by acquiring or developing skills as writers, readers, and communicators. If they prove unable to do so, they are the ones to blame. If standards shift, those people must adapt or be left behind.

The ideology thrives by confusing a self-regulating, hierarchical system with one that rewards personal striving among evenly positioned actors. And it tends to represent literacy as a panacea, when a more accurate representation would note how it supports social mobility for some people, helps create barriers for others, and yields a range of contradictory effects for still others, though never as an isolated phenomenon. Arising from complex, unstable circumstances, the effects are neither predictable nor attributable to literacy in and of itself. Yet the myth persists along with the dogged faith in the agency of the autonomous subject. In his reading of Stuckey, Kirk Branch reminds us of her trenchant critique of “literacy hope,” an optimism that “powerfully distracts us from addressing violent social disparities simply by repeating the promise that literacy is capable of solving them all by itself” (Branch 412). Beyond addressing social disparities, however, this hope aims at curing a range of poorly understood problems, and takes on particular cultural prominence when those problems cluster together and catch us off-guard.

To return to Wan’s historical analysis, literacy hope becomes especially strident in anxious times. Whereas Fahrenheit 451 has become a classic example of that phenomenon, Reed Morano’s film I Think We’re Alone Now provides a nuanced instance for the COVID-19 era. Like Fahrenheit, it constitutes a warning against the effacement of history and the regulation of memory. And like Fahrenheit, it ties the preservation of memory to the protection of books. But where the anxious times in Bradbury foreground the rise of tyrannical governments, the anxiety in I Think We’re Alone Now comes from an unexplained event that has eliminated most of the world’s population. The effects have been so sweeping that the central character, Del, assumes he is the last person alive. He fills his days in workmanlike fashion, cleaning the houses of the dead, burying the bodies, and returning to the town library where he has taken residence. He then spends his time reading, repairing bindings, making sure each book is properly shelved, and watching old movies. A profound ambiguity arises as we observe his routine, which hints at literacy once more as the “great hope,” the “magical actor” that Berry mentions as the perceived solution to the knottiest of problems (4). But literacy may also help pass the time, providing solace at the ostensible “crash scene of species extinction” (Roberson 3).

Both things are certainly possible at once, as Del is determined to keep records for an unspecified social future while he also appears content in his isolation. His contentment is such that when a young woman named Grace arrives in town, he is not only shocked but annoyed. She explains that she has been traveling between tourist sites looking for signs of life, and Del at first encourages her to keep looking elsewhere. Grace stays on, however, eager to help him with his work. By the time his grudging accommodation turns to affection, her adoptive parents show up, bringing word of a new society.

It soon becomes clear that Grace knew her foster parents were alive, and that thousands of others are alive as well. Del feels such betrayal that he forgets to consider why she would be on the run, and does nothing to stop them from taking her away. Only later does that question overtake his resentment, prompting him to leave the library and visit the utopian collective on the other side of the U.S. Soon after arriving, he learns that Grace, like other members of the community, has undergone surgery to relieve her of painful memories. Her would-be father shares the rationale with Del: “Grief and sadness and anger, despair, guilt. These people shouldn't have to live with that shit, right? It's not fair, right? So we're doing something about it.” When Del appears baffled, the man goes on: “You keep your town nice and clean. . . . We do that with our people. They don’t have to remember what happened before. They don’t have to live in the past. There’s no before. There’s only from now on.” With the smiling aggression of a neighborhood association representative, he oversees the suppression of history in ways that recall Bradbury’s firemen. In place of a memory-killing cocktail, he undertakes invasive surgery. In place of the fire brigade, he cultivates the ethos of a caring family member.

There is no small significance in the keeper of the library coming to rescue Grace from such circumstances; and after the requisite bloody standoff, there is no surprise in them driving off into the desert, top-down and intoxicated by a newfound sense of freedom. Whether they will return to the library remains unclear, but their status as its ambassadors lingers in the final scene. As denizens of the library who refuse to relinquish memory, Grace and Del reproduce Faber’s literacy hope: that the archive affords a means of defying the sunny despotism of the new utopia. But by rehearsing classic cinematic tropes of escape in the closing frames, they displace one problem with another, shedding any prospects for critical sociality or democratization. The options appear to be suburban oblivion or the open road.

It is uncertain whether Morano and her crew saw themselves as “preventers of futures” when crafting the narrative, affirming flight from fascistic tendencies in the Trump era. Released in 2018, the film has an eerie foresight in its portrait of a plague catalyzing narcissistic enclaves and hostility toward historical memory. But even as Morano’s rebels stand for written records in the face of forgetting, they strengthen the longstanding link between literacy myths and what Paul Feigenbaum calls “quixotic romanticism,” indicating that “within mainstream American culture, individualistic stories of valor can be awfully seductive” (9). Granted, Grace and Del have each other, but the prospects for a full-fledged counterpublic are unlikely at the end of the movie, giving its title a newly ominous resonance. Their stories of valor, though preferable to the social engineering they leave behind, signal no more dynamic a future than the one experienced by Truffaut’s dissidents, walking past each other in a snowy outpost, reveling in their singular texts.

Writing Contraband

Grace and Del’s flight into the desert, while suffused with the cinematic codes of the American rebel, nicely condenses the history of opposition to repressive paternalism in dystopian narrative. Such paternalism tends to represent its values as universal, its surveillance practices as benevolent, its language practices as innocuous. From Orwell’s Newspeak to Atwood’s ritualized greetings and patronymic naming, power expresses itself through discursive regulation. Lanthimos’s Dogtooth constitutes an off-kilter variant of that premise, with well-to-do parents using linguistic deception to convince their children never to venture outside their property’s garden wall. When we meet the children, they are in early adulthood, fascinated by the prospect of a world beyond the hedge but subject to language training that hides that world’s attributes. From the outset of the film, audio-recorded lessons misinform them about words, partly to curb desire for anything beyond their immediate surroundings. “A sea is a leather armchair with wooden arms like the one we have in our living room,” the recording assures them, while “an excursion is a very resistant material used to construct floors.” We soon learn that the father organizes the tutorials, and though he generally adopts a calm persona, he erupts into violence when intrusions from outside undermine his pedagogy.4

As writing studies scholars will quickly recognize, the father engages in a repressive version of what Brandt calls “literacy sponsorship.” Sponsors of literacy, in her formulation, are “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold, literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (19). Dogtooth places heavy emphasis on the withholding, as parents maintain the insularity of the family unit by denying communicative resources to their children. In Mark Fisher’s interpretation, the film’s opening lesson proffers

the strategy in a nutshell: the outside (the ocean) is always converted into the inside (a leather armchair). The inside can be frightening (pet cats become dangerous predators), but its meaning is established in advance, fixed by the father and mother’s linguistic micro-despotism. (Dogtooth 27)

The parents absorb otherness into a carefully monitored selfhood, making a homeland from the xenophobic impulse while forbidding “excursion.” This instruction sponsors a desire for transgression, however, as the children intuit something vast beyond the wall. Still, when the eldest daughter stows away in the trunk of her father’s car, we cannot be certain of a happy outcome. As the camera lingers on the trunk at the close of the film, we cannot even be sure she will find a way out.

That uncertainty reflects a distinctive feature of many dystopian narratives, one that brings into view both the persistence and the limitations of literacy hope. Whereas one tendency within the genre insists on the preservation of written records in the face of ecological and sociopolitical disaster, another dramatizes direct resistance to the “linguistic micro-despotism” (as well as macro-despotism) of the dominant order, yet without any assurances of success. That second tendency expresses itself with particular force in works by Octavia Butler, Alex Rivera, and Louise Erdrich. Their texts recall the literacy myth in their framing of reading, writing, and technological savvy as potentially redemptive, but they frustrate the myth with their suggestions that literacy alone cannot restructure unjust or disintegrating systems. They tell stories of literacy sponsorship that supports counterhegemonic activism, some of which yields sanguine if hard-won effects. But it is finally a sponsorship without guarantees, accentuating the indeterminacy of hope as much as its resilience.

Butler captures that dialectic in The Parable of the Sower, which she published in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles protests, and which projects a fictional world of racial unrest, sadistic police, and environmental crisis thirty years later. Reading the narrative around the year of its setting (2024) generates a profound sense of metalepsis, as the very problems Butler depicts have produced Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName, and Sunrise social movements as well as intense backlash against their participants. The Parable of the Sower constitutes what Daniel D. Clausen terms a “dystopian bildungsroman” (271), proceeding as a teenage girl’s journal entries, many of which catalog her efforts to engineer an agrarian collective on Earth before seeking more hospitable, off-world territories later on. In one way, Lauren Oya Olamina’s journal is contraband in that it rejects the policies of the U.S. government; in another way, it is treacherous for existing at all in a world where literacy has mostly gone dormant. From the journal arises Earthseed: Books of the Living, a manuscript that she composes on the run, and which becomes the central text of a movement grounded in antiracism, egalitarian ethics, and ecological attunement.5 While attempting to teach the principles of Earthseed, she laments people’s lack of access to historical information while still admiring how they manage to circulate texts through hidden channels: “Slaves did that two hundred years ago,” she notes; “they sneaked around and educated themselves as best they could, sometimes suffering whipping, sale, or mutilation for their efforts” (Sower 225). The history of anti-authoritarian literacy development sponsors her writing and her efforts as an itinerant teacher, reminding her that social gains often require bitter struggle and that victories are rarely final.

As committed as Lauren is to social justice on Earth, she experiences doubt borne of near-constant violence and rapid climate deterioration. As in Fahrenheit 451, political violence often expresses itself as fire, with pyromaniacs putting her ideas in relentless jeopardy. While mourning destroyed educational materials, she observes that

many books were not burned through. They were useless, but they had been packed so tightly together that the fire had burned in deeply from the edges and the spines. Rough circles of un-burned paper remained, surrounded by ash. I didn’t find a single whole page. (Sower 165–66)

The image of ruined, unreadable volumes corresponds with Lauren’s trauma, her experience of crises that demand analysis but defy interpretive resolution.6 While those events often involve grieving lost records, they also compel her to keep composing: “I have to write. I have to dump this onto paper. I can’t keep it inside of me” (139). The writing provides relief, but the pain returns again and again, causing her to wonder whether her approach is adequate. At such times, she feels “full of books and ignorant of reality” (162). Even as writing provides a means of coping with injury and establishing her vision for Earthseed, Lauren’s literacy hope meets with grave challenges.

Her doubt, and her treatment of Earthseed as a work-in-progress, help align The Parable of the Sower with the genre of critical dystopia, a specific subset of which Marianna Papastephanou associates with “denunciation of the present that is not serving eschatological, blueprint utopias but rather more open-ended and hazy images of futurity” (36). She situates the genre alongside Paulo Freire’s theories of critical literacy, where his dystopian depiction of educational realities serves as “an annunciation of a possible future” that is at once aspirational, speculative, and “in need of constant re-vision” (36). Papastephanou and Freire conceptualize much dystopian prose as a pedagogical call-to-action, though the character of that action must be negotiated and rhythmically re-assessed by those who undertake it, advancing collective problem-posing among people dedicated to alternative futures.

Butler highlights the unpredictability of alternative world-making in The Parable of the Talents, the sequel to her novel about the origins of Earthseed. The book finds Lauren’s daughter Asha Vere negotiating an anguished form of literacy sponsorship, admiring her mother’s ambition yet resisting her specific aspirations. Like Lauren, Asha writes with a firm self-awareness of literacy’s therapeutic and historical value, though she expresses deep suspicion of her mother’s rise to iconic stature and rejects the tendencies she sees as escapist: “the more I read about Earthseed, the more I despised it. So much needs to be done here on earth—so many diseases, so much hunger, so much poverty, such suffering,” and yet Lauren’s acolytes were “hoping to fly off to Alpha Centauri” (383).

Those goals gained worldwide attention following the spectacular demise of Andrew Steele Jarret’s presidency, which saw the rise of right-wing militias who destroyed seditious papers and burned opponents as witches. With the character of Jarret, Butler anticipates Donald Trump’s administration by nearly twenty years, foreseeing a figure who would promise to “make America great again” (29) while spreading xenophobic fear and disdain for environmentalism.7 Jarret disguises his extremism by denouncing the witch burnings, but “in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear” (29). Asha registers the ongoing threat of such politics after Jarret’s fall, and she sees off-world solutions as indicators of privilege, bound to serve the few at the expense of the many. For all the novel’s depiction of post-apocalyptic belatedness, Asha refuses to believe it is too late to redeem human life on Earth. By staging a dialogue between mother and daughter, Butler underscores the reflexive dimension of critical dystopian thought, the Freirean imperative toward constant reseeing.

Alex Rivera generates a similarly self-conscious narrative in his 2008 film Sleep Dealer, which depicts U.S. corporations exploiting Mexican labor through biotechnological prosthetics rather than on-site production. Workers who once crossed the border can instead pay to have nodes installed in their flesh, allowing them to “jack into” fabricated counter-spaces in ways that recall William Gibson’s Neuromancer, often serving as distance-based construction workers. The same network that allows for remote employment also supports potentially subversive social connections, however, with alienated subjects seeking comfort through node-based recreation and political expression. Skilled storytellers thrive within this environment, sometimes monetizing their narratives and other times generating dissident solidarities. Luz Martinez, an underground journalist who gauges the appetite for specific stories in the new literacy economy, communicates the interplay of corporate-capitalist and insurgent agencies in the network: “At times you control the machine and at times it controls you.” Instances of machinic control can be especially harrowing, as overwork leads to brain damage and death in the “sleep dealer” labor-pods that have come to replace maquiladoras.

Those forms of control extend to mass entertainment as soldiers use remote aircraft to kill suspected rebels in a reality show called Drones. While we might rightly tie that subplot to the Cops television series, Paula Straile-Costa locates an emergent-metaleptic parallel in the Fox network’s Homeland Security USA, which premiered the year after Sleep Dealer’s release. She laments how such shows “validate the structural violence that maintains an unjust system” of racial, economic, and international relations (64), but she also details the hacktivist potential of the decentralized narrative apparatus, applauding the movie’s depiction of a traumatized drone pilot who puts his plane to anticapitalist uses. The pilot, Rudy Ramírez, turns his fine-tuned technological literacy away from command-and-control rhetorics toward the defense of indigenous water rights, appropriating counterinsurgent weaponry to attack the dams that dehydrate Mexican villages. For China Medel, “the privatization and hyperindustrialization of memory that takes place in the militarized vision of Drones cut off access to the makings of futurity”; yet she finds Rudy participating in “fugitive relations within the memory market” whereby node workers struggle to define the world to come (134). Rivera’s protagonists, like Butler’s, attempt to invent a language of resistance from available resources, cultivating a literacy that combines words, moving images, soundscapes, and savvy engagement with digital networks.

Those characters thereby express a literacy hope that temporarily destabilizes power relations, aligning the hijacking of the network with the free flow of the previously dammed-up river. It is a haunted hope, however, and comes with an awareness of the system’s durability, a recognition that more often than not, “the machine controls you.” If Sleep Dealer generates a vision of revitalizing, politically charged labor from a dystopian premise, it is a fleeting, inchoate, and constantly threatened vision. It avoids the “blueprint utopianism” Papastephanou associates with dogmatic science fiction, gesturing instead toward “open-ended and hazy” futures that demand continued experimentation and refinement, and that challenge audiences to participate in that process after the credits roll. That contingent, invitational rhetoric reaffirms critical dystopianism’s anti-authoritarian ethos: it implies that sustainable futures will arise from persistent, democratic questioning rather than prefabricated platforms.

While the indeterminacy of historico-political development constitutes an intriguing undercurrent in Sleep Dealer, it becomes a kind of leitmotif in Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God. The novel finds the U.S. populace in dual regression: a global pandemic has generated a process of ecological devolution marked by the resurgence of ancient organisms and the almost complete cessation of human reproduction; the government reacts by radicalizing its already considerable control over women’s bodies, while militia groups hunt down pregnant women with the goal of “protecting” the fetuses.8 Amid these forms of environmental and biopolitical retreat, Cedar Hawk Songmaker composes a journal to her unborn child. Hers is a literacy hope that confronts multiple contingencies at once, presuming that her journal will not be confiscated, that her baby will survive when others rarely do, and that the species will last long enough for the child to read her words.

The journal embodies friction between projecting a livable future and doubting it will come. On one hand, it expresses the yearning for self-determination in a world that conspires to control Cedar’s range of motion. Anna Kemball finds especially powerful striving toward agency in the textual relationship Cedar builds with her child, her tendency to narrativize “stages of fetal development with second person pronouns: ‘your brain is hooked up to stereo—your ears. [. . .] You can hear me as I read aloud the first words of my letter to you’” (Kemball 162; Erdrich 63). On the other hand, the journal concentrates what Silvia Martínez-Falquina calls Erdrich’s “aesthetics of uncertainty” as Cedar struggles to keep faith after being apprehended (165). Once her captors take away her newborn son and sequester her for repeat insemination, whatever literacy hope her writing conveys becomes wracked with grief and a feeling that things are winding relentlessly down. In a conclusion that calls forth the mourning so common in climate fiction or “cli-fi,” Cedar realizes that she has not seen snow since she was eight years old: “There were birds, excited birds, a nuthatch clicking up and down the trees. Cold robins trilling as flake by flake snow collected. The air went still and still the snow kept falling. People drifted by like white shadows and their voices were the cries of lost children” (267). The focus gradually drifts toward her own child, and she asks, “Where will you be, my darling, the last time it snows on earth?” Once more the aesthetics of uncertainty inhabit the second-person formulation, the narrator willing her son to endure even as conventional experiences of “nature” come to an end.

Like Lauren’s writings in the Parable novels, Cedar’s letter to her son constitutes a form of illicit literacy, flouting the government through its very existence. Such contraband arises in response to negative literacy sponsorship, a systematic withholding that feeds the desire for transgression. Whereas Dogtooth compresses the scene of discursive regulation into a household microcosm, works by Butler, Rivera, and Erdrich extend it to national and international contexts. And where Lanthimos’s father-figure purportedly protects his children by defining the sea as mere furniture—taming the exterior menace—related dystopian futures find governments guarding the populace against climate alarmists, rebellious immigrants, indigenous feminists. These futures intensify pre-existing tendencies, reproducing forms of traumatic repression that are all too common in the Anthropocene era, and they consistently involve a pedagogy that closes off the world. The open-endedness of critical dystopia counters that totalizing tendency, with writing representing one of the genre’s most common means of resistance. But such writing hardly constitutes an unambiguous endorsement of the literacy myth. Nonconformists too often find themselves trapped in the trunk, imprisoned in the maternity ward, eager to try living on another planet.

Literacy as Sedative

If some instances of critical dystopian narrative affirm the Freirean impulse toward liberation while detailing constraints on that desire, other texts take on a more disquieting cast. As if to corroborate Faber’s claim that books never kept people from seeking “the highest cliff to jump off,” these texts clarify the frequent incapacity of reading and writing to curb self-destructive inclinations. Worse yet, some narratives emphasize the easy compatibility of literacy with social inequity and political quietism. Those stories bring a harder edge to the idea of the literacy myth, suggesting not just that upward mobility is uncertain, but that the myth of mobility may function to preserve hierarchical systems.

Among the firmest skeptics of such mobility stands Samuel Beckett, whose plays embody a kind of poetics of stasis. His 1961 play Happy Days exemplifies that tendency with its central figure delivering a two-act monologue while buried to her waist, and later her neck, in desert sand. Although the work premiered forty years before the “Anthropocene” became shorthand for climate change and human self-ruin, it has a new poignancy in the twenty-first century. It finds Winnie sweltering in a forsaken landscape, trying to protect herself from the sun only to have her umbrella catch fire (37). Wondering if she too will be reduced to cinders, she comforts herself with trinkets from a knapsack and one-sided conversations with Willie, who mostly stays out of view. She also reads her toothbrush handle and medicine bottle as part of her daily routine, and struggles to recall lines from Milton, Shakespeare, and Thomas Gray (14, 27–28). Willie voices snippets from the newspaper, updating her on obituaries and job ads, and takes pleasure in a salacious postcard that both fascinates and repels his companion. As the day drags, Winnie contemplates the gun in her bag, kissing it for the solace it provides.

As in The Drowned World, the image of the gun coexists with a desire to communicate, as Winnie wishes she had expressed herself more fully to others, that she had “sung her song” in earlier days (40). By the second act, the revolver is no longer accessible as the earth now covers her arms, though stage directions specify that the weapon is “conspicuous to her right on mound” (49). It is too late to sing, and too late to end her own suffering. Through much of the act, Willie no longer responds to her entreaties, though she hears curious sounds in the distance. The source of the sounds, like the source of the catastrophe that occasioned her burial, remains uncertain, leading critic Patrick Whitmarsh to remark on her “sense of being caught within a systemic process taking place beyond her perception” (113). She has the “strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim [. . .] in and out of someone’s eye” (Beckett 40). In Whitmarsh’s interpretation, she comes to see herself as a “specimen, not unlike the object of an experiment,” with no grasp of the experimenter’s motives or goals (116). Her recourse to remembered bits of literature, her striving to recall songs, and her second-act longing for a time when Willie would read to her—all signal an attempt to cope with confusion, to find relief amid her objectification. When Willie shows up at the play’s end, dressed in the finery of earlier times, she is thrilled at the chance to renew their conversation. He begins to climb the mound but his progress is halting. We cannot be certain he will make it; nor can we know whether he stems from Winnie’s imagination.

The work of the imagination soothes her as the sands rise, a lifetime of literate habits expressing themselves as total immobility looms. Rather than being the currency of Wendy Brown’s “responsibilized individual,” those habits provide distraction from anxiety and bewilderment. This scenario exists at a bleak remove from the “open-ended and hazy futures” of critical dystopian narrative, as the future outlined in Happy Days is rigidly defined. Literacy is, at best, a painkiller. And though we find such cold comforts throughout the work of Beckett, he is hardly the only artist to write doubtfully about the liberatory potential of writing. Jorge Luis Borges sounds similar notes in “The Library of Babel,” as do Albert Camus in The Plague and Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea. Those texts each deserve full treatment as examinations of the relationships between inscription and entrapment. But in what remains of this section, we address that relationship in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, where the central characters find themselves to be subjects of a literacy curriculum and a social-scientific experiment at the same time.

Unlike Winnie, who finds herself “caught within a systemic process taking place beyond her perception,” the focal figures in Never Let Me Go gradually become aware of how the systemic process works and how little power they have to alter it. They are human clones, raised in an elegant boarding school that regards their organs as property of the state: when doctors require those organs to treat patients or study public health issues, the clones will “donate” until their own bodies succumb. Most of them die as young adults. If Winnie feels herself a “specimen” within a murky research project, Ishiguro’s Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth come to recognize the terrible precision of their scientific subjection, which their education has conditioned them to accept (though with uneven effects). This pedagogy involves a firm regimen of self-care and medical examination, though it also involves participation in the arts, with particular attention to production and analysis of poetry, drama, and fiction. The closing stages of the curriculum require composing a thesis that can take up to two years to complete.

The program of study distracts the students from their situation while also encouraging them toward a kind of cultural hygiene, a desire to refine themselves as they prepare to donate. Moreover, their immersion in narrative aims to satisfy their curiosity about the outside world, helping them withstand the seductions of the space beyond the hedge. Reading and writing provide entertainment while keeping them from dwelling on and potentially resisting their condition as what Kelly Rich terms “infrastructure.” The Hailsham boarding school’s emphasis on beauty, in Rich’s view, “dramatizes a longstanding belief in an environment’s ameliorative effects on personal development” while reaffirming Douglas Mao’s conviction that graceful surroundings can “bring human beings to some kind of reconciliation with a world that otherwise seems alien, indifferent, fragmented, or oppressive.”9 Exposure to literature, and the encouragement to write in ways both creative and analytical, further foster such reconciliation.

Efforts to promote reconciliation betray a recognition on the part of the state, and the boarding school faculty and administration, that the clones’ experiences tend toward “alienation,” “indifference” and “fragmentation.” The idea of fragmentation has especially sinister connotations, as the students not only face psychological splintering but a literal loss of body parts until they “complete.” The language of completion, Rich explains, plays “a role in masking the cold reality of the clones’ lives,” as does the rhetoric of “donation,” which suggests that the subjects have a choice in the matter.10 Euphemism circulates readily within the school’s pedagogy of humanist acculturation, serving as one tactic in the broader project of infrastructural maintenance. Like converting the vastness of the ocean into an armchair, that project works to shrink overwhelming concepts into something manageable. Yet this literacy of benevolent reduction directly contradicts the social and economic mobility so often associated with favored cultural codes. And the positively coded tropes mask a “cold reality” in ways that are not merely deceptive but deadly.

Those tropes also enter the lexicon of the general populace, conditioning people to think of the clones as utilities rather than persons (Rich 631). Shaping perception through linguistic habituation is part of “a vast enterprise, large enough to assure the British population that ‘their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease’” (Rich 631; Ishiguro 263). Kathy H., the clone who also serves as narrator, explains her role in the enterprise as that of “carer,” or one who nurtures other clones as they move toward completion. From the outset of the novel, she describes herself as a moderately effective bureaucratic functionary: “I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year” (1). She doubts that her length of term has much to do with performance, as carer stints tend to vary, but she claims to “know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work” (1). Emily Johansen reads Kathy’s early self-descriptions as “decidedly reminiscent of the language of annual reviews and the particular dialect of the government employee,” pointing toward the “mysterious ‘they’ who ultimately determine one’s fate” as well as “the seeming disconnect between skill, merit, and promotion” (Johansen 420). Just as Kathy develops a command of classic literature over the course of the novel, opting to compose a thesis on Victorian novels, she also develops an ease with bureaucratic communication, blending quietly into the discourses of scientists, teachers, and “originals.” Both kinds of literate assimilation help explain her longevity as a clone even as other Hailsham students die young—though having only eight months remaining as a carer lends the narrative additional pathos, signaling that her linguistic conditioning is a terminal exercise.

Kathy’s literacy acquisition, whether in its high cultural variation or its reproduction of banal, workplace terminology, exists as part of a program of discreet sedation, subduing its subjects without announcing its intentions. While the effects on the clones are unsettling enough, the narrative becomes even more disquieting by extending the program to the reader. Johansen captures the dynamic by remarking how “Kathy addresses her reader as ‘you,’ implying a connection between herself as narrator, and reader as audience.” The “you statements,” she notes, “are often ones that suggest that the reader is part of and familiar with the rules of her world” (426). A memorable instance occurs when Kathy strikes a conversational tone at the outset of chapter 2: “I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we had to have some form of medical almost every week” (Ishiguro 13). For Johansen, this bit of metaleptic address suggests that “the reader not only understands the discourse of donation, but was somewhere like Hailsham, part of the insular and isolated community of clones” (426). The narratological account of Kathy invoking another clone as audience has real poignancy, indicating her effort to connect with others who are rhetorically constituted to complete, without objection, for those who qualify as human. But the “you statements” also have an indirect, more wide-ranging significance, insofar as they attribute a kind of anaesthetized quality to readers in general, and especially those immersed in corporate settings that perform concern—subsidizing medical attention, giving regular employment reviews—while simultaneously treating their subjects as interchangeable commodities.

Hailsham trains clones to ignore those contradictions, just as the discourses of late capitalism teach Ishiguro’s readers to overlook or accept them. But the pedagogy sometimes misses its objective, as when the clones experience violent spasms of pent-up anxiety or try to convince their overseers that they are exceptional, worthy of living a full life. That sometimes means attempting to prove that they have fallen in love with each other, are capable of profound emotion and thus human enough to deserve a reprieve. Even before they become fully aware of their condition as spare parts, the pedagogical breakdown expresses itself in the classroom during a discussion of poetry, when the students

somehow drifted into talking about soldiers in World War Two being kept in prison camps. One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence. [. . .] Laura—typical of her—got up on her seat and did a hysterical impersonation of someone reaching out and getting electrocuted. (78)

The class convulses with laughter, which reads in one way as inappropriate and in another as indicative of the students’ predicament. They may not know yet the full extent of their objectification, but Tommy will later reflect on the calculated way Hailsham released information, preparing them all along to accept their status as donors (82). In this retrospective view, the electric fence presents a variation on Winnie’s gun, a quick exit from unlivable circumstances.

All too appropriately, the fence image flashes up during an instructional exercise, a discussion of language that becomes a discussion of self-determination. The class aims to sponsor a reflective form of cultural literacy but ends up momentarily sponsoring a mocking response to students’ entrapment at Hailsham. The violence of soporific literacy triggers a violent reaction, which masks itself badly as levity. Yet order restores itself, the curriculum reverting to its anaesthetizing program rather than pursuing the argument implicit in Laura’s pantomime. Whereas Fahrenheit 451 features a drug meant to dull memory and curb the desire for literacy, Never Let Me Go figures literacy instruction itself as the tranquilizer. Hailsham’s pedagogy fosters a subjectivity like that of Del in his library, finding peace with old books as the world dies. Yet at least for Del, the drug is self-administered.

As Ishiguro imagines a mandatory course of sedation, he imbues his book with reflexive irony, producing literature about the potentially deadening effects of literary acculturation. In so doing, he casts an unflattering light on Mao’s description of aesthetic reconciliation with “alien, indifferent, fragmented, or oppressive” worlds, systems that literally pin subjects down and carve them up to reproduce standard power arrangements. By contrast to the enduring logic of literacy hope, Never Let Me Go evokes a kind of literacy despair, a frank and sorrowful recognition of its violence. Yet that may not be its last word on literacy. A novel that casts novels as soporific rhetoric may well be attempting to contest that condition, to catalyze political action beyond reading. And a book that frames teaching as palliative care invites a radical rethinking of pedagogy. More specific still, a narrative that addresses its reader, in the second person, as one among many public utilities, calls forth teaching and activism that lay such objectification bare.

Reflexive AntiFascism

The direct address in Never Let Me Go hails the reader as a subject who is subdued by literacy. It insinuates that the addressee shares the narrator’s imprisonment but learns to accept it, finding temporary routes of escape. Unfolding within a context of political and ecological catastrophe, the rhetorical exchange extends the absurdity of the diegetic world to that of the textual consumer, and thereby frames consumption as a political problem. The book exists amid a flood of works that combine attention to communication and apocalypse, each idea casting a spotlight on the other. As we have seen, some of those works argue for protecting texts from confiscation and ruin but remain cagey about the purposes. Books may teach us “what asses we are” (Bradbury, Fahrenheit 82), but the specifics of the lesson often remain opaque. Other narratives foreground acts of literate dissidence while expressing uncertainty about the outcomes: they dramatize acts of resistance that prompt intensified repression; they show charismatic individualism undermining social movements; they sometimes doubt they will be read at all. Still other dystopian books suggest that literacy instruction may reinforce rather than unsettle power relations, making that argument using the same forms and genres they critique.

In an era where authoritarianism and rightward populism have found traction in numerous national contexts, that last style of dystopia exhibits what may be termed reflexive (or self-referential) antifascism. Such politics resonate with Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis of fascist aesthetics nearly a century ago. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” he finds in artistic production and reception a tendency toward the co-optation of dissent, and worse yet, the capacity for art to supplant revolutionary energy by venting it safely. Fascism “sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses,” he explains, “but on no account granting them rights” (41). That substitution works to make class division durable: “The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged” (41). Rather than merely tolerating nonconformist rhetoric, fascism treats it as a pressure release.

Reflexive antifascism anticipates the commodification of critical communication and invites the addressee to subvert the system’s self-regulating machinery, jamming the smooth process by naming it and collectively insisting on the rights Benjamin specifies. It means refusing complacent participation in the apparatus of self-alienation, which Benjamin perceives as so advanced, so pervasive, that the collective “can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (42). The proliferation of apocalyptic narratives in the years since his essay only strengthens its relevance. Where cli-fi, dystopian cinema, and Anthropocene narratives produce awe in lieu of solidarity, they reaffirm his assessment. Where aesthetic intensity marks the limit of engagement with such texts, rather than serving as a catalyst for social movement politics, it does nothing either to reconfigure power relations or counteract the conditions it depicts.

Although we might argue that aesthetic experience can mobilize activist forms of affect—and Benjamin certainly embraces that possibility—he places particular analytical pressure on rhetorical displacements of revolutionary action. João Valente Aguiar shares this concern in his studies of the “aestheticization of everyday life” that has “consecrated a novel modality of de-centring social class” in popular discourse (624). Such aestheticization proves so elastic that even images of human self-destruction give “supreme pleasure,” indicating the cunning of the culture industry as well as the alienation of the viewing public from the narrative commodity, its own interests, its own future. This alienation inhibits relations between people as a potential collective, decentering not just social class but the range of intersecting histories and positionalities from which they might generate counterhegemonic ways of being. Aesthetic deflection of dissent constitutes a species of fascist ideology, protecting authority by confining political consequence to the realm of imagination.

A self-conscious antifascism would make this deflection the object of analysis, studying how hierarchical systems attempt to ventilate and defuse internal antagonisms by giving them “expression.” It would also adopt a stern skepticism toward the cultural logic of autonomy, asking whom that logic serves and whose authority it works to naturalize. Aguiar promotes this critical approach when denying that the “formation of lifestyles and identities” can ever be “autonomous from the economic and social fields” (626). By framing those fields and formations as distinct, the aestheticization of everyday life extricates itself from “the universe of social classes” (626). Brian V. Street adopts a similar position on the politics of communication, challenging the “autonomous model of literacy” that masks the “cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it so that it can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal” (1). Where people struggle to display the dominant code, the autonomous model brackets “the social and economic conditions that accounted for their ‘illiteracy’ in the first place” (1). Even where people recognize those conditions, the literacy myth teaches them that they can overcome such impediments through singular acts of will. If they fail to do so, the disappointment indicates their lack of resilience; if they manage to improve their situation, the result proves the wrongheadedness of focusing on social and economic constraints. This double bind forestalls systemic transformation by conflating agency with autonomy and literacy with conformity.

Composers of dystopian narrative often confront the lie of autonomy, exposing how the ideology of “responsibilized individualism” coheres with fierce competition for resources, xenophobic militancy, as well as a bootstraps mentality that fails to fulfill its promises. With their attention to journaling, high-tech screen literacies, manifestos, and production of sacred texts, those composers envision forms of textuality that might counteract such ideology, and that might, in Benjamin’s sense, generate transformation rather than merely expressing the need for it. In a realm of linguistic despotism, they aim to venture outside the garden wall. But they frame that transgression as a collective act, and one that cannot be confined to the page or digital interface.

This uneasiness about co-optation indicates the writer’s resistance to what we might call the generalization of Hailsham, the interpellation of the critical rhetor as infrastructure. Kathy already addresses her reader as contained by the system, and the self-conscious quality of Never Let Me Go hints at a similar identification between Ishiguro and other writers. For all its timeliness, his narrative may all too easily comport with the autonomous model of literacy, failing to influence the social and economic conditions from which it emerged and in which it circulates. For all its communal concern, it may typify the aestheticization of everyday life, expressing stylized discontent in ways that make trauma bearable while remaining unable to touch its causes. But this wariness of complicity may also involve a provocation, a summons to readers and writers alike to refuse the Hailsham effect. Contra Bradbury, the author alone will not be a “preventer of futures.” Such prevention requires concerted action beyond the aesthetic encounter. If, as Lauren worries in the Parable series, there is a risk of being “full of books and ignorant of reality,” reflexive antifascism meets that risk head on. The insinuation of the reader’s collusion constitutes an invitation to prove otherwise.

Such invitations are not exactly new, even if recent combinations of ecological disaster and political polarization give them fresh urgency. As high-concept post-apocalyptic worlds continue to arrive on our shelves and screens, older ones take on additional layers of significance. Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film On the Beach, for instance, offers a reflection on literacy hope even as the human species succumbs to nuclear fallout. As in The Drowned World, the disaster has rendered much of the globe unlivable, leaving people struggling to maintain viable societies where society is a dying idea. When communication systems pick up a signal from the western U.S., capturing something that sounds like Morse code, a nuclear submarine crew goes in search of the source. The narrative invests the signal with considerable importance as the transmission connotes life in a region thought to be deserted. Locating the sender promises to reveal how someone has survived the presumably un-survivable, and it promises to help decode a message whose obscurity lends it an almost mystical quality.

When they find the telegraph machine at an electric station near San Diego, there is no one operating it, only a Coca-Cola bottle caught in the cord of a window shade, tapping haphazardly on the key. In a moment of rude efficiency, this image deflates the anticipation of a living envoy in the fallout zone and dashes the prospect of a redemptive message. It reduces message and messenger alike to a waste object, and if that signal were not strong enough, a global icon of routine consumption. Whereas The Drowned World finds Kerans writing a note to an audience that is unlikely to arrive, On the Beach depicts a small but avid audience encountering the author as commodity, tapping a hopeful rhythm where hope has otherwise evaporated.

Reflexive antifascism constitutes a guard against our own commodification, or, if the idea of guard conveys too comfortable a perspective, at least an insistence that commodification is not total, does not conclude the story. Students in Never Let Me Go try, in a sense, to dissociate themselves from the Coke bottle, to contest their condition as disposable utilities within a closed system. But the Hailsham curriculum redirects their energies. Ishiguro hints that antifascist writers may face a similar situation in the age of global capitalism, mega-waste, and creeping authoritarianism. Confronting that problem may not be the work of the singular author, however. The work instead begins in earnest with the collective recognition of being called out, charged with acquiescence, invited to prove otherwise.

Notes

1. Ayana Archie reports that between January 1 and August 31 of 2023, people sought to ban 1,915 books, “a 20% increase compared to the same months in 2022.” It was the largest figure since the ALA started gathering book censorship data “more than two decades ago.”

2. The name’s associations with the pencil manufacturer escaped the author until after publication (Bradbury, “Investing” 205).

3. Managing daily routine with sedatives and technologies for mood manipulation constitutes common practice in the “bad place,” appearing in such works as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “The Era,” Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Zoe Kazan’s After the Blast, Chinelo Onwualo’s “What the Dead Man Said,” George Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead,” and Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix. The Matrix also features ubiquitous surveillance in one of many variations on the techno-totalitarianism of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

4. When itemizing features of dystopian writing and dystopian governments, Amy L. Atchison and Shauna L. Shames include surveillance, violent reprisals, and “a deep concern with language and its connection to thought control” (Survive 1). Dogtooth takes an absurdist approach to those topoi.

5. Earthseed’s inclusion of race, social class, gender, faith, and speech rights in its ecological program generates a fictive version of what Nixon would later call intersectional environmentalism (147). Such intersectionality also becomes apparent in actual social movement organizations such as Extinction Rebellion, which includes “racism, sexism, Eurocentrism, and heteronormativity” as characteristic of toxic systems (Friberg, “On” 54).

6. Butler similarly addresses the corporeal pull of the traumatic past in Kindred, imagining this pull in terms of time travel. Lead character Dana, a Black woman writer who is becoming acclimated to new marriage and a new home, finds herself transported, inexplicably, from her present in the 1970s to antebellum Maryland. There she saves the life of a White child who turns out to be an ancestor and thus a figure on whom her own life depends. The terrors of the Maryland plantation linger when she returns to the twentieth century, mediating her relationship with her White husband in a way that “belies the supposed linearity of time and the possibilities of endings” (Marisa Parham 1326).

7. Jarret’s rise to power (as well as Trump’s) demonstrates once more the constitution of culture and nationalism through narrative. Atchison and Shames note that “democracy’s greatest weakness is voters’ susceptibility to embracing would-be tyrants who can tell a good story” (“Response” 578)—or at least a story that resonates with voters’ sense of grievance.

8. The White patriarchal determination to exert control over new births in times of reproductive scarcity also figures prominently in The Handmaid’s Tale. And population management constitutes a major concern in Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad as well as Barry Jenkins’s adaptation. But rather than claiming authority over newborns amid mass infertility, racist doctors and political organizations in Whitehead’s narrative undertake to sterilize Black women for purposes of long-term social engineering. In still another variation, the second installment of the Snowpiercer graphic novel series features a segregated train circling a post-apocalyptic planet, with only the passengers in the front cars cleared to reproduce (Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette 44).

9. See Rich 635. Mao’s ideas first appeared in Fateful Beauty (6–7).

10. See Rich 633. The rhetoric of “donation” also appears in Mike Buonaiuto’s short film Credence, in which two fathers give up their entire savings to finance their daughter’s evacuation from a doomed Earth. When the savings turn out to be insufficient, one father gives up an internal organ for use by doctors and patients in an off-world population, thus securing his daughter’s passage. Working in a more naturalistic register, Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things similarly depicts organs as currency in a starkly divided social realm. In Boris Kunz’s Paradise, debtors and non-citizens do not “donate” organs but rather years of their lives, which can then be transferred to wealthy recipients in exchange for legal clemency or safe passage across national borders.

Chapter 2

Roquentin’s Nightmare

Fantastic Spaces and Failed Individuation

Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy Studies has produced an outpouring of meditations on the liveliness of inanimate things in the last two decades. From object-oriented ontology to ambient rhetoric to border materialism, there has been a persistent fascination with the communicative force of the extrahuman. Laurie E. Gries condenses the trend by describing “assemblages of active materialities” that include but do not privilege the human, depicting those materialities as “caught up in the process of co-becoming and deep entanglement” while asking how “entangled entities come to matter, acquire power, and act responsibly to co-construct our complex world” (305). For Gries, the entanglement deserves not just our attention but our philosophical embrace, our renunciation of human exceptionalism in the interest of attunement among varied species and ecologies. She acknowledges that her approach feels “late to the game” given the climate emergency in which she writes, but she meets the crisis eager to “act with humility and reverence for others whom so many of us have grossly dismissed as inert, unimportant, inferior, and/or, perhaps worst of all, disposable” (315). With her reference to otherness, she fuses a concern with human inequities with a respect for objects, processes, and places that often go missing in discussions of the social and political.

More than eighty years before Gries’s essays, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea showed a similar fascination with the vibrancy of things while evoking a form of affect that could hardly be more divergent: “Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts” (10). Narrator Antoine Roquentin implies that objects should never have the audacity to exert pressure; they should be touched, not touch. They should remain ready to hand rather than constituting active components of an assemblage. And yet they do touch, they do participate in power relations, they do help to “co-construct our world.” He finds this situation unbearable partly because it undermines his perceived distinction as agent. The outreaching thing at once impinges on his space and threatens his superiority. Insofar as it touches him back it creates “a sort of nausea in the hands” (11). The kind of entanglement that Gries narrates, and the kind of attunement she invites, are for Roquentin a living nightmare.

His longing for individuation, and his concomitant sickness at the prospect of ubiquitous connection, reflect a subjectivity that is much more prevalent in Gries’s era than the subjectivity she invites. The animacy of objects may not always produce the queasiness Sartre describes, but not because his perceptions are anomalous; on the contrary, Roquentin has a physiological reaction to what is for many people unthinkable, too absurd to bear consideration. This unthinkability hints at an orthodoxy that is at once economic and epistemological, a valuing of the distinct human agent as the heroic, or potentially heroic, protagonist within the culture of late capitalism. Normalizing competitive individualism, this culture treats environmental resources as a means of gaining advantage; they “are useful, nothing more.” In Toward an Anti-Capitalist Composition, James Rushing Daniel frames this perspective as feeding capitalism’s “production of hierarchy, its remapping of the world as a place of strife rather than kinship, its degradation of the climate, and its capacity to impoverish” (5). Such effects are “features” of the system, he explains, “not bugs” (5). The idea that the ecological surround might make a claim on us, touching back rather than submitting to our designs, exists uneasily, nauseatingly, with the principles of an economic arrangement that has achieved global dominance.

The urge to preserve autonomy has such prominence that it enters profoundly into storytelling culture, with Roquentin’s nightmare establishing a shorthand for the trope of self-definition, the introspection of the bildungsroman, the virtuous refusal to conform. According to Gregory Claeys, it is one of the defining features of classic dystopian narrative, which frequently involves “satire on collectivist despotism and the suppression of individuality by the group” (“Dystopia” [2022], 55). Such works as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We typify the tendency as do later texts like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. In many such narratives, the threat to individuality expresses itself in the built environment by means of transparent dwellings, surveillance cameras, microphones, intricate prison compounds, and fortified borders. Those environments communicate containment, docile normativity, security against pollution in its various material and demographic forms.

Zamyatin’s We takes the logic of enclosed normativity to remarkably detailed extremes, depicting a populace that has settled into mathematically precise routines, calibrated so rigorously that the smallest deviations bring swift rebuke. In parodic fashion, the novel features a narrator who initially associates his circumstances with general contentment, heaping praise on the literal glass bubble that surrounds his world:

Fortunately, between me and the savage green ocean was the glass of the Wall. O, the great, divinely restrictive wisdom of walls, barriers! [. . .] Man ceased to be a savage animal only when he built his first wall. Man ceased to be a savage man only when we built the Green Wall, when within that Wall we isolated our mechanical, perfect world from the irrational, shapeless world of trees, birds, animals. (85–86)

Where Roquentin fears the touch of inanimate things, Zamyatin’s D-503 prizes his distinction from a purportedly “savage” nature and from sentient beings he thinks inferior to “man.” The wall preserves rationality against disorder, collective harmony against unpredictable, willful variables. By devising a physical structure that serves as an analogy for insulated, mechanistic forms of sociality, Zamyatin opens the way for numerous dystopian page and screen renderings of totalitarian regimes, lending support to Claeys’s view of the genre as valorizing autonomy within repressive systems.

Yet a contrary trend has seen an inversion of the standard dystopian schema, disturbing the neoliberal fixation on market-ready individuality and affirming a variegated and critically reflexive commonality. Instead of refusing the Green Wall that purportedly preserves groupthink, such narratives oppose the projected borders that demarcate the human subject, and that thereby deny its enmeshed condition within rhetorical ecology.1 This revision of genre conventions treats Roquentin’s anxiety as at once dominant and worthy of suspicion, pervasive but susceptible to defamiliarization. Writers and filmmakers make the individualist impulse strange by framing it in spatial terms, refashioning Zamyatin’s bubble as an arrangement of finely segmented interiors and parasitic microcosms. Such visual conceits give habitable form to neoliberal subjectivity while also attempting to foreclose anti-systemic solidarities, at once embodying the architecture of the self-made subject and obstructing dissident organizational politics.

Dystopian narrative thus accentuates how space unfolds as a rhetorical production rather than existing as a static container. Social-material assemblages make space through practice, and those practices tend to reflect and mediate historical relations of power. This chapter details how fictional productions of space express concrete practices of individuation, promising to cushion subjects against environmental turmoil while actually pitting them against each other in the interests of a technocratic elite. The early sections of my argument establish continuities between the High-Rise structures of J. G. Ballard and Ben Wheatley, on one hand, and the Snowpiercer supertrain of Bong Joon-ho, on the other. Both the skyscraper and the “eternal engine” manifest an aesthetic of segmented enclosure that barricades inhabitants against a threatening exterior while zealously guarding sociopolitical distinctions within the stronghold. Both structures depict the pursuit of distinction as a traumatic drive, with the compulsion to divide and encapsulate only accentuating intra-dependence and cohesion.

The subsequent part of the argument extends the focus on the rhetoric of partitioning in dystopian spaces, this time addressing how that architecture works to inhibit the solidarity of captive subjects. Lingering on Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, the section shows how subdivided, hierarchical design obscures the shared interests of majority inhabitants, even as a powerful, resource-rich minority subjects them to creative forms of terror and deprivation. Where the early part of this chapter describes the trauma of failed individuation, the later portion details structural hindrances to insurgent collectivity. Together, these sections work to clarify a paradox of neoliberal spatiality: it advances a project of individuation that is doomed to perpetual incompleteness, yet it nevertheless proves robust enough to frustrate anti-capitalist as well as posthuman epistemologies.

The chapter finally locates that project in texts that portray dystopian spaces without reproducing the genre’s conventional reliance on fantasy. Without recourse to science fiction scenarios, these artifacts represent late capitalist environs as spaces of carceral autonomy. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, for instance, tracks the daily activities of a meatpacking factory worker who encounters constant environmental reinforcements of his alienation. At work and at home, he faces material rhetorics whose liveliness exceeds his own, restricting his mobility in ways that feel patterned and intentional rather than merely routine. The sense of menace is even greater in Todd Haynes’s Safe, which shows a woman’s development of a mysterious “environmental illness” where proximity to commercial chemicals accompanies, if not causes, severe physiological reactions. Like Roquentin, she comes to fear everyday objects “as though they were living beasts,” so that the prospect of “co-becoming and deep entanglement” with them evokes not just dystopia but outright horror. Finding spaces of aggressive individuation in contemporary custom rather than futuristic scenarios, Charles Burnett and Todd Haynes dwell with characters who either lack the energy to escape or seek refuge in further isolation. By confusing realist and dystopian genres, those characters help clarify why apocalyptic fantasy directs its critiques not just toward mass conformity but enforced distinction.

An Epidemic of Insularity

Dystopian world-builders frequently incorporate the drive toward embodied distinction in the architecture and infrastructure of their narrative settings, keeping fantasy assemblages in conversation with those that characterize the realm of the audience. To use Nathaniel A. Rivers’s formulation, they frame the built environment as rhetoric, as material engaged in “the practice of moving people” in both spatiotemporal and affective ways (590). Whereas the Green Wall in We moves people in lockstep fashion, maintaining the affect of group conformity, the conceits in High-Rise and Snowpiercer move people into compartments while promoting an ethos of competition and distrust. The cells in High-Rise are primarily vertical, encoding hierarchies of wealth and influence into its focal apartment tower, though the tower’s brutalist architecture also accentuates barriers between people on each floor. The cells in Snowpiercer take on a horizontal organization, with authority and resources clustering in the front of the train while rear passengers suffer in darkness, providing a reserve of just-in-time labor for the engine. Both the tower and the locomotive purport to protect people against an outside realm, promising small-world autonomy as a shield against the ravages of the exterior environment.

To recognize such microcosms as engineered rhetoric does not solely mean tracing the effects of the designers’ decisions, or reducing the work of spatial suasion to planning and building. Rivers encourages us instead to consider how subjects make space through activity, generating environments from “the intersection of bodies, media, and locations, which all influence one another” (583). Designed space moves people, then, but those people might not consent to its invitations, subverting the planners’ intentions and improvising in ways that resist deterministic conceptions of environmental-social interchange. In High-Rise and Snowpiercer, extrahuman rhetoric enrolls people in a process of self-recognition and regularized subdivision, but with unanticipated and highly uneven effects. The unevenness of those effects throws the dominant logic of the structures into crisis, generating a frantic effort to preserve their atomistic design principles while rowdy inhabitants “make space” in unorthodox or dissident fashion.

That effort to make space unfolds within and against environments that give physical form to the tenets of neoliberalism. Robert Asen describes those tenets as promoting “singularity over multiplicity” (331) while normalizing an economic struggle that “frames social relations as a zero-sum game” (339). Along with Jodi Dean and James Rushing Daniel, Asen detects a tendency toward “disaggregation” of publics in neoliberal capitalism, transposing “relationality” into a “battle for competitive advantage” (Asen 344). Its market-based epistemology cultivates the image of the autonomous individual while stressing the “strategic advantages in limiting the agency and denying the autonomy of others” (339). For Daniel, rhetorical emphasis on deregulated competition leads to a fragmented workforce and the dissolution of labor unions (11), advancing an idea of evenly positioned contenders that disregards the struggles of repressed and under-resourced populations (20). Spaces of neoliberalism move people to regard each other as rivals and to accept material inequities as earned and justified. Their advocates take an avidly presentist view of wealth distribution, ignoring or dismissing the history of racist violence, international conflict, colonial ventures, and ideologies of body privilege that might help explain power differentials.

Ballard offers a bleak send-up of such insular hierarchies by envisioning a tower that fortifies itself against history, against the rest of the city, and against anything that might confound its internal order. Part of a trilogy that includes Crash and Concrete Island, High-Rise features a forty-story, one-thousand-unit building in “a mile-square area of abandoned docklands and warehousing” far enough from central London that the city’s office buildings “belonged to a different world, in time as well as space” (Ballard 15). Beyond being removed from the city center, Sascha Klein finds the tenants to be “isolated vertically,” floating in a kind of heterotopic counter-city that inhabitants feel less and less inclined to leave (412). Designer Anthony Royal, who occupies the top floor of the structure, has devised a spatial rhetoric that both expresses and inspires the affect of self-sufficiency, and the occupants reinforce that ethos with their tightly orchestrated routines. As the story develops, they begin to resemble Roquentin in their wariness of externality, of imposition by things beyond the hive. Kevin M. Flanagan finds that wariness both in Ballard’s novel and Wheatley’s film, observing how “once elect men and women of this building gradually seal themselves off from the outside world and proceed to party, raid, and flog themselves into oblivion” (434). They initially find their needs met by the “self-contained space for living and leisure, complete with restaurants, swimming pools, gyms, and a well-provisioned shopping mall” (434). But the same impulses that compel them to pull away from the city lead them to attack each other, generating conflict between the upper and lower floors before descending into all-out warfare in which floor-based alliances collapse.

Wheatley honors the structure of Ballard’s novel by beginning with Robert Laing, the central character and erstwhile ideal tenant, eating a dog on his balcony once his neighbors have ransacked the building’s grocery store. He wears pants rolled up to his knees like a castaway, his one-time entrepreneurial persona now turned brute survivalist. The narrative thus previews the breakdown of social order before flashing back to days when tenants checked in on each other, amenities were in prime condition, and people still left for work. Appropriately enough, Laing’s early days find him ensconced in boxiness—his personal crates and packages echoing the clean lines and angles of his apartment, his concrete environs as tastefully dispassionate as the tower itself. Those days involve workouts and visits to the office, patterned behaviors that accord nicely with those of people throughout the building. Competitive individualism first proceeds in ways that are quiet and banal, unfolding as a kind of unspoken, affable agreement rather than a bare-knuckles clash.

But signs of trouble arise as people question each other’s uses of the trash chute, plan conflicting events at the indoor pool, and become suspicious of private elevators to the upper floors. Upon invitation from Royal, Laing makes his way to the top to find a pastoral otherworld complete with English gardens, sheep, and horses. The contrast with the apartments below resonates with Mark Featherstone’s critique of neoliberal capital as “sliding back towards a new Victorianism, defined by hyper-division and hyper-inequality” (1). Royal attributes the lavish rooftop to his wife’s nostalgic tastes, though his clear affection for hierarchical order manifests in his architectural decisions. As Laing later descends in Royal’s lift, its infinity mirror creates a series of nested frames that reinforce earlier signals of being hemmed in. But like many of his neighbors, Laing settles into the social arrangement, making self-affirming space within its confines rather than attacking its logic. This logic produces an epidemic of insularity, with his friend and eventual lover Helen Wilder observing that “no one cares what happens two floors above or below them.” The retraction into cells brings general disregard for the life of the city, such that Laing forgets both where he parked his car and why he might need it.

Mass compartmentalization also produces a general inattention to the wellbeing of others in the building, and the longer it goes on, active malice toward other flats and floors. In Wheatley’s film as in Ballard’s book, tiffs about garbage chutes give way to trash piling up in the hallway. Tense encounters in grocery stores escalate into consumer rampages. Residents of the upper reaches decide that they must throw better parties than those below, for “competition is the basis of modern economy and we must prevail!” Women experience increasingly horrific assault during and after the parties. People treat their neighbors’ animal companions as prey. A man falls to his death without anyone calling the police. Helen Wilder’s husband, Richard, initiates a documentary film on the parallel deterioration of the building and the social contract, discovering that Royal has, in classic plantation style, fathered a child on one of the lower levels. He receives the information from one of Royal’s servants, who hopes Richard will use it as a bribe to obtain her back wages. When a member of the penthouse entourage learns of such disloyalty, she accuses the housekeepers of being just like all poor people—“obsessed with money.”

Laing holds deep suspicions of Royal’s penthouse crew, but he shares their ethos of self-made success. Early in the narrative, this pride in independence expresses itself in his competitive exercising and his status as a leading doctor at a local medical school, but as the story progresses, it devolves into ruthless territorialism. When the grocery store riot breaks out, he makes an unrelenting play for a can of gray paint, nearing killing a rival shopper in the process. Flanagan highlights the episode in Wheatley’s film, noting how Laing “retreats to his apartment and covers the walls and his own body with this concrete-grey. As befits a film produced by frequent David Cronenberg collaborator Jeremy Thomas, man and structure merge into a hybrid whole” (435). Flanagan’s interpretation has explanatory weight given how the building and its occupants co-construct each other, but the scene has a more powerful resonance as Laing’s effort to control his environment, to make space in his own image rather than allowing it to determine his identity. In that way, it draws on themes from Ballard’s earlier Concrete Island, where architect Robert Maitland becomes marooned on a freeway median and decides, along with a few other expatriates, to “dominate” his surroundings rather than giving in to the absurdity.2 Michael Truscello links that decision to a “survivalist impulse” that “embraces industrial refuse and its dead spaces” as “the global ecological collapse advances and surpasses planetary boundaries essential to human existence” (4). Laing’s survivalist impulse also takes hold amid desperate conditions, bursting forth in the grocery and then through the paintbrush as post-apocalyptic assertions of private resilience.

This type of assertion “makes space” within a structure whose health is failing precisely due to lack of cooperation and shared purpose. Ballard encourages us to consider the building in terms of physiological breakdown, first by depicting it as a “huge animate presence, brooding over them [the tenants] and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place” (51). The narrator describes the elevator shafts as “pistons in the chamber of a heart,” residents as “cells in a network of arteries,” and apartment lights as “the neurons of a brain,” and later observes the building’s “vital functions fading one by one” (51, 85). When Royal shows Laing the architectural plans in the film, Laing compares it to the “unconscious diagram of some kind of psychic event.” As the lights fail, the elevators stall, the air conditioning dies, and waste accumulates in the pool, the psychic event appears to be one of inexorable ruin. In Wheatley’s vision, the sense of precarity draws additional intensity from the shape of the building, its cantilevered upper levels creating top-heaviness and imbalance while leaving the lower floors in shadow. As the lopsided crown proves an apt signal of troubles to come, the cells of the bloodstream start to attack each other, and homeostatic bodily processes begin to collapse. The neoliberal response to the collapse only speeds it along, having been the problem from the outset.

As Laing and his neighbors tighten their focus on private interests, the ensuing disaster manifests not just as traumatic symptoms in the physiology of the high-rise but as cycles of warfare and hedonism that disrupt the building’s functions. Those cycles exemplify the traumatized subject’s compulsion to reenact the moment of crisis in ways that defy rationality and intention, giving trauma what Trevor Hoag describes as its “temporal structure of afterwards-ness and repetitious haunting” (Occupying 61). The repetition of destructive behaviors would seem to sound an alert, but any awakening comes too late to avert the crisis. Hoag represents this crisis as crashing into our lives with little warning, and he thus emphasizes Michelle Ballif’s idea of trauma as rhetoric “that appear[s] out of nowhere—as a surprise . . . falling” (Hoag, Occupying 60). Such a “headlong fall,” Hoag contends, lands people in “a series of problematic habits and inclinations” that replicate the distress rather than productively intervening (60). Ballard’s novel gives the metaphor of the surprise descent a literal quality as someone falls from the thirty-ninth floor, producing fascination among tenants who gather on their balconies to witness the aftereffects. Whereas an aura of mystery surrounds the event in the book, Wheatley figures the falling man as one of Laing’s patients who has just received a difficult diagnosis. One of the film’s most stylized sequences dramatizes the landing in extreme slow motion as the person crashes headfirst into a car hood, ripples of impact coursing through the frame of the vehicle and creating the effect of body and machine jointly deflating.

As occupants arrive at their ledges, they face both the horrors below and the “afterwards-ness” of recognition, the impossibility of rewinding events and producing a different outcome. “With trauma,” Hoag writes, “one is always running, has already run, out of time” (Occupying 61). Given such deferment, Hoag reminds us of Ballif’s invitation to rhetoric scholars “to rethink the timely as untimely” (61). Trauma has the piercing quality of a kairotic moment yet lacks its associations with pragmatic efficacy. Hoag finds that “a striking parallel exists between the Greek kairion, ‘where an arrow finds its mark,’ and the Greek trauma or wound, ‘originally referring to an injury inflicted on a body’”; yet with the psychic wound people notice too late that they are “bleeding out” (61). It is without doubt too late to help the fallen neighbor, though his misfortune condenses “the headlong fall” of the collective—a collective that fails to see itself as such, proceeding instead as a gathering of loosely affiliated autonomies and outright antagonists.

The bleeding out of the occupants manifests not just in the intensification of self-destructive behaviors, but in the ways those behaviors transmit to the next generation. At the end of the movie, Charlotte’s son Toby roosts high in the skyscraper as if assuming Royal’s position. And where the dapper Laing comes to resemble a castaway as the maelstrom takes hold, Toby looks like a ship’s crazed captain. As he surveys the territory, he listens to a radio broadcast carrying the voice of Margaret Thatcher. “There is only one economic system in this world, and it is capitalism,” she proclaims. “Where there is state capitalism, there will never be political freedom.” Here we see Wheatley resituating the narrative within the original moment of its composition, amplifying the fantasy structure’s continuity with Ballard’s political environment. Piping in Thatcher’s voice emphasizes once more the disaggregation of publics, recalling her related pronouncements that rhetorics of society too often displace individual responsibility. Her dismissal of “state capitalism” expresses her fear of government social programs obviating such responsibility, even as the phrase takes capitalism to be the limit of political thought: there are stronger and weaker versions of the system, some marked by robust entrepreneurialism and other weakened by collectivist platitudes, but no other system worthy of consideration. Even as her principles take material shape in the traumatized high-rise, Toby adopts a high perch rather than attempting escape.

He thus comes to share Laing’s survivalism, eager to dominate the concrete monolith in lieu of the “concrete island” that featured in Ballard’s earlier narrative. Since it feels too late to try another, less insular way of operating, he sets his mind on out-competing his neighbors for dwindling resources. To recall Rivers’s definition of rhetoric as “moving people,” events in the skyscraper have moved Toby to adopt the prevailing logic: the building forms his subjectivity just as he makes a self-affirming space from its affordances. The structure’s vital functions may be failing, but like Laing (and Maitland before him), Toby embraces “industrial refuse and its dead spaces.” Better yet, he learns to treat vibrant surroundings as inert resources, “useful, nothing more,” something to control and turn toward private advantage.

High-Speed Inertia

Whereas High-Rise dramatizes the unsustainability of that ethos, Snowpiercer shows the purportedly external world refusing to submit, touching back in catastrophic fashion. This counter-pressure leads once more to traumatic enclosure, moving the world’s remaining population into a seemingly self-sufficient supertrain, subdividing people into class-specific cars, and catching the ensuing drama in a relentless loop.

As planetary warming threatens to make Earth uninhabitable in Snowpiercer, people attempt to lower the temperature by launching a chemical known as CW-7 into the atmosphere. The result is to ensure unlivable conditions rather than avert them, sending the planet into deep freeze. Ten years after the film’s release, such consequences appear fanciful, but audiences might also recognize them as condensing the dangers of stratospheric aerosols: acid rain, respiratory illness, slowed recuperation of the ozone layer, the “moral hazard” of diminished urgency to reduce CO2 emissions (Catherine Clifford; Alan Robock). Those audiences might further recognize an emergent form of metalepsis as the Biden administration formally engages “with what has largely been seen as the stuff of dystopian fantasy”—considering cooling the planet by “flying aircraft into the stratosphere, or between 10 miles and 30 miles skyward, and spraying a fine mist that would hang in the air, reflecting some of the sun’s radiation back into space” (Clifford). The early frames of Snowpiercer appear cruelly prophetic in the 2020s, though our receptivity to the signals of dystopian fantasy remains, as ever, deeply in question.

In Bong’s work, those signals not only portend environmental collapse but intensified social division. In the new ice age, a small portion of the human population piles into a supertrain designed by the mystic-entrepreneur Wilford, who shows a penchant for mixing bleeding-edge infrastructure with social engineering. The central narrative unfolds seventeen years after the CW-7 disaster, as the “Rattling Ark” runs its course through the snow while a makeshift government enforces class division onboard, concentrating resources at the front of the train. The arrangement spatializes neoliberal privilege in multiple ways—partly by forming a physical barrier against the ecological damage humans have done, partly by defining an affluent head-section against rearward deprivation, and partly by associating both those processes with determined movement through a dormant landscape—insisting on progress in the face of stasis. Yet that progress proves illusory insofar as the train continually revisits the same places, hurtling into a traumatic past rather than entering new terrain. And the urges to distinguish people from “nature,” prosperous authority from the laboring commons, tend to enframe and delimit the very selves they aim to liberate.

Giving material form to such urges, the Rattling Ark is a moving prison that serves as a conceit for the division of labor under capitalism. The most privileged participants in that system maintain order by regularly sending armed guards to the rear of the train, where they subject passengers to spectacular forms of punishment meant to break their will and “disaggregate” incipient solidarities.3 When a man objects to his young son being selected for duties at the front, for example, the guards thrust the man’s arm through a prepared opening in the train wall, freezing it solid and then shattering the limb with a sledgehammer. While Bong’s visual language here may not be particularly subtle, it holds multiple forms of significance. The punishment signals the regime’s effort to terrorize, to keep the populace “self-interested and afraid” in the ways Daniel associates with neoliberal discipline (40). But it also connotes frustrated outreach, eliminating the would-be rebel’s physical and symbolic means of connecting with collaborators.

Within the Snowpiercer microcosm, those who are subject to such punishments dwell in semi-darkness, nearly always under surveillance while being deprived of clear sight: “Don’t fucking look at me,” a guard warns as he moves through a dank compartment. Rob Wilson likens the train to “the contemporary neoliberal state on overdrive” as “the social body is polarized into wealth and poverty. Capital dwells in light and security, and feeds on luxury and epicurean thrill; labor lives in darkness and need, close to penury, misery, intoxication, and death” (203). The police blend into the darkness, their dull garb serving as camouflage, but formal emissaries from the front wear garish colors, flamboyantly styled to clarify their advantage. Although the high-contrast distinctions between classes aim to maintain order, they also risk radicalizing the same people they endeavor to subdue. Violent polarization may keep the tail cars “self-interested and afraid” for a time, but the constant flaunting of power also triggers recognition of common interest and collective agency.

This recognition prompts a series of conflicts where dissident passengers move from rear to front, darkness to light, working their way through the train’s segmented economy. But however subdivided that structure, Wilson observes that “there is no middle-class section on this train” (203). The spatial rhetoric affords little if any liminal space to soften distinctions: the “neoliberal state on overdrive” does away with areas of bourgeois aspiration in which people hailing from the rear identify with the overclass. As the rebels advance, they emerge abruptly from concentration camp conditions into luxury, encountering with astonishment a realm of lush gardens, wraparound aquariums, and sun-drenched leisure. Where before they ate only protein bars derived from crushed insects, they now have access to fresh fruit and vegetables as well as gourmet sushi. Where previously they were pressed together in sooty squalor, the cars are now all light and air—traveling greenhouses and posh restaurants set in an alpine landscape. The effect matches walking out onto Royal’s high-rise rooftop, entering a lavish otherworld whose provisions are all the more astounding for their contrast with the rest of the structure.

Yet that supposed otherworld remains dependent on the space it defines itself against. Early in the narrative, that dependency expresses itself in ways both petty and profound. The police come looking for a professional violinist to entertain the front cars, yet show disdain when a volunteer starts to explain his credentials. “We just need your hands,” the guard replies. Such commodification of the working subject is almost comical in its shamelessness, but the levity vanishes when the sentries begin to pick out children for more shadowy purposes. Bong delays explanation until near the end of the film, when we discover that Wilford uses children to replace failing engine parts, lodging them in small compartments and assigning them repetitive tasks. Fred Lee and Steven Manicastri note the film’s particular emphasis on the character Timmy, a Black child ensconced in the floor of Wilford’s own train car, functioning as machinery the Rattling Ark cannot re-manufacture. They describe a circuit of exploited labor that includes both Timmy and his mother, mapping the train’s economy onto global capitalism: “Timmy and his mother Tanya’s blackness signals that people of color have done and continue to do the labor of ‘social reproduction’ throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. This labor—including the labor of biological reproduction only women can perform—is often unacknowledged, devalued, unpaid” (219). The spatial rhetoric of the train, then, not only yields a material conceit for class division, it exposes how the train’s “progress” reproduces a deeply racist form of biopower. If rhetoric is the process of moving people, the rhetoric of neoliberalism moves people into racial categories and moves the categories into the service of a biopolitical system that repairs its constant breakdowns with organic materials. Human passengers do not just tend the machine, they become the machine. And the super-exploitation of Black passengers brings damning clarity to that arrangement, even as Wilford keeps the more outrageous evidence out of sight.

That doomed attempt to hide systemic dependencies evokes, like the varied forms of structural malfunction in High-Rise, the trauma of failed individuation. Wilford at once orders children to the front and hides the reasons, adopting the trappings of protected autonomy and yet harboring Timmy in the floor, mere feet away. He attempts to reduce people to things, components that are “useful, nothing more,” but the things touch back, whether in the form of a rebellion on the train or the awareness of what keeps the train in motion. And the biopower that moves the train is also what kills many of its passengers, exhausting their energies at a chilling pace, reducing the “span” of their lives in multiple senses. For Sang-Keun Yoo, however, “Bong’s works do not just trace the process through which the biopolitical becomes necropolitical; they also open to interrogation the necropolitical economic structure that results in a mutually parasitic relationship between the working poor and the extremely rich” (47). The death-dealing system is one of powerful interdependence among social formations, though those who benefit most from its functioning ignore or attempt to obscure those relationships. Bong dramatizes these forms of connection and repression in films that precede Snowpiercer—The Host, for instance—and those that come later, such as Parasite. (The complementary character of those titles is by no means accidental, and indicates a career-long fascination.) But rather than asserting a mutually beneficial parasitism or symbiosis between classes, Bong disturbs the common conception of who needs whom. Reflecting on Parasite in a post-screening discussion forum, he stresses how the rich family members in the movie “leech off the labour that others provide” (Yoo 59). The same logic applies to Wilford, though Snowpiercer examines how he masks his leech-like qualities, hiding his dependencies in the back, the floor, the walls rather than confronting them head-on.

The missed opportunity for confrontation expresses itself in the looping journey of the train, which transports them into a past they cannot bear, and that will not slow down enough to yield transformative insight. Snowpiercer thus renders neoliberal capitalism as rhetoric that proceeds without advancing, reproducing itself at high-speed and paradoxically remaining stuck. This fixity is rhetorical in the way that all space is rhetorical, as with Rivers’s “grammar and usage of the city” that manifest as “roundabouts, red lights, cul-de-sacs, zoning regulations, and speed limits” (585). Like those prosaic makers of routine, the Rattling Ark creates acceptable behaviors and pathways, communicating through repeat performance that the only real dangers are stopping or being derailed. Wilson remarks on the violent intensity of that routine, indicating that the “filming was done on train sets at Prague’s Barrandov Studios” to simulate “fury-driven autonomous motion”—as if the circularity and “horizontalness” of the journey were “enacting the closure of a plantationlike world-system with no alternative to its death-driven social antagonisms” (201). That performative closure constitutes political-economic doxa, setting firm limits on critique and imagination, hindering historical questions about how things might have been otherwise, as well as visions of a social and ecological thaw.

Yet even as the furious repetition establishes the groove of the normal, it also gives spatiotemporal shape to the affect of frustration and irresolution. It embodies what Carl Schlachte terms “material inertia,” which “describes how ideas enacted in material spaces continue to exert rhetorical force on the spaces and their inhabitants, long after their original temporal context” (318). He situates this concept within “a broader discourse of rhetorical materialism, which demonstrates objects’ active and agentive capacities,” arguing that to grasp how space acts on people, we must take a “long-durationed perspective” (317–18). The Rattling Ark has been running for seventeen years at the point where Snowpiercer begins, though it connotes a set of social and economic relations that long predate the train. Ironically enough, the failure of those relations made the train necessary, though Wilford and his acolytes still bring that arrangement aboard and intensify its inequities. With the technical breakdowns in the front and hardship in the back, the arrangement is a poor fit for most everyone. Yet the prospects for an alternative appear woefully lacking, as not even the rebels have a plan beyond their mantra: “take the engine.” Material inertia thus acts on human subjects by confusing the existent with the possible, allowing for proscribed renovations but foreclosing radical revision.

This inertia tends to cloud the history that produces it. If the ideas embedded in concrete space exert rhetorical influence “long after their original temporal context,” it becomes difficult to circumscribe that context. For John T. Gagnon and Maria Novotny, such is the nature of trauma: “Trauma stories exist in, on, and around bodies, and in past, present, future, and are lived and re-lived, purposed and repurposed, composed and recomposed. As such, trauma as embodied story exists not so much at a point in time in the linear past but rather in embodied spaces of experience, memory, and anticipation” (489). Trauma does not crystallize itself into discrete moments for bounded analysis; it loops and winds, proving elusive in its origins and unpredictable in its consequences. It exists as part of an “embodied story” where unanticipated shocks and disruptions throw linear development into turmoil, and it thus urges a retelling that establishes order again. Hoag associates trauma less with the narrative rupture than with the inability to heal the timeline. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s investigations, he reaffirms her position that even the phrase “traumatic experience” is “misleading since trauma is characterized by an inscription that disrupts experience” (Hoag, Occupying 61). The disruption happens too abruptly to be recognized all at once, or it proceeds as a kind of erosion that escapes awareness. Only later “does one become seized, preoccupied, obsessed, possessed, haunted, by the rhetorical force of an impossible image and/or mnemic traces as well as by having initially ‘missed’ the inscribing/material event’s occurrence” (Hoag, Occupying 61). No singular event initiated the revolving horrors of Snowpiercer—certainly not the building nor the boarding of the train. Its material inertia instead connotes the cycling of an economic system that cannot be reduced to a catalyzing episode or exceptional experience, and will not yield a distinct object of intervention.

Trying to intervene by “taking the engine” promises a radical revision of the train’s power distribution, but that promise turns out to be deceptive. Rather than upsetting Wilford’s plans, the deadly rebellion fulfills his need to thin the population to conserve dwindling resources. The extrahuman, spatiotemporal rhetoric of the machine on its cyclical journey casts revolution as spinning in place rather than overthrowing the regime. The train wreck at the conclusion of the film offers the only prospect of social and material transformation, as Timmy and a companion break free from the rubble and discover, with a mix of caution and wonder, that they can tolerate conditions outside. For a bracing moment before the credits roll, the children cross the border dividing them from the larger ecosphere, spotting in the distance a polar bear that embodies the prospect of a viable future. The disruption of neoliberal autonomy proffers a closing statement much different from High-Rise, offering to integrate what has been disaggregated in environmental and political terms. But the scene ends abruptly, everything still in question, still vulnerable to the ongoing effects of ill-considered climate engineering.

Sick Structures

The waning moments of Snowpiercer capture the dialectic of yearning and doubt. They frame the individuation project as always incomplete, at least potentially giving way to life beyond the traumatic enclosure that has defined human existence—especially the existence of the train’s young passengers, who have known no other life. But these moments also come with great uncertainty, as the polar bear’s survival provides no guarantee that the children will have similar success. The machinery of capital lingers in the background, undercutting any quick confidence in a sustainable alternative.

However unfinished the undertaking, it has typically proven robust enough to fend off the sort of collectivity that might displace it. Our entanglement with neoliberal space constrains our capacity to envision contrary arrangements while inhibiting the forms of solidarity necessary for transformative politics. To return to Daniel’s ideas, traumatic infrastructures persuade us that the world “is a place of strife rather than kinship” (5), competition rather than collaboration. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You spotlight that problem through the built environments that ground their narratives, proffering structural subdivisions that work expressly to hinder activist bonds. Engineered environments in both films manifest the rhetoric of hierarchical privilege, insinuating that to collaborate with representatives from other levels is to relinquish resources, power, happiness. Both movies give architectural form to Roquentin’s nausea, though in an ironic way: they give the lie to Enlightenment notions of autonomy by distributing agency throughout the environment, yet those environments simultaneously insist on isolationist politics. The structures persuade inhabitants to guard their freedoms, yet those same structures are hardly to be distinguished from prisons.

The Platform (“el hoyo” in Spanish, or “the hole”) features a social experiment that brings convicted criminals together with people who seek an extended hiatus from their working lives, confining them all in a spartan tower governed by sinister rules. The tower has an untold number of floors, each of which houses two inmates, and each of which has a gaping hole at its center. Once a day, a lavish banquet table descends from the top floor, stopping briefly at every level so the participants may eat. They must consume what they can in the allotted time, as retaining food once the table starts to descend will cause a given floor to heat or cool to unbearable temperatures. Even with the short feeding window, inmates consume the dishes long before the table reaches the lower floors. The occupants have no control over their position in the hierarchy, and must reside on a single floor for a month before moving to another platform.

The story centers on Goreng, a civilian who volunteers for the experience without knowing many details—only that it gives him respite from his customary existence, a chance to quit smoking, and comes with an “accredited diploma” at the end. He ascertains the rules of the experience as he goes, recognizing quickly that pocketing food has consequences, and that waking up on one of the lower floors might be deadly. What he does not discover from bitter experience he learns from his cellmate Trimagasi, a convict who reveals the horrors of the situation with frank stoicism. For Trimagasi, it is “obvious” that prisoners must accept the leftovers of those above. It is similarly “obvious” that self-interest is the supreme value, and that placing faith in other participants will bring personal suffering. Considering that every inmate may bring only one object into the tower, weapons are the most useful items. Goreng brings a copy of Don Quixote, Trimagasi a self-sharpening knife. The better choice is obvious.

It is also a given, in Trimagasi’s estimation, that people on different floors will not cooperate in mutually beneficial ways, as resentment, suspicion, and immediate self-concern foreclose any prospects for communal behavior. Although people can easily converse through the space where the table descends, they have not proven able to subvert the separatist logic of the tower. “Don’t speak to the people below,” he recommends, “because they’re down below. The people above won’t answer you . . . because they’re above, obviously.” In a review of the film for the Los Angeles Times, Carlos Aguilar interprets Trimagasi’s weary self-assurance as an admission that the social and economic “status quo” is “absolute and unchangeable.” Much of the narrative appears to support that conclusion, with efforts at inter-level dialogue generally devolving into insults and threats of violence. The prominence of tiered order obstructs any rhetoric of shared interest: if the higher level does not get its way, its inhabitants might as easily foul the banquet table as continue the negotiation. Granted, Goreng shows genuine compassion for the lower floors, especially those so far down they are hidden from view. But his is a minority voice that remains ineffectual through much of the narrative, at least until he and a new floormate decide to defend the food, riding the table to the wretched depths.

Goreng’s actions are anomalous insofar as he resists the appeals of the space, the way the design of the tower tends to urge specific behaviors. Paradoxically, the material rhetoric of “the hole” frustrates the inmates’ autonomy even as it persuades them to guard the self above all else. Although the brutalist architecture has an imposing fixity, it still moves people, guiding them in affective ways and enrolling them in recurrent modes of conduct. The movement works against political alliances and toward the “disaggregation of publics” that Asen associates with “free market” epistemology. Although The Platform’s release preceded the COVID-19 lockdowns by a few months, Susan Harmeling reads this disaggregation as ominously prophetic, a kind of surreal metalepsis. “Those who were feasting at the great banquet in The Platform are probably the same people who can buy a ventilator or are already in better health because they have healthcare in the first place,” she explains; “There was a literal trickle down going on in The Platform where the people at the top eat the best, and by the time you get to the bottom, there’s nothing to eat. And we’re seeing with this coronavirus crisis that being played out to the nth degree” (Sonaiya Kelley). Nico Voigtländer plots the critique on a longer timeline, with the movie representing “how we hand down our planet from generation to generation and how it’s just getting more and more depleted as time goes by” (Kelley). The film thus recapitulates the depletion of resources in Ballard’s skyscraper, though it takes the carceral dimension of the social hierarchy to novel extremes. Where the skyscraper at least pretends to be a space of pleasure, el hoyo is a torture device from its inception.

Its ecology permits limited lateral movement, and though it offers a view of seemingly endless space above and below, the austere platforms recur with a regularity that impedes any hope of escape. The visual monotony, the harsh buzzer that announces the arrival of the table, the fierce consumption—all express a kind of environmental repetition compulsion. The sources of the horror cannot be circumscribed or pinpointed in time, and if not for the monthly transitions, temporal orientation might fade altogether. The structure shares High-Rise’s epidemic of insularity; it matches the Rattling Ark’s cruel cycles. However determined Goreng’s defiance, the building design corroborates Trimagasi’s world-weary determinism, his conviction that the obvious result of noncompliance is death.

Similar prohibitions against dissident behavior characterize Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, with riot police set to attack workers who protest the focal corporation’s vertical ecology. But whereas The Platform concentrates on the violent reproduction of solipsism, Sorry considers in ways both comical and terrifying the attractions of hyper-conformity. It centers on Cassius Green, broke and living in his uncle’s garage, as he begins work in an Oakland telemarketing agency. He struggles in the early days of the job, having little success until a more experienced co-worker encourages him to use his “White voice.” After some initial confusion, he catches his friend’s meaning and responds with a kind of otherworldly (but all too conventional) performance that, apparently, cannot be resisted. His swift change of fortune earns him the designation of “power caller,” and subsequent sales garner him an invitation to meet the company’s CEO, Steve Lift. Recruiters from the upper floors usher him into a lavish, art deco-style elevator whose comforts exist in stark contrast to the dismal call center. Entering into Lift’s lift, he consents to spatial and ideological separation from his co-workers, a number of whom have decided to unionize. That movement toward physical distinction extends the work he began with his vocal adjustments, and it anticipates further transformations that will merge social realist politics with absurdist theater.

As the corporate schema draws him into the elevator and away from oppositional politics, it reminds the general workforce of the rewards that await compliance with managerial prerogatives. It builds that reminder into its architecture, suggesting at once that the lift is available to everyone and that only a select few can ride. Cash’s desire for upward mobility overpowers his connection to his co-workers, hinting that such betrayals are necessary to thrive within a system which, however much it trumpets freedom, permits no escape. Paul McGuinness and Alex Simpson associate this sense of inevitability with the rhetoric of “capitalist realism,” which comes with the “fatalistic acceptance that there is no alternative” (179). We can hear in that rhetoric Thatcher’s voice on Toby’s radio, Wilford’s train rattling endlessly past the same frozen places, Trimagasi’s insistence on the obviousness of hierarchical power. Drawing on the work of Mark Fisher, McGuinness and Simpson indicate that capitalist realism “does not connote pragmatism, but is more analogous to the deflationary perspective” that treats the idea of systemic revision as “a dangerous illusion” (181). The society that cultivates such belief becomes snared in a “disintegration loop, fated to repeat and decay, distracted by a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’ and pyrrhic perpetual motion” (182). Cash luxuriates in that newness for a time, his upstairs environment becoming a party-space akin to Ballard’s high-rise at its most triumphal. If acquiescence is a deflationary state, it nevertheless yields dazzling diversions.

But the diversions prove to be short-lived, as Cash soon recognizes the elevator as ushering complicity with Lift’s WorryFree campaign, and worse yet, his effort to dehumanize the workforce in ways that are horrifyingly, hilariously literal. WorryFree forgoes the nuisance of wages and instead offers living quarters, ready meals, and a place to sleep. Invoking modern-day slavery, Leshu Torchin observes that “the ostensibly chic decor of these accommodations fails to mask its prisonlike cramped efficiency: six bunk beds to a room, where people eat from the meal trays of correctional facilities” (32). Torchin underscores how “artivists” within the narrative world recognize the portentous history of Lift’s program, defacing Worryfree advertisements “in a style reminiscent of the culture-jamming Billboard Liberation Front, altering them with spray paint and stencils that spell ‘slaves’” (32). If the implications of assisting a White CEO in overseeing a system of unpaid labor were not troubling enough, Cash uncovers an even more shocking dimension to Lift’s plan: an already advanced effort to convert employees into human-horse hybrids, or chemically induced “Equisapiens” who undertake repetitive or physically demanding tasks with uncomplaining efficiency. However preposterous on its face, this development accords once more with capitalist realism by turning workers into compliant machines. Bryant W. Sculos sees in the Equisapien a metaphor for deskilling, for diminished “cognitive and creative labor” in the high-technology economy (6). Rather than eliminating workers, he argues, the technology will render them docile. Cassius has already demonstrated this penchant for high-performance obedience, and appears to Lift an ideal candidate for bringing out such traits in other workers.

The association of such complicity with Whiteness brings a historical texture to Sorry that distinguishes it from The Platform. Whereas Gaztelu-Urrutia’s film mostly hides the tower’s external geographical context, Riley’s narrative makes its Oakland setting plain. Torchin interprets that setting as articulating “the enmeshment of race and economic inequality and exploitation. Birthplace of the Black Panthers and home to a majority population of people of color, the city is a site of ongoing displacement, uneven development, and disproportionate access to affordable housing and employment facilitated by gentrification and venture capitalism” (30). As Cash adopts the White voice and makes his move into the elevator, he engages in a form of intersectional betrayal that not only disconnects him from racial-economic solidarity but makes him a target of protest. The bloodied bandage that appears in the film’s trailers and ads, and that he wears through a substantial portion of the film, connotes both the physical and ideological wounds that result from his shifting loyalties. The social movement welcomes him back once he recognizes his error, but by that time, he has unwittingly ingested the Equisapien catalyst, and the return to life before the elevator becomes impossible. If, for Trimagasi, the supremacy of self-interest is obvious, Cash finds that it comes with devastating consequences, which may prove irreversible despite the effort to rejoin the dissident collective. By the film’s conclusion, Cash must determine whether he can convert his now wildly heterogeneous subjectivity into revolutionary energy. As he and other Equipsapiens break into Steve Lift’s compound, the narrative affords a jolt of confidence in that prospect.

With its rousing affirmation of organized activism, Sorry inverts the traditional dystopian critique of group identity by exposing the deceptions of private agency. The Platform is less assured in its endorsement of movement politics, for even as it extols Goreng’s defense of the banquet table for the bottom floors, he engages more in hand-to-hand combat than organizing on the way down. This violence stems from the efficacy of a structural rhetoric that persuades people to guard their singular interests, and such rhetoric dominates the geography and architecture of both movies. In The Platform, that rhetoric urges people to consume what they can before it goes to others; in Sorry, it conditions people to value personal advancement above the union. And it extends that ontology beyond the workplace, or more accurate still, it disrupts the distinction between work and life itself. “If you lived here,” a WorryFree ad proclaims, “you’d be at work already.”4 Although Sorry situates its critique in a specific location with a highly charged history, it shares The Platform’s affinity for dystopian allegory where hyperbole and science fiction magnify social and material problems. But as the coming section shows, the dystopian concentration on sick spaces also makes its way into quieter, more naturalistic storytelling.

Allergic to the Twentieth Century

Dystopian narrative often relies on fantastical intensification to warn against ominous tendencies in the world of the audience. Sometimes those intensifications are radical, as with Wilford’s supertrain or the emergence of Equisapiens in Oakland. But in other instances, dystopian narratives present themselves as utterly plausible, barely distinguishable from everyday experience for many readers and viewers. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Todd Haynes’s Safe proceed in just such a fashion, generating a compelling rhetoric of realism while they share the political-economic critique advanced by their counterparts as satire, sci-fi, or horror. Both movies depict an epidemic of insularity that feels all too close to material routine, an array of sick spaces that impose an emotionally and politically debilitating isolation on their characters. But they do so in dramatically contrasting settings—Killer in economically troubled sections of Watts, Safe in the grand suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. Whereas Stan, the protagonist of Burnett’s film, experiences a stifling melancholy in the movement between home and work, Haynes’s Carol White develops a mysterious “environmental illness” wherein trace amounts of industrial chemicals and airborne pollutants generate violent reactions—or at least provide one explanation for those reactions. Safe also hints that Carol reacts to the constraints of her subjectivity as much as to physical toxins, with her support group suggesting that she is “allergic to the twentieth century.” Stan appears to contract a similar allergy, and together they embody a condition that lingers at the century’s end and well beyond.

Killer of Sheep introduces Stan at his most boxed-in, half his body lodged in kitchen cabinetry as he finishes work on a sink. He then peers up from the floor at a concerned friend, explaining in monotone that he cannot sleep, that he is working himself “into [his] own hell.” The narrow enclosure anticipates Stan’s experiences throughout the film, with the camera extending the effect of the cabinet frame into subsequent scenes. This technique constitutes a prominent concern in Paula J. Massood’s “An Aesthetic Appropriate to Conditions: Killer of Sheep, (Neo)Realism, and the Documentary Impulse,” where she contends that Stan

is trapped, and in many of the domestic scenes Burnett uses tight framing, long takes, slowly-paced editing, static camera, and stilted dialogue to illustrate the stagnation and claustrophobia of his situation. He is on a treadmill, and his inability to effect change indicates a lack of power—as a father, as a man, as a citizen—so profound that he can no longer envision a way to escape. (29)

He has a loving family, and a wife who desperately tries to revive his passions, but the domestic mise-en-scène and Burnett’s camerawork continually emphasize captivity. Even the film’s most lyrical scene, which finds the couple slow-dancing to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” places them in nested enclosures, a segmented window frame outlining the dance within the larger, squared-off field of view. By the end of the song Stan has come no closer to freeing himself, leaving his wife alone and pressed against the windowpane, forsaken and in clear distress.

The narrative quickly transitions from the dance to Stan working in a slaughterhouse, and thus communicates a patterned movement between emotional inertia at home and the desensitized performance of violence on the factory floor. Burnett mixes documentary footage of that factory with images of Stan blending into the daily routine, moving the animals through various pens in ways that accentuate the rhetoric of confinement. Massood attributes the visual aesthetic in part to the influence of Basil Wright, who helped define documentary principles alongside John Grierson in the 1930s and brought them to the UCLA film program a few decades later (25). Killer was Burnett’s thesis project at UCLA, and it combined what he learned from Wright with the tenets of Italian neorealism, a genre that includes close attention to working-class life while expressing a preference for on-location shoots and non-professional actors. Henry Gayle Sanders proved powerfully suited to Burnett’s vision when playing the role of Stan, as Sanders served two tours in Vietnam before arriving at UCLA, and he burrowed deeply into the character’s stunned numbness (Killer). Burnett everywhere confuses the distinction between reality and fiction, but never more than in casting Sanders, whose post-traumatic malaise constitutes the ethos of the movie. Nimbly transgressing the border between imaginary and lived experience, diegetic and metadiegetic space, Stan and Sanders channel and refract each other’s struggles.

Killer does not so much project a dystopian future as locate an already existing dystopia in Stan’s workaday life. Whereas Sanders’s emotional repression derives from his experience in Vietnam, Stan’s troubles signal the aftereffects of the Watts Rebellion of the 1960s, when racist police brutality led to a citizen uprising and furious intervention by the National Guard. Thirty-four people died in the ensuing struggle, with more than a thousand sustaining injuries. Public officials downplayed police violence and blamed agitators from outside the city, but “an official investigation, prompted by Governor Pat Brown, found that the riot was a result of the Watts community’s longstanding grievances and growing discontentment with high unemployment rates, substandard housing, and inadequate schools” (“Watts”). Those conditions characterize life for Stan’s family and their friends long after the Rebellion, and their neighborhood still bears evidence of the insurgency (Massood 36). If Stan is “allergic to the twentieth century,” the sickness is a reaction to the structural racism that governs law enforcement and capital investment, insisting that he is fortunate to have a job, no matter how dispiriting. His experience anticipates Cash’s more than forty years later in Oakland, signaling the durability of a logic that disguises its malice through the rhetoric of individual determination—the idea that people can overcome debilitating circumstances through private resolve.

Dejected as he is, Stan hardly lacks industry. At various points we see him fixing the sink, cutting linoleum for the kitchen floor, assisting friends with car engines, and filling his daily shift at the slaughterhouse. In every instance, we find him hemmed in and straining, sleeplessly trying to improve his situation. But the improvements are slow in coming, and sometimes things get worse despite his diligence. A signal instance occurs when he helps a neighbor purchase a used car engine, heft it down rickety steps, and load it onto a truck bed. An unsteady camera tracks their movement down a stairwell whose age and unforgiving angles make every step a struggle. At any moment, we fear, the motor will slip from their hands or the wooden planks will snap. When they finally make it to the vehicle, Stan advises pushing the engine deep into the bed, which, needless to report, has no tailgate. His friend protests, certain the cargo will not shift. They have barely begun to pull away when it slides backward and down the asphalt hill, cracking the block and rendering it useless.

The broken motor condenses much of Stan’s routine, a stark image of stifled momentum. His labors are entirely out of proportion to their rewards, and in many instances, the material environment seems intent on punishing rather than compensating his efforts. A similar kind of malice characterizes the spaces of Haynes’s Safe, though the latter setting expresses profound affluence rather than want. Carol White lives what Susan Kollin calls a “hyper-antiseptic existence,” moving between a gated mansion, elegant lunches, high-end furniture stores, and the local gym (125). Although her routine would seem to exemplify unmitigated comfort and security, she begins to experience dread and an indeterminate sickness when following her habitual pathways. The disturbance begins with annoyance over a delivery crew bringing the wrong color couch, but becomes increasingly painful as her tolerance for dyes, fabrics, hygiene products, and vehicle exhaust diminishes. Proximity to these substances, or even the suspicion of proximity, triggers vomiting and panic attacks. The once anodyne scenes of her existence—parking garages, hair salons, baby showers—become settings of psychological horror. Fumigation at the dry cleaners brings on a full-blown seizure. Carol develops an especially acute version of Roquentin’s nausea, yet with a difference: whereas he recoils in terror at inanimate objects that “touch back,” the threat to her autonomy need not take tangible form, and at times inhabits the very air.

Her husband expresses confusion about her condition and her doctor insists that there is nothing wrong. But as we witness Carol’s hyperventilation, nosebleeds, and fainting spells, the narrative positions us against their dismissive paternalism. Something is surely amiss, and it stems from her surroundings. Haynes invites our confidence in the idea of “environmental illness,” yet he hints that unseen toxins may only be part of the problem, or that the perception of them may signal an ideological crisis. Set approximately a decade after the events of Killer of Sheep, Safe features an unsettling scene in which Carol’s stepson reads aloud a homework essay on gang violence. While the family sits around the dinner table, Rory reads of “Black and Chicano gangs coming into the Valley” and disturbing “mostly White areas, more and more.” His father applauds; Carol asks why the piece has to be “so gory.” On one hand, her response treats Rory’s narrative as more movie script than news reporting, thus creating a buffer between the essay and her own life; on the other, the scene invokes her concern, at first understated and then all-consuming, that “class and race privilege will not buy safety from the problems of environmental destruction” (Kollin 136). Whether pollution and industrial chemicals make Carol sick remains uncertain as the film unfolds, but the idea that she has profoundly physical reactions to a perceived environmental threat becomes difficult to deny. As with much dystopian rhetoric, the threat constitutes an encroachment on autonomy, an offense against the individualized experience of feeling “safe.”

Although Haynes’s film codes Carol’s condition as unfeigned, it does not invite identification with the structures of feeling that dominate her experience. The narrative refuses the physician’s tendency to minimize her suffering but it also calls into question her own assessment. Kollin argues that Carol has “misdiagnosed her illness,” for while the “built environment may indeed be contributing to her poor health, the real source of her illness stems from a social order that privileges possessive individualism and holds out materialism and hyper-consumption as a way of life” (127). More pointed still, the built environment expresses and encourages the possessive individualism that brings about Carol’s alienation. The fortress-like home with its enclaves and private gardens, the isolated drives through shopping districts, the commercialization of physical fitness and beauty standards, the constant pressure to update one’s self-presentation and displays of wealth—all reinforce the logic of competitive self-management within a purportedly free market. Rory’s essay posits a danger to that system, stoking racist fears of intrusion on the scene of sheltered sovereignty. As Carol reacts to that risk, she shrinks more and more resolutely into private space, until not even domestic seclusion can provide enough security.

When she spots a poster asking if she is “allergic to the twentieth century,” she feels an immediate kinship with the author. Upon learning that it comes from Wrenwood, a new-age retreat for those experiencing environmental illness, she decides to relocate there and temporarily separate from her husband and stepson. But Kollin recognizes this choice as intensifying her condition, paradoxically increasing her alienation in the interest of treating it. Carol’s sense that her suburban lifestyle is unsustainable provides room for optimism, but the hope is short-lived as the second half of the film “shows Carol sinking deeper into the ideological terrain and spatial identity that made her sick in the first place as she becomes further enmeshed in the isolated, privatized world of Wrenwood” (Kollin 131). As with other dystopian stories in this chapter, whether in the “vertical isolation” of High-Rise or the self-preservationist nightmare of The Platform, there is no way to be safe in the way Carol desires. Compartmentalization fails. The project of individuation remains incomplete.

Still, we see her trying to realize that project in the final frames of the film. Although Carol is not the most solitary of Wrenwood’s inhabitants—one masked figure circles the periphery of the compound, watching the others but never engaging—she nevertheless constitutes a heightened case of isolationism. The administration observes that Carol experiences pain and shortness of breath outdoors, and that the problem has lately crept into her private quarters, so they assign her to new, igloo-like housing that provides a tight seal against external contaminants. Gratefully accepting the decision, Carol settles into her new cell and says “I love you” into the mirror, repeating it again and again until the lights fade. While the scene indicates relief after long anguish, it is also the most distressing moment in the movie. Self-care, it suggests, finally means complete spatial dissociation from other selves.

The pep talk reflects an attempt to stay motivated in dire circumstances, and in that way bears productive comparison to the conclusion of Killer of Sheep. In the misty monochrome of the slaughterhouse, Stan attempts to find purpose despite his pervasive dysphoria. He is more animated than at any point in the film, not just active but positively athletic in his efforts to move the flock forward. His problem, like Carol’s, is that the movement is toward death—literal for the sheep, social and emotional for the factory worker. The project of self-definition remains incomplete, but Stan and Carol never stop trying. His efforts stall out in an environment where lethal violence has become banal, hers in a space of elective quarantine. Both of them are, in their own way, relentless. Both are working themselves into their own hell.

As we move from texts like Snowpiercer and The Platform to Killer of Sheep and Safe, the trappings of fantasy fall away. Yet the focus on spaces of trauma stays constant. In all these narratives, the built world moves people in the material-rhetorical sense that combines emotion, persuasion, and physical propulsion. And like the Rattling Ark mimicking progress, the more naturalistic narratives dramatize restless inertia, people continuing without advancing. In this desperate loop, passengers do not merely feed or repair the machine, they become the machine. Along the way, the disaggregation of publics passes into extreme seclusion, to catatonic hang-ups and monomaniacal self-regard. More debilitating than any “nausea in the hands,” those reactions to vibrant exteriority discard the possibility of transformative politics. The durability of standing power relations is obvious; there is no alternative. Affective or somatic dissociation provides reprieve, however incomplete and fleeting. The strain of dystopian storytelling that apprehends those dissociative tendencies, and that supplants the satire of collectivist despotism with the critique of radical individuation, exposes a twentieth-century allergy that only worsens in the new millennium.

Notes

1. Denying this enmeshed condition reflects a tendency to define humanity against nature, wilderness, and the environment (Jennifer Clary-Lemon 25). The Western objectification of nature clouds human inclusion in the ecological web; nature becomes something to enter, manage, and contemplate rather than something people are. Zamyatin’s depiction of the Green Wall works as a critique of that logic insofar as he satirizes human separation from “the irrational, shapeless world of trees, birds, animals” (85–86).

2. References to “dominating” the concrete island occur on 52, 54, 78, 156. Maitland’s desire to control the space swiftly becomes a desire to dominate other people who reside there (107, 121).

3. In Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s graphic novel, which initiated the Snowpiercer phenomenon, the effort to prevent rear passengers from moving forward also aims to prevent the spread of illness (Volume 1: Escape 7). Deprivation becomes associated with plague, ensuring that those with fewest resources have little room to move.

4. A related meditation on workplace overreach occurs in Dan Erickson’s TV series Severance, where employees of the Lumon corporation engage with such sensitive data that they cannot be allowed to remember it once they leave the office. To obtain employment, they must submit to a brain implant that divides their work persona from their “outie,” or off-the-clock persona, thus ensuring that one part of their consciousness never escapes the workplace. Scathing as Severance is as a satire of corporate authority, the premise does not quite capture the malaise of labor in the post-Covid era. Rather than having a persona that splits from work when we leave, many find instead that work insinuates itself into the home and other purportedly protected spaces, spreading its hold through web conferencing and various channels of synchronous and asynchronous communication. In that scenario, the “innie” consciousness mounts a complete takeover.

Chapter 3

Limit Cases

Youth on the Border

In much dystopian narrative, depictions of physical space reflect a logic of human individuation, segmentation, rift. Those spaces signal competition and distrust, a bent toward self-preservation in irreparably damaged worlds. But such narratives also frame the occupants of those spaces as fixated on their own legitimacy, proudly authorized to struggle even if they are losing. This fixation often means that the inhabitants, no matter how suspicious of each other, find a quiet solidarity in fortifying their built environments against perceived intruders. Such fellow-feeling among antagonists manifests in the xenophobic mayhem of Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In, the toxic self-sufficiency of Ballard’s High-Rise, the proliferation of militarized checkpoints in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. The devotion to borders moves across a range of national and temporal contexts, from Zamyatin’s We to Albert Camus’s The Plague, from Haynes’s Safe to John Lanchester’s The Wall. In many of these works, the barriers evoke what Josue David Cisneros calls the “meanings and boundaries of national belonging,” working to “concretize these ‘imaginaries’ into reality” (Border 6–7).

And in concretizing belonging, they demarcate the territory of the alien. Giving physical form to ideological presumptions, these demarcations give material shape to linked abstractions. “The border is a metonymy,” writes Victor Villanueva, “a fiction within the fiction of a nation.”1 And the interplay of these fictions reproduces forms of division and hierarchy that many of their advocates would be loath to claim. Such rhetorical projections serve “racism in an era that no longer admits to racism” (Villanueva 34). Constantly re-forging connections between national and racial distinctions, yet refusing to acknowledge those bonds in explicit terms, border discourses clarify the constitutive character of geopolitical rhetoric. Cisneros insists that rhetoric is “more than hot air or manipulative language,” remarking how it “constitutes identity, incites emotions, and motivates actions” while moving “people to collective beliefs” (Border 6). At the border, those actions and collective beliefs often take the form of violence, whether in the armed assault on migrants, the detainment of purported outsiders in makeshift prisons, or the separation of families. Across the interior reaches of dominant nation-states, the rhetoric of the border carries material weight as an imperative to distinguish the citizen from the non-citizen, the legitimate from the unfit, all of which reiterates and thereby strengthens the authority of Whiteness.

The drive to maintain racial and national distinctions produces dystopian experiences for insiders and outsiders alike, generating anxiety in citizens along with varied forms of physical and psychological brutality for immigrants and refugees. Wendy Hesford notes that “nativist rhetoric” (xi) infuses an array of cultural narratives, some of which express themselves in fiction, drama, and cinema, and some of which govern the public personas of politicians and world leaders. Those narratives often emphasize the necessity of borders, sometimes associating them with dispassionate efforts to define social spaces, other times with militant attempts to guard group unity in a time of declining resources. Johan Schimanski locates a detached and technical variation on nativist rhetoric in Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516, which features a territory that “welcomes visitors” but maintains carefully regulated boundaries. Citizens circumscribe Utopia “by the building of a trench separating it from the mainland” and they deliberately render “its natural harbour inaccessible to outsiders” (55). Schimanski also notes that Utopians “must apply for passes to travel to other towns” and that the capital of Amaroutum is walled off (55). Half a millennium later, Donald Trump condensed such logic into a major plank of his campaign for U.S. president: “If we have no border, we have no country” (Heuman and Gonzalez 336). Such rhetoric aims to (re)constitute nativist identity, to spark emotion in the form of self-protective vigilance, and to motivate related acts of wall construction and draconian border legislation. Each of those effects extends the country’s history of racism even as large portions of the populace deny or minimize that history.

Nativist rhetoric supports surveillance regimes that combine and confuse the country’s police and military forces. Those regimes terrorize immigrants, along with people whom the dominant group associates with immigration, crafting a politics of intimidation and exclusion based in racial and ethnic codes. These divisive conventions impact a wide range of demographics, doing injury to people of varied ages and backgrounds, though border crackdowns in numerous countries have proven especially traumatic for children and young people. Dystopian images of kids in cages, of family separation, of suffering in the desert and death at sea have catalyzed public deliberation about the limits of our ideological fictions, the fallout that comes from concretizing our imaginaries.

Novelists and filmmakers have paid close attention to such limit cases over the last two decades, devising fantasy worlds and realist representations that highlight the relationships between youth and border rhetoric. Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher’s book Sanctuary, for instance, features an intensification of U.S. boundary maintenance, envisioning a government that walls off the recalcitrant state of California and injects microchips into the wrists of recognized citizens. The policy creates a market for underground chips, some of which allow immigrants to pass, but others of which fail when there is a system reset, thus producing a telltale glow at the site of the implant. Sabrina Vourvoulias develops a related schema in the novel Ink, imagining a regime that tattoos non-natives with barcodes, variously colored to signal temporary stays or grudging naturalization. This system also generates a subversive market in which artists create skin-strips to mask the tattoos, but those efforts do nothing to foil the GPS technology embedded in immigrants’ necks. Daniel Sawka’s film Icebox advances a similarly startling narrative without dealing in speculative futures, finding dystopian tendencies in the documented conditions of border detention centers. His characters are fictional, but the harsh journeys, unforgiving prison conditions, and bureaucratic inertia have proven all too real for Mexican youth fleeing gang violence and economic deprivation.

Sawka’s realist aesthetic underscores the idea of dystopia as a wide-ranging cultural rhetoric rather than a fixed literary genre. We need only follow the news cycle to find it. Sher describes the difficulty of keeping fantasy and reality distinct when composing Sanctuary, remarking that “every time we worked in a new plot twist, breaking news stole our ideas.”2 It is no fiction that children make deadly treks through the desert without adult support. In many instances, those children end up huddled together, freezing and undernourished, in the “icebox” cells of immigrant detention centers. And it takes no imaginative stretch to describe courtrooms where those children must convey a “credible fear” of gang culture to impatient judges. Even the idea of tracking immigrants with microchips, however redolent of science fiction, has been proposed by politicians and defended by business leaders (Jimmy Orr; James Pinkerton). These realities lend Sanctuary and Ink the quality of emergent metalepsis, their sinister visions becoming commentary on now plausible themes. Placing only moderate pressure on the boundary between “the world of which one tells” and “the world in which one tells” (Narrative Discourse [1980] 236), we find it giving way. Such moments lead Sher to resist describing Sanctuary as dystopian, arguing instead that it moves “just a few steps into ‘what if . . . ?’” (308). But rather than reject the moniker “dystopia” in favor of the “actual,” we might instead observe how border rhetorics render the dichotomy untenable. The distance between dystopia and life itself has collapsed.

As children and young people bear the weight of that collapse, they find themselves trapped amid competing nationalisms, caught in the in-between spaces that emerge from the concretization of ideology. We witness youth liminality in the border zones of Sanctuary and well as the cages and courts of Icebox.3 The upcoming section of this chapter situates those works alongside Hesford’s critique of American exceptionalism, where she remarks a tension between the country’s self-assured intervention in transnational human rights abuses, on one hand, and its treatment of children at its own borders, on the other. Both Mendoza and Sher’s book and Sawka’s film suggest that when migrating youth force the nation-state to face its contradictions, it reacts with intensified military and juridical violence, assaulting those who embody the paradox rather than working to resolve it. The following section then links dystopian tendencies in the U.S. to those in South Africa, detailing how the nativist assault on children converges with racism in such texts as District 9. Where Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi condemnation of apartheid proffers a sidelong critique of border politics in the West, it recasts the rhetoric of exceptionalism as a racist ploy. In its concluding stages, the chapter considers how exceptionalist rhetoric survives its own illogic, circulating white savior narratives for mass consumption at the same time that juvenile border incarceration persists. As in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the open secret of the suffering child, and of perpetuating that suffering to preserve collective identity, becomes dislocated from the fantastical and re-emerges as routine.

Exploding Exceptionalism

The mass mediation of humanitarian crises at national borders has a double valence, drawing attention to what privileged nativists might prefer to ignore, but also dampening the ethical urgency of the situation through representational ubiquity. Where the images still hold power to pierce the national conscience, they do so by accentuating the dissonance between a country’s self-concept and its conduct. Critics of border emergencies might wish to blame them on immigrants’ countries of origin, but when 52 percent of global refugees are children, those critics find themselves rationalizing the punishment of the wrong people—people who cannot be held responsible even within the nativist’s flawed logic.4 Those people frequently end up caught in a liminal space that materializes a psychic conflict, and they experience first-hand Dylan Winchock’s conception of border space as “a manifestation of the ideological” and “a rich site of hegemonic struggle” (255). The children cannot enter because they reflect an offense against national identity; they cannot be excluded because such an identity prizes children’s rights, or at least cannot bear the contrary perception. Granted, the hegemonic struggle is hardly so neat, and dominant groups have a range of attitudes toward immigrant youth. For some, the spectacle of child detention may serve as a warning against making the journey. But for countries like the U.S. that presume to intervene in international child welfare, the contradiction is an uncomfortable one, exposing the limits of an ethos that combines nativism with purported compassion.

Those limits become plain when the nation-state frames itself not just as a space apart but a space of unmatched principle. Hesford finds such framing in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism, which foregrounds tropes of individual attainment and market freedom we saw earlier in this book, but also advances a “state fantasy” of superior “moral authority” (18). In Violent Exceptions, she argues that such fantasies reinforce themselves through the image of the “child-in-peril,” setting up an exigency for militarized humanitarian mediation and casting the U.S. as rescuing agent. Hesford highlights such mediation in the U.S.’s attention to child suffering in Syria, gender politics in the Middle East, and young soldiers and amputees in Africa (32–35). She observes no shortage of incongruities in this logic, noting the poor response to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the country’s history of indigenous child removal, and the desperately inadequate response to asylum claims at the southern border (12–13, 65). Donald Trump at times dismissed the concern with child welfare altogether, depicting their incarceration as a deterrent to further immigration. In Hesford’s summation, those youth were “caged for effect” (66). Yet Violent Exceptions details a problem that precedes and outlasts Trump’s shamelessness—the suspension of immigrant minors in an in-between space where the country’s integrity comes into question, both as a clearly delineated sovereignty as an arbiter of global virtue.

Whereas Trump associated virtue more with power than morality, Joe Biden and his Democratic supporters initially expressed an impatient desire to resolve the trouble at the border. Yet by June of 2022, families attempting to cross still found themselves forcibly separated by U.S. authorities. Erica Bryant tells of “heartbreaking testimony from children like a 14-year-old boy who had traveled from Guatemala with his 29-year-old sister and her son. When they approached border patrol to seek asylum, they were detained in separate cages.” The boy explains that after three days of imprisonment “they took me out of my cage and said I would be separated from my sister, but they didn’t tell me where I was going. I don’t understand why they separated us. They didn’t give me a chance to say goodbye” (Bryant). The cruelty exposes the contradictions built into the idea of exceptionalism. On one hand, the claim to moral authority cannot easily coexist with such callousness, especially when it involves minors. On the other, a regime may at times cast the violence as itself exceptional, as an irregular but necessary affair that helps to define legitimate citizenship. The regime thereby propagates what Hesford terms a “differential distribution of vulnerability and valued lives” (99). The proscription of child harm does not apply evenly—not for stern nativists nor, unfortunately, for political administrations that regard themselves as humanitarian internationalists.

For those experiencing constant and intense vulnerability within this differential distribution, there is often little choice but to push the inconsistencies of American exceptionalism into clear view. Lamenting the risk inherent in such situations, Winchock explains that “the refused, hidden away in the margins of dominant space, are forced to survive through conscious disruptions of a binary power system” (255). Immigrant families risk grief and humiliation at the border because not doing so is akin to self-annihilation. And sometimes that risk proves just as deadly as remaining in Central America. Mendoza and Sher dramatize that eventuality in Sanctuary, opening with a young girl who decides to brave the demilitarized zone that exists between Tijuana and San Diego, just outside the mammoth border wall that occupies the narrative’s near-future dystopia. “It blocked out the sky,” they write, “with fifty-foot-tall reinforced steel slats and thick metal mesh in between” (2). Despite warnings from soldiers atop the barricade, the girl continues to advance, raising her arms to show peaceful intentions. She makes it fifteen steps, one for each year of life, when “the ground exploded beneath her. The sudden flares of orange, yellow, and red slashing through her. [. . .] Turning her to dust” (6). Her disruption of the power arrangement, and her vulnerability before its imposing authority, aim to expose the system’s vulgarity. Yet the movement through liminal space ends in death with the system left intact.

As Vali, the protagonist of Sanctuary, watches the televised spectacle of the girl stepping into “no man’s land,” she feels a sense of identification that will haunt her throughout the narrative. “She was just a girl my age,” Vali thinks, “wearing a faded Mickey Mouse T-shirt and jean shorts that were rolled over on top but still looked like they might fall off her skinny waist” (2). The girl’s child-like attire works at first to underscore her bravery, as she “had no time for warnings. She had no interest in being intimidated. [. . .] Her face looked clear, even calm, as she made her way across the dusty strip of scrubland between Tijuana and the wall” (2). Yet once the girl is vaporized, the lingering image of her youthful appearance reinforces the horror of the event, the nativist treatment of an unarmed teenager like a menacing criminal or enemy soldier.

At times, Vali finds herself motivated by the girl’s courage as she hides her own undocumented status from U.S. authorities. The memory of the girl diminishes her “hunted feeling” and instead gives her “a sense of momentum [. . .] some version of hope” (231). That momentum drives her and her small brother across large swaths of country toward California, which secedes from the union amid a fascist takeover of the country, and which provides Vali’s only prospect of escaping the forced labor camps that have come to supplant deportation.5 Once Vali reaches her destination, however, the T-shirt girl becomes a reminder of those who were not so fortunate, those who died on the journey or who remain unaccounted for. No less poignantly, the girl’s death shows the ruthlessness of nationalism when its limits are tested.

Whereas Sanctuary situates that scene in a not-too-distant future, envisioning out-of-control border walls and forced surveillance implants, Sawka’s Icebox stays firmly in the present. Early moments in the film feature “parents suffering from severe poverty and violence in Central America,” Joanna Perez writes, and making “the difficult decision to send their unaccompanied children to the U.S. in hope of providing them a better life” (197). That better life involves not just the prospect of economic mobility, but the more immediate need to escape gang warfare. Óscar, the film’s focal character, suffers the indignity of forced tattooing at the outset of the story, which at once ties him to a group he rejects and puts him at risk of punishment by rival factions. His parents quickly decide to send him north, demonstrating once more the pervasive problem of family separation. Icebox prefigures Óscar’s eventual imprisonment at the border with his travels in the pitch-black trailer of a freight truck, locked in with other migrants and unsure when (or if) the doors will open again. The trailer constitutes another liminal space, a claustrophobic in-between that concretizes Óscar’s psychic condition as well as the ideological inconsistencies that characterize U.S. relations with southern neighbors. U.S. businesses capitalize shamelessly on cheap Latinx labor, yet the country aggressively restricts that labor’s entry; the nation-state prides itself on protecting children’s rights, yet it corrals them into unforgiving conditions, interrogates them as criminals, and then turns them back to the dangers they fled.

As adult representatives of national border policy reproduce these traumatic behaviors over and over, young people show each other the compassion that the state denies. When police apprehend Óscar and detain him in the “icebox” facility, he finds himself indefinitely suspended between geopolitical sovereignties, between the deadly space of home and the space of ostensible refuge, between human rights rhetorics and nativist obsessions. Although the terror of such liminality sometimes causes his cellmates to strike out at the guards and at each other, Icebox lingers more intently on the ways they comfort one another, kindling memories of family and offering to listen when no one else will. Older children care for younger ones. Inmates watch for signs of panic and depression and provide whatever solace they can. This kindness takes on a kind of profundity at the border, contrasting the instrumentalism of officers who demonstrate greater concern with optics than child welfare: “Let’s wake up and make this place presentable for the reporters.” The reporters prove similarly self-interested during their visits, offering to help certain prisoners but only in exchange for information. Even though the journalists’ motives may be preferable to their police and military counterparts, opportunism undercuts their claims to moral exceptionalism while reducing children to tactical resources in a slow-burning media struggle.

Such self-concern brings the emotional intelligence of the children into relief, giving poignancy to scenes where kids act as carers—not just for each other but for grown-ups. When Óscar reaches his mother by phone, she assumes that he has crossed the border to his uncle Manuel’s home, exclaiming “¡lo lograste!” [You did it!]. She then observes that “Manuel is risking a lot to help Óscar, including his chance of getting a green card. When she asks to speak to Manuel to express her gratitude, Óscar lies to his mother and tells her that Manuel is working and to not worry because he’s cheque (Honduran vernacular for ‘alright’)” (Perez 198). Hiding his distress spares his family but also extends his stay in limbo, as Manuel initially avoids his calls and leaves Óscar no avenue for appeal. A journalist finally helps secure the boy’s release—again, in exchange for insider details—though Manuel shows reluctance to receive Óscar for fear of being apprehended himself. He hides his nephew during the day and refuses to enter the courthouse for the asylum case. Unsurprisingly, the judge rules against Óscar, remarking that U.S. courts cannot be expected to solve the problem of Honduran gang conflict. Manuel, for all his early hesitation, proves resourceful enough to transport Óscar to a sanctuary city, though even then, the child makes the bus trip alone. Parents, distant relatives, and reporters all have heroic moments in the film, but kids show the greater maturity and resilience. Icebox captures that irony in the particular, intimate layers of one child’s story, but the irony also takes on general, geopolitical scope, casting national policymakers as raw and undeveloped, judicial systems as naïve.

The irony is all the more emphatic given the U.S.’s ostensible humanitarian dedication to the child-in-peril, which becomes especially plain in the country’s attention to malnutrition in Yemen (Ferguson), the displacement and injury of children in Ukraine (Help), and the labor exploitation and sexual trafficking that involve children worldwide (Child). While efforts to address these problems are laudable and necessary, recent U.S. history suggests the nation’s inability to maintain the standards it holds for others. The state fantasy of exceptionalism falters before the limit case of the asylum-seeking minor, where both acceptance and rejection expose the fiction of national integrity. On one hand, the threat to integrity is geopolitical, introducing porous boundaries where nativists most desire clarity; on the other, the threat is ethical, calling into question the country’s dedication to human rights. The resulting strain is explosive, the limit case pushing the contradictions to the bursting point.

As we have seen with Sanctuary and Icebox, inhabiting this volatile, liminal space rarely ends well for asylum seekers. The inevitable blast consumes some children and leaves others profoundly scarred while the nation-state resumes its operations of self-definition and transnational policing. However much those operations reproduce the rhetoric of universal human rights, they participate in a differential distribution of vulnerability whose logic is not only nativist but racist.

Toxic Youth

At various stages of this book, it has become clear that Black and Brown children suffer disproportionately in dystopian realms, whether those that ground our daily experiences or those that exist “a few steps into ‘what if . . .?’” Butler’s Parable series finds BIPOC youth harassed by pyromaniacs; Snowpiercer tracks the reduction of kids to machine parts; Icebox features Latinx children who show the compassion and political courage that their guardians cannot muster. In each case, young people contest a system that insists on limiting their movements, not merely because they are children but because they lack the privileges of Whiteness. Hesford links those privileges to citizenship and class status as things that safeguard much of the populace from “the likelihood of becoming a victim of the U.S. carceral systems and security state” (xv). She also critiques the dominant imaginary that makes Whiteness a condition of “childhood innocence,” and she shows in chilling detail how the absence of that condition renders kids vulnerable to environmental disaster and police violence (3, 11, 140). When U.S. authorities find themselves caught between rhetorics of border integrity and child welfare, they are apt to forsake the children whose innocence is in question.

Dystopian narrative often figures Whiteness as a key advantage amid differential distributions of vulnerability, showing how it not only associates itself with innocence but conflates itself with humanness. Blomkamp’s District 9 places hyperbolic emphasis on that confusion, detailing a South African society that cordons off extraterrestrial refugees in barbed-wire encampments. Military police and bureaucratic emissaries regularly evict the interplanetary immigrants from their makeshift homes, deny them health and sanitation resources, and subject them to varied forms of violence and humiliation, rarely making distinctions between adults and children when they raid the compound. When the authorities do pay attention to children, it is often as heralds of an unwanted future, and worse yet, pollutants. The darkness of the perceived alien carries the threat of contagion, and insofar as children embody those dangers, they forgo the protections they might otherwise garner. In that way, District 9 reaches beyond its South African context to help explain a wider array of nativist rhetorics.

The film thus suggests that the logic of apartheid has global resonances, even as the narrative’s atrocities hold particular significance for its Johannesburg setting. Megan Jones notes that “the film’s treatment of the stranded aliens recalls the spatial practices of apartheid in its title and visual imagery. District 9 conjures up the racially mixed freehold area of central Cape Town, District 6, whose residents were forcibly relocated to make way for whites under the 1950 Group Areas Act” (299). The imaginative revision of District 6 features frantic media coverage of the camp, emphasizing the spread of violence and disease and blaming it on the inhabitants. Ignoring their individualized experiences, the coverage frames them almost solely in collective terms as a problem to be managed. The mockumentary segments of the film thus provide creative illustrations for Schimanski’s claim that migrants “are invisibilised as individual subjects with political rights and agency, but at the same time visibilised as racialised masses” (53). The young migrants get little better treatment than the adults, becoming absorbed into the “bio- and necropolitical discourse of migration crisis,” where “they are brown bodies, dead bodies, or bodiless statistics” (53). The biopolitics of apartheid objectifies Blackness and Brownness in ways that are mostly indistinguishable from necropolitics, treating the racialized masses as insensate and unworthy of mourning.

That necropolitical ethos expresses itself with startling force when the central character, Wikus van de Merwe, enters the compound to serve notices of eviction and relocation. A bureaucrat with a military escort, Wikus not only displaces families without remorse, he makes concerted efforts to limit their numbers in the future. Referring to the refugees as “prawns,” he tracks down and destroys areas where they store their eggs. Upon discovering a nest that is linked by an umbilical cord to its food source, he casually disconnects the apparatus and sends the fetuses into a frenzy. He then orders his amused entourage to incinerate the egg mound. Even before birth, the alien subjects appear to Wikus a racialized mass, a problem best addressed before it fully commences.

Depictions of Wikus’s nastiness early in the film work, in one way, to concentrate the rhetoric of nativist brutality in a single figure, one who holds a metonymic relationship to the megacorporation (Multi-National United) that has displaced South African government.6 But Blomkamp refuses to allow audiences safe distance from the character, insinuating our complacency in the face of parallel horrors beyond the movie screen. Gregory Brophy and Shawn Malley find in the burning egg scene an example of such indirect allegation, observing how

Wikus stammers to the camera in a moment that playfully gestures to the fourth wall: “That’s a popping sound that you’re hearing. It’s almost like popcorn. What the egg does it, it, it, it, it pops up, you know, the little guy, what’s left of him, pops out there!” Turning the camera back on the viewer—perhaps fresh from the concession stand—Wikus’s popcorn analogy questions any claims to neutrality we might have as consumers of the image. (205)

The immigrants’ exploding offspring double as an allusion to entertainment, a metaleptic nod to the cultural touchstone of the “popcorn movie,” aligning the putative pleasures of spectatorship with Wikus’s gleeful approach to his work. That conflation is too sweeping, to be sure, but it nevertheless denies us the moral superiority of the critical witness. Witnessing shades into consumption, the film suggests, and consumption is a poor substitute for intervention.

These intimations of audience complicity produce rising anxiety as the camera continues to follow Wikus, documentary-style, on his round of evictions. He meets varied forms of resistance along the way, but none more poignant than that expressed by children. Although Wikus masks his intentions with a rhetoric of charity, Hee-Jung Serenity Joo highlights his “coercive attitude” after he “extends a piece of candy to a child alien” (76). When the child “throws it back in Wikus’s face, the treat turns immediately into a threat: ‘I’m trying to be fucking nice to you,’ he screams, revealing the hypocrisy of his kindness and the immense powers he wields” (Joo 76). In many cases, audiences will identify with the refusal, inwardly applauding how the youth rejects the White man’s ruse. But given the film’s implied critique of viewers’ privilege, which permits them to revel in the action while being safely removed from its effects, the narrative laces any pleasure in opposition with an uneasy awareness of voyeurism.

That unease takes on added intensity as the film repeatedly situates the children amid trash heaps and images of decay. In most cases, they are sifting the rubbish piles for materials by which they and their tech-savvy parents can survive, and, in one standout instance, repair the escape pod that has descended from the mother ship. But even as their foraging serves sophisticated purposes, their association with pollution and garbage reproduces a prominent trope in the popular discourse on immigration. In “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration,” Cisneros finds that cable news networks as different as CNN and Fox establish visual links between undocumented immigrants and “piles of potentially dangerous waste” or, in other cases, “mobile pollutants” (579). Such metaphors develop alongside images of the nation as a physical body that must maintain boundaries to keep out infection and infestation (572). The aliens of District 9 have breached those boundaries from above, and so must be contained within camps to prevent further spread. The mock news coverage of those camps signals multiple forms of political address: in one way, it shows how Multi-National United has contained the problem, at once reminding audiences in the storyworld of the toxic threat and reassuring them of the corporation’s protective measures; in another way, it opens those rhetorical strategies to critique, as the diegesis gradually invites viewers’ identification with the very subjects who have been conflated with waste. By invoking the two audiences at once—the intradiegetic, White, South African audience and the viewers who experience Blomkamp’s film—District 9 both operationalizes and denaturalizes the metaphor of pollutant.

The dystopian rhetoric that figures refugees as a noxious mass crosses fluidly between diegetic and audience domains, generating emergent parallels across narrative realms and geopolitical territories. And in these varied arenas, the general response is quarantine. Although the “district” in Johannesburg constitutes an interior form of containment, a controlled space for toxins that have already breached the national boundary, Blomkamp still places heavy emphasis on the fortifications that separate alien subjects from their purportedly native counterparts. Writing before the Trump presidency, Cisneros describes how the metaphor of toxicity informs policy at the U.S. Southern border, contending that “the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which called for the building of a 700-mile border fence along areas of the U.S.-Mexico border, arguably draws on an understanding of immigrants as invaders or pollutants that must be restrained behind a barrier” (“Contaminated” 593). Over the next decade, that understanding became prevalent enough that Trump could build a winning presidential campaign around it. From the outset, that campaign trafficked shamelessly in images of a racialized hazard: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump pronounced. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Katie Reilly). “Build the wall” became the mantra for blocking out the sickness, forbidding the northern flow of Central American excess.7

During his presidency, the rhetoric of immigration as a viral risk became more specific and pronounced. And it took on a profoundly material dimension, not just as the abstract image of the wall began to take three-dimensional form, but as border facilities began to terrorize their detainees in especially precise ways. Shortly after the COVID-19 outbreak, inmates at the Adelanto Immigration Detention Center in California reported being “doused with an industrial disinfectant in confined spaces in an attempt to control the spread of the coronavirus” (Louise Boyle). The chemical, known as HDQ Neutral, “can cause severe skin burns and serious eye damage,” and should only be used “outdoors or in well-ventilated areas while wearing protective gloves, clothing and eye and face protection” (L. Boyle). Yet the detainees reported having the substance sprayed directly on them every half-hour or so amid tight confinement. Similar reports occurred at a detention center in Glades County, Florida, emphasizing the presence of quaternary ammonium compounds at levels that could produce sickness, blistering, burning, and damage to reproductive health (Freedom for Immigrants). The treatment of inmates as an infectious mass extends the logic of pollution control, while the specific threat to immigrant reproduction connotes the nativist effort to regulate the numbers, and more pointed, to limit the futures of Brown immigrants in the U.S.

Spraying chemicals at those immigrants evokes pesticide and thus intersects in troubling ways with the rhetoric of infestation. Such rhetoric appears explicitly in Sanctuary, where the U.S. president associates his border wall with the process of “cleanup” and decontamination (20, 33). Children in the novel find themselves targets of the cleanups, and experience post-traumatic memory loops and loss of bodily control in their wake. Such efforts at cleanup are no less prominent in District 9, which treats refugees as “prawns” or scavengers who at once ingest and embody pollution. And the children of Icebox become associated with waste as well, huddled together in mylar blankets like wadded-up tin foil. In each case, tropes of contagion and ruin converge with those of racialized masses, which underwrite violence against border crossers in worlds that provide little if any respite for minors.8

Blomkamp renounces that violence, but he also reproduces its logic in his representations of specific populations within the Johannesburg setting. District 9 shrewdly envisions MNU as a corporate surrogate for government, a militarized mega-business that fuses security rhetoric with that of waste management. But while showing how the corporation abuses putative outsiders, Blomkamp situates Nigerian gang members inside District 9 along with the refugees in ways that signal a “differential distribution” of “valued lives.” Brophy and Malley point out how the Nigerian subjects, who are “making a living in the garbage dumps” while engaging in near-constant urban warfare, “cannot be contained by the allegory” that drives the film’s narrative (217). The movie draws a bright line between the White supremacist violence of corporate governance and the determined endurance of the extraterrestrial population, “but what remains is the untidy humanity that the film tries to eviscerate as evil, dangerous and unhealthy” (217). Whereas Blomkamp lends the “prawns” trope a double-voiced quality, making it the dominant description of the extraterrestrials while loading it with critical irony, he does little to subvert or destabilize malicious representations of the Nigerian population. The film thus deploys the same tropes it decries, framing certain Black subjects as “untidy,” “unhealthy,” and indeed toxic even as it rails against such rhetoric in its broader argument.

District 9 generally disrupts the equation of Whiteness with innocence, linking it visually with acts of inhumanity including summary executions, medical experimentation, imprisonment and mass displacement of refugees, and institutionalized violence toward children. White subjects who are convinced of their own exceptionalism react with horror when Black and Brown children remind them of that violence: “I’m trying to be fucking nice to you!” Those efforts to be “nice” falter badly when the charitable agent otherwise frames his charges as prawns, insects, trash, vectors of disease. Blomkamp alerts his audiences to those contradictions throughout the film, thereby encouraging a certain analytical remove from narrative events. But he collapses that critical distance at almost the same moment, insinuating that White audiences have a history of viewing without intervening, consuming without challenging. The technique of accentuating and retracting the luxury of distance comes with risks, however, as we see Blomkamp treating some populations as “racialized masses” even as he excoriates the MNU for such constructions. No less troubling, we see Wikus rise to heroic stature by the film’s final act, the White savior who becomes so by slowly, indignantly, and always incompletely forgoing Whiteness.

Open Secret

Wikus’s transformation begins during his raid of the compound when he finds a suspicious chemical and, toying with its container, accidentally sprays himself in the face. Ingesting the substance sets off a reaction whereby he gradually takes the form of the extraterrestrials. The change means relinquishing the authority that comes with his MNU position, but more distressing for him, the privilege that comes with Whiteness. He finds himself rejected at home, shunned in the public square, and tracked by the media and military as a traitorous abomination. When he hides out in District 9, a child refugee notices that Wikus’s arm has nearly completed its metamorphosis: “We are the same.” Wikus fumes at the observation, and at one point in the film becomes so wracked with shame and confusion that he attempts, unsuccessfully, to amputate the arm.

His refusal of the boy’s entreaty frustrates what Kenneth Burke construes as a fundamental condition of rhetorical interchange: the establishment of consubstantiality or identification across difference (Rhetoric). This unwillingness to identify, along with the act of self-mutilation, signals a rejection of what Stephen Trinder calls “the protagonist’s impending Otherness” (11). But it also implies Wikus’s denial of a particular structural relation—the alienation of Black children as the obverse of White privilege. That relation evokes a similar conceptual interdependency in Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which premises the sustainability of its storyworld on the misery of a hidden child. In both Le Guin’s and Blomkamp’s work, comfort and prosperity come with an awareness of that misery and an acceptance of its inevitability. But the assertion that Wikus is consubstantial with the child, at once dependent on its suffering and now coming to resemble it in bodily terms, proves too much to bear: “We’re not the fucking same,” he retorts.

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” draws a different conclusion than does Wikus, positing a traumatic continuity between privileged subjects and the abjection their system produces. Le Guin captures the relation in spatial and architectural terms, revealing that in the

basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. (283)

In that room sits a lonely child. It is “afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come.” And yet sometimes people do come, some staring in disgust while others “kick the child to make it stand up” (283). Begging for release, the youth assures them that it will behave. They leave a little food, then flee as abruptly as they arrived. Alone once more but for the mops, the child tries to comfort itself with memories of a loving mother and the feeling of sunlight. But the prisoner can never recover those things if the happiness of the city is to continue.

The citizens fully recognize the dependency of their comforts on this arrangement, attributing to it everything from rich harvests to good weather to the health of their own offspring. Although they treat the hidden youth with contempt, they know that society is consubstantial with the inmate’s anguish. “Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness,” the narrator explains; “They know that they, like the child, are not free” (285). The citizens learn to live with the contradiction of public security grounded in secluded horror, but that does not mean forgetting it. They must remember if they want to secure happiness for future generations; they must keep the child alive along with awareness of the bargain. For the storyteller, that awareness constitutes the cost of the city’s wellbeing, and demonstrates a necessary if unpleasant kind of intelligence: “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain” (280). The intellectual character of citizenship in Omelas expresses itself through a knowing identification with its own shameful, founding condition. Such intelligence is neither heroic nor exculpatory. On the contrary, it indicates a particular cunning, a studied readiness to exploit the singular, defenseless other in the interest of mass gratification.

But the bad habit the narrator describes has a grimmer underside: if happiness is unexpectedly intellectual, pain and evil are often thoughtless and mechanical. District 9 insists on the banality of alien imprisonment and relocation, highlighting Wikus’s bureaucratic ethos in ways that illustrate Le Guin’s concerns. Joo specifies “the image of Wikus wearing a bulletproof vest neatly and comically adorned with a calculator and multiple pens” as an instance of horror-made-ordinary, noting how “the film often combines depictions of unnecessary violence and the mundaneness of paperwork, depictions not to be read as oppositions” (77). We also see the violence of the mundane in the proliferation of checkpoints in Sanctuary and the repetitive, almost stupefied ways guards scan bodies for the “chips” of citizenship. Much of the barely futuristic surveillance apparatus in Sanctuary associates itself with dull necessity, posing as mere infrastructure until a child decides to test it, bringing its malice fully into view. And in Icebox, we witness the casual ways guards and inmates prepare the detention center for reporter visits, sanitizing the space in ways both literal and metaphoric, engaging in impression management as a weary matter of course. Bailiffs and judges demonstrate comparable attitudes in the court system, subjecting unrepresented minors to psychological terror with such practiced regularity that no one save the court reporter (herself a Latinx subject) appears to notice. The narrator in “Omelas” suggests that such scenarios signal an intellectual bargain to which privileged people have agreed, a faith that their own comforts depend on containing the non-citizen, the pretender against which they define their own authenticity. In that way, they depend on child prisoners and other so-called outsiders to catalyze public performances of belonging and exclusion. Favored selfhood is consubstantial with the otherness it delineates. Yet, however intellectual the arrangement, the habits that sustain it tend toward the monotonous, recasting systemic violence as perfunctory obligation.

White supremacy perpetuates itself through just such perfunctory performance, insisting that if happiness must be based on an exception, the exception must be racially other. Yoo designates this performance “the workings of whiteness as banality,” and pinpoints how “bureaucratic tyranny” incorporates Black and Brown subjects into the “state of exception” (62). Once more, the rhetoric of exceptionality works on at least two levels. The quarantined other embodies the constitutive condition for White security, affording the dominant group such privilege as to dissociate itself from anything so objectionable as tyranny, instead framing their exploitative comforts as workaday orthodoxy. And that self-protective coding accompanies White self-perception as necessarily exceptional, involving a moral and cultural superiority that is unimpeachable, whatever the circumstances in the cellar.

Many citizens maintain that sense of superiority by repressing the conditions that underwrite their prosperity. In Johannesburg as in Omelas, they cordon off the idea of the racialized, suffering child while simultaneously imprisoning actual children. Barbara Bennett attributes similar rhetorical and affective techniques to much of the U.S. population, arguing that “we have found a way to live with the knowledge that the child is there, a way to live in spite of the knowledge” (67). We may be horrified when we see such images on television or social media, but we “find a way to rationalize the existence and suffering of such a child,” accepting that “the suffering of an individual may be worth the price for the happiness of thousands” (67). While her examples include young people working in sweatshops beyond the border, we might also include those incarcerated at the border, undergoing a form of bureaucratic processing that typifies the banality of White dominance.

Le Guin figures this banality into the foundations of Omelas, which treats the captivity of the other as the basis of communal stability while urging reconciliation with that principle. Yet however dominant such reconciliation proves to be, it is not total; it does not rule out the prospect of refusal. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” builds refusal into its very title. Some citizens prove unable to live with the exception or to embrace, along with their neighbors, the city’s own exceptionalism. “These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone,” Le Guin writes. “They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates” (286). They set out for a “place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness.” “I cannot describe it at all,” admits the narrator. “It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas” (286). This “seeming to know” indicates a confidence that may not be justified, hinting that any new location will have its own structuring bargain, its own secret-that-is-not-one. As the expatriates seek their improbable alternatives to Omelas, they renounce the city while leaving it intact, doing nothing to free the child or themselves. They seem to dissent, but walking away is at best a contradictory performance, and may not be possible at all.

By contrasting the renunciation of Omelas with the acceptance of its logic, the story unfolds a dualistic rhetoric of sharp juxtapositions and nicely defined counterparts. But other political coordinates undoubtedly exist. Citizens might decide to test the city’s strictures, for example, questioning whether the prisoner criterion constitutes an absolute necessity or a habituated ideology. If it turns out to be a necessity, some people might deliberately court self-destruction. When Olivia Burgess taught the story as part of course on literature and ethics, one student insisted that people should break “the social contract of Omelas by freeing the child and bringing the city to ruin” (66). Other, more cynical citizens might decide to stay, reap the benefits of child torture, and blame the arrangement on poor governance or an agency like MNU. District 9 certainly offers that excuse for its own open secret, depicting MNU as unrepentant in its White supremacist and class-divided power structure. Trinder holds that insofar as Blomkamp’s megacorporation affords a “scapegoat for colonial and capitalist exploitation,” it cushions viewers against their own “complicity in propagating this form of neoliberal violence, allowing similar real-life atrocities to continue unabated” (14). Whether fictive or part of our everyday political economy, the clearly defined villain deflects attention from our own culpability, making “real-life atrocities” seem someone else’s doing, an inevitable part of contemporary life, and thus something we can live with. In any number of Omelas-like scenarios, the imperative to stay or go gives way to liminal standpoints, which, if not committed to razing the corrupt social arrangement, involve distancing the self from liability.

One way we diminish or distract from our own answerability is, ironically enough, by telling stories. Science fiction and imaginative world-building provide ways of considering real crimes and injuries, but they also equip us for living with the trauma. Wikus is such a watchable character partly because he represents conversion, at first functioning as a manager or handler of Johannesburg’s open secret, acting primarily to render it tolerable, and then gradually becoming the aliens’ champion. The narrative at first identifies him with alienation as a bureaucratic process, administering life in the compound, but then with alienation as a material, psychological, and political condition that potentially radicalizes its subjects. After ingesting the chemical, he starts to transform in ways both physical and perceptual, his white skin blackening and his sense of belonging undergoing a protracted shift. He comes to defend the very refugees he persecuted, becoming heroic almost against his will. He initially rejects the child’s assertion that “we are the same,” but when he can no longer deny that bond, he becomes District 9’s most formidable rebel.

But this putative heroism imports the same racist logic that subjugates the refugees in the first place. Just as Whiteness affords certain people the privilege of establishing and overseeing the alien encampment, it lingers in the figure of the liberator, the one who promises to cleanse the citizenry of longstanding sins. Wikus’s becoming-Black serves to redeem Whiteness, and insofar as dominant audiences identify with that transformation, they derive relief from it. They find another way to live with the open secret. Storytelling yields a means of reflecting on the structural violence that privileged citizens might otherwise consign to the cellar, but it can also perpetuate that violence by locating political agency in the realm of fiction, and solely with characters for whom agency has been a historical expectation.

Fantasies of Sabotage

In chapter 1 we encountered the “Hailsham effect,” a tendency of literacy to help stabilize a set of power relations by diverting attention from them, or in some instances, confining critical intervention to the realm of the imagination. Ishiguro details the problem in Never Let Me Go, inventing a world where wealthy citizens engineer clones to support medical procedures, slowly harvesting their organs until they die—or “complete,” in the language of the bureaucratic establishment. Analysis and production of cultural artifacts, especially books, serve sedative functions within a starkly divided political economy, even as they appear to foster ethical and aesthetic sensitivity.

Although Ishiguro frames the cultural narcotic as a way to manage doomed clones, it can also describe the experiences of subjects who recognize social trauma, register the urgency of intervention, and yet confine their own contributions to the provinces of fiction. Films like District 9 lend themselves to such an approach, centering on a character who at first denies identification with a confined and alienated child, then little by little comes to accept their structural bond. Wikus’s changing perspective manifests in physiological terms, his consubstantiality with the other expressing itself in altered limbs, transformed features, unfamiliar sensations. And as the narrative effaces the border between Wikus and those he calls “prawns,” it invites audiences to identify with him, displacing the distrust he originally provoked with a sense of shared purpose. This invitation promises an affective cleansing through rejection of past complacency, urging audience solidarity with refugee populations while framing activism in the thrilling terms of sci-fi adventure. And most important for our purposes in this chapter, it affirms viewers’ answerability to the captive youth, trapped in a liminal space against which rightful citizenship constitutes itself. But insofar as the film invokes those sensibilities in fleeting ways, it does little to disrupt the injustices it dramatizes. Worse yet, it may actively contribute to the ideological crisis by substituting for concerted political action, limiting dissidence to the laudable but inadequate practice of critical viewing. The Hailsham effect works in one way to cushion subjects against the traumatic histories embedded in present material conditions, but in another way, it works to preserve those conditions by restricting world-building to the field of the imaginary.

And even as an imaginary intercession, Wikus’s late-stage performance in District 9 has troubling racial implications. It exists as part of a long train of White savior narratives, with sci-fi examples ranging from The Matrix to Avatar to Dune. Granted, Wikus forgoes much of his privilege once the transformation begins, but his purported heroism in the film’s final third comes suffused with a history of White self-praise, the oppressor group celebrating its own benevolence. Wikus’s most pronounced moment of compassion comes when he dresses himself in the refugees’ biotechnology and turns it against the MNU military. The battle suit permits him to prevent a rocket from hitting the pod that will connect the visitors back to the mother ship, and in protecting that small vessel he saves a child’s life—the same child who earlier noted their sameness. “This selfless act apparently highlights Wikus’s newfound vitality,” Trinder writes. “He has finally seen beyond his own selfish ends—something he could not do as he ruthlessly battled to prevent his gruesome mutation earlier in the narrative” (9). Yet Trinder also distrusts the logic whereby “Wikus is seemingly absolved of his earlier prejudice towards the aliens,” indicating not only that it reproduces the trope of White heroism, but that Wikus’s actions are hardly as selfless as a decontextualized reading of the scene might suggest. Protecting the space pod, we must remember, constitutes Wikus’s only way of regaining human form, which is a goal he never relinquishes, no matter how fiercely he identifies with the extraterrestrials.

His closest relationship in District 9 is with Christopher, a refugee who has been working for twenty years to mix enough fuel to power a hidden escape pod. Christopher’s son has dutifully gathered the raw materials for that fuel, and the project is nearing success when Wikus discovers the concoction. As the substance takes effect, Christopher promises to devise a mixture that will reverse the transformation—but only after he reaches the mother ship and obtains the necessary supplies. When Wikus mounts his spectacular defense of the escape pod, he knows that acting otherwise will mean remaining alien. Given such a bargain, Trinder argues that the “grand act of altruism displayed towards the prawns at the film’s climax is ultimately a selfish act” that aims to “maintain the strict lines of mental and physical segregation with the Other” (13). According to Trinder’s interpretation, the White hero is no hero at all, but only someone desperate to reclaim his human physiology and, by extension, the White privilege that his metamorphosis has wrecked. Given the film’s one-dimensional portrait of Nigerian subjects early on, its re-inscription of White privilege in its final stages should not prove altogether surprising.

Yet District 9 does not merely endorse Wikus’s selfishness, expressing instead an ambivalence that sustains itself throughout the closing scenes. To be sure, the narrative foregrounds a figure who protects the same immigrants he once terrorized. As with the Hailsham strategy of providing an artistic surrogate for political agency, that figure undertakes action-packed intervention while we remain quiet spectators. But at the same time, Blomkamp subverts the fantasy of dissidence by accentuating how Wikus’s rebellious militancy harbors self-serving motivations. The knowing emphasis on those motivations suggests that, rather than reaffirming White heroism, the film may well aim to undermine that trope. The irresolution lingers in the narrative’s final moments as Wikus’s wife Tania discovers gifts of sculpted scrap metal on her porch. She suspects that her husband is the sculptor, and the film confirms her feelings by featuring a fully transformed Wikus in the last frames, holding up his handiwork as a kind of offering. On its face, that offering represents his desire to recapture his previous form and resume life with her. Yet it also functions as another kind of gift, reaching across the constructed alien/human divide and inviting identification where only rupture and rancor have existed. To settle on one or the other reading is to diminish the film’s productive ambiguity, missing its discomfort with the racial tropes it evokes, its defiance of the borders that nativist routines concretize into reality.

As this chapter has shown, those borders have especially harsh consequences for Black and Brown children, whom dominant populations figure as waste, pollution, pestilence. Rarely do such images hold such poignancy as in Omelas. And where Le Guin’s story derives allegorical resonance from the secret, Sher and Mendoza’s Sanctuary locates it at the U.S.-Mexico border, exploding the exceptionalist myth that frames the U.S. as an authority on human rights and child welfare. Sharply alert to this contradiction, Sawka’s Icebox tracks it through detention centers and into the court system, raising the question of which site is colder.

As children become separated from loved ones at the border, the conditions they experience move past the dystopian into the realm of the horror show. Confirming Sher’s observation that the headlines exceed fiction for sheer outrage, reports detail COVID, flu, strep throat, and lice moving through the facilities with limited response while wounded children wait weeks for medical aid (Hilary Andersson; Anna Flagg and Julia Preston). “When we went to ask for medicine they gave us dirty looks,” one boy said, “and they always laughed among themselves” (Andersson). One refugee broke her shoulder when leaping from a train, ending up in a detention facility for eighteen days with no pain relief. She created a makeshift sling, but a guard confiscated it based on security codes. “No one told you to come to the United States,” an attendant told her (Flagg and Preston). Under such circumstances, people become depressed and prone to self-harm, often finding that the center staff worsen the problems rather than mitigating them. Inmates recall verbal abuse, physical intimidation, and accusations of falsifying their age to garner undeserved protections. Worse yet, some report sexual harassment and rape (Andersson; Varela). And in border camps that hold children in tents rather than cages, detainees find themselves assaulted by sandstorms (Cedar Attanasio). Dystopian prose and cinema, for all their inventive capacity, have trouble keeping up.

These traumatic news stories present us with limit cases for American exceptionalism: unfolding in the no man’s land between immediate peril and doubtful refuge, they generate explosive tension between the country’s idea of itself and its everyday injustices. To recall Hesford’s framing, they expose the “differential distribution of vulnerability and valued lives” that characterizes Western geopolitics, and they signal the Whiteness of the carceral violence that underlies rhetorics of citizenship. The fictional narratives outlined in this chapter bring that violence into clear view, constituting less a dystopian digression from the commonplace than an interpretation of the commonplace as itself dystopian. The stories posit a thin line between intra- and extradiegetic realms, with such a robust circuit of exchange between them that the continuities overwhelm the differences.

Still, there occasionally lurks in the fiction a quiet insistence on exceptional Whiteness, a depiction of subjects heroically sabotaging the system that reflects and sustains their dominance. Fantasies of sabotage prove seductive for otherwise frustrated audiences, those who recognize the need for dissent but feel overmatched by the problem, or who acknowledge the historical cruelty of Whiteness and wish, if only for the space of a story, to repudiate their own privilege. Such stories afford those audiences a liminal space in which to linger, choosing not to walk away but nevertheless cushioning the self against accountability. Stories provide equipment for living, and sometimes for living with the unthinkable. But in their more reflexive moments, they also identify the self-protective tendencies that guide our interpretations, suggesting that those interpretations undertake systemic and well as psychological maintenance. In the work of Blomkamp as of Ishiguro, that metaleptic rhetoric aims to unsettle and provoke, to induce discomfort with reception as an end in itself. Even as we read, children undergo untold abuses at the border—separation, shaming, harassment, and sickness that our critical analyses cannot touch. Whether we resemble the denizens of Hailsham cannot be determined by the fiction.

Notes

1. Villanueva reflects on the rhetorical production of geopolitical boundaries in “Metonymic Borders and Our Sense of Nation” (34). Kate Vieira does similar work in Writing for Love and Money, describing how borders prove variably permeable for Ukrainian and Mexican people at varying times of their lives. “We often think of borders as incontrovertible facts,” she writes. “But from the perspective of people who have moved, are moving, or are planning to move, the view is different. The lines keep getting redrawn.” Or those lines become brighter and more menacing: “as freshly cruel policies are written in the United States, the perimeter of what is livable space for many has constricted” (155).

2. See Sher 307. Under the Trump presidency, breaking news signaled a dystopian reality by highlighting the normalization of xenophobia and the separation of migrant families, and by covering a leader whose rhetoric “emboldened others to carry out supremacist ideals and incite discursive and physical violence on those deemed as deviant and/or pollutants” (Heuman and Gonzalez 338–39). This viral rhetoric stems from a history of nativist discourse that associates Latinx immigrants with lawlessness and violence (Anne Demo 306). In Jennifer Potter’s analysis, the reconstitution of “illegal” as a noun reflects a sustained effort to dehumanize such immigrants, to criminalize not so much their actions as their existence (229).

3. Those isolating spaces also appear as the train roofs of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre.

4. In 2018, Chak put the number of refugees at 25.4 million with 52% being children.

5. In 2019, Victoria Law documented a groundswell of litigation over detention centers forcing migrants to work for almost no compensation. The suits allege that the centers “are coercing detainees into working for a dollar a day and punishing those who don’t.” She explains that while requiring convicted criminals to work is permitted by the Thirteenth Amendment, immigrant detention is not a criminal but a civil matter. Under civil law, centers need only define the work as voluntary and pay the migrants one dollar a day, a Congressional rate set in 1950 and never increased. Migrants argue that the “voluntary” designation is inaccurate, as people who refuse find themselves denied basic supplies, reassigned to dangerous units, or locked in their cells for extended periods. Eighteen Republican Congress people put forward a staunch defense of the dollar-a-day rate in 2018, arguing that increasing the wage would frighten off private contractors. In Law’s view, they were “worried that if the private prisons were forced to pay reasonable wages, the companies would pass on those costs to the federal government.”

6. Other instances in which corporations direct or overtake national government include the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, “Buy-n-Large” in Wall-E, and the Octan Company in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s The LEGO Movie (Atchison and Shames 37–8).

7. In his reflections on “slow violence,” Rob Nixon interprets border walls as manifesting “a short-term psychology of denial: the delusion that we can survive long term in a world whose resources are increasingly unshared” (20). As walls deny the global entanglement of diverse populations, they also concretize an ideology that amounts to “out of sight out of mind” (20). At the same time, I would suggest that the presumed villain on the other side of the wall provides a foil for opportunistic politicians, who never want the threat too far “out of mind” for their voters.

8. The “Men against Fire” episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror series also depicts a fortified territory whose population treats non-citizens as insects and vectors of contagion. Soldiers of the stronghold have brain implants that make the non-citizens easy to spot, distorting the features of the “other” and turning their words to shrieks. The soldiers call these figures “roaches” and treat them as wartime combatants. The implants permit no distinction between adult and child roaches, translating them into monsters of various sizes. When the non-citizens develop technologies to disrupt the implant’s masking effects, one soldier recognizes his targets as human and begins to experience post-traumatic stress. His superiors justify their approach as a means to guard against outsiders bringing blood-borne pathogens into the homeland, thus revealing not just nativist but genocidal impulses.

Chapter 4

Eating Our Own Crimes

Food Horror in the Anthropocene

Of the many hardships children face in times of dystopian nationalism, hunger and malnourishment rate among the most pernicious.1 Food insecurity acts as a powerful motivator for migration, stalking the attempted passage from one country to another and compounding the terrors of incarceration at the border. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series treats uneven food distribution as a weapon of class struggle, distilling the geopolitics of resource inequity into a state-run gameshow with largely unwilling contestants. In her vision, an opulent Capitol divides the nation into districts that must, at an appointed time each year, send select children to a televised battle royal. At its most efficient, the spectacle stabilizes power relations by reminding the districts who is in control, stoking antagonisms between potential allies, and demonstrating the expendability of the districts’ offspring. In the transition from Collins’s books to the films of Gary Ross and Francis Lawrence, the concern with starvation in the districts diminishes and the titular “hunger” becomes a metaphor for mass fixation on the games. But at times the movies revert with a fury to the source material, as when a contestant at a pre-game celebration notes the overwhelming supply of food, only to encounter an emetic cocktail meant to help him go on eating. “People are starving in 12,” he remarks. “Here they’re just throwing it up to stuff more in” (Lawrence).

The contestant’s observation helps situate food as a form of rhetoric, at once expressing and mediating coordinates within a specific social arrangement. Joshua J. Frye and Michael S. Bruner depict that expressive capacity in resolutely corporeal terms: “Discourse. Materiality. Power. These are the sinews that connect rhetoric to food” (1). That tripartite framework permits us to make layered sense of the party scene, where food is discursive in its tightly controlled abundance. Food comes in waves, communicating an easy and limitless availability, but only for Capitol citizens and their guests. The reigning discourse simultaneously signals that those who dwell outside Capitol borders do not deserve such ready sustenance, their lives being of small value to the administration. These messages circulate in profoundly material fashion, inviting the addressee to savor rather than merely receive the significance. In such instances, vision, smell, touch, and taste supplement and at times displace verbal delivery. Those sensations derive power from affective intensity, driving the lessons into to the body, but they also convey power as a relationship, a condition of unequal influence and authority. Material plenty and sensory variety exist in relation to deprivation in the districts, who have earned their penury through past attempts at revolution. The sinews that connect rhetoric to food thus suggest a body that, for all its efforts to achieve equilibrium, is riven by internal conflict.

The Hunger Games is one of many dystopian fictions that showcase that conflict, and one of many for which food constitutes a prominent concern. By “attending to food and eating as cultural rhetorics,” Abby M. Dubisar writes, we can discover “how ideologies accompany food discourses” (118); moreover, we can track how those cultural rhetorics disrupt the boundary between private and public (Dubisar and Hunt 76) and how our “most personal behaviors” double as “political activity” (Stephanie Houston Grey 309). We have already witnessed those politics in earlier chapters, as with The Platform’s insistence that dining on one floor affects all those below. Whereas The Hunger Games refashions the topos of resource distribution as a gameshow, The Platform compresses the problem of sustainability into experimental architecture. We have seen similarly cruel architecture in High-Rise lead to violent runs on grocery stores and the consumption of animal companions, and enforced hunger in Snowpiercer motivates militant uprising. With District 9, we have found ourselves chastised for treating a narrative of immigrant starvation as a “popcorn flick.” Cultural rhetorics of food and eating thus appear in otherworldly texts in ways that concern our own world; they not only describe relations of power and material distinction but situate us within those relations.

Recognizing the interplay of diegetic and audience realms requires a certain alertness, however—an attunement to conditions that motivate the fictions. This sensitivity exemplifies, in a limited but instructive way, what OreOluwa Badaki calls “critical food literacy.” Drawing on the research of Dianna Winslow as well as Lina Yamashita and Diana Robinson, Badaki associates such literacy with “politicized knowledge” of food and its production, with particular emphasis on inequities of distribution, the alienation and civic marginalization of producers, and the values and rituals that attend consumption (128–29). Critical food literacy aims not just to describe the circuits of discourse, materiality, and power that accompany cultural routines, but also to intervene in the routines that naturalize or conceal longstanding injustices. In her work with Eileen Schell, Winslow locates one of those injustices in the problem of food access, which is “impacted by a wide range of influences, from the environment, drought, climate change, famine, and disease, to complex political forces, such as civil unrest, war, repressive regimes, fluctuating political trade agreements, racism, sexism, classism, and variable, often unjust public policies” (12). The question of access to nourishment, inflected as it is by inter- and intranational conflict, cannot long sustain the illusion of detached investigation. Like the metaleptic moment in District 9 that accuses viewers of complicity, it implicates us in inescapably intimate ways, perhaps even as we watch, read, write, reflect. As critical food literacy discloses dystopian cultural rhetorics, we cannot dissociate ourselves from the narrative.

That narrative pairs the exploitation of labor with the exploitation of environmental resources. Both unfold at a pace and scale that signal a menacing future for commercial agriculture and for human cultures more generally. The abuse of farmworkers takes a particular toll on the migrant populations we encountered in chapter 3, who frequently travel on the promise of healthy wages only to experience poor pay and unsanitary housing. Worse yet, they become victim to human trafficking, death threats, sexual assault, and rape (Michael Sainato; Susan L. Marquis). And just as we saw children undergo harrowing treatment at border facilities, youth who manage to cross successfully often experience violence in the fields (Marquis). Migrants who have their asylum claims denied still supply a ready workforce for agribusiness, and the precarity of their status affords them no room to appeal for improved conditions (Abdul Rizvi). Worker abuses proceed in tandem with practices that systematically diminish the fertility of the land. Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster adopt the Marxian language of alienation to describe those practices, detailing a long history in which “essential soil nutrients” have been “stripped away to supply food and fiber for distant markets” (91). Like the expropriation of labor, the “failure to recycle lost nutrients” violates “the law of compensation” (91). Workers and farmland undergo exhaustion together, neither of them having their energies replenished in sustainable ways.

Those connected processes of alienation have unfolded with such persistence and geographical reach as to have dire implications for the biosphere. What Deborah Mutnick terms the “cascading, cumulative effects of industrial agriculture” have contributed to an anthropogenic phenomenon known as the “Great Acceleration,” a quickening increase in average global temperature and ocean acidification that threatens the durability of all sorts of living organisms, including those who set the change in motion (92). Our agricultural routines, which focus on “extracting maximum profits for minimum costs,” are responsible for “more than a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, making food production a major contributor to the climate crisis” (Nina Lakhani et al.). Although people who extract profit from that arrangement will pass its worst effects to future generations, we are already witnessing the damage. Clark and Foster specify some of the developing tendencies: “loss of biological diversity, diminished availability and quality of fresh water, land cover change (e.g., deforestation), the rupture of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and increasing pollution from synthetic chemicals, which leads to the bioaccumulation and biomagnification of toxins within living organisms and across the food chain” (89). Agribusiness not only alienates the worker and the soil but indirectly poisons its consumer base. And in poisoning its consumer base, capitalism effectively devours itself.

This chapter will show how various dystopian rhetorics, from film to stage to fiction to contemporary journalism, address this political-economic tendency toward self-consumption, and more specifically, how they do so through representations of food and eating. In tracking dystopian rhetoric across varied platforms and genres, the chapter affirms Badaki’s contention that critical food literacy should, like literacy studies more generally, engage with “different modalities” including the “written, visual, auditory, [and] performed” (128). As the argument moves among those modalities, it proceeds in four stages: First, it suggests that scenes of commensality, or eating together, regularly serve as portraits of power and structured inequality in dystopian discourses. Focusing on Mark Mylod’s The Menu and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, the section connects power at table with global problems of hoarding and unjust distribution. Playing variations on the theme of food horror, those pictures feature scenes in which the privileged must not only face their crimes but eat the results. Second, the argument examines how the ecological effects of such crimes elicit devious attempts at compensation or disguise—institutionalized efforts to render resource crises palatable or manage them in clandestine ways. Zoe Kazan’s play After the Blast outlines inventive forms of sensory modification that arise when climate trauma forces people underground and necessitates an unfamiliar diet. And the classic dystopian text Soylent Green addresses food shortage by transforming the consumer into the consumed, constituting a fearsomely literal vision of a system ingesting itself.

Whereas Soylent Green depicts a government hiding industrialized cannibalism from the citizenry, Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender Is the Flesh figures it as a banal reality that people have learned to accommodate. The third section of the chapter treats that book as yet another critique of systemic self-consumption, though one where the industry has gone public. It shows how prosperous groups deploy euphemism and linguistic trickery to routinize violence toward the poor, making food horror the more horrible by underscoring its dull conventionality. But if eating the other serves as a conceit for ordinary class relations, it can also work as a rhetoric of dissidence, destabilizing the variables within the sociopolitical food chain. In the final section, the chapter locates such dissidence in Julia Ducourneau’s Raw, Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, and Marina de Van’s In My Skin, noting how such works critique established discourses of power. In My Skin affords a particularly confrontational instance of this critique, featuring a businesswoman who abruptly renounces past conformity by injuring and gradually devouring her own body. The narrative indicates how profoundly the language of consumption has permeated the cultural imaginary, even inhabiting its expressions of resistance.

Theater of Consumption

The language of commensality is a language of unevenly distributed privilege and authority. It expresses itself in who determines the menu, who dines and serves, where people sit, whose rituals and preferences hold sway, and who directs the flow of conversation. In “Speculative Visions and Imaginary Meals: Food and the Environment in (Post-Apocalyptic) Science Fiction Films,” Jean P. Retzinger frames that language as a means of reading people and group dynamics in dystopian and other narrative worlds. She argues that “depictions of meals in films serve as shorthand that often allows audiences to better understand individual characters through their relationship to food and characters’ relationships with others in interactions taking place over food” (371). Those meals are thus discursive in the sense provided by Frye and Bruner, communicating accepted practices within a given social sphere while providing clues about the relative influence of individual participants. “Both on and off screen,” Retzinger writes, food “‘places’ us in the world” (370). It has a powerfully material dimension in that it “forces attention to the body” while also helping reveal “shadings of gender, class, ethnicity, power, and community” (370). Less apparent in any single meal is the division of labor that precedes it and makes it possible, the supply chain that transports it to the table. Those conditions are embedded in commensality even if they remain out of sight: if discourse, materiality, and power are the “sinews” that link food to rhetoric, that ligature cannot be separated from agribusiness and the workings of transnational capitalism. To suggest that food places us in the world is to indicate our entanglement with those systems.

Those systems concentrate economic agency among a small range of transnational corporations, whose history of mergers and alliances have given them great political influence while supporting the deregulation of their industry. Aggressively limiting restrictions on labor practices and environmental impacts, those businesses favor maximizing immediate profits over generating sustainable production routines, and the resulting density of capital accumulation further strengthens their lobbying power. According to Nina Lakhani, Aliya Uteuova, and Alvin Chang, that consolidation of resources means that a few companies “dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.” Lakhani and her co-authors point to a small group of mega-corporations such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kellogg, Kraft Heinz, Conagra, General Mills, Del Monte, and Tyson Foods, arguing that just a handful of players “control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans.” This outsized authority helps determine how farmers focus their operations, how much money they can earn, and what sort of selection buyers come to expect. The businesses so carefully control the range of options that “consumer choice is largely an illusion” (Lakhani et al.). While promoting this illusion, they are principal innovators in what Clark and Foster depict as the dual alienation of land and labor, and they contribute mightily to the warming trends that threaten food security over the long term.

It is in this context that Mylod’s The Menu appears, telling the story of one evening at celebrity chef Julian Slowik’s island restaurant, Hawthorn. Patrons pay $1,250 per person for the experience, which blends fine dining with meticulously produced theater. From early frames in which we hear orchestral instruments tuning up, to the presentation of the kitchen as an artfully lit stage, to Slowik’s distinctive clap and soliloquy as he introduces each course, the event fully integrates commensality with dramatic performance. That performance insists on its exclusivity, unfolding within a rarefied, detached space, while also announcing its capacity to concentrate the tendencies of the world outside. Slowik tells the diners that they will ingest not just “fats, salts, sugars, proteins” but “entire ecosystems.” Those ecosystems involve an array of interrelated nutrients and ingredients, to be sure, but they also involve a network of social relations marked by class division other forms of habitual violence.

As Slowik introduces those ecosytems, he performs within a genre that typically aims to uplift the guests, indulging their appetites and celebrating their refined tastes. That genre constitutes a kind of epideictic rhetoric, praising patrons through a multi-course regimen of delicately crafted display. The diners expect such treatment and engage in their own forms of competitive display as the drama proceeds. The self-impressed food critic, the movie star, the business magnate, the entrepreneurs and investors, the culinary fanboy—all approach the experience as performers more than audience members. But Slowik subverts generic expectations by infusing his initial remarks with ambiguity, clouding the distinction between praise and critique. After offering a brief history that associates bread with working-class experience, for example, he serves a bread-less bread course, sauces without grain, because “you, my dear guests, are not the common man.” The scene illustrates one way that food “places” characters, reminding them of their privilege in the most privileged of spaces. While some of them perceive the dish as a playful joke, others take offense; they cannot accept being denied anything in the food economy, no matter how metaphoric the gesture.

As various characters begin to object, it becomes apparent how little their demands matter at Hawthorn. While The Menu hardly constitutes a conventional dystopian narrative, the island setting reproduces the technique in which an otherworldly environment brings worldly tendencies into view. The offshore location embodies what Michel Foucault terms a “heterotopia” that “represents, contests, and inverts real sites,” a removed space that simultaneously underscores and eliminates the everyday advantages of the patrons. The pageantry of curated courses suits their self-concept, yet the arguments embedded in those courses do not. The arguments first draw attention to the patrons’ elitism, but become steadily more specific, suggesting that Slowik and crew have done thorough (and thoroughly unwelcome) research prior to the gathering. The dystopian dimensions of the experience sneak up on the guests, who at one stage find their misdeeds laser-engraved on tortillas: fake business charges, extramarital affairs, cruel reviews that led to the shuttering of venues on the mainland. Those tortillas make explicit the subtext of the entire meal by inviting customers to eat their own crimes.

Although Slowik appoints himself judge of those crimes, he does not excuse himself from the ranks of the guilty. Instead, he emphasizes his failings by admitting his sexual harassment of employees, his catering to the rich and the spoiled, and the crushing intensity of his ambition. The Menu stresses his culpability by redoubling the rhetoric of the heterotopia: an island home so exclusive that not even his staff and closest advisors can visit. For the course called “The Mess,” Slowik asks his sous chef, Jeremy, if he desires such a life. Jeremy responds by committing suicide with a revolver, only to be wrapped up and whisked away by the remaining employees. The theatrics of the evening have been so pronounced that several of the guests assume stagecraft, but space for denial is swiftly emptying out.

Jeremy’s death signals what is to come for the patrons, the staff, the chef—everyone at Hawthorn except for Margot, who was not on the original guest list and thus not one of Slowik’s targets. If his introduction to the meal was epideictic in its emphasis on ceremonial display, the later soliloquys reaffirm the association of epideixis with funereal rhetoric. The dinner moves not toward penitence but collective self-sacrifice: as the culmination of eating its crimes, the group consumes itself. A critical food literacy that involves a “politicized knowledge” of its subject will here recognize a resolutely necropolitical convergence of discourse and materiality, an enactment of power at its most unrestrained. Slowik brings to dessert a penchant for gallows humor, treating the diners as ingredients in a giant batch of S’mores while Hawthorn serves as the requisite fire pit. He describes the S’more as a peculiarly American indulgence, though his greater interest lies in fire as the agent that fuses the whole.

Visions of a fiery end have particular gravity in a situation where Slowik’s patrons consume “entire ecosystems”—a phrase that works as a metaleptic nod toward the audience’s own participation in self-destructive networks of food production, circulation, and waste. The film’s final, necropolitical ceremony moves beyond private offenses to broader behaviors in which whole cultures set personal accumulation above sustainable practice. Granted, the film does not dwell on the social and environmental impacts of agribusiness, but it does focus on a node within that corporate capitalist network while stressing people’s inability to outrun past harms. The food horror of The Menu unfolds against a public backdrop where those harms constitute a growing, multilayered concern: anxiety about the distribution and durability of agricultural resources mingling with awareness of how high-technology farming helps overheat the planet. As we eat our own crimes, our crimes eventually turn to devour us.2

An earlier, more lurid example of such retribution occurs in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. As with The Menu, much of the narrative proceeds in an upscale restaurant where authority expresses itself as ostentatious eating. And like Hawthorn, Le Hollandais is a theater where food “places” characters within a finely arranged social hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy stands Albert Spica, a feared crime boss who finances the restaurant and treats it as a base of operations. Every meal presents an opportunity to flaunt his dominance, which he does in his manner of eating, his monitoring how other people eat, and his boisterous, near-constant chatter. “Conspicuous consumption advertises his status,” writes Estella Ciobanu, and his various relationships are “mediated by food” as he teaches table manners and “feeds others by force” (85). The act of force-feeding nicely condenses his authoritarian tendencies, epitomizing his relationships with his wife, his crew, and any patrons unlucky enough to catch his attention. Those acts are discursive partly for the expectations of deference they communicate, but also for the flood of verbal insults and threats that accompany them. Although his transgressions will rebound on him in gruesome ways by the end of the film, the bulk of the narrative finds him monopolizing the stage, dictating roles within the food economy while hoarding the revenues.

Framing the restaurant as stage is as much material as metaphorical, with Greenaway rigorously emphasizing the theatrical qualities of his set. Whereas The Menu begins with the sounds of orchestral tuning, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover opens a velvet curtain, gesturing in metaleptic fashion toward viewers’ embodied engagement in the proceedings. And where Slowik treats the threshold of his kitchen as proscenium, Spica ranges freely between the performance space of the dining room and the backstage kitchen area, merging the roles of director, lead actor, and stage manager into one frantic composite. Long, gliding camera movements clarify the sprawling unity of Le Hollandais, which for all its opulence has an unfinished quality, an aura of stagehands still at work. The spectacle of fine dining collides with the spectacle of dramatic art, the technical self-consciousness of a movie that wants simultaneously to be a play. However attentive to its own artifice, the movie strives to create the affect of firsthand, visceral involvement, actors and audiences feeding each other in a single space.

Coming at the end of the 1980s, that immediate, bodily appeal aimed to evoke disgust not just with a fictional character but with the dystopian dimensions of the Thatcher regime, some of which we encountered earlier in High-Rise. Greenaway describes his movie as a way of focusing his “anger and passion about the current British political situation,” framing the narrative as both a critique of consumer society and a portrait of “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” (Gavin Smith, “Food” 55). As a surrogate for Thatcher, Spica moves with the assurance that power is its own justification: those with privilege deserve it and those without must accept their failings. He demands deference in the dining room, roaring orders in ways that indicate an always unfulfilled desire for control. When people displease him, he ruins their dishes, makes them consume excrement, murders them offsite. Within his fortified microcosm, the only alternative to conformity is to eat shit and die—in short, no alternative at all.

Given those strictures, a keen sense of impending violence arises when Spica’s wife sneaks off for romantic trysts with another patron. Georgina and Michael meet in the lavatory and various rooms of the large kitchen, managing to foil Spica’s surveillance apparatus, at least temporarily, with the help of the chef and his staff. Michael is a student of revolutionary history, but so mild in the dining room that Albert can only chastise him for reading when he should be eating. Yet the affair with Georgina works to radicalize the disgruntled employees, prompting them to assist by making space for the rendezvous, keeping watch, and assisting their escape when Albert catches on. If food is rhetorical insofar as it “places” people, those engaged in food production occupy dissident territory in Greenaway’s film. But in a world that permits no alternatives, the repressive regime is bound to mount a response.

That response comes when Spica and his henchmen track Michael back to the presumed safe space of the book depository. Although Albert’s first thought when discovering Michael’s actions is to eat him, he devises a more pointedly counterinsurgent punishment by stuffing pages down the victim’s throat until he dies. Always concerned with self-display, Spica relishes how the punishment will read for posterity: the betrayer “was stuffed. And Albert liked good food. They might even smile: ‘He was stuffed with the tools of his trade. He was stuffed with books. The crummy little bookkeeper was.’” Of the many ways of regulating literacy in dystopian narrative—monitoring, limiting, banning, burning, submerging, commodifying—force-feeding stands out for its linkage of ingestion, communication, and political control. “Ram the bloody books down his throat,” Spica commands, at once associating literacy with rebellion and compelling the unruly subject to choke on his own dissent. Focused though it is on Michael, such agonistic rhetoric also aims to discipline Georgina and her kitchen accomplices. The necropolitics of torture and allegorical reprisal center on the individual body while implicating the social one.

Commanding as is Albert’s statement, however, the final word belongs to his victims. In a rhetorical struggle that expresses itself through food, Georgina devises a plan to serve Spica his own crimes, revisiting the act of force-feeding on its most avid practitioner. Enlisting the help of Chef Richard and his team, she develops a fitting variation on the human dish, serving up Michael’s roasted body as part of a banquet meant for Albert alone. The restaurant workers along with various characters he has exploited, maligned, and attacked all participate in the presentation of the meal—a ritual that combines, like The Menu, the epicurean with the funereal. Insofar as Michael personifies Georgina’s heartbreak, the cultivation of unauthorized knowledge, the repression of the laboring classes, popular alienation under the Thatcher government, and the scapegoating of the rebellious subject, the staff makes Albert swallow the political violence he has helped to normalize. They compel him to eat “an entire ecosystem.” Forcing him to dine at gunpoint, they redefine roles in the theater of consumption, converting the site of commensality from one of authoritarian display to carnivalesque defiance, however circumscribed and temporary.

Both Le Hollandais and Hawthorn constitute heterotopic venues in which food doubles as discourse. Those discourses contest gluttony and the hoarding of wealth while suggesting the continuity of laissez faire economic policies with civic inequity. As the deregulation of the food industry allows poorly restrained corporate expansion, placing managerial prerogatives above the interests of workers and their environments, the films depict forms of commensality that involve flagrant abuses of power, unresolved trauma, and slow death. The Menu and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover make their arguments in intensely material ways, alternately feeding and depriving bodies while eventually making a meal of them. Those meals are “conduits for power,” to use Ciobanu’s language (89), and though that power mostly takes the forms of repression and domination, it occasionally manifests in fiery moments of resistance. Those moments demand that the overclass absorb what it has wrought, feasting on the yield of its everyday violence. But the demand is hardly necessary. At its most unrestrained, the political economy self-destructs of its own accord, eating itself alive.

Food Futures and the Rhetoric of Concealment

Greenaway builds the sense of traumatic self-destruction into his staging and prop work, offsetting the luxurious spaces of Le Hollandais with images of rot. As Albert flaunts his authority in the restaurant, meat trucks sit unattended in the parking lot, the payload slowly decaying as the unloading process undergoes a long delay. Waste and deterioration thus haunt the scene of self-congratulatory excess, gradually fouling the air as diners come and go. The film depends, in Ruth D. Johnston’s interpretation, on the tension between “agencies of order” and the disruption of order through “filth, decay, excrement, violence, adultery, cannibalism” (23). That tension presents itself in the actions of the characters, but also in the details of the mise-en-scène. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is an “encyclopedia of still lifes,” writes Johnston, as its artful food presentations recall such seventeenth-century painters as Jan Davidsz de Heem and Willem Kalf (Johnston 25–26). Yet the stalled delivery outside the restaurant subverts the parade of dishes inside. Piatti-Farnell details the cultural implications of such sabotage in Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film: “Rotten meat, especially when ridden with maggots, is more than simply taboo. It is the sensorial evocation of our own mortality, and the final representation of that which we fear in virtue of its own unsalvageable nature” (57). The proximity of putrefaction to the site of fine dining signals Albert’s moral corruption, and it lends somatic intensity to Greenaway’s critique of the Conservative Party. In more specific terms, it suggests the structural relationship between bounty and abjection in the world of food services, depicting them as part of the same ecosystem.

In The Menu, eating entire ecosystems means eventually going up in flames. Slowik particularizes the food horror for each character, having them undergo specific forms of punishment related to past transgressions, but he also engineers a collective form of retribution that involves everyone at Hawthorn. Taken together, Mylod’s and Greenaway’s movies indicate that at the scene of extravagant consumption, things are decaying, the heat is rising, and a reckoning is close at hand. But if some food horror is about moving toward apocalypse, other texts focus on the aftereffects of collapse and how survivors cope with what remains. Such works often highlight how those groups use leftover technological infrastructure to disguise the harm, managing affective energies through sensory manipulation and carefully kept secrets. The texts depict forms of necropolitics that aim to manage human death on a massive scale, sometimes by creating simulacra of pre-apocalyptic experiences, and other times by converting such death into fuel for lingering populations.

In Zoe Kazan’s play, After the Blast, those populations linger underground. Devastation at the Earth’s surface has driven people below, where scientist-administrators work to create serviceable comforts while maintaining strict control over the birth rate.3 Anxiety and depression present constant threats, and only those who withstand those threats receive authorization to reproduce. To ease the difficulties of confinement, the emergent government implants chips in people’s brains that allow them to “Sim” or undergo virtual experiences of open-air spaces. Those chips also make people’s subterranean diet palatable, overlaying bland nutritional units with the flavors, textures, and aromas of refined dishes. The hybrid of nutrient blocks and body mediation makes a decidedly material kind of argument that pleasure is still available, joy and basic sustenance are still linked, and people can recover the satisfactions of the surface and the freedoms of the past. Given that the play’s focal characters were born after the blast, their experience of eating generates nostalgia for a time they never knew, attempting to compensate for a traumatic rupture they never experienced in the first place.

Their nostalgia also includes fascination with paperback books, photographs, and music from the surface era, some of which the characters archive in an operation called Cultural Collection. Those artifacts have an antique quality amid the routine Simming, which not only supports people’s leisure and dining activities but helps with family planning, showing potential parents what their children might look like. When the would-be mother Anna learns that the projection program requires a server to run its calculations, her general concern about the implications of simulated reality deepens: “I just don’t have any particular interest in being used as a server,” she remarks. Her friend Patrick finds the hesitancy contradictory:

PATRICK: You’re doing it right now.

ANNA: Not by choice.

PATRICK: No? What does your food taste like? What are you eating right now?

CARRIE: Patrick.

PATRICK: I’m having steak.

ANNA: That’s different.

OLIVER: How?

ANNA: What?

OLIVER: How is it different, when we Sim with food?

ANNA: Because we don’t have a choice.

PATRICK: Yes you do. You could choose to taste what you’re actually eating. (33–34)

The point brings Anna up short, calling into question her scruples about virtual reality and her determination to face the material conditions of life underground. Those conditions complicate the prospects of having a child, even though she desperately wants one, thus aligning with the Anthropocene anxiety about bringing new life into a deteriorating biosphere.4

Ironically, she develops her most profound relationship with a robot—Arthur, the artificial intelligence that responds to her nurturing and aims to determine her fitness for motherhood. As she reveals her worries to Arthur, she shares her discomfort with Simming, which “confirms what the worst parts of my brain already think. [. . .] That our lives are so awful we have to augment them in any way possible. That everything good has already happened and there’s nothing left worth sticking around for” (49). Despite that sense of belatedness, she finds greater fulfillment in her relationship with Arthur than with her husband. When the authorities reclaim Arthur for another maternal candidate, Anna reacts as if to a death. Yet for all the complexities of her engagement with A.I.—her initial resistance and subsequent, ardent embrace—the question of food mediation does not yield the same sort of quandary. She Sims with food “because we don’t have a choice.” To accept Patrick’s challenge and “taste what you’re actually eating” is unthinkable.

After the Blast thus suggests a particular direction for critical food literacy, a line of inquiry that intersects with what Nora Castle and Graeme Macdonald call “food futures.” This discourse proceeds from “technofoods such as synthetic pastes, factory bread, bioengineered fruits and vegetables, lab-grown meat and seafood, and ersatz foods made of fungi, algae, and yeast, to more fantastical examples, such as alien cuisine, space travel tea, digital fare, and even human bodies” (209–10). The more sinister of those prospects suggest that waste accumulation, rising global temperatures, and poor stewardship of arable land may eventually necessitate dietary interventions akin to those outlined in Kazan’s play. Far-fetched as some of those prospects seem, Retzinger notes that food modification is already an enormous industry, with processing and selective breeding becoming common in the years after World War II and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) figuring prominently in twenty-first century grocery stores (371, 384). Developing critical literacies attuned to food futures means defamiliarizing those historical tendencies while staying alert to the warnings that infuse popular culture. Those warnings typically aim not to predict food futures in literal terms, but rather to sound an alarm about the precarity of current practice and the disquieting strangeness that may lie ahead.

Terry Gilliam anticipates that strangeness in Brazil, depicting a food future that is at once comical and unnerving. The Orwellian setting allows for fine dining but with marked constraints. Patrons receive menus with glowing images of the entrees, though the actual food departs dramatically from the portrait. Retzinger observes the high style of the orders—“braised veal in wine sauce, duck a l’orange, crevette a la mayonnaise, and steak”—and how it contrasts with the rushed, readymade meals that follow. Those dishes look “remarkably alike,” she explains: “three scoops of a paste-like substance varying only slightly in shades of green or tan. At the center of each plate, a color photograph of the ‘original’ food item is affixed to an elegant silver card holder” (378). The illuminated menu and photo supply low-grade versions of the Simming that occurs in After the Blast, aiming to persuade people that nothing has been lost, that the pleasures of eating can be recovered despite the dearth of once plentiful resources. The discourse of technological compensation thus takes multiple forms in the portrayal of food futures, from the nudgings of visual rhetoric to full-blown sensory deception, helping populations bear the material experience of a degraded diet along with the despondency or outright panic that accompanies it.

Those feelings of panic indicate the strong connection between established foodways and the sense of wellbeing. Just as fictional food futures depict threats to that affective security, so do some of the products emerging in today’s market for dietary efficiency. Ellis Brooks samples those products in “My 24-Hour Experiment with Dystopian Food Units,” showing what happens when startups attempt to condense whole dinners into compact nutrient squares. She describes a meal of “vacuum-sealed reconstituted” dishes—“three units of salmon, two of sweet potato, and one of asparagus”—that “looked like protein pellets for the discerning survivalist.” They also resemble sci-fi visions of what people are left with when ecological catastrophe eliminates familiar dinners or renders them a luxury of the rich. As Brooks assesses the salmon pellets, she describes the taste as neither pleasant nor unpalatable but “recognizable” and therefore “a little unsettling”: “It wasn’t like a crab cake or some other patty with a mix of spices, flavors, and textures. This tasted precisely like salmon, and salmon alone. A reproduction of salmon.” The uncanny feeling intensifies when she tries the asparagus, which has the appropriate flavor but feels like “eating pre-chewed food.” Upon realizing that it “tastes exactly like asparagus but doesn’t feel like asparagus,” she finds the sensation “a little horrifying.” In a line that might have been culled from After the Blast, she feels she is “eating a sad, square-shaped memory of what food once was.” Her reporting reads like a vicarious acceptance of Patrick’s challenge, a twenty-four-hour determination to disconnect from virtual filters and experience post-apocalyptic cuisine.

The emergent, metaleptic interplay between Kazan’s drama and the SquarEats phenomenon exemplifies the sometimes playful, sometimes vexed dialogue between sci-fi and nonfiction food cultures. The discursive character of food travels freely back and forth between daily custom and the realms of imaginative storytelling, with Castle and Macdonald pursuing those currents of dialogue “from journalistic and anti-GMO activist invocations of ‘Frankenfoods,’ to the purposeful reference to Soylent Green (1973) in the branding of the Soylent meal-replacement company” (212). Bearing a variety of sinister undertones, that reference aims in part to invoke maximum utility in a time of flagging resources. But for some entrepreneurial thinkers, the concern is not so much with agricultural sustainability as productive use of time. “‘The act of eating is a task that technology can make more efficient—or eliminate entirely’ is not a line out of science fiction,” writes Alice Barsky, “it is a quote from Rob Rhinehart,” creator of the Soylent liquid food substitute. Although Rhinehart means mainly to provide a substitute for junk food, he describes the benefits in ways that cast cooking and eating as time-drains, not to mention questionable expenditures of the energy they are supposed to replenish. Barsky remarks that “his design was inspired by the busy working bachelor” but with “potential to serve the 48.1 million that go hungry in the U.S.” The company has democratic aspirations, then, reaching out to the overworked and the unemployed, assuring them all that it can provide the requisite fuel when dining is either a bother or an indulgence.

Naming the substance Soylent clearly works as a joke in light of those aspirations, but the joke lands badly. The problem is threefold: first, the most sympathetic characters in Soylent Green openly long for the experience of food that preceded the apocalypse. When detective Thorn manages to secure a small cache of vegetables, fruit, and beef while on assignment, his older friend Sol sheds tears of wonder both at the find and his own sense of loss: “How did we come to this?” he asks. Retzinger observes that “both men revel in the sensory experience and seem to derive equal pleasure from the flavors—for one, familiar, for the other, exotic—they taste. For Sol, this meal operates much like Proust’s madeleine, evoking another world, another time” (373). Second, Soylent Green feeds the poor and homeless not as an act of altruism but one of counter-revolutionary population management. Little more than a green wafer, it suggests a kind of desperate utilitarianism in its form and materiality. But no matter how unappetizing it is, rebellion breaks out in the public square when shipments fail to appear.

Third, the Soylent corporation in the film hides its technical solution to hunger rather than flaunting it. The movie shares that corporation’s dedication to secrecy, delaying the revelation in almost comical ways while lingering on characters who know too much—a soon-to-be-assassinated mogul who feels judged by God, a priest who has heard ghastly confessions and stares blankly into the distance. However heavy the hints, only in the final scenes do we learn the truth: “You’ve gotta tell ’em!” Thorn exclaims. “Soylent Green is people!” Whereas technoscience in After the Blast manipulates the senses to make conditions bearable, it also operates in Soylent Green to placate the populace while maintaining the mystery of its methods. And while both narratives dramatize global capitalism consuming itself, Soylent Green makes that argument in literal fashion. In that way, it anticipates later films such as Delicatessen, where a French butcher fills his case with job applicants, and The Matrix, where “humans are grown synthetically in pods and fed the liquefied remains of other humans, pumped in through umbilical cords” (Barsky). It also prefigures the concerns of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in which post-apocalyptic protagonists attempt to maintain their own humanity by refusing cannibalism. But rarely has dystopian storytelling so clearly envisioned the industrialization of cannibalism as does Soylent Green. As Thorn discovers assembly lines of green wafers in the late stages of the film, it becomes plain that the rebels in the square are among the raw ingredients. Sol awaits processing as well, having opted for assisted suicide upon discovering the secret. Those who openly resist the system, or who are unfortunate enough to learn its truths, end up on its conveyor belts.

Sol’s death gives particular poignancy to the idea of a society consuming itself, a dying organism forced to eat its own crimes. When he decides he cannot live with his newly acquired knowledge, he opts to visit a facility called “Home” that affords people a gentle end, giving them a lethal drink and allowing them to watch surround-screen images of life before the catastrophe. Another innovation in necropolitical population management, the immersive discourse provides a last respite from the waste that fills the city streets. It evokes the meal that Sol and Thorn shared earlier in the narrative, making a heaven of a time long past, when the worst effects of the Great Acceleration were still to come. The experience proceeds as a kind of Simming, presenting Sol with images of pastures and unspoiled beaches, gardens and smog-free skies accompanied by classical scoring. It thereby constitutes yet another instance of the Hailsham effect, offering aesthetic richness as a distraction from, or means of reconciling with, the horrors at hand. That aesthetic compensation poorly disguises the ways “Home” is as much a theater of consumption as Hawthorn or Le Hollandais, and just as much an architecture of power. The extent of that power becomes clear when attendants roll out Sol’s remains for shipping to the Soylent factory.

That transportation happens quietly, behind the scenes, in a process so secretive that it takes a seasoned detective to uncover. Coming at the end of the film, the revelation coils into one complex conceit the traumatic information arrayed throughout the narrative, some of which Stacy M. Jameson lists as “dehumanization, resource depletion, corporate totalitarian control, absences of pleasure, dichotomies of extreme privilege and subjugation, and futility” (44). All those concerns haunt the underground world of After the Blast as well—so much so that Simming provides a daily means of coping rather than just palliative care. Both texts feature food futures in which routine commensality depends on a rhetoric of concealment, either through augmentation of a bland reality or systematic suppression of corporate procedures. In the next section, we encounter a text that revisits the ideas of Soylent Green fifty years later, and that shares Kazan’s interest in how people make unbearable truths palatable.

Words that Cover Up the World

At first encounter, the narrative world of Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender Is the Flesh appears to flaunt the very things other dystopian food narratives hide. Whereas Thorn only witnesses the aftereffects of Soylent’s processing techniques, discovering the contents of the green crackers in the film’s waning moments, Tender Is the Flesh situates us from the outset in an abbatoir that converts people into food. And whereas Anna and friends use sensory filters to mask what they eat, most characters in Bazterrica’s work have come to accept and even relish their new diet, making from it a vibrant market with gourmet variations. That market arises in the aftermath of a virus that renders non-human animals unfit for consumption, making previously unthinkable substitutes commonplace. (Veganism, it seems, was not an option.) But even as the book shows such ready adaptation to perceived necessity, it also shows how euphemism and understatement work to ease the transition. “Transition” is itself one of the words that mark the turn to cannibalism, while using the term “cannibalism” brings heavy social penalties. Insofar as the new meat requires a modifier, that modifier is “special”—special cutlets, special kidneys—and never “human,” as animals raised for slaughter cannot be deemed human. Food industry workers refer to such animals as “head” or “merchandise,” at once downplaying the materiality of their labor and underscoring the process of commodification. That unsparing emphasis gives the novel immediacy and even familiarity despite its audacious premise, suggesting that the rhetoric of food futures, for all its imaginative excess, is about the here and now.

The story centers on Marcos Tejo, a meat supplier who reminds us time and again how routine market tropes make the new reality bearable. Providing “head” to butchers, tanners, scientists, and hunters, he carefully adheres to linguistic codes while secretly lamenting the “words that cover up the world” (3). He recognizes that legal authorities could “process” him for referring to meat as human, though a better word for the consequence would be “assassinate” (3). In his angrier moments, Marcos longs to replace bureaucratic idioms with terms like “atrocity” and “sadism,” though he knows the outcomes would be severe. He occupies a more openly violent world than that of the clones in Never Let Me Go, but the worlds depend similarly on verbal moderation. And just as Tender Is the Flesh discloses its list of forbidden terms and acceptable substitutes, it also specifies banned texts, one of which is a film about “green crackers that are really made of people” (153). Only available on the dark web, Bazterrica’s metaleptic proxy for Soylent Green is called Destiny Is Catching Up.

The strict monitoring of food discourses in the post-viral era suggests the extent to which words make worlds and narratives help to bind communities. The euphemisms and prohibitions that attend the new reality resemble constitutive rhetoric in James Boyd White’s sense, as they help compose “community, character, and culture in language” (x). This kind of rhetoric “creates a set of roles and voices by which meanings will be established and shared” while fashioning “characters in relation to each other” (71, 199). To adopt the favored vernacular and avoid proscribed texts is to help sustain the drama by treating it as ordinary, no drama at all but merely the way of things. Such behavior works to reinforce expectations for other characters while preventing any suspicions on their part. Marcos plays his role with care, though his disgust with disingenuous language reveals how raw the new arrangement still is. Building on White, we might say that arrangement depends on “reconstitutive rhetoric,” which involves laminating a strange, once taboo set of practices with the familiar terminology of the pre-viral period. Overlaying purportedly neutral market tropes—merchandise, head, processing—on the scene of industrialized cannibalism makes the so-called transition bearable, at least for some. Ushering in change while reproducing custom, it reconstitutes community, character, and culture by insisting that traumatic developments are only extensions of past practice.

Bazterrica’s emphasis on the plausibility of that reconstitution lends the novel an anticapitalist dimension, showing how a neoliberal lexicon naturalizes human crimes against other animals and against each other. Daniel Kraus finds it “surprising, though it shouldn’t be, how easy it is to critique our real-life factory-farm processes by mentally swapping a human for a pig or cow. There really is no debate here; our process of mechanizing meat production is morally appalling” (“What”). As an analogue for the horrors visited upon farm animals, the narrator specifies the techniques that facilitate human meat production: the removal of vocal cords “so they’re easier to control,” the amputation of pregnant women’s arms and legs “who otherwise would kill their fetuses by ramming their stomachs against the bars of their cage [. . .] doing whatever it takes to prevent their babies from being born and dying in a processing plant” (20, 22). The narrator guides the reader slowly through the stages of processing, dwelling on the skills required to stun an animal before bleeding it (62–63). Marcos marvels at the contrast between the “white, compact, efficient” buildings of the plant and what goes on inside them, remembering his father’s dictum that “a slaughterhouse should go unnoticed and blend in with the landscape,” and it “should never be called what it really is” (50–51). The reconstitutive rhetoric of Tender Is the Flesh cultivates consent to the new diet using the same framework that accompanies the global trade in pork and beef, sanitizing the business through market-friendly synecdoche (“head”) and nondescript infrastructure. By defamiliarizing those practices through one grimly imagined food future, Bazterrica draws our attention to the systematic violence that characterizes present conditions, the crimes that precede routine consumption.

That violence is intensely material, abhorrent in its physicality, but it is also conceptual. It transpires through the psychic conversion of vibrant, suffering animals into unfeeling objects of exchange. Jameson critiques such violence in her reading of Soylent Green, arguing that the dehumanization on display in the film is less about “becoming animalistic or monstrous” through cannibalism and more about “becoming the commodity,” a unit to be traded and “used up” (47). Bazterrica imagines how the processes of alienation that already characterize the contemporary workplace, already consuming labor’s energies without replenishing or fully compensating those exertions, might “transition” to a more literal model of consumption under appropriately desperate conditions. Once the virus generates those conditions, neoliberal discourses reconstitute themselves to frame specific populations as products rather than producers, taking to new extremes the logic whereby people become “used up.” The basic machinery of depletion and absorption has long been in place. Tender Is the Flesh gives that machinery an unbridled efficiency, and shows how long-established language practices help to soften the shock. Whereas powerful agents in After the Blast supply virtual filters to make the new reality bearable, and they take great pains to hide the technical fix in Soylent Green, here the solution lies in a kind of linguistic drift, a roaming of agribusiness vernacular into new territory. In Bazterrica, the most expedient technology of accommodation is the word.

As conventional language works to authorize unconventional foodways, the previously criminal becomes normal, and the threshold for crime adjusts accordingly. If normal discourse establishes a human hierarchy dividing consumers from those bred to be consumed, criminal discourses take a wider view of what is edible, one that maps onto preexisting discourses of class and nation. In a review for the Guardian, Justine Jordan observes that “with the taboo on cannibalism removed, there’s now a brisk trade in black market flesh. ‘Special meat’ fulfils hygiene regulations and comes with a high price tag; ‘easy meat’ is ‘meat with a first and last name.’” The risk of becoming easy meat depends in part on people’s economic status and place of origin, the dynamics of national power relations playing out in the underground food market. Marcos and the general public react with disdain when “two unemployed Bolivians” are “attacked, dismembered, and barbecued” by their own neighbors, but they also register the message about markers of vulnerability (6). And those populations who have been most susceptible to human trafficking experience new intensities of peril, as buyers can now pay additional fees to eat the people with whom they couple. That option pushes such trafficking from the third largest industry in the narrative world to the first (147). In the new reality, using up the human commodity means more than draining its labor power.

Such prospects aggravate existing social antagonisms, reconstituting neoliberal atomism as a deadly war of position. As we saw in chapter 2, neoliberal rhetoric generally works to “disaggregate” the polity, keeping people “self-interested and afraid” so as to catalyze competition and discourage organized dissent (Daniel 40). But the fear is greater for some groups than others, as what Mark Featherstone terms “uneven austerity” (3) means that suppliers like Marcos have an economic and ideological buffer against becoming “easy meat”—not impenetrable but nonetheless protective. And as we noted in chapter 2, The Platform provides an instructive view of the relationship between social disaggregation and food distribution. The lower levels not only lack sustenance, they have to worry about becoming food themselves as the starving turn on each other. But where The Platform depicts cycles in which the once privileged may later wake up on the lower floors, uneven austerity means that historically poor and under-employed constituencies have heightened likelihood of continued struggle.5 In Tender Is the Flesh, geopolitical history mediates the politics of consumption: the most heavily exploited populations tend toward the condition of meat.

But even in conditions of asymmetrical privilege and vulnerability, the security of wealth at times proves fleeting. Job loss or bad investments can swiftly transform people from buyers into merchandise, or, in the case of Ulises Vox, from celebrity into quarry. A one-time rock star who has fallen into debt, he becomes prize game for rich hunters, and a cautionary tale about the presumption of long-term safety in the market economy. Neoliberal publics downplay social and environmental explanations of financial attainments in favor of private accountability, which, according to Daniel, means that poverty is a judgment of merit (71). The reconstitutive rhetoric of Tender Is the Flesh converts that judgment into a death sentence, though one that emphasizes the debtor’s status as a commodity, a thing to be used up by means of the hunt and the banquet that follows. The fear of such condemnation reflects what Asen calls the “disciplinary force of neoliberalism,” which compels people “to act according to market logics” (340). This discipline motivates the desire to dominate the scene of competition, or at least find stable purchase within its ubiquitous war of position. More fundamentally, it exploits the dread of being devoured.

Neoliberal discipline always promises material-economic consequences for those who fail to compete, though the prospect of becoming a special cut for the new diet gives fresh meaning to the threat. However fantastical her food future, Bazterrica frames it as continuous with present practice: the words that currently cover up the world will serve similar purposes as conditions of inequity deteriorate. And this traumatic deterioration, in her rendering, looks to be irreversible. “Her new world order isn’t so much woven into story as it is planted in front of us like a gravestone,” observes Kraus; “the conveyer-belt pacing therefore feels intentional: Our murderous wrongs are repeated, and repeated, and to look away is to refuse, deliberately, to bear witness.” Bearing witness means recognizing that rhetorics of austerity and scarcity, like the array of euphemisms that mask industrialized cruelty, represent a long-term, relentlessly recursive strategy for rationalizing massive wealth disparities and the dehumanization of the poor. Bazterrica’s metaphor of normalized cannibalism parallels Featherstone’s assessment of austerity as no longer “a short-term response to crash, recession, and a discourse of state over-spend,” but rather the watchword of “a class society that cannot speak its name or recognize the injustice of hyper-division and hyper-inequality” (2). Eat-or-be-eaten discourse has little time for considerations of class or injustice, mainly assuming that those who consume deserve to consume. That framework is so encompassing that it even governs visions of resistance, casting rebels, outsiders, and other alienated subjects as deviant “eaters.” We turn to those visions in the final section of this chapter.

All-Consuming Passion: “Eaters” and the Politics of Despair

While attending to food and eating in dystopian narrative, we have noted how they place characters in relation to each other, and, more revealingly, how they mediate structures of power when those structures are in danger. We have gathered copious evidence for Dubisar’s conception of “food and eating as cultural rhetorics,” and those rhetorics have framed people as consuming falsehood, consuming ecosystems, even consuming each other. Post-apocalyptic varieties of dystopian narrative have emphasized rhetorical cover-up, managing the horror of a diminished food supply through technological and linguistic smokescreens. The proliferation of these rhetorics in the era of the Great Acceleration signals a specific, visceral unease about unsustainable agribusiness. “The living urgency of the Anthropocene,” write Zane Cerpina and Stahl Stenslie, “means the current menu is about to expire and soon will become too resource-intensive or perhaps even outright impossible to produce in the future” (91). The idea of post-apocalyptic damage control, ironic as it is, reflects a need to contain panic as the menu changes.

Bazterrica envisions such damage control as laminating ghastly new realities with the language of older ones, showing how the banal rhetoric of the market assists with dietary transitions. The problem, of course, is that the transition involves learning to eat each other. That problem has extended across the sections of this chapter and has come to be a customary feature of dystopian social transformations. In most of these narratives, cannibalism stands in for everyday inequality under capitalism as storytellers fuse labor exploitation and mass desperation with the metaphor of species self-consumption. In such instances, anthropophagy magnifies standing power relations. Yet in other, less plentiful but still notable instances, it represents more dissonant and even dissident impulses, connoting rebellion against social and economic norms rather than acquiescence. It signals a rejection of order and an embrace of alterity, an assertion of insurgent class politics in worlds that treat them as taboo. At strange, disarming moments, it conveys tenderness in places where it is otherwise missing, consubstantiality in realms defined by estrangement.

Examples include Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All and Julia Ducournau’s Raw, both of which cast anthropophagy as an outsider urge and a language of affection. Bones and All is a dystopian road movie that concentrates on two young members of an “eater” subculture, each of them running from past crimes and dysfunctional families. Maren and Lee develop a romance grounded in alienation, helping each other outrun the consequences of their appetites as well as the sinister attentions of other eaters. Reviewer Mark Olsen interprets their journey as a roving form of economic critique, yielding “a portrait of 1980s small-town America being hollowed out by the forces of progress, zombie towns that leave few options for the young people growing up there.” The zombie reference feels apt given the focus on social class, though the picture mostly avoids monster-movie tropes in favor of a neorealist aesthetic, generating a creeping dread without resorting to supernatural renderings of the undead or the vampiric. And though the scenes of feeding can be gruesome, A. O. Scott remarks that “you’re more afraid of what might happen to Maren and Lee than of what they might do to anyone else.” Both Scott and fellow film critic Wendy Ide compare the film with Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, locating its roots more in the cinema of traveling outlaws than paranormal predators. Their outlaw cravings express a traumatic feedback loop, at once arising from and motivating their disaffection and continual displacement.

Raw similarly associates the sense of dislocation with the onset of transgressive cravings, focusing on a young woman’s metamorphosis as she leaves home for veterinary school. An avowed vegetarian, Justine is forced to participate in a hazing ritual where classmates douse her with pig’s blood and make her eat rabbit kidney. She appeals to her sister (and fellow student) Alexia for help, but Alexia only heightens the brutality, cramming the kidney into Justine’s mouth and disparaging her prolonged childhood. Soon thereafter, Justine develops a strange rash and a powerfully eroticized desire for meat. As she comes to recognize that only one type of meat satisfies, she undergoes a maturation process that involves a series of violent encounters with friends, lovers, and family. That maturation yields a growing insistence on embodied singularity and self-determination even as she admits being prisoner to her new drives. These contradictions produce the sort of body horror for which David Cronenberg is famous, though Ducournau observes that “I was never scared when watching a body horror movie” (Matthew Monagle). She tends instead to emphasize the humor and the prospects for identification across difference: “We can laugh about ourselves, we can laugh about these moments where we are ugly and disgusting”; we can also find in body horror “a promise of equality, because in the end we are all like this in our intimacy” (Monagle). Even as Justine’s anthropophagy conveys a rejection of convention, an embrace of the outlaw positionality triggered by the hazing, it also promises solidarity with other vulnerable beings, an intimacy that translates across a range of mobile subject positions.

Once Raw and Bones and All establish the “eater” subculture as a structure of alliances that simultaneously emphasizes outsider status and shared animality, they advance the idea of eating as an act of passion and compassion. Raw makes the stronger link between food and sex, infusing a profound sense of physical danger into Justine’s relations with her vet school boyfriend. Yet both stories press beyond the conceptual linkage of carnality and consumption, framing the desire to eat and the willingness to be eaten as expressions of love. When Alexia accidentally severs her finger, Justine cannot control the impulse to devour it. An eater herself, Alexia covers for her sister by blaming the family dog. By the end of the film, we discover that the sisters’ condition extends a hidden family history. When their father opens his shirt to reveal how his wife feeds, he reassures Justine: “I’m sure you’ll find a solution, honey.” Maren and Lee find no such solution in Bones and All, running from one misdeed after another while maintaining a mostly chaste decorum with each other. Yet, when Lee finds himself mortally wounded in the late frames, he offers himself to Maren in ways that underscore the film’s title. She hesitates, but only for a moment.

Whereas such scenes associate anthropophagy with deep affection between subjects, Marina de Van’s In My Skin ties it to self-love amid the experience of social ennui and corporate detachment. The story follows Esther, a rising business executive whose on-the-job success belies feelings of unfulfillment. Early in the film, she takes a spill while wandering outside a party, cutting deeply into her leg but not noticing until later in the evening. When she visits a clinic, the doctor is puzzled by her delayed reaction, suspecting shock but not satisfied with that interpretation. Esther develops a fascination with the wound, toying with it, opening it up in ways that trigger a desire for additional lacerations and scarring. After an especially frustrating business dinner, she rents a hotel where she can continue her experiments free from the gaze of her lover and friends. During such excursions, she develops a taste for her own blood, eating strips of flesh and preserving other shreds to commemorate the experience. At first, she deliberately crashes her car to explain the damage to her body, though the self-conscious ruses fade as the narrative progresses. By the end of the film, she stares defiantly into the camera, spurning the audience’s judgment and concern in a moment of confrontational metalepsis.

The scars and mementos have multilayered rhetorical significance for Esther, the most prominent being her reclamation of embodied selfhood from structures of workaday conformity. She generates a material rhetoric of resistance that travels everywhere with her, inventing a private language and carrying a sliver of flesh close to her heart. De Van associates these acts with “a personal quest,” explaining that for Esther “each scar has a different meaning, which is visually conveyed by its shape and its position on the body.”6 Those meanings remain opaque to the audience, thus reinforcing their reflexive quality, the sense that they are for Esther rather than us. But it is not only the aftereffects of her composing that resonate with dissent; she derives energy and satisfaction from the process, which feels like self-determination in a milieu that disallows it.

That milieu encompasses both the diegetic realm in which Esther moves and the historically freighted media that convey her story. Whereas Western cinema has a gendered history of segmenting certain bodies, carving them up for the pleasure of dominant audiences, In My Skin appropriates that pleasure for its central character while she looks calmly back at the viewer. That return gaze transpires within a restrictive frame, to be sure, but de Van takes pains to unsettle those restrictions. Romain Chareyron locates an example in the film’s late stages, when

we see Esther half naked, looking at her reflection in a standing mirror. Her face and body are covered in blood and her body is shot in very unusual, animal-like postures as she is seen crouching and arching her back the way a feline would. If the mirror in this scene acts as a secondary frame, its purpose is not to increase the character’s entrapment within the fiction, as it usually does, but to create a space where the body can freely perform outside a pre-established frame of moral conduct. (78)

Rather than working as a frame-within-a-frame, the mirror represents for Chareyron a proliferation of reflective possibilities, an array of poses that the audience can witness but not decode. Esther is not ours to pin down or consume.

But in framing self-consumption as a form of dissidence, Esther exposes the imaginative limits of de Van’s political vision and anticipates the contradictions of Ducournau’s and Guadagnino’s. In each case, neoliberalism’s disillusioned subjects consume themselves as a way to assert sovereignty. Whether eating the self to reclaim expropriated value or giving oneself wholly to another to renounce enforced individuation, the narratives find characters ingesting the very vitality they wish to preserve. That paradox is rhetorical in the complex sense we earlier encountered in the work of Frye and Bruner, where discourse, materiality, and power are the “sinews” that link rhetoric to food. In My Skin, Bones and All, and Raw emerge within a carceral discourse that equates agency with consumption; their protagonists decide that, if the world compels them to eat or be eaten, they might at least respond to the imperative on their own terms—finding ways to express love for themselves and each other despite the destructive consequences. The problem lies, however, in consenting to the discourse in the first place, allowing it such authority that it even dictates the language of resistance. The rebellious instinct betrays a desire to live and to flourish, but the expression of that desire finds characters erasing themselves, grinding themselves up, no matter how fervently Chareyron claims Esther’s newfound freedom. The presumed dissent unfolds within a discourse that treats people as merchandise, units, “head,” and such dissent does little to subvert that structure.

The framing of subversion in terms of ingestion indicates the extent to which the Anthropocene rhetoric of austerity has come to define civic relations: humanity is on the wane, means of subsistence are running out, we must articulate more and less ethical ways of converting finite resources into energy within a doomed system. To use Kenneth Burke’s language of “dramatism,” the material setting informs and infiltrates the motives of communication: within the scene of inevitable depletion, the panicked response produces a general desire for intake, and so much so that it coopts political discourse. What I have called the “theater of consumption” produces a spectacle of communicative entropy. Within that drama, the varied players consume “entire ecosystems”—the poor eating each other, the upwardly mobile eating themselves, and the prospects for fecund, abundant collectivity remaining indefinitely offstage. Nonconformist renderings of anthropophagy may register as localized protest, but they amount to variations on necropolitics rather than alternatives.

Those necropolitical implications reproduce the longstanding concern with totalitarianism in dystopian narrative. Often, the appearance of nonconformity in those narratives works to shore up the norm. Equating resistance with individualized instances of nonconformity, however extreme the performance, ensures that resistance remains contained. The relationship between food and power stays constant: the poor struggle to secure nourishment while they themselves constitute, in the nightmarish terms given us by Bazterrica, “easy meat.” Feasting on the self reflects the systemic production of despair, both in the general sense of profound discouragement and the particular inaccessibility of alternatives. That discouragement, while weighing heavy on the individual subject, foreshadows the demise of the collective.

To anticipate this demise is not only to intuit the foreclosure of organized insurgency, but to reckon with the implications of the Anthropocene—an era in which humanity makes its geologic mark while bringing about its own end. The prospect of that end comes in part from high-contrast hoarding and destitution, as mega-businesses dictate the terms of competitive consumption. These processes speed deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and burgeoning waste and pollution along with rising average temperatures and rising seas.7

Critical food literacy involves an awareness of how media representations of food and eating work sometimes to mask or downplay, sometimes to expose and protest, the unfolding ecological crisis. Such literacy aims not just to recognize and describe, but to intervene. Unfortunately, the dystopian narratives outlined in this chapter offer small hope for course correction, occasionally showing the downfall of tyrants in the food industry but rarely imagining sustainable alternatives to those figures’ practices. If Retzinger is right that depictions of commensality tend to “place” people in the world, food horror places people on a precipice, teetering at the point of personal and collective self-destruction. As with this book’s earlier meditations on the politics of literacy and the built environment in worlds gone wrong, the relentlessly bleak quality of dystopian food generates both a provocation and a plea. Developing in heterotopic spaces that distill Anthropocene adversity, the narratives catch us eating our own crimes—the social inequity and environmental damage that follow each commodity to table, and that predict hostile food futures. Wildly inventive in their grim prophecies, they demand a similarly inventive retort, though they do not show the way.

Notes

1. In Eating Our Way through the Anthropocene, Jessica Fanzo reports that “around 50 million children are acutely malnourished” (12).

2. For a growing segment of the human population, that time is already here. A third of the population is malnourished, and “without concerted action in the next ten years,” the figure will rise to half the people on Earth (Fanzo 9).

3. Other dystopian narratives where populations retreat underground include Wells’s The Time Machine as well as Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys and the short film that inspired it, Chris Marker’s La Jetée. The underworld setting also features prominently in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, though it serves not as a refuge but a factory where the working classes produce conveniences for the rich. Blomkamp’s Elysium expands on such logic by depicting Earth itself as the netherworld, a place where the poverty and pollution of his District 9 camp have gone global, while the privileged live in a luxury space station with advanced medical resources.

4. In the years just prior to COVID-19, this anxiety expressed itself through the activist collective BirthStrike for Climate. Heather McMullen and Katharine Dow read that movement as endeavoring to create “existential shock” that might “spur climate action,” but note that it received a harsh public response for appearing to dictate people’s personal choices (660).

5. The unevenness of austerity expresses itself in agricultural terms, as the countries that produce the most greenhouse gases through farming, and who consume in the least sustainable manner, feel the effects less dramatically than do poorer countries. Fanzo remarks that “in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and East Asia people are being forced to move or migrate, despite not being the ones who are consuming excessively or eating in environmentally intensive ways. This begs the question: do we have the right to eat wrongly?” (13).

6. De Van’s reflections on Esther’s motivations first appeared in Philippe Rouyer’s “Entretien: Marina de Van. Le corps-objet.” Romain Chareyron translates the French passage into English and includes it in “Horror and the Body: Understanding the Reworking of the Genre in Marina de Van’s Dans Ma Peau/In My Skin (2001).”

7. According to Rebecca Lindsey’s data, which has been featured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), “global average sea level has risen 8–9 inches (21–24 centimeters) since 1880.”

Chapter 5

Out of Time

Kairos and the Post-Apocalypse

As dystopian narratives address resource depletion on an overheated planet, they often render visions of humanity devouring itself out of desperation. Sometimes that activity plays out in individualized and intimate forms of self-destruction, but more often, it proceeds as a collectivized way of being, a struggle where the urge to survive serves as pretext for untold cruelty and avarice. In Soylent Green and Tender Is the Flesh, that struggle becomes industrialized, complete with sophisticated supply chains, processing plants, and standardized methods of distribution. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road depicts a less formal but no less pervasive economy of cannibalism, a bombed-out world so starved for nourishment that every stranger presents a predatory threat. An unnamed man and his son spend their days seeking provisions, guarding against other wanderers while refusing to become predators themselves. This refusal constitutes a first principle in their makeshift code of ethics, the only compass they have once an unspecified blast eliminates the trappings of social and legal order. Adhering to that code means retaining vestiges of what preceded global devastation, an act that father and son call “carrying the fire” (83).

The metaphor of transporting fire also appears at the end of McCarthy’s previous novel, No Country for Old Men, a work that is similarly concerned with maintaining ethical continuity in the face of catastrophe. It focuses in part on the troubles of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who becomes preoccupied with an especially pitiless kind of criminality, one that lacks motivation or sense of accountability, and one that appears to be increasingly prevalent. Feeling outmatched by the swell of violence, he finds himself visited in dreams by his long-dead father, whose image signals a hardened endurance before it swiftly fades:

He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it . . . And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up. (309)

Where the father and son in The Road attempt to preserve a sense of decency amid social and ecological ruin, the duo from No Country for Old Men assumes a similar task when confronted with unrestrained brutality. In both works there is a kind of grim resolution, at once patriarchal and nostalgic, to help secure the livability of the planet for a threatened species. But in both works there is also profound doubt. In The Road the father suspects their journey amounts to a lie, and that humanity will likely “wink out forever” regardless of his meager efforts (89); in No Country for Old Men, the dream of carrying the fire cannot last. The final line of the book—“And then I woke up”—signals the withdrawal of a comforting fantasy.

McCarthy’s related narratives exist among a range of texts, some fictive, some not, that find people considering their own extinction, concluding in many instances that whatever action they might take to delay it, the slide toward self-annihilation cannot be reversed. This conclusion is one way of interpreting the rhetoric of the Anthropocene. Jan Zalasiewicz remarks that the Anthropocene “has already produced an indelible stratigraphic record. With huge effort, we might be able to clean the waters of plastics—but we can’t clean the plastics, or radionuclides, or change carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios, or fly ash particles out of the strata already deposited” (Gross, R2). Developing a name for that stratum of deposits comes with controversy, to be sure, and the science is far from settled, but the very prospect of the Anthropocene as a recognizable period indicates the impermanence of the animal who names it. “Creating a geological epoch named after ourselves suggests the impossibility of imagining our way through it,” writes Jennifer Clary-Lemon—“after all, the end of the anthropos suggests the end of human life on earth” (136). In such a scenario, “carrying the fire” provides only temporary security against “winking out forever.” And the dream of durability is one from which we grudgingly start to awaken.

The claim that people have breached an ecological limit has long been a feature of environmentalist rhetoric, which converges with dystopian discourse in the emphasis on eschatological concerns. Both forms of address generate tension between immediate exigency and belatedness. Adeline Johns-Putra views apocalyptic imagery as a dominant characteristic of ecocriticism since at least the 1960s, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring made its debut (525). That tendency informs the language of contemporary activists such as Vanessa Nakate, for example, who contends that “we have no time left,” as well as Juan López, who insists that capitalism’s “extractive economic model” promises mass extinction, with human elimination representing a sliver of the overall transformation (Sam Baker; Jesse Remedios). Similarly convinced that “time has run out,” Fadeke Banjo cites the U.N. Environmental Programme’s finding that “no credible pathway” exists for “staying below a 1.5 degrees Celsius global temperature increase” (as compared to pre-industrial averages), and she contends that such inevitabilities will render already difficult conditions completely unbearable for many populations (Banjo). We are likely to cross that threshold by 2040 and then surpass the 2 degrees Celsius mark by century’s end (C. J. Atkins). Such prospects elicit a panicky urge toward self-protection in many audiences while simultaneously implying the futility of that urge.

The crisis calls forth the ancient trope of kairos, with the term’s connotations of urgency and right timing, and simultaneously frustrates its appeal. The idea of kairos typically contrasts chronos, which for Michael Northcott “indicates the successive cyclical passing of day and night, moment by moment, generation by generation” (107). In place of the emphasis on linear progression, kairos concerns “moments in time which herald great or sudden change” (107). Where chronos conjures duration and quantity, Robert Lestóncontends that its counterpart marks the time when “chronos comes to a critical point; it is qualitative” (32). Dystopian narratives throughout this book have posited such critical points, urging a reckoning with widespread ruin. Future Home of the Living God, Sanctuary, and Icebox all depict a limited horizon for young and prospective generations. The denizens of The Menu and In My Skin engage in reckless self-consumption. In On the Beach and After the Blast, the whole species consumes or buries itself through the misuse of nuclear energy. The Drowned World and Happy Days depict a sweltering planet swallowing its inhabitants, while in Snowpiercer the effort to counteract those effects sends the Earth into deep freeze. Our various, richly imagined endings manifest as sterility, fire, ice, flood, and mass burial, and in every case serve as a warning: we have reached the decisive juncture; the kairotic moment is now.

The qualitative pronouncement that cuts crosswise through ordinary temporal progression invites a preventative response, though often with no prescription as to its form. In some cases, the vague aim is to recapture a happier age, a period before the affect of cataclysm established itself. Drawing on Frank Kermode’s “timescales of apocalypse,” Johns-Putra suggests that climate crisis “lifts us into kairotic time when it implores us to think of lost pastoral pasts, trusting that we will be inspired to reverse the devastations of the present” (525). In other cases, the goal is to create something novel, at once divergent from current practice and incommensurate with the pastoral. In Alessandra Asteriti’s estimation, such kairotic rhetoric seizes “the chance for a new, revolutionary constituent power to take charge of time itself” (291). Yet neither version of kairos fully registers the irrevocable character of the Anthropocene. When time has run out, neither nostalgia nor innovation conveys an apt response.

Nevertheless, rhetors of the Anthropocene often regard themselves as “carrying the fire,” imagining humanity’s end in the interest of staving it off. The upcoming section of this chapter outlines the kairotic paradox where the expression of hopeless belatedness aims to generate activist urgency. Concentrating in part on Donald Bason’s graphic novel Gone Too Quickly: The Rise and Fall of the Anthropocene, it examines how Anthropocene discourse cannot bear its own conclusions, asking audiences to help avert catastrophe and yet insisting that the catastrophe has already arrived. In such narratives, the determination to reverse the irreversible frequently manifests as a concern for children, a desire to protect them from consequences they did little to produce. The subsequent section suggests that children’s exposure to the effects of global heating correlates with their exposure to class oppression, racism, and imperialist ideology. We have witnessed those convergences in Parable of the Sower and Snowpiercer, and we will see Bason underscore them in Gone Too Quickly as well. His work marks an affiliation between Anthropocene rhetoric and the historical advantages of Whiteness, with privileged populations only claiming kairotic exigencies once climate conditions threaten their own comforts.

Yet even as those populations attempt to carry the fire in self-interested ways, others counsel audiences to “wake up” from the dream of endless longevity. The third section of this chapter locates such counsel in Richard McGuire’s Here—an earlier graphic novel that shares Bason’s concern with climate shifts while tracking it across a much broader expanse of time. Focused on a single geographical space at various points over billions of years, the work dwells on human routines while presenting them as fleeting; it toggles unpredictably between the transience of domestic concerns and the passing of the species. In such texts, the trope of kairos holds a kind of ironic poignancy, and the dystopian tone gives way to awed humility.

It also opens the way to grief, not for humanity in and of itself but for the ecosystem in which it once thrived. The experience of anticipatory mourning affirms our continuity with other vulnerable organisms, dislodging kairos from a liberal humanist model of agency and relocating it in the vibrant entanglement of actants experiencing different intensities of precarity. What Thomas Rickert depicts as the dissolving of kairos into ambience has become a staple of resilience thinking, which decenters human ambition in the interest of preserving long-range biodiversity. But such decentering, laudable as it is, does not fully come to terms with the implications of the Anthropocene for the animal who initiated it. Those implications demand a politics that reckons with self-extinction, envisioning the shift from decentered humanity to a posthuman world, and thus recognizing that the fire was never ours alone to carry.

The Vulnerable Point

In The Road, that posthuman world appears near at hand, though the remaining wanderers do what they can to delay its arrival. They travel through an atmosphere of ash so heavy that it nearly blackens the snow, and what few structures they encounter bear the effects of a tremendous shockwave, buildings standing “vaguely askew” as their “melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake” (272). Rarely do they meet other people, though when they do the father treats them with profound distrust, seeing everyone as a thief or enemy combatant. If neoliberal capitalism has advanced an ethos of public disaggregation and kept people “self-interested and afraid” (Daniel 40), the paroxysm of The Road brings those habits to a frenzy.

Not having internalized the lessons of the earlier world, the child feels compassion for the strangers they meet, pleading with his father to assist them whenever possible—even to forgive those who steal their waning supplies. Yet the man generally resists, explaining time and again that generosity in such circumstances will prove deadly. He also demands that they keep moving, even when they find sturdy houses and stocked bomb shelters, for fear that those places will eventually attract hostile attention. When they happen upon a cellar of people chained up and stored as a food source, the man’s reasons for caution appear warranted. And when it becomes clear that some predators make no distinction between adults and infants, the boy nearly loses his will to continue.

Bason’s Gone Too Quickly creates a similar sense of desperation within post-apocalyptic conditions, following a small band of survivors through an incinerated landscape. Framed from the outset as a cautionary tale, the graphic novel situates the group’s problems amid historical developments such as the industrial revolution, transnational agriculture, and the evolution of military weaponry. As it describes those technological and organizational developments, it tracks parallel forms of deterioration: “we had cut down vast tracks of forest, hunted many animal species to extinction, dug and drilled deep into the earth and emptied our waste into the oceans.” The narrator dwells on the irreversibility of the damage, depicting the Anthropocene as the geological epoch “we made and the one where we ended.” This despairing tone undermines the work’s aims as a deterrent, though he expresses a “futile hope that our existence will not have been in vain, that others may read this and not make the mistakes we did.” Trying to “make sense of what increasingly appears to be senseless,” he catches fellow travelers wondering when they will start to consume each other.

As he records these observations, he suspects that his missive will never find an audience. In that way, Gone Too Quickly continues a tendency we noted earlier in this book, where characters in The Drowned World, The Parable of the Sower, and Future Home of the Living God start to write amid ecological breakdown, fearing their work will not be read but expressing a “futile hope” to the contrary. The graphic novel’s narrator thus implies a tight alignment with its author, who describes himself as “a freelance graphic designer and illustrator” for “conservation and development publications,” who made Gone Too Quickly “in the hope that his sons, Harry and Jamie, will not have to experience this in real life.” Yet even as the work conveys this desire, it portrays a reception crisis that long precedes the decimation of human populations. As the effects of mass logging and plastic waste start to become clear, the narrator notes that “there was still time to change things, to go in a different direction, to listen to the voices of protest and warning.” But “for whatever reasons . . . we didn’t.” The lines hover over a full-page rendering of direct-action protest, with marchers holding a banner that reads “Defend Our Forests: Clearcut the WTO.” Numerous activists wear facial coverings and gas masks, and some of their mouths are taped shut.1 To accentuate the attempted silencing, Bason superimposes a panel of paramilitary police on the demonstration. At the foot of the page, officers haul off one of the more vocal advocates.

Subsequent images reveal how dire the results of such suppression and denialism will be. Tracking the movement toward three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial norms, the book features megafires and terrible floods on the same page, hurricanes not to be measured by existing wind gauges, beaches turned to deserts, stranded whales and porpoises bringing heavy news from the oceans, loss of insects that are essential to healthy ecosystems, reindeer dying from anthrax poisoning as permafrost thaws, people plagued by diseases not seen for 30,000 years. Bason envisions the destruction of the Amazon rainforest closing off the “lungs of the world” and generating impacts all over the globe: intense heat and loss of habitat eradicating vast numbers of animal species, small islands and coastal cities disappearing, the death of agricultural systems as great rivers dry up. As the book’s small band of travelers negotiate the changed environment, they see oceanic methane hydrate explosions thousands of miles in the distance—a phenomenon where methane rises from the seabed as water temperatures increase, and “then, like a massive belch, the water and methane blasts into the air, sending shockwaves in all directions. A spark or lightning bolt can ignite the methane with the force of a nuclear explosion.” The group goes on to encounter one wrecked city after another, uncertain whether the damage is due to oceanic discharges or battles between remaining clans.

When Bason indicates that he wishes to spare his sons such experiences, he retains a sliver of hope that the grim prospects he illustrates are avoidable, or at least susceptible to mitigation. That hope infuses the metaleptic layer of the narrative, where even as the narrator addresses an intradiegetic audience that might never come, the text also communicates with us—its embodied, historically situated readers—the urgency of preventing or at least limiting the damage it conveys. The novel suggests that transformative praxis cannot wait, and that failing to act amounts to species suicide. In that way, it evokes the senses of kairos that are prominent in the New Testament, one of which connotes “the period when fruit becomes ripe and the harvest is ready,” and others of which designate “the time that is fulfilled,” “crisis or the last times,” and even “the end of history” (Roland Boer 117). There emerges from these meanings an emphasis on reaping, on facing the accumulated consequences of past actions and inactions. The thinning of forests, the loss of animals and habitats, and the intensification of droughts and storms all embody the effects of destructive economic routines. Bason’s vision of methane hydrate explosions suggests that conditions will only worsen without swift and determined efforts to cool the planet. Given what we are already experiencing, and what we are likely to suffer if we fail to revise our customs, the time for mass action is upon us.

This eschatological rendering of kairos suggests that climate disaster demands a concomitant political upheaval. And if we track the idea of kairos to earlier uses in ancient Greece, we find politics that have especially agonistic qualities, figuring the addressee as a dangerous opponent that must be subdued through argumentation. Susan Wells locates that sense of the term in studies by Keith Dickson, Philip Sipiora, and Debra Hawhee (Bodily), all of whom associate the term with “openings or opportunities, but not of a peaceable kind” (Wells 258). Wells explains that “the adjective form, kairios, describes a vulnerable point in the body, a place where a wound can be made,” and she emphasizes the attempt to find “a gap in a soldier’s armor, a spot unprotected by a shield” (258). The dystopian narratives of McCarthy and Bason work to expose chinks in the arguments of those who deny or downplay climate change, implying that such views will make life inhospitable or even impossible for coming generations. But those narratives also assail would-be allies who admit the reality of global heating yet fail to move with the required speed and determination. This sort of kairotic rhetoric finds its rivals all over the political landscape, locating unprotected openings in the egocentrism of the deniers and the weak will of people who merely concede the problem.

Finding those openings often means emphasizing the audience’s responsibility for the catastrophe, its active contribution to global heating through the constant pursuit of profits and corporate expansion. As Bason illustrates in the early panels of Gone Too Quickly, Greta Thunberg made such kairotic overtures when addressing the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2019: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” Still a teenager at the time of the speech, Thunberg reminded her audience that its fairytales were already destroying the lives of young people, especially in under-resourced countries, and that conditions will be worse for their own children. Framing economic orthodoxy as the movement toward extinction, she has no time for “empty words” that emphasize gradual reform and no time for unfounded optimism: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic,” she said; “I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is” (Friberg, “On” 49). She locates a “vulnerable point” in the assembly’s feigned compassion, implying that its members perform concern for the future of the species while failing to limit capitalism’s waste production. In the context of Bason’s book, Thunberg’s discourse extends beyond the WEF to indict us, breaking the putative fourth wall to assert our complicity with the crimes she describes. One of those crimes, she implies, lies in fleeting and often disingenuous attention to the crisis. When the house is already on fire, the short-lived performance of concern is not just inadequate but deadly.

In depicting complacency as a kind of violence that “steals childhood,” she makes activist use of a dystopian trope that runs across varied media formats. From The Handmaid’s Tale to Children of Men to The Last of Us, anxiety about sustainable reproduction amid ecological breakdown has proven to be a narrative commonplace, with especially resonant stories crossing back and forth between fiction, graphic novels, film, television, and games. Gone Too Quickly captures some of that circulatory energy in graphic novel form, associating climate disaster with a rupture between generations. The narrator remembers with pain the last time he communicated with his son, explaining that “somehow, in the middle of a raging hurricane we managed to connect.” On the top half of the page, a hand holds a cellphone showing the son carrying his own infant child. “It was the first time I saw my granddaughter,” the narrator reveals, going on to recount a halting, sorrowful exchange: “He didn’t say much but I could see the accusation in his eyes that seemed to say, why didn’t you do more to stop this when there was still time?” Before the call signal fails, he hears the words that will haunt him throughout the remaining pages: “She doesn’t have a future.” Given how Bason dedicates the project to his own sons, and the rhythmic way he visualizes the plight of youth in the Anthropocene, the phone call compresses the litany of losses into something unbearably intimate. The scene intensifies the book’s kairotic appeal by condensing its terrors onto one page, finding its vulnerable opening or suasive opportunity in the vicarious experience of parental grief.

That grief comes not just from family separation, but from the feeling of having failed his son and granddaughter. The rhetorical urgency of the book, and of other ecological dystopias, issues from their bid to avoid such failure. Johns-Putra attributes the reception of The Road, with its Pulitzer Prize and subsequent film adaptation, to the cultural anxiety about betraying our offspring—“a growing shame at having so completely reneged on obligations not just to the current inhabitants of the biosphere but also to future generations” (520). Invoking this shame may create a renewed environmental consciousness in some readers, though she also notes reactionary side effects. Insofar as the child “functions as a guarantor of higher meaning and purpose,” she writes, it is “pressed into service for all kinds of ideological agendas” (524). She rehearses Lee Edelman’s case that the child-image “dominates both left and right sides of the neoliberal landscape,” with starkly opposed worldviews vying for durability (523). This ubiquity confirms the hold of a certain “heteronormative hegemony” that locates wholeness in endless reproduction, failing to find motivation or significance outside a human-centered model of futurity (524). The kairotic appeal of the imperiled child may spark an urge to protect the environment, but it also suggests an inability to value a world that goes on without us, a world that is not for us.

The Catastrophe Comes Home

Preserving livability for “us,” which constitutes a recurrent objective of kairotic rhetoric in the Anthropocene, may appear to evoke a generalized humanity. But neither kairos nor the idea of the Anthropocene have egalitarian discursive histories. They both carry connotations of lurking catastrophe, though the crisis only comes into being, only acquires a name or rises to a formal category, when it affects specific constituencies.

So far, we have encountered kairos’s eschatological implications and its associations with agonistic exchange. Such exchange involves the pursuit of weak spots in the opposition’s argument, which ancient Greek culture tended to figure as exposed places in a body-at-war. Yet Roland Boer suggests that these contending bodies were typically those of “elite, ruling-class males,” at once “athletic” and “virile” (122–23). The struggle for advantage occurred between already privileged citizens who helped establish and reproduce standards of decorum, symmetry, and timeliness through their forms of governance and public argumentation (123). In its early historical context, kairos takes on “a rather unsavoury class sense,” construing “the body out of proportion” as “the body of the poor, exploited majority of Greek society” (126). Kairotic rhetoric underwrites hierarchies among the elect, but it also helps distinguish the elect from the majority. “A kairological social order has everything in its proper place,” writes Boer—“aristocratic elites, exploited peasants, driven slaves, [and] women,” and its notions of right timing work to reinforce that order (126). Even in instances where authority figures experience the exposure of their own vulnerabilities, the lesson does not disturb the social arrangement so much as underscore its precepts.

The idea of the Anthropocene similarly arises from an arrangement of human power relations even as it attributes geological effects to the species as a whole. It comes not from the recognition that reckless drilling poses grave threats to indigenous groups, nor from awareness of the deadly exploitation of Black labor that has characterized international mining and extractivism. It does not stem from alarm at how heat waves, ruined agriculture, and wars for resources force already poor populations to migrate. Rather, it gains traction when wealthy, White publics begin to feel their own economic practices and cultural habits rebounding on them in startling ways, placing spatial and temporal limits on their fantasies of ceaseless expansion. Insofar as those publics tend to equate their interests with those of the species, they bolster Kathryn Yusoff’s contention that “the production of the Anthropocene is predicated on Whiteness as the color of universality” (51). The circulation of Anthropocene rhetoric derives energy and magnitude from the self-protective urge of the kairological order.

That order fuses race and economics such that Whiteness and capitalism constitute a composite, default mode of being. The Anthropocene names a point of vulnerability in that composite whereby the drive toward growth, toward continual accretion of profit and absorption of space, entails a movement toward self-destruction. With that movement in mind, Ashley Dawson describes the Sixth Mass Extinction, or the current process that destroys around a hundred species a day while threatening the longevity of humans, as “the tendency of capital accumulation to destroy its own conditions of reproduction” (9, 14). Resource-rich and heavily militarized countries have long imposed their economic will on less powerful regions, only to find that the pursuit of immediate rewards through globalization was not to their long-term advantage. But the apocalyptic results of such enterprises are hardly new. “Imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence,” writes Yusoff; “the Anthropocene as a politically infused geology and scientific/popular discourse is just now noticing the extinction it has chosen to continually overlook in the making of its modernity and freedom” (xiii). The beneficiaries of racist economic routines are noticing the catastrophe because the catastrophe has come home.

Stephen Sewell lingers on this surprised recognition in the comic-dystopian play It Just Stopped, showing the reactions of a well-to-do couple when their daily conveniences start to disappear. Annoyed at first by problems with the heating and waste disposal in their high-rise apartment, they begin to panic when their computer crashes and the elevator fails. A sense of helplessness sets in when the cell phone network proves inoperative, causing them to suspect that the infrastructural breakdown extends beyond the building. They consider taking the stairs to the street level, but having relied completely on the elevator up to now, they are not sure where the emergency exits are, nor are they eager to descend forty-seven flights on foot. Beginning to speculate about terrorism and gas attacks, they become at once desperate to uncover the source of the disruption and terrified to leave the apartment. In Sewell’s reflections on the play, he notes how the couple’s day-to-day cushioning against the outside world becomes a kind of trap: “all the verities of their lives, even down to the availability of food and water, are in the process of mysteriously disappearing and they are left like soft white things inside a machine that no longer works” (96). Representatives of the kairological order, their vulnerable point lies in their inability to manage crisis, their lack of self-sufficiency amid technological collapse.

As the couple’s fears intensify, their even wealthier neighbors arrive to report that the utility failure is an indicator of a larger chain of civic and environmental crises. The newcomers offer an airlift to safety, but only in exchange for the promise of slave labor. As the grim comedy plays out between tenants who would normally be buffered against each other, the relationship between their private routines and the apparent apocalypse remains obscure. Rosine Kelz and Henrike Knappe find a similar reticence in much Anthropocene discourse, which highlights current emergencies and predicts a troubled future while providing limited historical context. Granted, there are debates about whether to date the Anthropocene to the invention of nuclear weaponry, the industrial revolution, or early agricultural developments, but the question of which social groups engineered and benefited from such events often goes unasked. Taking the work of Anthony Burke and colleagues as a case-in-point, Kelz and Knappe note their view that “that we are so deeply intertwined in this ‘true terror of the moment’ that it just does not make sense anymore to ask who is responsible for it” (Kelz and Knappe 2). The kairological order may shudder at the terror of the moment, and may feel its effects keenly as global heating escalates, but ahistorical thinking cushions them against accountability.

Like It Just Stopped and related strands of Anthropocene discourse, The Road concentrates on immediate crisis without addressing causes. The narrator describes “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” at the onset of the disaster but leaves the source to the reader’s imagination (52). Possibilities include a meteor strike, a supervolcano, supernatural retribution, or nuclear conflict, but the narrator never resolves the question or even considers it at any length. With the book’s stark renderings of human cruelty, it strongly suggests that people brought the destruction on themselves. Yet in doing so, The Road neglects historical power relations among social groups as well as the uneven extent of their predation on each other and the biosphere.

Gone Too Quickly, on the other hand, makes pronounced distinctions as to culpability for ecological damage while also clarifying its asymmetrical impacts. Late in the narrative, a member of the small group of survivors hears a fellow traveler question her judgment once too often, and decides to inform him about their contrasting circumstances: “You see me as a poorly educated refugee but I have lived through things that you couldn’t even imagine,” she explains; “Women and children always suffer the most from climate disasters . . . prey to violence and rape . . . the last to get food and health care.”2 Her passion rising, she reveals that “in camps where I grew up girls were pushed into marriage and sold for sex just to put food on the table.” Noting that he has only recently begun to experience the pain his culture has imposed on others, she observes that “my world was destroyed long before and I learnt to survive in that . . . paying the price for your Western lifestyle”—a metaleptic moment where the critique reaches beyond her intradiegetic addressee to the Western audiences that read the comic. Her message implies that major sources of social and environmental toxicity lie in Western hoarding, sexualized labor exploitation, and exporting of waste.3 More pointedly, she emphasizes the gendered character of those toxic effects while once more conveying the harsh consequences for young people.

At an even finer resolution, her critique specifies how Black and Brown children bear an overwhelming share of the burden. Bason’s illustrations of hunger, human trafficking, and forced immigration support that case, as do texts we considered in earlier chapters: the children of Earthseed in Butler’s Parables, the displaced and terrorized youth of Sanctuary, the kids who serve as living machine parts in Snowpiercer. We also encounter these Anthropocene inequities in the reporting on child hunger and disease in such countries as Somalia and Yemen, and in Central Sahel, where drought forces girls “to travel farther to collect water and firewood, exposing them to greater risks of sexual exploitation and gender-based violence” (International Rescue). Granted, a strict focus on the child-image may connote a heteronormative anxiety about species reproduction. But it also involves a more nuanced, reflexive politics in which rhetors grapple with the disproportionate grief that differently positioned people experience in the age of rapid global heating, protesting the ways that climate-driven precarity weighs heaviest on already oppressed populations.

Given the urgency of such protest, we might be tempted to interpret it as a form of kairotic intercession. Yet the kairological order has proven a poor respondent to forms of address that do not threaten its immediate interests. Given this kind of indifference, Boer begins to doubt kairos as a mode of subversion and looks instead for a kind of persuasive urgency that rejects the timelines of the ruling class, that develops in opposition to its standards of decorum and proportion. He seeks a qualitative temporality that does not assume answerability to elite conceptions of proper contest, that does not appeal to constituted power for its authorization. He finds this sensibility in the under-examined idea of akairos.

The concept brings together temporal and spatial insurgency, refusing officially endorsed platforms for political discourse. Akairos opposes the kairological order. Where chronos contrasts kairos in emphasizing “the ordered march of time,” akairos differs from its counterpart in designating strategically bad timing (Boer 117). “If kairos designates the well-timed, well-placed and harmonious,” Boer writes, “then akairos means the ill-timed, displaced and non-harmonious” (124). It connotes positionality as much as temporality, with historically disempowered groups delivering unwelcome news in inappropriate areas and conditions. Like kairos, it may expose the vulnerability of power, but not by conforming to its rules of engagement.

Breaking these rules might involve direct-action protest that immediately disrupts ongoing injustices rather than just raising awareness of them. From an array of examples ranging from blockades to boycotts to sit-ins to unauthorized occupation of territory, Boer selects the wildcat strike as especially instructive. “The big end of town prefers to pressure governments to enact more and more legislation in order to restrict the strike to an ‘appropriate’ time, carefully measured and portioned out,” he notes; “They say: you may strike only at this point (kairos) in the process of negotiating a new award; before or after is illegal and you will be charged. The untimely, akairological strike must be brought to order, allotted its place and time” (126). The wildcat strike declines these restrictions, flouting the preferred schedule of business owners and advancing without the formal approval of union leadership. The unruly demonstration takes issue not only with wages, working conditions, and benefits, but with the administrative attempt to corral dissenting subjects into convenient blocks of space-time, a tactic that pays homage to democracy while keeping relations of authority firmly in place.

Akairotic rhetoric rejects the pretense at democracy as well as the rhetor’s answerability to established authority. It represents the “body out of proportion” insisting on historical consciousness rather than allowing the “true terror of the moment” to obscure liability for the problems at hand. It encompasses the refugee telling her privileged counterpart that the destruction of worlds is not new, that racist economics has been obliterating them for centuries. As the catastrophe comes home for the kairological order, it means reminding its beneficiaries that wealthy nations tend to produce more greenhouse gases while poorer ones feel the environmental effects sooner and with greater intensity (Nino Antadze 49; Sharon L. Harlan et al. 127). Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria see their wheat crops dwindle; Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Kenya lose enormous swaths of forest; Kiribati, the Maldives, and the Marshall Islands move ever closer to drowning.4 Akairotic rhetoric questions both the will and the competence of the more powerful countries to mitigate the damage. With their belated and ineffectual response to heating trends, the leaders of such nations often convey a certain helplessness akin to Sewell’s stranded tenants: frantic and inconvenienced, they are like “soft white things inside a machine that no longer works.” For some critics, the akairotic charge against those leaders is that any action comes too late, that the current condition is already terminal.

Then I Woke Up

Traveling through a lifeless landscape during his waking hours, the father in The Road has vivid dreams when he and his son stop to rest. The intensity of their color brings respite from his surroundings, though the contrast makes the already bleak mornings harder: “Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day” (21). The image of disintegrating beauty recalls once more the end of No Country for Old Men, when Sherriff Bell describes a dream about his own father’s endurance in the face of desperate conditions, only to remember abruptly awakening. From one vantage, waking up may suggest Bell’s renewed purpose, the motivation that his father’s image provides in trying times. But the elegiac tone hints at a more painful possibility—that the Sherriff recognizes his father’s ethical persistence as the stuff of dreams, a reverie that cannot withstand the daylight. In The Road, even those reveries take on a sinister character, coming to represent the man’s release from the terrible journey: “The dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you?” (21).

The dreams, along with the man’s worsening lung disease, reinforce his doubts about the purpose of their travels. Determined as he and his son are, they appear vestigial forms within a system that no longer supports them. The belatedness of their efforts captures a certain affective tendency in Anthropocene discourse, a confused wrangling with the idea that we can no longer save ourselves. That idea is traumatic partly for its fatalism, but more so for its invocation of lost opportunity. Missed chances inhabit traumatic consciousness in ways that produce a repetition compulsion, an effort to avoid a disaster that has already occurred or been set in motion. The daily trek in The Road through a washed-out, largely undifferentiated topography enacts this compulsive behavior, involving the pursuit of sustainable living conditions despite no evidence that they exist. And as we saw in chapter 2, the concept of trauma has historical harmonies with that of kairos, each term designating a piercing wound to the body (Hoag, Occupying 61). Both connote psychic urgency as well, though with trauma the prospect of resolving agonistic conflict is endlessly delayed.

Father and son seek resolution by pushing toward the coast, but by the time the “shear of light” and “series of low concussions” arrived, the process of irreversible decline had already begun. The traumatic blast spared some lives while ensnaring them in a cycle of attempted recovery and frustration. Hoag explains that with trauma, “every kairos through which one might seize an alternative future seems closed such that one is prevented from moving forward,” and yet the desire to move forward is relentless (Occupying 62). Life continues, but “since one is fixated upon an irreparable past along with feeling barred from the future, everything is unreal, out of joint” (62). The unreality comes in part from temporal puzzlement, but also the loss of influence over one’s surroundings. Instead of seizing the kairos that might help recover equilibrium, the kairos seizes traumatized subjects in ways that leave us “preoccupied, obsessed, possessed, haunted, by the rhetorical force of an impossible image” (61). For the father in The Road, that image is not the shear of light that obliterates temporal and ontological order, but rather the symbolic fire that preceded the descent into cannibalism, the fire that should have precluded or at least withstood the destruction.

Keeping that fire alive constitutes a major concern within the fiction but is also a point of alarm for the scientific community, many members of whom find themselves seized by the kairos of unsustainable heating trends, and many of whom note the irrevocable character of existing damage. As weather patterns worsen and superstorms multiply, Linda Mearns of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research offers a dire appraisal of the situation: “It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse. [. . .] Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide” (Atkins). Those comments come in response to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has determined that “human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years” (6) and that the results are measurable in “every inhabited region across the globe” (10). Impacts on ice sheets and global sea level “are irreversible for centuries to millennia” (21). The historical rarity of the changes, the range of their influence, and the durability of their effects all warrant immediate efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, yet the profit motive constrains political will. In such circumstances, scientific assessments take on the cyclical character of trauma, continually refocusing our attention on missed opportunities while heightening the pathos of belated awareness.

The problem of untimely response also has an akairotic dimension, indicating to centers of corporate authority that expectations of continuous growth are self-defeating. Bason depicts the crumbling of those expectations in the early pages of Gone Too Quickly, his wanderers using ruined mansions as waystations and places to reflect on their losses. Juxtaposing those structures with industrial smokestacks, massive landfills, and plastic-strewn beaches, the narrator explains that “some 252 million years previously, 96% of all marine life was wiped out when volcanic eruptions caused rapid global warming. [. . .] Now it was happening again, but this time it wasn’t due to volcanic activity.” While he locates parallels between the current situation and Permian mass extinction, the travelers don gas masks to cope with the smoke, search with little success for drinkable water, and note a marked absence of birds and other animals. The remains of once-opulent homes and businesses augment the rhetoric of decline by evoking the cultural and ideological tendencies that produced it. The unwelcome news of those self-destructive tendencies aims to spark policy change while simultaneously casting doubt on that possibility.

Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here offers similarly unwelcome news, though without the traditional trappings of dystopian narrative. McGuire shares Bason’s interest in climatological transformation, but rather than illustrating the disastrous effects of global heating on various regions, Here focuses on one location at moments that range unpredictably between 3,000,500,000 BCE and 22,175 AD. It begins with a two-page spread of a living room in the early twenty-first century, and then transitions to earlier and later points, sometimes moving in increments of a few years, sometimes traversing millennia. Pop-up panels emerge within the spreads so that a single layout can carry scenes from 500,000 BCE, 1932 AD, 1923 AD, and 2008 AD. The volume features scenes from long before and long after the putative Anthropocene, portraying the period of human dominance as one epoch among many, all of which reveal a portion of themselves in the limited area McGuire designates “here.” He foregrounds the micro-dramas that unfold in the living room, wringing deep affective resonances from that focal setting, while he also situates those exchanges within a dispassionate rendering of epochal variation. At one scale, anthropogenic climate change yields a devastating conclusion; at another, it merely marks a passage between eras.

As the topic of human extinction threads itself throughout the book, one of the more oblique instances takes the form of a joke that unfolds over multiple page-spreads. As three generations of a family sit together in the focal parlor, the youngest participant recounts a call from the doctor’s office: “Well, Mr. Jones, I have some good news and some bad news . . . ” She delivers the joke in 1989 while McGuire gives us glimpses of moments as far past as 8,000 BCE and as proximate as a decade later. “The good news is that you have twenty-four hours to live.” When the patient asks for the bad news, the doctor replies, “I should have told you yesterday.” As if to reinforce the feeling of startled helplessness, the oldest listener begins to cough while the others laugh. A few panels later, he collapses backward in his chair while grabbing his chest. Between the first cough and the last, a stately, eighteenth-century house emerges in a background layer, persists for seventeen years, then catches fire.

Midway through the book, the joke and its aftermath become more explicitly linked to climate concerns. Although the man collapsing may appear to mark the end of a sequence in Here, McGuire instead suspends that sequence while related situations intervene. One of those situations involves another grim joke, which references a “drip” in 1949, shows the ceiling leaking in 1998, and culminates with waters bursting through the window in 2111 due to sea-level rise. In Philip Smith’s reading, “the water seems to ‘flood’ and wash away the narrative moments which surround it, suggesting that modern life, which takes up the bulk of the novel, is far more ephemeral than our limited frame might allow us to accept” (46). Once the floodwaters breach the living room, McGuire returns us to 1989, where the joke-teller starts to panic as her listener struggles in his overturned chair. In multiple, cleverly nested ways, we encounter the belated delivery of bad news, and the inability to mount an adequate response exposes our “limited frame” along with the “ephemeral” quality of our lives and species history. By 2126, a shark swims directly over the spot where the ceiling began to drip.5

The submersion of routine living arrangements constitutes a traumatic moment in the book, asking how we might avoid such scenarios even as it represents them as inevitable. Locating Here within the cli-fi genre, Smith notes its effort to make “unnervingly concrete the actuality of climate change and the threat which rising sea levels represent to humanity” (39). With its inundation of the focal dwelling place—the moment when “here” starts to crumble as a human habitation—the graphic novel “can be understood as a work which aspires to bring about social change” (47). From that perspective, we may be seized by the kairos of McGuire’s prospective futures, but those visions need not leave us powerless. Smith finds room for optimism in later page-spreads, noting that “by 2213 humans have re-occupied the space where the house once stood. The site has become a kind of museum, where holograms of artifacts from the twentieth century—items which previously seemed to have vanished without trace—are on display” (47). Humanity survives the flood, and its representatives return to the space of trauma not with desperation but historical curiosity.

Yet these depictions of species durability eventually wink out. “By the year 22,175,” Smith writes, “the world has become a posthuman Eden, populated by strange and beautiful creatures” (47). This long-term transformation suggests a kind of akairotic rhetoric—and in more than one sense. First, it parallels Boer’s critique of kairological order by expressing the limits of human dominance. This news carries a particular sting for those who have dominated not just other species but members of their own. Second, it suggests the absence of a kairos that would preempt humanity’s eventual end, resonating with Phillip Sipiora’s definition of akairos as “time that is without opportunity” (2). In Here, the movement toward a “posthuman Eden” is already underway, part of the process of large-scale, periodic change that characterizes Earth’s development. People may collectively extend their participation in that development, and they may find ways to persist after waters inundate their current living arrangements. But that persistence is finite, and we speed the conclusion with our own cultural and domestic routines. There is no opportunity to erase what we have already written into the stratigraphic record, and no kairos that would render the Anthropocene permanent.

Waking up from the dream of permanence need not nullify activist impulses, however. Smith is right that McGuire’s cli-fi works as a call for ecological sensitivity and care, and for policymaking that might slow the increase in global temperatures. Collective efforts to limit drilling, pollution, and the spread of greenhouse gases can extend and enhance our time on earth while revising the Anthropocene’s associations with extraction and toxicity. At the same time, Here illustrates the decentering of human agents in the long history of the planet, catching us in a larger flow of organisms and material conditions rather than insisting on our principal significance.6 It thereby opens the way for a posthuman conception of kairos—one that is, in Donna Haraway’s sense, “exceedingly unfaithful” to the term’s elitist, agonistic origins, displacing rhetorical contest with immersive, highly distributed modes of collaborative invention (151).

Worlds to Come

To this point, we have considered numerous ways in which dystopian rhetorics of the Anthropocene seize, or are seized by, kairotic moments in public discourse. From novels to plays to comics to political speeches, expressions of crisis and kairos consistently complement and converge with each other. In ecocritical contexts, asserting a kairotic exigency at times means addressing the crisis we have brought on ourselves, the “harvest” or “yield” of our everyday habits and conveniences. It might also mean exposing the vulnerable point in an opponent’s argument, showing the audience how particular perspectives on the environment are logically and materially self-destructive. Given kairos’s historical associations with the deliberations of the privileged, however, some thinkers instead favor akairotic gambits that defy authoritative conceptions of right timing and appropriate venue. While I applaud such dissident approaches to kairos, this final section describes recent reorientations of the term that refuse liberal humanist models of agency, declining autonomous subjectivity while foregrounding entanglements with an array of biological and geopolitical systems. The section then derives from such posthumanist entanglements an anticipatory ethics that envisions accountability to a posthuman biosphere, a future world we have helped fashion but no longer occupy.

The ecocritical tendency to decenter Enlightenment subjects while describing their participation in complex, emergent networks also characterizes some of the more innovative thinking about kairos. Such theory accentuates the ambiguity of coordinates and their interplay, which disrupts what Lloyd Bitzer calls the “rhetorical situation.” Madison Jones interprets that situation as “something which can be mastered,” and he inclines instead toward kairotic processes that arise from the unpredictable interactions of varied, vibrant matter (10). Those interactions displace the idea of a singular rhetor who pursues the opportune moment, and they suggest that transformative potential develops from the volatile flux of bodies, environments, and affects. Within such flux, the rhetor cannot create or discover the right time for intervention, as such a time results from the relationships between lively constituents rather than a planning consciousness. Distrust of centralized planning motivates Debra Hawhee to embrace a “middle voice” when discussing kairos, a condition in which human actants are written by the ecology they write, invented by the material circumstances they invent (“Kairotic” 17–18). The rhetoric of the middle voice situates good timing, as well as prospects for agency, in the spaces between subjects and their environments—the dynamic, liminal territory in which they co-create each other.

Yet the idea of between-space presumes distinct coordinates with a discernable gap separating them, a subject/object dichotomy that confounds ecological connectedness and its intra-relations. Rickert resists that polarity, questioning conceptual models that reify inside and outside, insisting on the fusion of presumably bounded positions so that the “middle is transformed, or perhaps even effaced” (“In” 913). Where Lestón interprets Hawhee as advocating “a sort of cunning, improvisational adaptability to what life throws at us (metis for the Greeks),” he reads Rickert’s kairos “as a way to transform the concept of the middle voice so that the self and world ‘dissolve’” into ambient continuity (Lestón 37). Instead of fielding whatever life throws at us, we are ourselves thrown into ambience in ways that unsettle traditional notions of cunning and adaptation. The idea of subject and environment co-creating each other presumes variables that are defined enough to exert mutual influence. Arguing that the distinction was always deceptive, Rickert treats kairos as the transformative potential that emerges from a meshwork of material and affective energies, a felt entanglement where commonplace divisions between persons and nature do not hold.

There is a risk, however, in becoming so focused on ecological positionality that we neglect temporality. When discussions of middle voice and ambience disregard time, Lestón argues that we have “stopped talking about kairos in order to talk about subjectivity” (38). While acknowledging people’s participation in a historical and environmental meshwork, he also observes a certain “power to deterritorialize” in ways that disturb routine chronology, supplanting the experience of material immanence with the prospect of an “elsewhere,” however virtual (42). Such a power becomes especially germane at traumatic moments that trigger a compulsive pursuit of relief, a way to recover lost equilibrium. “It is then,” Lestón maintains, “when the sensory-motor schema has broken down, when we cannot continue to narrativize, and when time is unhinged; in short, when we have reached our limit, it is then, in that gap, in that kairos, that invention becomes possible, even necessary” (47). Inventing an elsewhere does not presume the capacity to extricate oneself from the ecological web, but instead assumes the possibility for distributed, critical imagination within highly integrated, more-than-human systems. Paradoxically, the need for such imagination arises at times when our rational resources falter, when we are most overwhelmed. From that perspective, kairos designates a confrontation with the sublime (47).

Through much of this book, those sublime occurrences have featured contrasting extremes: fire and deep freeze, desertification and flooding, population explosion and infertility, the virtual masking of material conditions and the breakdown of technological infrastructure, alien immigration and human desire for off-world living, the proliferation of fortified boundaries and the attrition of national divisions. Gone Too Quickly incorporates many of these oppositions into one narrative, showing us varied possibilities as the travelers make their journey. With Here, however, the kairotic moment comes in a more concentrated way, spilling in through the window, spilling into the world of the reader, signaling the dire precarity of human dwelling. Granted, people do return to the site a hundred years later as a ruin, meeting holographic tour guides who project the room’s various objects and forms of décor. But as we noted in Philip Smith’s reading, that return is temporary. The human occupation of “here” has numerous phases, but it eventually ends. An evocative if imperfect microcosm for human cultures, “here” captures the flooding out of the species in ways both local and global.

In one way, the waters breaking through the window might be a catalyst for critical imagination, a prompt to deterritorialize from doomed systems and commit to collective self-preservation. Smith highlights that moment of alarm when describing Here as a kind of cli-fi warning. But the metaleptic summons to reckon with our own extinction also raises supplementary questions about human responsibility to what succeeds the Anthropocene. Trying to extend our own durability might proceed alongside efforts to leave a livable environment for the evolving forms that populate Earthly futures. McGuire invokes human accountability to those futures with his renderings of “here” in 22,175, which includes flora and fauna that are at once familiar and otherworldly, clearly carrying forward adaptations from earlier eras yet in extraordinary sizes and configurations. Enormous, showy flower petals dominate the foreground. Something that appears part horse, part dinosaur, part fowl stalks a fish. Winged creatures like iridescent hummingbirds fly into view. Pop-up panels show speech bubbles from an answering machine: “Hi, we’re not home. Please leave a message after the beep.” The machine reinforces our absence from the scene while also signaling uncertain communication: “Hello? I didn’t hear a beep. I hope I’m leaving a message.” Subtly and with characteristic humor, the temporal juxtaposition invokes the question of answerability to worlds to come, though the book leaves the reply to us.

With its kairotic allusions to human extinction, then, Here situates immediate exigencies within a vast time scale, intimating our accountability to the dimly imaginable. Confronting the limits of species durability constitutes a kairotic event in Lestón’s sense, a traumatic stimulus where we begin to invent an “elsewhere.” For Benjamin Haas, such a kairos presents an occasion both for mourning and humility, grieving a distinctive ecology while also beginning to decenter its dominant figure. “From almost anywhere you stand,” he writes, “you can see the smoke of an existence burning out. Here, I want to talk about the ways in which this extinction, our extinction, is inevitable” (279). The pain of that thesis permeates the article, though it comes with a marked lack of sentiment: “I don’t think any grave crime is being committed by our elimination. [. . .] It just is. Like gravity or sitting next to an angry person on the train. And as far as the science can tell, there is nothing we can do about it” (279). A staunch advocate for decarbonization and wildlife conservation, such thoughts lead him not toward nihilism or despondency but to a more pronounced sense of mission. Particularly focused on the welfare of dolphins, he commits to make what difference he can with the time available.

He recognizes the likely limitations of that difference, but however small it turns out to be, he firmly distinguishes the process from self-validation: “There is, for sure, work to be done, but, remember, it won’t do us any good. And that’s the important part—we (read: humans) are not the only things that matter” (279). Although it is wrong to suggest that limiting carbon emissions, regulating pollution, and preserving wildlife habitat will not do humans any good, Haas’s point is that we have already set in motion the processes of our own extinction, and that we nevertheless have a responsibility to our more-than-human kin. In making that claim, he wonders whether we have the ability “to even imagine a post-human world,” whether we can go that far toward “decentering the human from its position of privilege in philosophical thought” (290). One way of beginning, he argues, is “to witness the pain we cause others” while being careful to include nonhuman animals in our considerations (293). Such an approach requires more than cataloging instances of speciesism, reflecting on our dietary habits, or educating ourselves about the long-term effects of corporate drilling and waste disposal. Arguing that “witnessing pushes beyond the act of watching,” Haas draws on Peggy Phelan’s language to clarify his plea: “To witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s place in them.”7 Haas and Phelan associate this ethic with deep affective connection, experiencing its gravity as a substantive load rather than an abstraction. And they stress our accountability for violence toward the other, highlighting “our place” in systems of ecological power even when we are not first-hand aggressors.

Haas embraces this accountability in his activist work, spending a considerable portion of his energy protesting dolphin hunting in Taiji. The meager impact of those efforts leaves him in a frustrated rage, shaking his confidence in progressive rhetorics of “hope” yet making him determined to bear witness. On occasion, this witnessing permits him to learn from the dolphins about ethical entanglement, about the continuity of a seemingly singular life with a vital, integrated network: “There is an image from one of the last hunt days, where a Risso’s dolphin had managed to escape from the netting just outside the cove. Instead of running for freedom, she swam straight back into the nets to be with her pod. I hope someday I can love my own death that much” (295). Swimming back to the pod represents a kairotic affirmation of the life of the collective, a decisive act that recasts ecological connection as a form of solidarity. It is also a charged instance of temporal intensity, a moment of seizing and being seized by shared precarity. By insisting on her entanglement, the dolphin practices the sort of self-effacement that inspires an earnest articulation of “hope” in an essay that otherwise doubts its efficacy.

Granted, the hope is to love his own death. But such love involves witnessing interspecies vulnerability, feeling it as a kind of binding energy in a time of planetary emergency. It is a kairotic moment that troubles the subject/object division while staying attuned to time and finitude; it reaffirms ambient being while acknowledging the fleeting quality of specific ecological networks, the transience of once-thriving nodes. It also reiterates Haas’s view that humans “are not the only things that matter” and that things will continue without us. His insistence on responsibility to that posthuman continuance resonates with what Northcott calls “stranger love,” or compassion for unassimilated otherness in spaces and times far removed from our own. For Northcott, the kairos of the Anthropocene invites “works of love for future generations and species” in lieu of the “chronological but unsustainable growth of the present human economy into the near-term future” (109). Both Northcott and Haas encourage readers to deterritorialize from such regimes of expansion, anticipating a far-off elsewhere that will bear the effects of our fixation on compressed, profit-driven chronologies. Such an approach does not mean diverting our attention from current crises; on the contrary, it requires intensifying our interventions while re-imagining their range of benefit.

McGuire contributes to such re-imagining with his rendering of life in 22,175, envisioning a world that matters even after we have faded from the scene. That vision departs from the outrage and denial that often mark discourse on human extinction. Such discourse tends to feature what William E. Connolly depicts as variations on nihilism—an aggressive version that proceeds “by attacking the messengers, and by doubling down on the very activities that exacerbate the problem,” and a passive version where the humanist ground “begins to rumble,” people “lose faith,” and “existential anxiety arrives on the way to possible despair” (12–13). McGuire’s vision also departs from activist appeals that foreground parental obligation to children, or that frame ecological indifference as a betrayal of youth and coming generations. Laudable as they are, those strategies bear out Haas’s suspicion that we balk at a posthuman world, many of us lacking “the ability to even imagine” such possibilities. Even theoretical discourses that work to decenter human subjectivity keep it firmly in the mix—including, I acknowledge, this book.

And dystopian narratives that address human extinction often represent it as a passage into abjection, an obscurity against which a few survivors carry the fire. The Road constitutes a ready exemplar, with its portrait of a dying man shielding his son from a nihilism that is not just aggressive but predatory. But for all its humanist disquiet, the book ends with an image of more-than-human flourishing that appears to exist on either side of the narrative proper, serving both as its ancient antecedent and its coda. “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains,” McCarthy writes: “On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery” (286–87). Although the scene works in serene contrast to the preceding drama, the final image becomes its own elegy. The introductory “once” strikes a note of mourning, as does the past tense. More poignant still, the codes on the trout backs represent “a thing which could not be put back” nor “made right again.” Like the vast temporality that operates in McGuire’s Here, those codes encompass the Anthropocene while far exceeding its reach. The prospective dissolution of the codes conveys a kairotic exigency not unlike the structure of trauma, a felt urgency that feeds on its own belatedness.

Notes

1. Acknowledging that some of their readers may not accept the existence of anthropogenic climate change, Atchison and Shames contend that whatever one’s political persuasion, “it’s hard to deny the effects of pollution on air quality when, for example, in New Delhi in 2017 pollution reached more than thirty times the levels recommended by the World Health Organization” (60). The gas masks in Bason’s comic may feel far-fetched to some, but New Delhi parent groups “were seriously debating the best gas masks for their children” (61).

2. Women and children also figure disproportionately in the realms of modern slavery (Atchison and Shames, Survive 11; International Labour Organization).

3. The offloading of waste onto poor communities has resulted in indigenous outcry and organized rebellion. Rob Nixon attributes those uprisings to “a clash of temporal perspectives between the short-termers who arrive (with their official landscape maps) to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time’s scales” (17). Building on Nixon’s point, I suggest that once short-termers start to feel the effects of their own practices abroad—in things like hotter temperatures, giant wildfires, and megastorms—stakeholders invent terms such as “Anthropocene” to distribute responsibility for the problems. When I use the term in this book, I attempt to impart a certain double-voiced quality to it, underscoring the impending extinction of a now dominant species while remaining aware of the outsized accountability of Whiteness and neoliberal economics for the crisis.

4. The adversity experienced by these nations appears in the writings of Evan Bush; Paolo Omar Cerutti, Thiago Kanashiro Uehara, and Jon Wallace; John D. Sutter; and Phyllis Xu and Charlotte Greenfield.

5. The occurrence of anthropogenic environmental change over hundreds of years constitutes what Nixon terms “slow violence.” McGuire’s visualization of such processes in comic form addresses the rhetorical problem Nixon outlines when discussing currents in popular media: “In an age when media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative disasters that are slow moving and long in the making”—especially given that these disasters are “anonymous” and “star nobody”? (3). Here provides a powerfully engaging answer to that query with a series of stills in which the violence occasionally makes itself plain by bursting into the domestic interior. Rich as the answer is in conceptual terms, it does not so fully sort out the problem of reception, appealing to a variety of public and academic audiences but showing little capacity to shape public policy by articulating immediate needs.

6. Clary-Lemon interprets the philosophical reproduction of the nature/culture dichotomy as extracting humanity from its embedded material condition and placing supreme value on the anthropos. She rejects that kind of extraction as well as the attendant attribution of agency to humans alone (9). The critical dimension of High-Rise and Safe exists not in the coming alive of the nonhuman but in the human insistence on its own preeminence, as well as the deadly competition among presumed autonomies.

7. See Haas 293. Phelan’s work first appeared in Etchell 10.

Conclusion

Unsure Horizon

In early December of 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India produced one of the world’s great industrial disasters. A methyl isocyanate (MIC) leak killed at least 2,000 people right away, and as many as half a million in its long aftermath (Trevor J. Hughes 4). Survivors experienced nausea along with burning eyes and lungs, and many developed respiratory and neurological disorders (Ritu Chatterjee). Precise causes of the spill remain mysterious, though contributing factors likely included overfilling of tanks, disabled refrigeration equipment, and a substandard emergency response system. Other factors included maintenance failures based on poor employee training and inadequate staffing after a period of layoffs. Suspicion of sabotage arose soon after the event and persists decades later (Hughes 75–77). Whether caused by human error, human malice, poor corporate regulation, or a mix of these things, the spill had devastating effects whose scale has yet to become fully clear. A 2023 study shows that those effects reached over sixty miles outside Bhopal, impacting the children of expectant mothers and increasing the likelihood of cancer in men born after 1984 (Gordon C. McCord et al. 6).

Less than two months after the leak, Don DeLillo published White Noise, a novel in which an “airborne toxic event” disrupts life in a small college town. After a train car accident releases poisonous chemicals into the atmosphere, a garish cloud hovers over the city, prompting authorities to announce an evacuation and then, with a kind of bleak hilarity, to declare a lockdown once people are already on the road. The narrative tracks the reactions of the Gladney family, examining how the disaster exposes the parents’ already pronounced fear of death. Babette Gladney’s fear is so intense that, even before the leak, she has undergone experimental drug tests to ease the pain, engaging in an extramarital affair with a seedy scientist to get continued access to the medication. When her husband Jack discovers the affair, he seeks out the scientist partly to get revenge, but, in greater part, to get the drug for himself. This drama unfolds amid increasing confusion about the toxic cloud, which Jack describes as “immense almost beyond comprehension, beyond legend and rumor, a roiling bloated slug-shaped mass” that seemed to be “generating its own inner storms” (151). Although we might suspect that the Bhopal crisis afforded DeLillo the novel’s structuring image, his book was already in press when the Union Carbide episode occurred.

Nearly forty years later, Noah Baumbach condensed the sprawling, purportedly unfilmable novel into a serio-comic movie, filming much of it in northeast Ohio near the areas that inspired DeLillo’s fictional setting. The shoot took place not far from the city of East Palestine, drawing on townspeople to play extras during the exodus occasioned by the airborne toxic event. Shortly after the movie wrapped, those extras faced the collision of fantasy with fact as a train carrying hazardous chemicals crashed on the edge of town, necessitating a rapid evacuation. Journalist Dan Zak reports that five Norfolk Southern cars “carrying 115,580 gallons of flammable vinyl chloride were in danger of exploding,” leading city authorities to undertake a controlled burn of the spilled materials. The resulting smoke “looked volcanic,” Zak writes: “it looked atomic. Some would later refer to it as ‘the black cloud of death.’” As residents fled the smokestack, they learned of chemicals such as butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and isobutylene flowing into the fields and waterways near the railway; further, they learned that the vinyl chloride might cause headaches, faintness, and long-term risk of cancer in the blood, lungs, liver, and brain (Brenda Goodman and Kyla Russell; Alison Stine). Although the magnitude of the disaster did not match that of Bhopal, and the chemicals in question did not replicate those in White Noise, the material rhetoric of the airborne toxic event traveled from breaking news to fiction and back again over five different decades, eroding the boundary between narrative realms.1

In that movement we witness another instance of the emergent metalepsis that has expressed itself at various points in this book—the gradual convergence of Contagion with COVID-19, Sleep Dealer with Homeland Security USA, Snowpiercer with the discourse of stratospheric aerosol injection, Sanctuary with immigrant surveillance, After the Blast with Frankenfoods. The metaleptic rhetoric of White Noise, however, is distinctive for its temporal complexity, its unplanned allusions to both past and future events. The dialogue with Bhopal and East Palestine gives the novel a sense of retro- and pre-cognitive capacity, an attunement to sociopolitical developments that, at first encounter, defies rationality. But despite the admittedly eerie harmonies between narratives, there is no lack of industrial accidents and airborne threats with which a disaster novel might intersect. Although DeLillo could not have foreseen the Union Carbide leak, he had access to plenty of related incidents. In the early 1980s, he began to notice a daily pattern on televised news programs, explaining that “there was the news, the weather, and the toxic spill. This was a phenomenon no one even mentioned. It was simply a television reality. [. . .] This was one of the motivating forces behind White Noise” (Mervyn Rothstein). When such incidents make the news every day, the likelihood of overlap between imagined and lived catastrophe increases in dramatic fashion. The fact that the East Palestine derailment occurred so close to the movie shoot, both in time and location, may still cause a shiver. But the regularity of such events, and the economic imperatives that keep the toxic flow in constant motion, reduces the mystery. The rhetoric of dystopia becomes an uncertain way to distinguish fiction from “television reality” from life in general.

Corporations like Norfolk Southern are eager to quiet this rhetoric, assuring concerned residents that the dangers in Ohio have been contained. The Environmental Protection Agency further contributes to the normalization process, indicating that the remaining chemical residues are similar to those “in almost any community” (Goodman and Russell). Although such pronouncements should perhaps not be a source of comfort, they combine with the raw frequency of industrial calamities to establish a sense of the ordinary, the smoothly distributed risk of doing business. In the early stages of the crisis, many townspeople were clearly traumatized, reporting rashes, strange smells, fish and farm animals dying, an ashy mist in the air. At a downstream copper plant, one employee complained that “when he operated his machinery, skin fell off his hands” (Zak). Fear of cancer runs from Bhopal to DeLillo’s Blacksmith to East Palestine. Citizens wonder about the effects on the unborn. Officials rush to ease the disquiet, some lending sympathetic ears and others offering scientific-sounding observations about routine toxicity. For those farther removed from potential harm, the leaks and derailments fade into “television reality” and its social media equivalent, the white noise that accompanies many people’s daily news diet.

Reframing the airborne toxic event as a contained threat, or mere background noise, helps get the trains running again. And those trains are profoundly rhetorical engines, communicating the flow of goods and the durability of the economy.2 Their swift return to action ensures the profitability of Norfolk Southern while coding the accident as anomalous, a temporary hitch in an otherwise thriving machine. They must get moving partly because we want what they carry, requiring it for our daily conveniences, and partly because long delay signals systemic flaws. The major beneficiaries of the system cannot afford for us to dwell on the meaning of the crash or its long-term implications; nor can they afford us drawing connections between the spills, breaches, and derailings that occur from day to day.3 This drive to preempt critical questioning constitutes a key dimension of White Noise, whose narrative plays as bad television, mixing apocalyptic tropes with those of the late-night crime thriller, its characters moving with “staticky” hands as the screen works to right itself (296, 304). Crisis in Blacksmith shades into media routine, punctuated by corporate branding and advertising tropes: Kleenex Softique, Toyota Celica, Panasonic, “void where prohibited” (39, 155, 241, 303).

The resumption of routine keeps the traumatic cycle in motion, persuading us that order has been restored while hurtling toward the next disaster. In his reading of White Noise, Nathan Jandl associates this tendency, and the confused emotions it generates, with the discourse of climate change and the “insidious physical damages” caused by the “by-products of consumer capitalism” (436). We might go further, linking the train to stories of the Anthropocene, which often begin with the industrial revolution and the proliferation of rail services in the early 1800s. Those stories combine portraits of economic and social connectedness with increases in atmospheric pollution and average global temperature, all while fossil fuel extraction and ground waste leave their geologic mark. The train concentrates those stories into an evocative image, its associations with a poison cloud augmenting the sense of peril. Over the course of this book, that peril has opened onto numerous dystopian futures, bringing floods in The Drowned World, civic and agricultural breakdown in Butler’s Parables, the prospect of human extinction in Future Home and Gone Too Quickly. The Anthropocene also serves as backdrop for environmental illness in Safe, harrowing migrations in Icebox and Sanctuary, the bitter evolution of consumption practices in Tender Is the Flesh. The railway that transports untold environmental dangers, that must resume business before we register the implications of its malfunctioning, constitutes the infrastructural rhetoric of collective trauma.

When we start to situate the book in its political-economic context, its discourses appear to break the fourth wall again and again, confusing Genette’s distinction between “the world of which one tells” and “the world in which one tells” (Narrative Discourse [1980] 236). As that partition becomes “staticky,” the narrative fixates on another kind of confusion in which economic progress gets enmeshed with self-destruction. We visit and revisit the scene of our derailing, it suggests, without figuring out how to avoid it. In that way, it epitomizes the dystopian rhetoric that runs through this book, cruel prophecies describing how cultures repeat their deadly missteps, even converting disaster into commodity form. These commodities display for us the bad place not just as an imagined future, nor only a version of the place we already occupy, but one that long precedes us and continues to enframe our ways of thinking and being. No wonder they often create the sense of terrible belatedness, of arriving well past the time for transformative intervention.

Late Capitalism’s Gamble

By the time the toxic potential of Union Carbide and Norfolk Southern expresses itself, irreversible damage has occurred, some that is immediately apparent and some that takes years and even decades to uncover. Those results derive in part from what Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites call “modernity’s gamble,” or “the wager that the long-term dangers of a technology-intensive society will be avoided by continued progress” (244). As the rhetoric of progress works to rationalize risks, there will be “normal accidents and system effects,” modern conveniences allowing “greater freedom and mobility while also creating individual loss of control and increased probability of catastrophes” (244). Hariman and Lucaites give the example of air travel, which allows for movement between destinations at once unthinkable speeds but also introduces new ways to die. Before the arrival of the toxic event in White Noise, the book makes a parallel argument by depicting a plane in freefall, certain to kill everyone aboard, but regaining power shortly after the pilot has given up hope. Modernity’s gamble means knowing that high-stakes technologies and authority figures will fail on occasion, but burying that knowledge beneath routine dependency, taking reassurance from the low probability that a major crash will directly involve us. News of those crashes draws our attention, partly for the loss of life, partly for the way they expose our repressions.4 But the fascination quickly fades. We resume our part in the gamble we inherited, sure that to renounce it would be another kind of death.

The prominence of the profit motive in this calculus suggests that the gamble might more precisely be attributed to late capitalism than modernity writ large. Getting the Norfolk Southern trains running again is not merely about demonstrating the hardiness of “technology-intensive society” nor the will toward progress, though it clearly serves those ends. It is about moving the commodity, persuading investors and clients that their interests are safe. It is about recovering the losses generated by spilled chemicals, ruined train cars, and the cost of managing public sentiment in East Palestine. The administrative response to the crash clarifies the immediate privileging of corporate profits, and thus the continued enrichment of the managerial class, over the long-term wellbeing of larger publics. The gamble is that those publics will continue to stand for it.5

But even as crises in East Palestine and Bhopal bring power relations into view, the more insidious harm comes with the smooth operation of the political-economic system, the mundane periods when it runs on rails. At those times, relations of exploitation tend to hide beneath the veneer of the everyday, just as the slow heating of the planet by trains, planes, and broader networks of commodity transport either escapes notice or settles comfortably into the rhetoric of acceptable risk. In those intervals, late capitalism becomes quietly consubstantial with the Anthropocene, creatively extracting surplus value from labor as livable conditions wither. This routine toxicity shows up in dystopian realism as the ordinary alienation of Killer of Sheep, the suffocating ambience of Safe.

The spectacular disruption of routine, however, accentuates late capitalism’s condition as a traumatic repetition compulsion. Outbursts of disorder from daily custom arrest public attention, at once demanding and defying explanation. In Cathy Caruth’s analysis, the disruption provokes forms of storytelling that speak “not only to the nature of violent events but to what, in trauma, resists simple comprehension” (Unclaimed 6). Appropriately enough, she illustrates her point with the image of a train wreck, though the focus is on traveling passengers rather than hazardous materials: “the accident from which a person walks away apparently unharmed, only to suffer symptoms of the shock weeks later” demonstrates a “commonly occurring violence,” though the delayed reaction “does not simply represent the violence of a collision but also conveys the impact of its very incomprehensibility” (Unclaimed 6). In the case of the wrecked passenger train, subsequent flashbacks, nightmares, and tremors may indicate a person’s confusion at surviving when others do not.6 Or it may suggest the unfinished attempt to process an event that came without warning, shattering the assumption of security before the victim even registered a threat. The unexpected impact produces a retroactive bracing, an attempt to mitigate or guard against damage that has already occurred. A similar logic holds for the Norfolk Southern incident, though the impossible desire to preempt the past is collective rather than individualized. In both renderings, what lingers is not just the memory of intense physical and environmental violence, but the inability to absorb the episode into narrative continuity.

This rhetoric of incomprehensibility captures trauma’s intrusion into subjectivity, the affective experience of an unwelcome but insistent mystery. Yet, at the same time, not everything about such accidents and infrastructural breakdowns is mysterious. The very idea of modernity’s (or late capitalism’s) gamble entails the possibility of grave losses. These losses may come at unexpected times, triggering a delayed raising of defenses, but the prospect of defeat comes with the wager. Here we return to Bollas’s idea of the “unthought known,” which helped us earlier in the book to interpret people’s unreflective dependence on imperfect power grids, and their repression of the potential for ecological upheaval due to warming trends. In both instances, the knowledge of inevitable adversity may not rise to conscious appreciation, but it nevertheless permeates the rhetorical ecology in which we operate. When the crisis arrives, it generally shocks us not just with its physical force but its rude abruptness. Then again, we may also feel, quite rightly, that we anticipated its coming all along.

Either way, the blow brings acute temporal discontent, a yearning for the time before the bet went bad. The incursion of the unthought known into full-blown awareness leaves us reaching after lost equilibrium, reliving the experience of psychic rupture in the process. The desire to right the timeline helps explain the overlap between rhetorics of trauma and stories of time travel, with harried protagonists circling back in time to prevent numerous kinds of adversity. Pandemics set the cycle in motion in Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée and Terry Gilliam’s feature-length remake 12 Monkeys. Looming apocalypse gives way to similar effects in Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, Doug Liman’s The Edge of Tomorrow, and multiple installments of The Terminator—a franchise that attributes destruction to artificial intelligence, giving it particular resonance in the era of ChatGPT and advanced robotics. Portals serve as insurance against self-destructive habits in Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon’s cartoon series Rick and Morty. And in the works of Quentin Tarantino, moviemaking itself permits imaginative access to horrific pasts, allowing for sensationalized, self-congratulatory vengeance against Nazis, plantation owners, and the Manson clan.7 Time travel stories often convey fantasies of heroic intervention in disastrous histories, though the extra-cinematic trauma that provokes the fantasy tends to survive its onscreen resolution. The performance of resolution produces the appetite for more, converting rhetorics of cyclic anxiety into a market niche.

As publics feed those appetites with fictions in varied forms and media, nonfiction versions of the airborne toxic event create the feeling of an actual temporal loop, hauling us through disaster scenes where the variables are different but the systemic logic remains the same. That repetition yields what we framed in chapter 2 as high-speed inertia, the paradox of moving at breakneck pace without going anywhere. But whereas the derailing in Snowpiercer suggests the prospect for departure from the dogged pattern, in Bhopal, White Noise, and East Palestine, the crash is itself the pattern. Caught up in late capitalism’s gamble, we push our chips forward again and again, eventually taking spectacular losses that never fail to surprise. But as Roberson hints in “To See the Earth before the End of the World,” the cycle gradually exhausts itself. Our temporary fascination with each new loss may well amount to rubbernecking “at the crash scene of species extinction” (3).

Spectators often comfort themselves that however vast the wreckage, the threat will be contained, its worst effects visited on other people. Jack Gladney practices these kinds of self-deception in DeLillo’s novel, first denying the seriousness of the crisis and then assuring his family that their privilege will serve as a buffer. “Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters,” he explains. “People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornadoes. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods?” (114). As the prospect of evacuation arises, he doubles down: “I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department”; fleeing is “for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the country, where the fish hatcheries are” (117). He is right that under-resourced populations tend to experience the heaviest toll of industrial and weather-related catastrophes, having been denied full access to choice territories through centuries of sociospatial discrimination. Yet the idea that such historical trends will necessarily protect his family ignores how they too are caught up in late capitalism’s gamble, subject to startling losses when routine processes of production and circulation break down or create ecological havoc. The Anthropocene first punishes those who are least responsible for generating its effects, but it broadens its range over time, bearing down on those who are least able to accept their own vulnerability.

The sinister comedy of White Noise comes with Jack and his cohort confronting this vulnerability, trying to cushion themselves against the unthought known. From pursuing Dylar to parsing vaguely terminal medical diagnoses to admiring pollution-enhanced sunsets, Blacksmith’s professional managerial class finds itself in a collective standoff with mortality, facing down a material rhetoric that is both incomprehensible and inescapable. The standoff is traumatic in the certainty of its outcome and in rising to the level of species self-preservation. It is also traumatic in a metaleptic sense, drawing widespread psychic tensions into its storyworld and giving way to haunting repetitions decades later. Those repetitions demonstrate the prescience of dystopian world-building, but they also call into question its suasive force, its capacity to help heal the ruptures it encodes.

A Return to Hailsham

Part of the problem is that dystopian rhetoric tends to dazzle its audiences rather than altering their customary behaviors. Among its cruel prophecies, which include the assurance that those behaviors will produce a string of rhyming disasters, is that the same missives that aim to serve as warnings will instead serve as diversions. The Hailsham effect, where doomed clones learn to distract or comfort themselves with literary and visual art, becomes its own kind of repetition compulsion. We have encountered that effect in Never Let Me Go, in District 9 mocking its status as a popcorn flick, in Goreng taking Don Quixote into the torture chamber of The Platform. We have seen Michael stuffed with his own books not far from Le Hollandais, and we have witnessed Sol soothe himself with wraparound cinema while being prepared for slaughter. In each case, acts of consumption work to isolate and pacify the endangered subject, cultural literacy functioning as a sedative rather than a mode of agitation.8

In White Noise, this soporific rhetoric takes the form of fascination with sunsets, which acquire a colorful new intensity in the wake of the airborne toxic event. Neighbors gather on an overpass to watch as

the sky takes on content, feeling, an exalted narrative life. The bands of color reach so high, seem at times to separate into their constituent parts. There are turreted skies, light storms, softly falling streamers. It is hard to know how we should feel about this. Some people are scared by the sunsets, some determined to be elated, but most of us don’t know how to feel, are ready to go either way. (324)

For some audiences, the same spectacle that connotes a poisoned atmosphere affords an ironic comfort, the beauty of the sight overriding its distress signals. Apocalyptic aesthetics thus double as a form of constitutive rhetoric, fashioning mesmerized publics rather than ones intent on detoxifying their environment. For other audiences, the spectacle tends to petrify rather than inspire, foreclosing agency through its sublime finality. Awestruck viewers find themselves pinned in place, constituted as bystanders instead of participants.

That condition of being pinned in place, whether due to admiration, fear, or a mixture of the two, serves the political process of individuation. People come out to view the sunset together, but their togetherness amounts to a loose affiliation of amazed and docile subjects rather than an active form of solidarity. They are transfixed by the sky but on no account prepared to negotiate its meaning or hold anyone responsible for its implicit threat. This reception is rhetorical in multiple senses, bringing Anthropocene discursive habits into forceful relief. When we consider rhetoric, as we did earlier alongside Dolmage, as the “strategic study of the circulation of power through communication” (3), we recognize the scene as one of stifled potential, a latent solidarity frustrated by the overwhelming ambiguity of the horizon and shared confusion about how to address it. If rhetoric, to recall the writings of both Nish and Rivers, is also a material energy that moves people, a way of circulating power by nudging and motivating and positioning its constituents, then the poison sunset moves them toward the threshold of collectivity but stops decidedly short. To revisit Daniel’s anti-capitalist analysis, the spectators remain “self-interested and afraid” (40): their day-end ritual exemplifies the “disaggregation” of publics even as they gather into a common space (Asen 344).

Dystopian rhetoric attracts broad audiences, yet the popular consumption of it risks a similar kind of disaggregation. Crossing back and forth between fiction and journalism, this rhetoric often exerts a private fascination without outlining clear ways to address the adversity it depicts. Its capacity to focus our attention on that adversity is a key dimension of its cultural work, and at its best, the genre poses vital questions about self-destructive patterns we might otherwise repress. It invites the eye-opening, life-affirming kind of literacy Patrick Berry details in Doing Time, Writing Lives. But it can also contribute to the sort of magical thinking he critiques, the sense that producing and consuming critical texts will be enough to prevent the misfortunes they envision. The more reflexive instances of dystopian world-building acknowledge such problems, incorporating them into their renderings of the “bad place.” These techniques appear not just in Hailsham’s pedagogy or Michael reading revolutionary history in Spica’s dining room, but also in Lauren Olamina’s fear of being “full of books and ignorant of reality” (Sower 162). They appear in Del’s stewardship of the town library—an isolated figure diverting himself with stories, when, for all appearances, humanity has vanished. In effect, these characters find themselves spellbound by a toxic sunset.

All these characters have witnessed late capitalism’s gamble go horribly wrong. And they have all found (or been given) ways to manage the distress. In other stories the sedative takes the form of a screen or augmented reality, with characters jacking into a substitute world to escape their pain or experience a compensatory feeling of agency. Beyond Sol’s soothing view of unspoiled nature at the conclusion of Soylent Green, we have seen the rise of a plug-and-play story market in Sleep Dealer and the addictive power of simming in After the Blast. The lure of alternative realms also figures prominently in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, along with numerous Black Mirror episodes including “Arkangel,” “San Junipero,” and “Striking Vipers.” Lingering in such spaces constitutes the central purpose of much digital gaming, with dystopian variations including Fallout, The Last of Us, Orwell, and Papers, Please. Across a range of modes and forms, these artifacts challenge the cultural logic that pins individuals in place, yet the viewer/player experience reproduces that very logic. The dystopian genre stems from the sort of misgivings characters feel on DeLillo’s overpass while it also produces a similar intoxication.

Some of the more spirited entries in the genre exhibit a self-conscious attention to this contradiction. As we have seen in Never Let Me Go, the narrator is a clone who addresses the reader as a kindred spirit, someone who may have experienced a place similar to Hailsham. Kathy’s style of delivery is at once matter-of-fact, confessional, and sneakily dissatisfied—asking, in effect, What are we to do with ourselves knowing that others have already mapped out the conclusion? She insinuates that we are like her, pre-ordained to “complete” for people with more money and resources and higher status. And we are, like her, readers who become immersed in other worlds when the one we occupy is in bad condition. Granted, her second-person address enhances the spell of the story, creating the effect of one clone communicating wistfully, and a little conspiratorially, with another clone within the storyworld. But the discourse also works in metaleptic fashion to hail us as clones, doomed things who disengage from one dystopian realm to roam for a while in another. In that way, Never Let Me Go refuses a clean division between dystopia and everyday life.

In identifying her experience with ours, Kathy addresses us as similarly subject to rhetorics of individuation, suasive conditions that pin us in place. She thereby specifies one of the consistent ways dystopian discourses highlight the circulation of power through communication. We encounter it in Snowpiercer with the conversion of children into machine parts, in High-Rise and The Platform with congruent forms of architectural and social segmentation, in Sorry to Bother You and Killer of Sheep with the sort of workplace alienation that creeps into employees’ home lives. The language of partitioning and hierarchical privilege reproduces a claustrophobic ontology, coaxing subjects to stay focused on their floor or level, their appointed train car, their place in the division of labor. This coaxing, or symbolic inducement, ensures the smooth functioning of a system that effectively devours its participants. Of the worlds featured in this book, Tender Is the Flesh takes the rhetoric of consumption to its furthest extreme, with both eaters and human “head” pinned gruesomely in place. And it is the long-accepted tropes of the market that normalize such a system, the familiar lexicon of merchandise and processing and special cuts that forecloses collective rebellion.

The idea that language would provide the necessary distraction links Bazterrica to Beckett to Ishiguro to Gaztelu-Urrutia. Even Bradbury, who frames literacy as a brake on fascist drives, recognizes that it might function otherwise—Fahrenheit’s Faber reminding us that when books were plentiful, “we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off” (Bradbury 1951, 82). In that observation lurks the possibility that the dystopian narratives that diagnose our self-destructive tendencies may create a psychological distance from them, a kind of buffer-technology that settles us into the flow of traumatic repetition instead of disrupting the cycle. Earlier in the book I described that idea as a provocation, a challenge to audiences to distinguish their literate practices from those favored at Hailsham. I further endorsed a form of reflexive antifascism that resists the rendering of self-destruction as, above all, an aesthetic pleasure. I return to those arguments in the concluding sections, resisting the sense that dystopian visions always and necessarily tend toward individuation, and locating in widely shared trauma some prospects for dissident collectivity. In this scenario, the poison sunset might serve as a bonding agent rather than a form of mystification.

Vital Imperatives

On occasion, the aestheticization of self-destruction is too much to bear. It feels too intimate to serve recreational purposes, and too urgent to sustain any contemplative distance. The rhetoric is material both in its affect of tangibility and its infuriating relevance. Ben Ratner, an East Palestinian who worked as an extra on the White Noise film, finds it difficult to watch the finished product. “We’re basically the same people in different clothes,” he explains when comparing Blacksmith to his hometown (Zak). And in an interview for CNN, he remarks that “I actually made a meme where I superimposed my face on the poster and sent it to my friends” (Goodman and Russell). But the gallows humor does not distract Ratner from his purpose, which is to discover as much as he can about the spilled chemicals and the subsequent burn, alerting the community to immediate and long-term effects while endeavoring to hold Norfolk Southern accountable.9 “Are we going to realize in 10 years that we should’ve made a bigger deal about this?” he wonders. Turning his ire toward government representatives who were sent to Ohio to calm public nerves, he asks them, “Why are soil measurements shifting between pounds and cubic yards? What about the two tankers’ worth of petroleum lube oil that might be stuck to the bottom of Sulphur Run?” (Zak). As the agents fail to provide useful details, Ratner’s frustration grows, with the subtext of the encounter being another, unspoken query: Can’t we do better than the bureaucrats in a satirical novel?

The administrative response to the airborne toxic event in White Noise is famously inept. Authorities are so poorly prepared to evacuate that the episode becomes the prototype for their new SIMUVAC program, the actual disaster providing on-the-spot situations for simulated disaster training. Agents scan people for exposure to chemicals, but they refuse to interpret the readings for their frightened subjects. When Jack asks what it means that he is “generating big numbers [. . .] bracketed numbers with pulsing stars,” his assessor responds, “You’d rather not know” (140). Whether the agent aims to spare Jack a heavy blow, or does not himself understand the numbers, remains uncertain. When Zak follows Ben Ratner on a visit to the EPA Welcome Center in East Palestine, the story is much the same:

The government reps seem sympathetic, overwhelmed, answerless. They let Ben monologue. He refers to the Notes app on his iPhone, which is stocked with numbers, maps, terms, links, questions. After 10 minutes of science, he downshifts to pop culture. Maybe this way they will grasp what he’s asking for.

“If this were a movie,” he tells them, “this should be the part where Dennis Quaid comes out and calms everyone down.”

If the connection to White Noise were not enough, the allusion to The Day after Tomorrow further shows how dystopian rhetoric informs public discourse in the Anthropocene. It also conjures up the faith that heroic expertise will set things right, the figure of the scientist-physician-engineer emerging from the wings to restore order. But in this instance, Dennis Quaid is nowhere to be found. The social experience of trauma in East Palestine involves not just a toxic event nor the uncertainty of its health implications. It involves the collapse of authority.

That disaster hovers over the town long after the toxic cloud has dissipated. It keeps Ratner returning to the Welcome Center with questions, and it keeps other citizens anxious about the continued livability of the affected areas. “It may not be beach-front property,” remarks resident Lenny Glavan, “it may not even have the highest paying jobs, or much else to offer, but [. . .] when you need a helping hand, a shoulder to cry on, a friend to pray with, or a place to call home East Palestine has always been that place to want to be” (Goodman and Russell). He argues that Norfolk Southern has “taken the life, the heartbeat, the unity and that security that families or individuals long for in this wild world away . . . possibly indefinitely.” The experience shows that when late capitalism’s gamble goes wrong, the damage is often irreversible, with no clear way for aggrieved parties to guard against continued losses. The systemic breakdown keeps people returning to the scene of the crime, trying to regain a vanished stability, looking for more from federal representatives than sympathy and a listening ear.

Much as traumatized behavior indicates a fixation on catastrophe, it also signals what Caruth calls an “imperative to live” (Ashes 6), a determination to fashion a viable future that defies the image of ruin. The crash cannot be undone, nor can its ecological effects be entirely contained. But the voices of people like Ratner and Glavan can help generate the collective energy necessary to address systemic injustices—the imbalance of risk taken on by the corporation and by the community, the inequitable exposure of poor and historically oppressed groups to late capitalism’s gamble, the cushioning of industry executives against the environmental consequences of daily operations. Dystopian rhetoric clarifies how regularly those operations lead to calamity, and how shamelessly the responsible parties define those events as accidents. But the repetition of that rhetoric also hints at other narratives trying to emerge, not to mend a broken timeline or retrieve some lost wholeness but to validate life, to pursue the conditions for its persistence and proliferation.

East Palestinians’ stories of animals dying after the spill, of experiencing headaches and nausea and seeing the skin fall off their hands, suggest prospects for a dissident collectivity that denaturalizes late capitalist orthodoxy. Their fears for the unborn suggest an unwillingness to let the furor die, an eagerness to sustain it in the interest of communal life. Although these narratives reflect the bafflement of distinct citizens, Caruth reads such telling “not as the story of the individual in relation to the events of his own past”—or at least not only such a private rendering—but as “the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound” (Unclaimed 8). The surprise lies in the affective intensity of the connection through trauma, the powerful affinity that comes from shared psychic upheaval. And the broad articulation of these affinities creates potential for veering from seemingly fixed political-economic pathways.

Collective mobilization based in the experience of widespread trauma helps shift focus from the unknowability of the past to the vibrant uncertainty of the world to come. Caruth argues that “the witness of survival itself—the awakening that constitutes life—lies not only in the incomprehensible repetition of the past, but in the incomprehensibility of a future that is not yet owned” (Ashes 7). To frame the future as incomprehensible is to embrace its openness, to hold out possibilities for something other than routine toxicity, something different from late capitalism running on rails. The distributed witnessing of survival, of living through the train crash and the poison cloud, also involves a collective witnessing for survival, a testifying on behalf of communal life. As people listen to the wounds of others, and narrate their own wounds in turn, they generate a multi-layered cultural rhetoric in which singular experiences of persisting through crisis become a joint plea.

Engaging with dystopian rhetoric in its varied forms can fuel public solidarity, helping specify the habits that need breaking, the cyclic behaviors that limit life’s durability and diversity. It can alert us to the structures of hierarchy and alienation that cloud our ecological entanglement, and that thereby inhibit our relationships with each other and our surroundings. It can clarify how our practices of communication, our built environments, our experiences of work and economic exchange, our foodways, and our attitudes toward future generations conflict with our assumptions of endless longevity. In short, it can reveal the self-destructive tendencies embedded within human cultures, prompting us to adopt alternative ways of being. It urges us to tell contrary stories, to perform the kind of work Susanne Shawyer associates with the “theater of the oppressed.” Within that framework, “the marginalized spect-actor who tells their own story opens a space for the questioning, challenging, and reconfiguring of representation by groups whose voices are unheard and whose speech is unauthorized” (48). We should undertake this process, she argues, “with the goal of authorizing as many voices as possible, again, and again, and again, moving from subjunctive to indicative mood and back again.” In the looping, recursive movement between imagination and praxis, theory and public performance, we undertake “a rehearsal of revolution and a rehearsal that is a revolution” (48). Here the recurrent, intentional encounter with dystopian rhetoric does not displace activism but gives it purpose and direction, expressing through dialectical contrast the imperative to live.

This dialectical process impedes the identification of dystopian rhetoric with mere spectacle, supplanting docile reception with the work of the “spect-actor.” It thereby counters the fascist aspiration to regulate all representation, and thus to treat potentially subversive texts as ways to vent dissatisfaction or arrest transformative ideas at the level of fantasy. As we saw in the first chapter, Benjamin frames fascism as tolerating expression without granting rights, abiding only the simulation of politics. Under these conditions, the populace experiences such profound alienation, so large a gap between image and consequence, that renderings of apocalypse can provide “supreme aesthetic pleasure” (42). As authoritarianism and rightward populism gain transnational purchase, Shawyer’s revolutionary blurring of critical interpretation and activist performance has a particular salience. The collective pursuit of environmental justice in the wake of the Norfolk Southern spill keeps the disaster from being yet another instance of mass-media diversion, the phenomenon DeLillo calls “television reality.” The emphasis on air quality, cancer risk, the threat to biodiversity, and the stories of specific inhabitants keeps the calls for transformation grounded in lived experience, intent on precise forms of accountability and reparation. Whether this activism will produce those reparations, and whether the public outcry will prove sustainable, are as yet uncertain. But the movement beyond fantasy has made itself clear.

The desire to produce this movement informs what I have called “reflexive antifascism” in certain strains of dystopian rhetoric. It is the self-consciousness that resists the Hailsham effect and that troubles our gaze into the poison sunset. It is the effort to generate a critical dystopian literacy rather than permitting literacy itself to become another property of dystopia, another thing that entertains us on our way to self-destruction. Reflexive antifascism is constantly wary of becoming what it contests. It promotes a revolutionary approach to late capitalism’s gamble, a collective disidentification with the terms of the bet. But its proponents know that such dissent can be all too theoretical, effectively mired in the speculative. It is here that the oscillation between the subjunctive and the indicative becomes decisive, conveying the will to live beyond the pull of trauma.

Prophecies and Provocations

Given this book’s emphasis on belatedness, the prospects for constructive intervention appear slim. As we observed in chapter 5, even those activists who have devoted their lives to climate justice insist on the tardiness of the cause. And still they advance it. They adopt the sort of critical dystopian rhetoric outlined by Papastephanou and Freire, rigorously describing the recklessness of power, detailing how deterioration is speeding up, and yet remaining focused on the pursuit of ecological attunement. That impractical practice helps define critical dystopianism by refusing predetermined ends, stubbornly questioning all forms of projected closure.10 In such a view, even the concerted move from reading and interpretation to public activism becomes a problem when it stagnates, when it gets fixated on its own image or program. The Freirean dialectic keeps things in motion, defying its co-optation as a systemic pressure release. It thereby brings Ishiguro’s reflexive antifascism into the wider world of activist politics.

Such antifascist self-awareness strives to lend ecological activism a dynamism that is responsive to changing public exigencies and corporate strategies, keeping collective dissent from becoming the semblance of itself. It recognizes how social trauma, with its regular, fruitless repetition of injurious behaviors, replicates the totalizing logic of fascism. It requires more than narrating these cycles, more than exposing their structural consistency, however necessary those narratives might be. It means holding Norfolk Southern and similar entities accountable for the damage their routine procedures cause, asking why those who profit most from those procedures tend to be least susceptible to their toxic effects. Asking those questions in the fashion of Ratner and Glavan means engaging in Freire’s style of “problem posing,” undertaking a dialogue in which people who consistently suffer the heaviest losses in late capitalism’s gamble assume narrative authority. Granted, corporate capital generally withstands such interrogation by assembling a small army of sympathizers, brand managers, and requisite experts to perform concern and develop the appropriate simulations to handle future crises. Those techniques, along with big-money patience and the flow of mediated distraction, typically work to dampen public indignation over time. But critical dystopianism refuses to concede the perpetual efficacy of that approach, insisting on the indeterminacy of our temporal horizon.11

The incomprehensibility of the horizon gives us another way to read the late sections of White Noise. Rather than emphasizing bafflement, the gathering of individual subjects into picturesque confusion, we might find motivation in the sky’s uncertain rhetorical signals. That indeterminacy holds prospects for breaking with old patterns, inventing ways of being that support biodiversity, the entanglement and flourishing of varied forms of life. Little in DeLillo’s description indicates that the citizens of Blacksmith incline in activist directions, though the persuasive reach of the ambiguous sunset crosses the border of his constructed diegesis. Critical dystopianism keeps conflicting interpretations in play, acknowledging how the toxic skyline pins some actors in place while serving as a political stimulus for others. Sensitivity to this stimulus suggests our capacity to disidentify with Blacksmith’s beleaguered watchers, to act differently from the characters that populate its imagined space. The metaleptic moment thereby conveys the dissident potential of dystopian rhetoric. By confronting us with worlds in which the future appears locked down, it urges us to prove that those futures are not ours.

The cruel prophecies of dystopia, which predict us repeatedly rehearsing the drama of our own self-erasure, invite determined contradiction. We might therefore think of them as cunning provocations, itemizing our responsibilities as what Hawhee describes as “future ancestors.” Recognizing those responsibilities means imagining how our cultural habits will resonate for later populations—how spills in East Palestine, controlled burns, dams, border walls, oil drilling, fracking, logging, commercial exhaust, waste accumulation and transport, the spread of pesticides and fertilizers, over-fishing, corporate farming, and nuclear testing will matter long after we are gone. A small sliver of humanity may have already created conditions that will shorten the species’ time on Earth. Slowing the progression toward that end may be a more reasonable objective than reversing it. As McGuire reminds us in Here, epochs give way to new epochs, ecospheres proving variably hospitable to specific forms of life over the course of millennia. Commitment to future ancestry means cultivating sensitivity to the far-reaching implications of our production, circulation, and disposal practices, not just for our species but for biodiversity and the flourishing of life in general. This process requires relinquishing some of our immediate conveniences, but it also means rejecting the inevitability of late capitalism’s gamble, focusing not just on sensational disasters but the deathly effects of everyday custom. Altering those customs requires the kind of solidarity that dystopian worlds typically fracture or prohibit. From High-Rise to The Platform, Parable of the Sower to Sorry to Bother You, dissident collectivism proves difficult to generate and harder to sustain. Dystopia thereby magnifies once more the world of the reader, and it thereby continues its cunning provocation.

If that provocation is to enact critical consciousness in the Freirean mode, or the kind of revolutionary literacy Susanne Shawyer associates with the “theater of the oppressed,” it must not only spark collectivism but amplify the voices of people with the fewest resources—people who typically experience the heaviest effects of Anthropocene adversity. Rob Nixon holds that

poor communities, often disproportionately exposed to the force fields of slow violence—be they military residues or e-waste or the rising tides of climate change—are the communities least likely to attract sustained scientific inquiry into causes, effects, and potential redress. Such poor communities are abandoned to sporadic science at best and usually no science at all; they are also disproportionately subjected to involuntary pharmaceutical experiments. (16)

Ratner and Glavan are clearly worried about the corporate abandonment of East Palestine once the spill has become old news. In yet another echo of White Noise, there lurks the prospect of authorities treating the spill as a SIMUVAC-style simulation, Norfolk Southern learning how to limit future losses without fully investing in East Palestine’s recovery. And there is the danger of public pressure dying once the media spotlight dims, the episode feeding appetites for dystopian news spectacle before giving way to the next attraction. The rhetoric of reflexive antifascism guards against such eventualities, resisting the reduction of suffering to DeLillo’s “television reality” or another disaster-commodity. Yet such resistance proves hard to maintain. The pull of neoliberal convention has a quiet relentlessness, with poor people bearing the ordinary, inconspicuous pain of its return.

The pain draws more media attention when it affects those who have historically evaded it by containing it in distant places among unknown others. When it breaks those confines and starts to become generalized in ways that threaten species endurance, it exerts Boer’s akairotic force, disrupting the schedules and aspirations of the privileged. It spoils the kairological order—capital’s breakneck tempo and assumption of its own permanence. Insofar as capital refuses to alter its routines, it speeds its own unthinkable end. But even with the recognition of deteriorating ecological conditions, prosperous populations take refuge in what Nixon calls “short-termism” (22), wagering that the unbearable, the unlivable, will arrive after their own time has passed. Dystopian rhetoric always appears fanciful to them, even when it mirrors daily custom. Apocalypse always comes later.12

Counteracting such thinking might require a redefinition of kairos, dislodging it from the itineraries of the powerful and affirming our entanglement in the larger meshwork of ecosystems that comprise the Anthropocene, ecosystems that will co-evolve into succeeding epochs. Already apparent in the work of Rickert and Hawhee, this kairos decenters human organisms by stressing their dispersed and protean positionalities within the web of vibrant materiality. This kairos invites humility, a problem-posing that emerges not from the discrete animal, or even from its strategic collectivity, but from broadly distributed attunement to the ambient environment. Critical dystopianism attunes itself to distress signals within that environment, discerning prophecies not just of humanity’s decline but the narrowing of Earth’s biodiversity. Those prophecies double as provocations, asking how human grappling with trauma might express a will to life beyond the human.

Notes

1. Many thanks to Jay Arns for pointing out the connection between the East Palestine derailment and White Noise. Thanks also to him for continuing the dialogue once I discovered that extras on the film set hailed from East Palestine. Arns described the interplay as like “something out of Eco or Borges or King or Barker: the terrifying side of life imitating art.” And when I shared Goodman and Russell’s observation that White Noise was published shortly after the Bhopal disaster, Arns quipped, “the ouroboros gobbles on.”

2. Clary-Lemon records the commonplace that “transportation infrastructure not only represents the promise of stability, speed, connectivity, and access to spaces but also holds steady culture and order (in the form of material development) in the face of a resurgent, chaotic nature (in the form of the environment)” (151). She then shows the failure of that dichotomy to describe makeshift roads for seasonal tree-planters in the Canadian forest. The derailed train in East Palestine also disturbs this commonplace, demonstrating the kind of thing-power that departs from corporate and community expectations, aligning not with stability and technological order but with unruly materiality.

3. Hoag describes such reflection, and the mourning or grieving that accompany it, as a poor fit with neoliberal practice. Mourning and grieving are “temporary stopgaps in production” that find themselves “quickly brushed aside”: “Little wonder—these are Modern Times; the machine must keep running” (“Ghosts” 4). Financial losses and loss of security are typically not grievable at all, he observes, resulting as they do from the “heroic risk” of free market participation (5).

4. Hariman and Lucaites explain the transformation of the Hindenburg and Challenger disasters into photographic icons as a cultural effect of modernity’s gamble. Those images reflect an ongoing attempt to balance the horror of the bet gone bad with reverence for the technological ambition the machines represent, expressing an underlying anxiety while also working to mitigate it (245).

5. Assessors of corporate risk also wager that even if local publics rise up, the citizens will not have enough resources to sustain the endeavor. When the assessors turn out to be correct, affected populations often have no choice but to live with the fallout. Sometimes corporate prerogatives confront people with the threat of “forced removal,” explains Nixon, while other times they bring “displacement without moving”: the threat of such displacement “entails being simultaneously immobilized and moved out of one’s living knowledge as one’s place loses its life-sustaining features” (19). Residents of East Palestine fear precisely such a result, being uprooted and yet having nowhere to go.

6. Caruth also contends that survivor trauma expresses itself in awakening from stress-induced nightmares. “It is the surprise of waking that repeats the unexpectedness of the trauma,” she maintains. “It is the incomprehensible act of surviving—of waking into life—that repeats and bears witness to what remains ungrasped within the encounter with death” (Ashes 6). I agree that this awakening may mimic the shock of persisting when others have died, and I recognize how the implications of such persistence may defy rational explanation and narrative credibility. But I also want to underscore the clear if suppressed understanding the comes with late capitalism’s gamble, the knowledge that some will occasionally take a “bad beat” while others narrowly escape. This is the deal that high-technology capitalism offers us each time we turn a car key or catch the train to work.

7. These forms of vengeance occur in Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, respectively.

8. Atchison and Shames argue that dystopian fictions “can be enormously useful as case studies; they help us to know and name what we are seeing, perhaps avoid it if we see it coming, and find the way out if we are trapped” (Survive 6). I share their assessment, though I also maintain that fictional prospects for avoiding and escaping actual authoritarianism often yield a kind of imaginative release. When imagined escape supplants activist engagement, it becomes a dimension of lived dystopia. Some of the incisive entries in the genre, including those by Ishiguro and Butler, show awareness of such potential co-optation.

9. To accentuate the already absurd interplay between fiction and nonfiction, Zak notes that a previous DeLillo novel is called Ratner’s Star.

10. Clary-Lemon resists this closure when arguing that “the Anthropocene marks an epoch and also an argument”; she asks researchers to treat the epoch “as made up of acts of constant invention, states of being and being-with, rather than a foregone conclusion” (6). If we frame the Anthropocene as an unalterable condition rather than an invention grounded in material contingencies, it becomes impossible to envision any outcome beyond the creeping self-destruction of humanity. She holds out the prospect for other -cenes, though they require dramatic change in social and economic habits, as well as greater attunement to more-than-human wellbeing.

11. Even some activists who claim that climate disaster is already here, and that humanity has set a course for continued global heating, hold out a certain openness for worlds to come (Friberg, “Disrupting” 8), “The good news is that scientists believe limiting warming is absolutely technically possible,” insists the Fridays for Future organization. “No matter what happens, it is never ‘too late.’ There are always better and worse futures to be had.”

12. This view of the future works in direct opposition to Thunberg’s emphasis on cathedral thinking. Whereas Thunberg invites participation in a construction project that will continue after the architects are gone, its greatest benefits accruing to organisms that do not yet exist, short-termism insists on immediate benefit while disregarding possible impacts beyond the lifespan of current stakeholders.

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About the Author

Christopher Carter is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches courses in writing theory, activist rhetoric, and visual culture. He is author of four single-authored books, two collaborative books, and he is previous editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. His essays have appeared in Works and Days, JAC, College English, and Rhetoric Review, and he has written chapters for Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers as well as Narrative Acts: Rhetoric, Race and Identity, Knowledge. He has also directed the Composition Program at UC and served as Divisional Dean of Humanities.