MEA CULPA: MAnifestations of Alchemical apocalypse
I keep starting this story, again and again. A love story for the digital age, the story of how it all ends, the story of apocalypse. It’s a story that, it seems, I can start but not finish (there’s a discursive intro adjacent, if you prefer).
The perceived threat of apocalypse—annihilation of people, communities, cities, landscapes, animals, plants, and ways of life—looms large in 2020, in both the public eye and collective consciousness. When the widespread strain and uncertainty of the global COVID-19 pandemic had already unsettled international order, a longstanding injustice in the United States—state violence against those citizens racialized as Black—was suddenly revealed with new scrutiny after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The public outrage and civil unrest that erupted as a result offered one microcosm—experience and visualization—of the kind of multifaceted, discrete, and dispersed destruction that increasingly characterizes the contemporary historical moment: false apocalypse. Protest and riot, like that seen in Minneapolis, does not in itself constitute apocalyptic destruction. However, destruction of structures, space, and symbols—Target, AutoZone—of a rigidified, false apocalyptic global order may manifest its alternative: the alchemical apocalypse, which, through catastrophe, is fractal, intimate, fluid, transformative, ungraspable, wild.
In the Cold War period, during which the three novels I analyze in this dissertation were written, the perceived source of potential apocalypse lay in the threat of nuclear war. As I write this chapter, though the nuclear threat remains, the perceived source of potential apocalypse lies in ecological catastrophe on a global scale—and the incidences of unrest and conflict that attend it—especially when this category includes viral destruction like that seen in the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic and social impacts. As temperatures and incidences of disease rise, and as images or experience of lockdown, extreme weather events, and social, political, and civil unrest follow suit in severity and frequency, as news outlets, Netflix series, and New York Times bestsellers spread tales of apocalypse and images of destruction, many suffer a pervasive, intensifying narrative pull toward ‘the end’, even as the true scale of potential or imagined destruction is impossible to fully fathom.
In this disembodied, digital essay, I narrate one fractal expression of bifurcated apocalypse, oriented through my own bodily experience of creating, beginning, and preserving human life through motherhood, an experience located in space at the same geographical location of the most marked destruction dramatized here. The story adjacent, gestures to the radical unknowability and uniqueness of apocalypse, the impossibility of interpreting, or mastering. In this case, through narrative, I inhabit the peripheral experience of being a white woman standing witness—largely through fraught, digital means—to Black-led and Indigenous-led dismantling of oppressive, dominant forces, those that led to the total, final end of a life—George Floyd’s: whose own murder is an instance of catastrophe, a fractal expression of the whole of apocalypse. The history of white supremacy, integral to colonial and capitalist expansion—which was channeled through the actions of one police officer on May 25, 2020—are the same as those that caused radical, apocalyptic destruction of Indigenous peoples in the United States, that enslaved and oppressed Black people for generations, that sequestered white people in privilege and supremacy, and that are causing the impending, devastating threat of ecological catastrophe on a global scale.
In this narrative I grapple with the constitutive apocalypticism—that is, catastrophe of a radically destructive quality—inherent to the status quo as I seek to allow other elements of the concept “apocalypse” to emerge from within the confines of its presumed definitions and previous, devastating formations. In telling a lived experience of acute destruction alongside the lived experience of humanity’s bodily, intersubjective beginnings, I explore what emerges when the destructive is integrated with the creative and formative. The narrative portion of this essay includes the reader in its construction through the use of second-person, and integrates elements of autoethnography and creative nonfiction, juxtaposed and in intertextual dialogue with the theoretical and conceptual portion. Through this bifurcated, digitally-rendered work of nontraditional scholarship there may flash up a third, fleeting, untamable, alchemical element, hinting at occasions for transformed realities, for survival.
The Oxford English Dictionary first defines apocalypse as: “The complete and final destruction of the world, esp. as described in the biblical book of Revelation” (71-72). This reference to the “complete and final destruction of the world” remains an essential aspect of any consideration of apocalypse. It is the total, absolute threat of annihilation, the crash into nothingness, that gives the term its evocative power. In his essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” published a generation ago in 1984, Jacques Derrida considers the threat of nuclear apocalypse in relation to the work of historians, literary critics, theorists, and those working in related fields. He cautions scholars in the nuclear age who confront the threat of this complete destruction not “to neutralize invention, to translate the unknown into a known, to metaphorize, allegorize, domesticate the terror, to circumvent (with the help of circumlocutions: turns of phrase, tropes and strophes) the inescapable catastrophe, the undeviating precipitation toward a remainderless cataclysm” (21). The nuclear threat, Derrida implies, demands full consideration of the extent of its horror, the ways in which existence has been forever changed in relation to it. This sentiment takes on a new relevance as, around the world, millions—scholars included—face radically transformed realities that force acknowledgment of, and adaptation to, the inventiveness of catastrophe. However, the apocalypse unfolding into, through, and beyond 2020 executes what may appear to be less-than total destruction, but one which is in truth multiple, unfolding around us in expressions of “remainderless cataclysm” and apocalypse where the inventiveness and undomesticatability Derrida describes remain at the fore. Apocalyptic scholarship then must at least attempt to embrace and embody the unknown, the undomesticated wildness of terror and cataclysm.
In the Cold War period, during which the three novels I analyze in this dissertation were written, the perceived source of potential apocalypse lay in the threat of nuclear war. As I write this chapter, though the nuclear threat remains, the perceived source of potential apocalypse lies in ecological catastrophe on a global scale—and the incidences of unrest and conflict that attend it—especially when this category includes viral destruction like that seen in the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic and social impacts. As temperatures and incidences of disease rise, and as images or experience of lockdown, extreme weather events, and social, political, and civil unrest follow suit in severity and frequency, as news outlets, Netflix series, and New York Times bestsellers spread tales of apocalypse and images of destruction, many suffer a pervasive, intensifying narrative pull toward ‘the end’, even as the true scale of potential or imagined destruction is impossible to fully fathom.
In this disembodied, digital essay, I narrate one fractal expression of bifurcated apocalypse, oriented through my own bodily experience of creating, beginning, and preserving human life through motherhood, an experience located in space at the same geographical location of the most marked destruction dramatized here. The story adjacent, gestures to the radical unknowability and uniqueness of apocalypse, the impossibility of interpreting, or mastering. In this case, through narrative, I inhabit the peripheral experience of being a white woman standing witness—largely through fraught, digital means—to Black-led and Indigenous-led dismantling of oppressive, dominant forces, those that led to the total, final end of a life—George Floyd’s: whose own murder is an instance of catastrophe, a fractal expression of the whole of apocalypse. The history of white supremacy, integral to colonial and capitalist expansion—which was channeled through the actions of one police officer on May 25, 2020—are the same as those that caused radical, apocalyptic destruction of Indigenous peoples in the United States, that enslaved and oppressed Black people for generations, that sequestered white people in privilege and supremacy, and that are causing the impending, devastating threat of ecological catastrophe on a global scale.
In this narrative I grapple with the constitutive apocalypticism—that is, catastrophe of a radically destructive quality—inherent to the status quo as I seek to allow other elements of the concept “apocalypse” to emerge from within the confines of its presumed definitions and previous, devastating formations. In telling a lived experience of acute destruction alongside the lived experience of humanity’s bodily, intersubjective beginnings, I explore what emerges when the destructive is integrated with the creative and formative. The narrative portion of this essay includes the reader in its construction through the use of second-person, and integrates elements of autoethnography and creative nonfiction, juxtaposed and in intertextual dialogue with the theoretical and conceptual portion. Through this bifurcated, digitally-rendered work of nontraditional scholarship there may flash up a third, fleeting, untamable, alchemical element, hinting at occasions for transformed realities, for survival.
The Oxford English Dictionary first defines apocalypse as: “The complete and final destruction of the world, esp. as described in the biblical book of Revelation” (71-72). This reference to the “complete and final destruction of the world” remains an essential aspect of any consideration of apocalypse. It is the total, absolute threat of annihilation, the crash into nothingness, that gives the term its evocative power. In his essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” published a generation ago in 1984, Jacques Derrida considers the threat of nuclear apocalypse in relation to the work of historians, literary critics, theorists, and those working in related fields. He cautions scholars in the nuclear age who confront the threat of this complete destruction not “to neutralize invention, to translate the unknown into a known, to metaphorize, allegorize, domesticate the terror, to circumvent (with the help of circumlocutions: turns of phrase, tropes and strophes) the inescapable catastrophe, the undeviating precipitation toward a remainderless cataclysm” (21). The nuclear threat, Derrida implies, demands full consideration of the extent of its horror, the ways in which existence has been forever changed in relation to it. This sentiment takes on a new relevance as, around the world, millions—scholars included—face radically transformed realities that force acknowledgment of, and adaptation to, the inventiveness of catastrophe. However, the apocalypse unfolding into, through, and beyond 2020 executes what may appear to be less-than total destruction, but one which is in truth multiple, unfolding around us in expressions of “remainderless cataclysm” and apocalypse where the inventiveness and undomesticatability Derrida describes remain at the fore. Apocalyptic scholarship then must at least attempt to embrace and embody the unknown, the undomesticated wildness of terror and cataclysm.
I took those official announcements—reinforcements enroute to Minneapolis, infiltrators enroute to Minneapolis—as a request, or permission, or even a command, although on the face of it, anyone could say it was mea culpa.
That is to say, of course I had to head down to the Third Precinct. I didn’t know it would burn.
Some kind of traffic jam at University and Lex. Emergency vehicles. Guys pulling wheelies, guys driving one-handed, standing up-out the window. Stopped at the light by I-94, the corner where the winged, sculpturally-hatted gentleman with the “SIMILIE! ☺” sign daily canes his way up the rush hour traffic. (“Similie,” you said.) I’d always give him a couple bucks and once I had to be all “no cash!” and he was like, “I just wanna see that beautiful smile.” Similie. So I, like, obliged. Not good: like begging for a dollar. “It’s alright,” I said, looking them in the eyes, in the rear-view, “he’s an angel and an artist: see the wings, babies, see that sculpture on his head?” Angel of the alchemical apocalypse, maybe, coming into being through destruction. Anyway, the crew in a Tahoe and the guy riding shotgun with a few thick dreads maybe neck-long, he kind of side-leans out the window—the Tahoe was maroon—curving round that turn—I don’t even remember—so illegal like you’d never see normally and frankly, I was like, “What am I doing here? am I just a catastrophe pornographer? wealthy whitegirl naively or inadvertently sensationalizing the suffering of others? locked up in my ivory tower fantasizing apocalypse-chic? fooling myself, trying to make fashion deep? whose apocalypse are you talking about, honey? Cause there’ve been many. And here’s me, just rolling in my warranty-ed Jetta to a riot, what, like it’s a rock show? when people are dying left & right because: corona.”
Some kind of traffic jam at University and Lex. Emergency vehicles. Guys pulling wheelies, guys driving one-handed, standing up-out the window. Stopped at the light by I-94, the corner where the winged, sculpturally-hatted gentleman with the “SIMILIE! ☺” sign daily canes his way up the rush hour traffic. (“Similie,” you said.) I’d always give him a couple bucks and once I had to be all “no cash!” and he was like, “I just wanna see that beautiful smile.” Similie. So I, like, obliged. Not good: like begging for a dollar. “It’s alright,” I said, looking them in the eyes, in the rear-view, “he’s an angel and an artist: see the wings, babies, see that sculpture on his head?” Angel of the alchemical apocalypse, maybe, coming into being through destruction. Anyway, the crew in a Tahoe and the guy riding shotgun with a few thick dreads maybe neck-long, he kind of side-leans out the window—the Tahoe was maroon—curving round that turn—I don’t even remember—so illegal like you’d never see normally and frankly, I was like, “What am I doing here? am I just a catastrophe pornographer? wealthy whitegirl naively or inadvertently sensationalizing the suffering of others? locked up in my ivory tower fantasizing apocalypse-chic? fooling myself, trying to make fashion deep? whose apocalypse are you talking about, honey? Cause there’ve been many. And here’s me, just rolling in my warranty-ed Jetta to a riot, what, like it’s a rock show? when people are dying left & right because: corona.”
But, at the same time, it’s no big deal. I’m simply talking about collective affect here, having embodied it. And I’m gesturing to my privilege. Apologies for the embeddedness, really. The thing is, possibly only particulars can tell the story of universals. I, at least, am riding that idea here: what happened in Minneapolis, told through a folded-in-on-itself narrative, can be particular, material, and digitally-reproduced enough to shout up at universals.
In a conversation with
Gionvanbattista Tusa, transcribed and published in 2017 as The End: A
Conversation, Alain Badiou considers one of the most cataclysmic events
humanity has witnessed, the Holocaust, presenting it as essential to
understanding the category of destruction as well as the notion of ends, though
with a catch. In a position divergent from that of Derrida, Badiou emphasizes
the need to guard against inadvertent prominence afforded to radical
destruction, horror, and devastation, and argues that his famed concept of the
Event does not apply to the worst catastrophes that humanity has witnessed, and
caused. “I believe I have shown that there is really no eventual dimension to
genocide, to the massacre, because it is not a proposition or a possibility. On
the contrary, in and of itself it is nothing but the realization of a
pre-established end” (33). For Badiou, then, narratives that catapult toward
horrific, radical, or attempted-absolute destruction—as in the case of genocide,
of holocausts, and some understandings of apocalypse—are not novel, but are
preordained, obviating freewill, denying the ability of individuals and
communities to take up and change “the pattern” that shapes societies,
individual lives, and the future, as Donna Haraway envisions in her Staying
with the Trouble. Opposed to such pre-established ends might lie paths
through, and extending beyond, a state of catastrophe, and so through its
presumed finality or conclusions. By one account, apocalypses as catastrophes
and radical ends, have occurred throughout history, extending into the present.
By staying with the destruction, rather than allowing its power to overwhelm,
transformed realities, and futures remain.
In these remarks, Badiou argues for an approach that, in some ways, subordinates the importance of occurrences of radical destruction, though by his account not as an example of psychological denial, but in order to avoid affording those cataclysms undue longevity or power. He suggests that one begins by “circumscribing it, in all of its deadly finitude, so as to definitely prohibit its repletion, its recurrence” (36). Though ecological or viral catastrophes or ends on a global scale may no longer be circumscribable—as in the case of COVID-19 and its rampant, rapid global spread—Badiou’s suggestion is worth integrating at this historical moment, since by some accounts the scale of today’s potential catastrophes seem to obviate the kinds of transformation of perception, interpretation, action, and interrelation that could mitigate or halt the most devastating effects, or could offer the gateway for a world to come. While denying horror and cataclysm the power to dominate, as Badiou suggests, the wildness Derrida emphasizes, and the paradigmatic rupture the threat of apocalypse imposes, remain necessary to bear. What’s more, both Badiou and Derrida offer readers an alternative to the teleological destructiveness that rigid, disembodied, false apocalypticism enforces. In its place, the undomesticated and ungraspable, the bodily, the unknown and obscured, are fleetingly revealed, through alchemical apocalypse.
In these remarks, Badiou argues for an approach that, in some ways, subordinates the importance of occurrences of radical destruction, though by his account not as an example of psychological denial, but in order to avoid affording those cataclysms undue longevity or power. He suggests that one begins by “circumscribing it, in all of its deadly finitude, so as to definitely prohibit its repletion, its recurrence” (36). Though ecological or viral catastrophes or ends on a global scale may no longer be circumscribable—as in the case of COVID-19 and its rampant, rapid global spread—Badiou’s suggestion is worth integrating at this historical moment, since by some accounts the scale of today’s potential catastrophes seem to obviate the kinds of transformation of perception, interpretation, action, and interrelation that could mitigate or halt the most devastating effects, or could offer the gateway for a world to come. While denying horror and cataclysm the power to dominate, as Badiou suggests, the wildness Derrida emphasizes, and the paradigmatic rupture the threat of apocalypse imposes, remain necessary to bear. What’s more, both Badiou and Derrida offer readers an alternative to the teleological destructiveness that rigid, disembodied, false apocalypticism enforces. In its place, the undomesticated and ungraspable, the bodily, the unknown and obscured, are fleetingly revealed, through alchemical apocalypse.
Then I saw helicopters, maybe it was, or heard sirens, so I swung around and parked by the taxi lot. Kids looting the Midway, so calm and controlled there, quiet, as if the cops were blocking the road so everybody could reappropriate their pilfered goods. I’m telling you what it looked like. I know what it is.
Police state.
And yet, perhaps I should refuse the cops the power implicit in the phrase “police state.” It’s not their state. The end isn’t up to them, it’s up to the rest of us.
Red shoe boxes in the child’s arms. Me just standing there, voyeur whitegirl with the camera. Camera to capture—to arrest—this ricocheting moment, this ripple in the fractal, multiple apocalypse. Me trying to wear some sign of solidarity, allyship, accomplice-ship like a garment. You might be asking: Is she just in it for approval? Is she just in it for guilt? White-shame complex like scars, like chains dragging down so many white folks. And then, there is this: an attempt at retelling, an attempt at analysis and interpretation of a tiny piece cut from that cacophony of inventive apocalyptic happenings that can never be fully fathomed or interpreted.
So maybe I was there with the camera—staying with the trouble—to find a way to imagine the story ensures those called “cops” did not threaten imprisonment, or pain, or death, but instead protected that child, held space for that child, to bring shoes home: for his mother maybe, for his auntie, for his summer looks, and winter. Retelling this scene of catastrophe, of apocalypse, offers a moment of revelation, where the hidden potentials latent under the veneer of the expected—strip mall shopping, in this case—emerge.
But at the time, on the Midway, I was trying to look for … interesting colors? lines? graffiti? things that were on fire? broken things? something. I didn’t know really. Everything was happening at once, meaning everything and nothing.
On my little screen, I was constantly asking K. what I was doing there, she said “gathering.” She said, “don’t worry,” but I did, the air vibrating with violence and trepidation. Like only in America it could. Its unique brand of riot: Genocide, Slavery, Freedom. Helluva cocktail. Put a match to that.
Police state.
And yet, perhaps I should refuse the cops the power implicit in the phrase “police state.” It’s not their state. The end isn’t up to them, it’s up to the rest of us.
Red shoe boxes in the child’s arms. Me just standing there, voyeur whitegirl with the camera. Camera to capture—to arrest—this ricocheting moment, this ripple in the fractal, multiple apocalypse. Me trying to wear some sign of solidarity, allyship, accomplice-ship like a garment. You might be asking: Is she just in it for approval? Is she just in it for guilt? White-shame complex like scars, like chains dragging down so many white folks. And then, there is this: an attempt at retelling, an attempt at analysis and interpretation of a tiny piece cut from that cacophony of inventive apocalyptic happenings that can never be fully fathomed or interpreted.
So maybe I was there with the camera—staying with the trouble—to find a way to imagine the story ensures those called “cops” did not threaten imprisonment, or pain, or death, but instead protected that child, held space for that child, to bring shoes home: for his mother maybe, for his auntie, for his summer looks, and winter. Retelling this scene of catastrophe, of apocalypse, offers a moment of revelation, where the hidden potentials latent under the veneer of the expected—strip mall shopping, in this case—emerge.
But at the time, on the Midway, I was trying to look for … interesting colors? lines? graffiti? things that were on fire? broken things? something. I didn’t know really. Everything was happening at once, meaning everything and nothing.
On my little screen, I was constantly asking K. what I was doing there, she said “gathering.” She said, “don’t worry,” but I did, the air vibrating with violence and trepidation. Like only in America it could. Its unique brand of riot: Genocide, Slavery, Freedom. Helluva cocktail. Put a match to that.
Related: what is this? Sure, it’s an experiment at constructing public intellectualism in the digital age, an experiment in theoretically-infused storytelling as a full embrace of the core position of this dissertation: this is apocalypse, everything must adapt accordingly, and is.
I acknowledge that to some degree—whether nuclear, ecological, viral, or a combination of these causes—apocalypse itself, if understood as total destruction, even of the archive of what came before destruction as Derrida mentions, makes most attempts to understand or interpret it futile: first, since total destruction defies full conceptualization; and second, since interpretation itself would also be destroyed if the most radical cataclysms latent in reality come to fruition. Of nuclear ends Derrida writes: “Now what allows us perhaps to think the uniqueness of nuclear war, its being-for-the-first-time-and-perhaps-for-the-last-time, its absolute inventiveness, what it prompts us to think even if it remains a decoy, a belief, a phantasmic projection, is obviously the possibility of an irreversible destruction, leaving no traces, of the juridico-literary archive—that is, total destruction of the basis of literature and criticism” (26). But the threat of apocalypse also opens new vistas for thought, vistas that must be explored, however feebly, if this new possibility within the nuclear—or the Anthropocenic or the viral—reality is to be grappled with sufficiently by those who have played a role in engendering it. What’s more, radical transformation and profound ruination emerge, not with sudden finality, but as interconnected assemblages, each element of which demands new forms of perception, interpretation, action, and interrelation, revealing too the “inventiveness” Derrida identifies as an unexpected but unavoidable feature of apocalypse. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the inventiveness of destruction emerges as an imperative to develop similarly inventive forms of interconnected narrative, interpretation, and inquiry, those which reveal what has long remained hidden.
K. told me: Like Kafka, all you can do is describe what’s happening.
So I tried to focus on the cops who, despite the latent possibility, were still guarding the Target instead of the lives. I tried to focus on the asymmetrical displays of force, the banality: cops drinking from little plastic bottles of water, standing around in clumps in the network of parking lots behind the abandoned Herberger’s department store. What were they thinking, standing there? “People need their paper towels! We need to keep our boys clearcutting Idaho!”
Maybe you’d say: That’s called progress, sweetheart, that’s called being a realist.
Sure, yes, then let’s talk about realism: California ablaze, a deadly pandemic paralyzing the globe; we can’t go on like this.
Sedan of girls takes the turn through the intersection I’m about to cross (nothing doing here in the Midway, time for my final destination).
“Fucking bitch!” one of them shouts, and I think: she’s right.
And I’m on Lake Street—I’m talking in first person in the present tense for a moment here, though this writing is months after that moment was. But in 2020, alchemical apocalypse is that kind of story: past, present, future folding in on themselves, at least once the virus ripped the veneer off, and the privileged few sat around, losing track of the days, waiting for something to happen. Well, y’all got your wish. And maybe I got mine—as if my predictions of apocalypse came through. Whereas he just kept putting those boots on, those nail bags, heading back to the jobsite. You too?
Or were you like me, reliving the end again and again as if this could be an evocation of the self-regenerating power of Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal l jellyfish, which I’ll go ahead and call conceptual biomimicry.
In apocalypse, be the jellyfish.
So I tried to focus on the cops who, despite the latent possibility, were still guarding the Target instead of the lives. I tried to focus on the asymmetrical displays of force, the banality: cops drinking from little plastic bottles of water, standing around in clumps in the network of parking lots behind the abandoned Herberger’s department store. What were they thinking, standing there? “People need their paper towels! We need to keep our boys clearcutting Idaho!”
Maybe you’d say: That’s called progress, sweetheart, that’s called being a realist.
Sure, yes, then let’s talk about realism: California ablaze, a deadly pandemic paralyzing the globe; we can’t go on like this.
Sedan of girls takes the turn through the intersection I’m about to cross (nothing doing here in the Midway, time for my final destination).
“Fucking bitch!” one of them shouts, and I think: she’s right.
And I’m on Lake Street—I’m talking in first person in the present tense for a moment here, though this writing is months after that moment was. But in 2020, alchemical apocalypse is that kind of story: past, present, future folding in on themselves, at least once the virus ripped the veneer off, and the privileged few sat around, losing track of the days, waiting for something to happen. Well, y’all got your wish. And maybe I got mine—as if my predictions of apocalypse came through. Whereas he just kept putting those boots on, those nail bags, heading back to the jobsite. You too?
Or were you like me, reliving the end again and again as if this could be an evocation of the self-regenerating power of Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal l jellyfish, which I’ll go ahead and call conceptual biomimicry.
In apocalypse, be the jellyfish.
Or, mark decades with girls, with acquisitions, with properties, coups, victories. Whatever, I suppose there are lots of ways to pass the time.
As the threat of annihilation grows in public consciousness, scholars in anticolonial and antiracist traditions point to the logic of colonialism—acquisition, extraction, and possession of lands, species, societies, and bodies—as fundamental to the false apocalypse that has brought radical destruction for centuries. In Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, Nick Estes describes an anticolonial prophecy that envisions something akin to the dissolution of that false apocalypse through the transformative destruction of its alchemical counterpart. He writes: “During the late 1880s … the Ghost Dance prophecy envisioned the end of the present world through the settlers’ erasure from the earth, and the return of human and nonhuman relations that had been vanquished by colonialism. It was foretold that, at some unspecified time in the near future, a cataclysmic event—such as an earthquake or whirlwind—would wipe the United States off the surface of the earth. Once the land was cleansed, life would be free of disease and colonialism, and correct relations among human and nonhuman worlds would be restored” (122). Essential in this passage is the image of one transformative-destructive, or alchemical, force overtaking its purely-destructive, or false, counterpart. Also essential is the resulting return of “correct relations among human and nonhuman worlds,” hinting at the deep interconnection across species, and across people, that emerges in fractal expressions of alchemical apocalypse—in contemporary Minneapolis, in apocalyptic fictions around 1968, and otherwise.
The helicopters over the precinct ready to shoot, or maybe just collecting evidence for the trials to come. I didn’t realize how much of the city was boarded-up until later, driving home, looking for an open liquor store. But by then, the whole of University Avenue was vacant, everyone hidden behind the plywood covering the storefronts. Were the bartenders back there, drinking the best scotch, smashing the glassware on the boozy concrete floors, waiting for the sky to fall? It was then, on my quest for drinks, that I fully realized how much a body relies on a functioning infrastructure, civil society, on a functioning system of global trade. The wine I bought was probably French. Or Argentine. Australian maybe. Imported. Will there be wine-tastings in this apocalypse?
That’s a joke.
Truth is, driving the blocks and blocks and city blocks with it all boarded-up and nobody in sight? In theory, it made me panic. I can’t remember how it really was. This is all just retroactive speculation, this is all just me, continuously remaking meaning after the fact, which in an endless end might be a form of survival.
That’s a joke.
Truth is, driving the blocks and blocks and city blocks with it all boarded-up and nobody in sight? In theory, it made me panic. I can’t remember how it really was. This is all just retroactive speculation, this is all just me, continuously remaking meaning after the fact, which in an endless end might be a form of survival.
To say the contemporary moment is apocalyptic—and to seek the intimate, fluid, generative, ungraspable, and wild therein—is not to anticipate a withheld finality as in the case of nuclear apocalypse, which ostensibly takes place as a sudden, absolute happening in the relatively near future. Instead, to say this moment can be usefully—and not fatalistically—understood as apocalyptic is to connect, conceptually, the unfolding, destructive or revealing layers of disparately-placed and widespread phenomena. These phenomena include riots, pandemics, species extinctions, droughts, flooding, heat waves, ‘superstorms’, unprecedented wildfires, and more, phenomena that may continue in interrelated uniqueness until the moment when the entire earth becomes uninhabitable, at least for humanity. This does not mean that the destruction is withheld for that future moment of uninhabitability, but that it is instead already in a process of becoming, with each stage a fractal expression of the whole. As was the case in Minneapolis during the uprising for Black lives and reactions to it, theoretical and creative labor clearly exists within a condition of radical, unfolding destruction: thinking alongside catastrophe it is not only essential, it is already happening. The ways that this thinking is articulated and disseminated must, then, transform too.
Poet and essayist Omar Sakr argues—in the thick of the Australian bushfire crisis of late 2019—that the common understanding of apocalypse as singular and final—an interpretation that has dominated for millennia—does not apply today. Instead, a multivalent apocalypse is underway, one that confounds clear or easy conclusions or interpretations:
“I think of how the word ‘apocalypse’ has been haunting this past decade as we witness these extreme fires and our cities are smothered in smoke that warps the sun into a malevolent eye. Honestly, I am bored of the word, or at least the Hollywoodesque understanding of ‘apocalypse’ as a single disastrous event: we seem to be waiting for the tsunami, or comet, or volcano eruption, or nuclear disaster to trigger the end of the world. What none of us appear to be reckoning with is the idea that the apocalypse, having begun long since, might last for the entirety of our lifetimes; that we could live through this slow worsening, the poisoning of sky, water, land, and mind as the world heats up, resources become more scarce, and violent conflict spreads.”
Sakr questions the notion of a “single disastrous event” and evinces the more terrifying reality transpiring today, one of many interconnected disasters, often without a clear meaning or interpretation. Implicit in Sakr’s argument is the idea that many apocalypses have been experienced, especially by those most oppressed and marginalized by colonialist expansion around the world. Particular instances of catastrophe, fractal expressions of the whole of apocalypse, are not necessarily laid out on a linear timeline, but instead are embedded within apocalypse’s ongoing presence, an endless end with no clear termination or meaning. Internal, psychological experience of catastrophe also confounds linearity and frustrates a clear progression of past, present, and future. As D.W. Winnicott puts it: “clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced” (103). That is, catastrophe of the psyche models that of society as it warps experience, and “breakdown” in the future—the end of humanity, for example—is simply continuation of what has come before, an apocalypse that has, as Sakr puts it, begun long since.
Poet and essayist Omar Sakr argues—in the thick of the Australian bushfire crisis of late 2019—that the common understanding of apocalypse as singular and final—an interpretation that has dominated for millennia—does not apply today. Instead, a multivalent apocalypse is underway, one that confounds clear or easy conclusions or interpretations:
“I think of how the word ‘apocalypse’ has been haunting this past decade as we witness these extreme fires and our cities are smothered in smoke that warps the sun into a malevolent eye. Honestly, I am bored of the word, or at least the Hollywoodesque understanding of ‘apocalypse’ as a single disastrous event: we seem to be waiting for the tsunami, or comet, or volcano eruption, or nuclear disaster to trigger the end of the world. What none of us appear to be reckoning with is the idea that the apocalypse, having begun long since, might last for the entirety of our lifetimes; that we could live through this slow worsening, the poisoning of sky, water, land, and mind as the world heats up, resources become more scarce, and violent conflict spreads.”
Sakr questions the notion of a “single disastrous event” and evinces the more terrifying reality transpiring today, one of many interconnected disasters, often without a clear meaning or interpretation. Implicit in Sakr’s argument is the idea that many apocalypses have been experienced, especially by those most oppressed and marginalized by colonialist expansion around the world. Particular instances of catastrophe, fractal expressions of the whole of apocalypse, are not necessarily laid out on a linear timeline, but instead are embedded within apocalypse’s ongoing presence, an endless end with no clear termination or meaning. Internal, psychological experience of catastrophe also confounds linearity and frustrates a clear progression of past, present, and future. As D.W. Winnicott puts it: “clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced” (103). That is, catastrophe of the psyche models that of society as it warps experience, and “breakdown” in the future—the end of humanity, for example—is simply continuation of what has come before, an apocalypse that has, as Sakr puts it, begun long since.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. It was afternoon still, back then, and I parked by the church where parishioners were handing out supplies: little plastic bottles of water, granola bars, first aid. That’s what I’m supposed to be writing about: examples of intersubjective community-making across difference in situations of catastrophe. Mutual aid, new social-formations, new identity-formations emerging, my worn-out refrain: “destruction as a cause of coming into being.” And maybe I’ll find myself there in a minute or two, after all, that’s what I’ve been saying.
Walk with me now, through that stand-in for a logical transition (I’m telling you how to read this): all that is to say, the worlding I’m looking for doesn’t start in the church. (“No Church in the Wild.”) The worlding I’m looking for starts in the flame or the rubble, it is the wild. That sounds like a cliché. But is it?
Timothy Morton, whose work relies on the notion of apocalypse and its contemporary impacts, and who implicitly integrates apocalypse as central to his take on the Anthropocene, sees apocalypse as frustrating linearity. As he suggests in his Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World: “The future, a time ‘after the end of the world’, has arrived too early” (21). He goes on to write: “We were perhaps expecting an eschatological solution from the sky, or a revolution in consciousness—or, indeed, a people’s army seizing control of the state. What we got instead came too soon for us to anticipate it” (21). Rather than characterizing the contemporary, unfolding, multivalent apocalypse primarily based on its multiplicity, Morton features its suddenness, as well as our disappointment that it has not brought with it satisfactory narrative closure for our internal and external existences. But for Morton, the phrase “the end of the world” does not only mean scenes of widespread wreckage. Rather, what transpires first is the end of the concept “world” itself. In the Anthropocene, the notion of “world” has ceased to be the monolithic backdrop to human existence it was imagined to be in the past. At the moment when James Watt patented the steam engine, “what comes into view for humans … is precisely the end of the world, brought about by the encroachment of hyperobjects, one of which is assuredly Earth itself” (7).
Hyperobjects—objects that are, like a virus, “viscous,” “nonlocal,” that “involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones,” that “occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time,” and that “exhibit their effects interobjectively”—are what have brought about the apocalyptic moment (1). That is, humans are encountering, in new and uncomfortable ways, objects that are too big to perceive and conceive of or integrate into thinking and practice, including the hyperobjects pandemic, climate change, world, or nature. These hyperobjects are also revealed to be highly porous, including a porousness between hyperobjects and human beings themselves—physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and politically. Morton’s descriptions of hyperobjects, which for him are a key element of apocalypse, do hint at the interconnectedness of species, of people. COVID-19 presents a clear example, with its impacts experienced across geographies and modes of experience.
For Morton, rather than believing in discrete phenomena, “[t]his is a momentous era, at which we achieve what has sometimes been called ecological awareness. Ecological awareness is a detailed and increasing sense, in science and outside of it, of the innumerable interrelationships among lifeforms and between life and non-life” (128). Such a position resonates with the depictions of human and non-human fluidity in apocalyptic fictions of ‘68, in which fictional apocalypses offer the occasion to envision and depict the melding of entities previously presumed to be distinct, including human beings themselves, one with another. While Morton sees global warming and its potential impacts as urgent, and menacing, he still argues that apocalyptic events and narratives, those that offer closure and meaning (if of a horrific kind) should not be imagined to extend into the future, or to prevent us from engaging in effective perception, interpretation, action, and interrelation today. “All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the ‘end of the world’ are ... part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space” (104). Instead of casting forward a traditionalist apocalyptic vision, apocalypse is now, and must be grappled with, not as a withheld potential, but as an aspect of existence.
Hyperobjects—objects that are, like a virus, “viscous,” “nonlocal,” that “involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones,” that “occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time,” and that “exhibit their effects interobjectively”—are what have brought about the apocalyptic moment (1). That is, humans are encountering, in new and uncomfortable ways, objects that are too big to perceive and conceive of or integrate into thinking and practice, including the hyperobjects pandemic, climate change, world, or nature. These hyperobjects are also revealed to be highly porous, including a porousness between hyperobjects and human beings themselves—physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and politically. Morton’s descriptions of hyperobjects, which for him are a key element of apocalypse, do hint at the interconnectedness of species, of people. COVID-19 presents a clear example, with its impacts experienced across geographies and modes of experience.
For Morton, rather than believing in discrete phenomena, “[t]his is a momentous era, at which we achieve what has sometimes been called ecological awareness. Ecological awareness is a detailed and increasing sense, in science and outside of it, of the innumerable interrelationships among lifeforms and between life and non-life” (128). Such a position resonates with the depictions of human and non-human fluidity in apocalyptic fictions of ‘68, in which fictional apocalypses offer the occasion to envision and depict the melding of entities previously presumed to be distinct, including human beings themselves, one with another. While Morton sees global warming and its potential impacts as urgent, and menacing, he still argues that apocalyptic events and narratives, those that offer closure and meaning (if of a horrific kind) should not be imagined to extend into the future, or to prevent us from engaging in effective perception, interpretation, action, and interrelation today. “All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the ‘end of the world’ are ... part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space” (104). Instead of casting forward a traditionalist apocalyptic vision, apocalypse is now, and must be grappled with, not as a withheld potential, but as an aspect of existence.
“No Church in the Wild,” the title of a 2011 Jay-Z and Kanye West song, offers this bifurcated digital essay a bridge between the narrative portion on the one hand, and the theoretical portion on the other. In the lines of “No Church in the Wild,” Jay-Z condemns rigid, colonial-Christian hegemony, saying: “Lies on the lips of the priest/Thanksgiving disguised as a feast.” A panacea to the violence and hypocrisy of the church and settler-colonial society of the United States implied in the song’s first lines, stands wildness. Wildness is that which escapes the closure, stagnation, and rigidity of religion and settler-colonialist expansion and ideology, gestured to here with Jay-Z’s dismissive reference to the disguise of Thanksgiving. In “After the Apocalypse: Wildness as Preservative in a Time of Ecological Crisis,” Timothy Gilmore extends the argument presented in “No Church in the Wild” to the apocalyptic predicament of the Anthropocene. He writes: “The apocalyptic potentiality resonating in Fukushima and all acts of slow violence exemplify the need to think beyond a naïve reconnection with nature to our complex immersion within the wildness of ecological complexity and the development of ecological consciousness as the imaginative ability to understand what resists our thought” (389). Wildness—that which cannot be contained or tamed—is essential for a transformative response to the destructive conditions that have grown only more virulent since the publication of Gilmore’s article in 2017.
I walked past the church because I knew that around the corner, there on Lake and Minnehaha and Hiawatha, was where the news footage was coming from, so many young people, just kids, so of course I had to go. Like Noname said: “George calling for his mother, saying he couldn’t breathe.” So, that there is one’s duty, as Mama: keep the children. Plus, that corner is where I raised my own, every day trying to signal my opposition to the condition in which I’d found myself (motherhood-as-late-modernity’s-point-of-failure: an impossibility) with Obey stickers on the stroller like it would make a difference, and my tiny girl in all sorts of weather. Maybe it’s my fault she was tiny, as I was trying to please (still am), trying to shrink myself while mutating and elephantine, while embodying the abject-grotesque of ‘pregnant’, my very being in those months a reminder that yes, we’re animals.
In considering humanity’s end in relation to its beginnings, within the human body, I embrace the position that the categories “woman” and “mother” are not biological facts, but are socially constructed fantasies, even if they have real effects. Still there remain symbolic or interpretive potentials latent in the concept “mother,” the one whose body grows distended, abject—as Julia Kristeva might have it—with fetus, and who takes this abjection further in blood, urine, and feces, as she bears a human child, made from the tissue of her own body. Abjection in pregnancy and birth—in the very origin of the human—those theorists with whose work I engage here all contribute to the rich feminist and queer criticism that has unsettled the essentializing, biological notion of woman and mother, while their direct attention to the concept remains essential, lest phallocentrism, and so repression of the feminine, occur in the guise of its opposite.
In her rare, seminal monograph on motherhood, Adrienne Rich writes: “In the division of labor according to gender, the makers and sayers of culture, the namers, have been the sons of mothers. There is much to suggest that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea of, the son’s constant effort to assimilate, compensate for, or deny the fact that he is ‘of woman born’” (11). The spectre of the origin of human life in the bodies of women continues to haunt late capitalist modernity, rendered visible even in the hyper-masculine, militarized repression that characterized both official and clandestine, nationalist reaction to the protests and uprising for Black lives in Minneapolis. The phallic objects, machine guns, tear gas cannons, and police batons are a clear visualization of the ongoing phallocentrism that has attempted to dominate the globe, including the bodies of women, resulting in a real and present threat to (human) life itself. I, as mother, to the cops in this fractal expression of apocalypse, was: “Woman … nothing but the receptacle that passively receives his product … Matrix—womb, earth, factory, bank—to which the seed capital is entrusted so that it may germinate, produce, grow fruitful, without woman being able to lay claim to either capital or interest since she has only submitted ‘passively’ to reproduction,” and so, I would add, to destruction (18). To bring Luce Irigaray’s 1974 rejection of society and psychoanalysis’s phallocentrism into the contemporary context would mean acknowledging directly the way that aggressive, global domination and reproduction through (neo)colonialist capitalism has meant extraction, and ultimately, irreparable damage inflicted on lands, species, societies, bodies, babies.
In her rare, seminal monograph on motherhood, Adrienne Rich writes: “In the division of labor according to gender, the makers and sayers of culture, the namers, have been the sons of mothers. There is much to suggest that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea of, the son’s constant effort to assimilate, compensate for, or deny the fact that he is ‘of woman born’” (11). The spectre of the origin of human life in the bodies of women continues to haunt late capitalist modernity, rendered visible even in the hyper-masculine, militarized repression that characterized both official and clandestine, nationalist reaction to the protests and uprising for Black lives in Minneapolis. The phallic objects, machine guns, tear gas cannons, and police batons are a clear visualization of the ongoing phallocentrism that has attempted to dominate the globe, including the bodies of women, resulting in a real and present threat to (human) life itself. I, as mother, to the cops in this fractal expression of apocalypse, was: “Woman … nothing but the receptacle that passively receives his product … Matrix—womb, earth, factory, bank—to which the seed capital is entrusted so that it may germinate, produce, grow fruitful, without woman being able to lay claim to either capital or interest since she has only submitted ‘passively’ to reproduction,” and so, I would add, to destruction (18). To bring Luce Irigaray’s 1974 rejection of society and psychoanalysis’s phallocentrism into the contemporary context would mean acknowledging directly the way that aggressive, global domination and reproduction through (neo)colonialist capitalism has meant extraction, and ultimately, irreparable damage inflicted on lands, species, societies, bodies, babies.
That’s not an aside, it’s an example of how the nature-culture or human-nonhuman divide is illusory and tenuous at best, one of the ‘revelations’ the 2020 alchemical apocalypse makes obvious, at least if this apocalypse is read through the imaginings of ‘68, which I do. Despite my pregnancy of yoga and of complicated “only-a-human-subject-could-come-up-with-something-that-convoluted” breathing techniques: I’ll go ahead and admit I learned first-hand—through experience understood via concepts, and from there into self-conscious awareness (thanks G.W.F.)—that I’m a wild animal. If you want to talk about sexual difference, we can go there. But boys, how’d you find yourselves here on planet earth? Are you really all self-made men, created by your autonomous, agential self-conscious awareness of your own thought (cogito ergo sum, we know, we know). Or did that brain and body grow in a womb? Admit it: you got here in a sack of flesh, and possibly, via a vagina. Just like everybody else.
That’s the beginning of humanity, friend, so now I’m talking about how it (doesn’t) ends.
Anyway, stay with me: back then, on that now-rubble block, pushing my tiny bald girl through the johns & sex workers turning tricks (or weathering arrests, which reminds me: why is it so hard to remember making eye-contact with cops?) and through the—what was it then? heroin already?—deals like I didn’t give a fuck, and past the so-often Indigenous men, who I hoped weren’t dead but just wasted (don’t forget who brought the booze, the smallpox, the Trail of Tears, and all the rest; don’t forget who brought the apocalypse, and this coming from a Mayflower descendant; like I said: mea culpa), sometimes cops there, looking down disapprovingly with their big arms akimbo. And I’d be pushing past—was I thinking “do you really need your Glock to bring a man to detox?” or did I take that as given—“cops’ work”—and try not to see?
Either way, I’d stroll through all those kinds of ruins—those constitutive exclusions, those remainders and excesses, the refuse of the world that must die—and on into the produce section of that Cub Foods across from the Third Precinct where (I think his name was) Vince, wearing the hot-blue apron, eventually recognized us and was pleased to see me and my tiny girl when we would arrive to buy pre-washed spinach and genetically-modified, industrially-imported mangoes. He was pleased to see me and my tiny girl when we would arrive to buy shrink-wrapped chicken (I couldn’t tell you if there were beaks on those fowl) and aluminum cans of artificially-carbonated water. See? Just like a small town: the friendly grocer listening to my tiny girl describing the fruit with great articulation—the spotless pears. Or, I’d let her steal a caramel from the bulk candies (nobody would suspect) and she’d strut ahead of me in those littlest cowboy boots, from the Cub—past that strip mall and the bank and the Arby’s, all that just rubble now—to the Target that I hope remains gutted, which is where we’d buy the diapers.
I know they’re a mortal sin, diapers. Another exclusion of the existent global order, another constitutive element of the trash-island, filled with human shit. Try that metaphor on for size. The ‘diaper-daze.’ That’s when I was writing, in my head, this apocalyptic story that would come along and engulf me. And here I am, living through it. I can’t leave that part out. That I made this story up. Everything that’s happened since, a figment of my imagination. If I need words for that, I’d better start making them up myself. Can you see, I’m doing that right here? So, alright, okay, it’s fine, you can go ahead and blame me.
(How am I doing here? Too much? Or you like it? Am I making you a little nervous maybe?)
That’s the corner of my mothering, the block of my mothering, is all I’m trying to say. So of course I was there the day of the night the precinct burned, that now I’ve watched go up in flames again and again and again, across digital platforms. YouTube: taking the lonely through the looking glass of indoctrination. Where’s my embodiment of abjection and animality in all that footage? Here I guess, on this page or screen, here in this missive I’m writing about desire and love at the end, a bunch of words that maybe nobody will ever read.
Standing there, scanning the crowd of protesters, what was I? Had I, in all those years of stroller-pushing and shrink-wrapped chicken buying functioned not only as a denied-but-present, repressed-but-present embodiment of the abject, the wild and animal, but also as a false symbol of the white-supremacist Minneapolis Third Precinct, or of American policing in general? Had I functioned, with others who might match my description in a police report (like that other-mother who my neighbor kidnapped and raped instead of me, as if she was my replica, or vice versa), have I, and we, functioned as: white-mother-as-justification-for-state-violence? Have I, and we, functioned as: justification for insatiable networks of cancerous exchange, including the industrialized agriculture that Cub Foods and Target contain—and, insofar as they are symbols of global order—represent?
“People need jobs! People need to eat!”
So there I was, with the camera (I keep saying that), looking out from the inside. It bears repeating: there I was, as whitegirl, as occasional symbol and justification for oppressive force, violence, profit, networks of equivalence and exchange. Something like that. I mean really, I’m asking: if, like Luce Irigaray says, a wife is phallus to her husband (where exogamy is the basis for exchange) what does that make her to the cops?
I walked up around the corner where Minnehaha Liquors still stood, for the time being, guarded by a handful of beefy bros. A lotta good that did. It’s rubble now, charred. There were still cops on the roof of the precinct, only a couple by then, I don’t understand how the timing worked. Looking back, everything happened at once. Seems appropriate to say it again: that’s how it is at the end, everything collapses in on itself.
That’s the beginning of humanity, friend, so now I’m talking about how it (doesn’t) ends.
Anyway, stay with me: back then, on that now-rubble block, pushing my tiny bald girl through the johns & sex workers turning tricks (or weathering arrests, which reminds me: why is it so hard to remember making eye-contact with cops?) and through the—what was it then? heroin already?—deals like I didn’t give a fuck, and past the so-often Indigenous men, who I hoped weren’t dead but just wasted (don’t forget who brought the booze, the smallpox, the Trail of Tears, and all the rest; don’t forget who brought the apocalypse, and this coming from a Mayflower descendant; like I said: mea culpa), sometimes cops there, looking down disapprovingly with their big arms akimbo. And I’d be pushing past—was I thinking “do you really need your Glock to bring a man to detox?” or did I take that as given—“cops’ work”—and try not to see?
Either way, I’d stroll through all those kinds of ruins—those constitutive exclusions, those remainders and excesses, the refuse of the world that must die—and on into the produce section of that Cub Foods across from the Third Precinct where (I think his name was) Vince, wearing the hot-blue apron, eventually recognized us and was pleased to see me and my tiny girl when we would arrive to buy pre-washed spinach and genetically-modified, industrially-imported mangoes. He was pleased to see me and my tiny girl when we would arrive to buy shrink-wrapped chicken (I couldn’t tell you if there were beaks on those fowl) and aluminum cans of artificially-carbonated water. See? Just like a small town: the friendly grocer listening to my tiny girl describing the fruit with great articulation—the spotless pears. Or, I’d let her steal a caramel from the bulk candies (nobody would suspect) and she’d strut ahead of me in those littlest cowboy boots, from the Cub—past that strip mall and the bank and the Arby’s, all that just rubble now—to the Target that I hope remains gutted, which is where we’d buy the diapers.
I know they’re a mortal sin, diapers. Another exclusion of the existent global order, another constitutive element of the trash-island, filled with human shit. Try that metaphor on for size. The ‘diaper-daze.’ That’s when I was writing, in my head, this apocalyptic story that would come along and engulf me. And here I am, living through it. I can’t leave that part out. That I made this story up. Everything that’s happened since, a figment of my imagination. If I need words for that, I’d better start making them up myself. Can you see, I’m doing that right here? So, alright, okay, it’s fine, you can go ahead and blame me.
(How am I doing here? Too much? Or you like it? Am I making you a little nervous maybe?)
That’s the corner of my mothering, the block of my mothering, is all I’m trying to say. So of course I was there the day of the night the precinct burned, that now I’ve watched go up in flames again and again and again, across digital platforms. YouTube: taking the lonely through the looking glass of indoctrination. Where’s my embodiment of abjection and animality in all that footage? Here I guess, on this page or screen, here in this missive I’m writing about desire and love at the end, a bunch of words that maybe nobody will ever read.
Standing there, scanning the crowd of protesters, what was I? Had I, in all those years of stroller-pushing and shrink-wrapped chicken buying functioned not only as a denied-but-present, repressed-but-present embodiment of the abject, the wild and animal, but also as a false symbol of the white-supremacist Minneapolis Third Precinct, or of American policing in general? Had I functioned, with others who might match my description in a police report (like that other-mother who my neighbor kidnapped and raped instead of me, as if she was my replica, or vice versa), have I, and we, functioned as: white-mother-as-justification-for-state-violence? Have I, and we, functioned as: justification for insatiable networks of cancerous exchange, including the industrialized agriculture that Cub Foods and Target contain—and, insofar as they are symbols of global order—represent?
“People need jobs! People need to eat!”
So there I was, with the camera (I keep saying that), looking out from the inside. It bears repeating: there I was, as whitegirl, as occasional symbol and justification for oppressive force, violence, profit, networks of equivalence and exchange. Something like that. I mean really, I’m asking: if, like Luce Irigaray says, a wife is phallus to her husband (where exogamy is the basis for exchange) what does that make her to the cops?
I walked up around the corner where Minnehaha Liquors still stood, for the time being, guarded by a handful of beefy bros. A lotta good that did. It’s rubble now, charred. There were still cops on the roof of the precinct, only a couple by then, I don’t understand how the timing worked. Looking back, everything happened at once. Seems appropriate to say it again: that’s how it is at the end, everything collapses in on itself.
The intersection was all just young people milling around in the street, the odd quiet from no-cars deafening. Sage and sweetgrass caressing the Autozone’s smolder and smoke. White boy dragging his phone toward a couple of young women like he thought his handheld oppressor-weapon would impress them? He was trying to interview them, looked like he had a mic.
“I’m not going to be on your fucking Instagram!” she was shouting.
And he actually went “but it’s not Instagram” while acting offended. True story. Incredible, isn’t it? So she was having to repeat—she was just ripped open with rage and grief—forced to defend herself in that moment against the blind gruesome violence of this up-in-her-face attack that didn’t recognize itself as such.
I asked myself: am I like him?
And I’m asking you: is this here a violence that doesn’t recognize itself as such? Is this me, yet another white person trying to dominate the Story of History? rolling or marching toward The Absolute Knowledge Apocalypse like a buncha little Bonapartes trotting into Jena, until Jesus floats down from Papa’s cloudy lap to bring all the Mormons and Evangelical anti-abortionists up to their own planets of individualist salvation while the rest of us get drunk and frisky in our polyamory meetup groups, waiting to get fire-bombed? What I’m saying is: possibly we’re there. Getting fire bombed by their God, History, Progress. Watching the block go up in flames. What I’m saying is: possibly we’re the ones who were left behind. Or, alternatively, there will be no floating down of seconds-please Jesus, there will be no salvation-or-damnation bifurcation; possibly there will be no answers, no interpretive lens, no representation of how it was, no words, no “The End” at all. Only unanswered questions, and silence.
Surrender.
I’m not saying it won’t be torture.
So what I’m doing here is trying to archive that? research that? I don’t think I can do that, still pretending to be like everybody else, I don’t think I can do that the way it’s been done before, and met with institutional approval. I’ve been trying, I swear, and I’m sorry, I just can’t. Though in my experience, I typically have to do it anyway.
“I’m not going to be on your fucking Instagram!” she was shouting.
And he actually went “but it’s not Instagram” while acting offended. True story. Incredible, isn’t it? So she was having to repeat—she was just ripped open with rage and grief—forced to defend herself in that moment against the blind gruesome violence of this up-in-her-face attack that didn’t recognize itself as such.
I asked myself: am I like him?
And I’m asking you: is this here a violence that doesn’t recognize itself as such? Is this me, yet another white person trying to dominate the Story of History? rolling or marching toward The Absolute Knowledge Apocalypse like a buncha little Bonapartes trotting into Jena, until Jesus floats down from Papa’s cloudy lap to bring all the Mormons and Evangelical anti-abortionists up to their own planets of individualist salvation while the rest of us get drunk and frisky in our polyamory meetup groups, waiting to get fire-bombed? What I’m saying is: possibly we’re there. Getting fire bombed by their God, History, Progress. Watching the block go up in flames. What I’m saying is: possibly we’re the ones who were left behind. Or, alternatively, there will be no floating down of seconds-please Jesus, there will be no salvation-or-damnation bifurcation; possibly there will be no answers, no interpretive lens, no representation of how it was, no words, no “The End” at all. Only unanswered questions, and silence.
Surrender.
I’m not saying it won’t be torture.
So what I’m doing here is trying to archive that? research that? I don’t think I can do that, still pretending to be like everybody else, I don’t think I can do that the way it’s been done before, and met with institutional approval. I’ve been trying, I swear, and I’m sorry, I just can’t. Though in my experience, I typically have to do it anyway.
In her ruminations on the contradictions and antinomies of motherhood in late modernity, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (2018), psychoanalytically-oriented feminist theorist Jacqueline Rose writes: “But, as feminism has long pointed out, by refusing to be mothers, women have the power to bring the world to its end” (48). I include this excerpt as a point of meditation, a point of contrast to the extractive and militarized actions and reactions that have, in fact, brought this world to the brink of its end. There is perhaps an element of alternative interpretation, and so action, latent in this other possible end-by-mothers, the one that is not unfolding today, save in theoretical considerations. As Rose evokes, on the horizon of possibility lies that potential end women could make manifest if we were to cease to participate in Irigaray’s matrix of “womb, earth, factory, bank.” What I mean to suggest is: the beginning-and-potential-end of humanity, that stands outside, or against, or above, this matrix, is one that demands closer attention. Perhaps, rather than receptacle of victim, rather than one of the dominated, as mother, what I am to the cops is an other who also holds the power to destroy the world. Perhaps in this withheld, potential end, in which bodily beginnings also hide in the womb, there lies a messy metaphor for alchemical apocalypse.
In her Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel, Teresa Heffernan draws heavily on, and takes issue with, the contemporary relevance of the etymological roots of the term apocalypse, with its biblical and totalizing implications, and with canonical theoretical work on the topic in the study of narrative and in literary criticism, namely, Frank Kermode’s widely cited The Sense of an Ending, published in 1967. Essential to Kermode’s argument, as well as many apocalyptic scholars since, is the original Greek form of apocalypse—apokalyptein—which conveyed an uncovering, and developed into the Latin term apocalypsis, meaning revelation. What was uncovered or revealed might be a hidden truth, a pattern latent in existence, or perhaps a new beginning or mode of life. Heffernan’s argument emphasizes what she considers to be the impossibility of this kind of revelation, or truth, in late modernity and post-modernity, and alongside modernist and post-modernist literature and theoretical work. Indeed, this kind of closure—of interpretation and meaning, often through redemption or damnation—prevents many potential transformations, unimagined new-beginnings, interpretations, and modes of creation or “lines of flight” as Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would have it. But Heffernan’s rejection of the original meanings too-quickly obscures the various ways those meanings still operate, often tacitly, but just as often overtly, in the concept. To uncover—expose, unveil, strip—and reveal—to transmit knowledge, especially knowledge of a transcendent or metaphysical nature: these elements of apocalypse’s conceptual shape do not necessarily impose rigid or totalizing interpretations, or aggressively teleological timelines. On the contrary, they suggest the opposite, hinting at the opportunities for new kinds of insights and action that thinking alongside destruction enables, or forces. That is, the apocalypse erupting today does not follow a singular, linear narrative arc where what is revealed is one dogmatic interpretation that partly serves to divide the saved from the damned. Rather, this apocalypse demands responses to destructive conditions characterized by transformations of perception, interpretation, description, action, and interrelation.
Did I feel bad for the young woman, for her friend, for the kid with the mic? I felt bad for everybody. The mood in the street was actually hard to identify and name: tension, trepidation, grief, rage, rage, indignation, righteousness. “Just a feeling,” like freedom. And off in the alleyways, in the out-of-the-way parts of the city, far from this brief attempt at an Autonomous Zone, the cartels with their unmarked vehicles (I saw a few), doing what? Planning how to raid and burn the pharmacies? Plus the boogaloo bois, (there’s something intensely ridiculous about them, don’t you think?) planting explosives and caches of weapons around the city. Trying to gain territory, trying to start a race war.
In front of the Third Precinct, an Indigenous man was drumming right up by where the bike cops were posted, holding the line south of the building, and a bunch of people were clustered around taking videos, in the sweet smoke that blessed and cleansed us. I backed up, it’s a pandemic after all and that shit is airborne.
And that’s when I saw a mannish boy I’d met maybe twice, second time at a municipal airport where I watched him watch the little props take flight. It was something in the eyes above the bandana covering his face, a pale gaze built around a simple horizon that I’d come to love. Attired for the situation, would you call the look apocalyptic? Military-style shirt, up-to-the-minute dark-wash denim. He and his friend with silly white helmets on top, OSHA-approved, I didn’t realize until later his friend had taken a rubber bullet to the head, and the helmets came after.
In front of the Third Precinct, an Indigenous man was drumming right up by where the bike cops were posted, holding the line south of the building, and a bunch of people were clustered around taking videos, in the sweet smoke that blessed and cleansed us. I backed up, it’s a pandemic after all and that shit is airborne.
And that’s when I saw a mannish boy I’d met maybe twice, second time at a municipal airport where I watched him watch the little props take flight. It was something in the eyes above the bandana covering his face, a pale gaze built around a simple horizon that I’d come to love. Attired for the situation, would you call the look apocalyptic? Military-style shirt, up-to-the-minute dark-wash denim. He and his friend with silly white helmets on top, OSHA-approved, I didn’t realize until later his friend had taken a rubber bullet to the head, and the helmets came after.
“Excuse me …?” I said. “Are you ...?”
He was surprised, a little delighted I’d say, to be identified in such an outlandish situation, so far from small-town home. The sage and motor oil smoke rising behind him, the street blocked, the in-it protest kids surrounding us, a multiracial group of easy glamour and intellect and exhaustion, ready to put bodies and lives and souls before the riot-geared cops. I took his arm, motherly.
I don’t mean to center myself. I’d been waiting for this moment, as you know. And so I ushered this manish boy away from the third precinct, and toward the simple block where they took another father’s life away.
This is a story of multiplicity, of distractions. In the writing of these ruins, other disasters have seemed to usurp the totality of this, which so gripped these little cities, gripped me. Maybe I ought not to write on, should discuss other expressions of apocalypse.
You can see why I can’t tell this story.
Wildfires in California engulfing so many loves’ lives, and here’s me: in clean air talking uprising, teasing out the difference between righteous riot and hateful destruction while a soft wind blows through the oaks in a place where even my retelling of this story is met with discomfort, consternation.
“It’s still raw for her,” I overheard him tell his computer.
Yes, and if Mr. Floyd had been my uncle, my father, how raw then, how total would be the ruin, the end?
And still my body, even, in this as-yet untouched place, my person & self are ruins, mutated by the acute apocalypticism all bodies absorbed in Minneapolis and St Paul in the days that followed the total destruction of one precious totality and life: George Floyd’s.
An apocalypse in itself, the end. One example among too many.
The story changes. I can’t go on like this. I’ve said a lot, too much. But as you can see, I can’t stop.
Are you still listening?
I don’t mean to center myself. I’d been waiting for this moment, as you know. And so I ushered this manish boy away from the third precinct, and toward the simple block where they took another father’s life away.
This is a story of multiplicity, of distractions. In the writing of these ruins, other disasters have seemed to usurp the totality of this, which so gripped these little cities, gripped me. Maybe I ought not to write on, should discuss other expressions of apocalypse.
You can see why I can’t tell this story.
Wildfires in California engulfing so many loves’ lives, and here’s me: in clean air talking uprising, teasing out the difference between righteous riot and hateful destruction while a soft wind blows through the oaks in a place where even my retelling of this story is met with discomfort, consternation.
“It’s still raw for her,” I overheard him tell his computer.
Yes, and if Mr. Floyd had been my uncle, my father, how raw then, how total would be the ruin, the end?
And still my body, even, in this as-yet untouched place, my person & self are ruins, mutated by the acute apocalypticism all bodies absorbed in Minneapolis and St Paul in the days that followed the total destruction of one precious totality and life: George Floyd’s.
An apocalypse in itself, the end. One example among too many.
The story changes. I can’t go on like this. I’ve said a lot, too much. But as you can see, I can’t stop.
Are you still listening?
All these words ruined, distorted, mutated by the digital on their way to you. The meaning lost, the intention, and even in the end, the desire. All of it, everything, is met with silence.
Better than noise.
Your child choking on the tear gas, running from the lines and lines and lines of riot cops come to my city to kill an uprising. Your child at my door. Your child asleep like a baby, your child and mine, on the roof, before the helicopters came, before your candidate said he’d send the army. Your child.
You say nothing. I take nothing.
It’s my job, afterall, mutations of motherhood, as of apocalypse, the alchemical: make nothing from something, or vice-versa, in situations of catastrophe; care for the other—Levinasian ethics, I’m not saying that’s enough—in the face of the threat of the end.
You say nothing. I take nothing.
I tap tap at the digital void again and again—just so many silent screams. Chaos. Grasping through it all for the one thing I can’t have, the one thing that slips forever out of reach: the impossible, the indescribable, like love or god or the real.
Or maybe K. is right and it’s an illusion, a mirage the computers made to get me hooked. An expression of the false apocalypse, not the alchemical.
And still, nobody understands a thing.
Better than noise.
Your child choking on the tear gas, running from the lines and lines and lines of riot cops come to my city to kill an uprising. Your child at my door. Your child asleep like a baby, your child and mine, on the roof, before the helicopters came, before your candidate said he’d send the army. Your child.
You say nothing. I take nothing.
It’s my job, afterall, mutations of motherhood, as of apocalypse, the alchemical: make nothing from something, or vice-versa, in situations of catastrophe; care for the other—Levinasian ethics, I’m not saying that’s enough—in the face of the threat of the end.
You say nothing. I take nothing.
I tap tap at the digital void again and again—just so many silent screams. Chaos. Grasping through it all for the one thing I can’t have, the one thing that slips forever out of reach: the impossible, the indescribable, like love or god or the real.
Or maybe K. is right and it’s an illusion, a mirage the computers made to get me hooked. An expression of the false apocalypse, not the alchemical.
And still, nobody understands a thing.
In his 2019 book, The Second Coming, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi—whose work, rooted in both the Autonomist Communist movement and in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari on schizoanalysis, often tackles broadly psychological phenomena—also suggests that the contemporary historical moment can, and should, be considered apocalyptic. For Berardi, this apocalyptic characterization is two-fold. On the one hand, he argues that this moment is apocalyptic in the sense that humanity is hurtling ever-deeper into a state of radical chaos. For Berardi, the expansion of semiocapitalism to multilayered, global proportions, and the exponential growth of digital technologies—a trend exacerbated for the world’s wealthiest by the shelter-in-place orders extended internationally in order to fight the COVID-19 pandemic—does not signal the triumph of human ingenuity, as scholars of artificial intelligence like MIT’s Max Tegmark would have it, but instead signals the shift toward darkness, totalitarianism, injustice, inequity, and “acceleration of events'' that humanity has lost the ability to control or understand (2). On the other hand, Berardi takes the unprecedented quality of this historical moment, and his interpretation of it as apocalypse-as-chaos, as an opportunity, one he eventually connects to the spirit of ’68. Berardi writes:
“Now an apocalyptic model seems the best suited for describing the surrounding landscape, from many points of view. I won’ forget that the apocalypse is an event that reveals the hidden rationale of the cosmos: chaos. But the apocalypse is also the moment in which a hidden possibility comes to be revealed. If we are unable to see and to actualize the hidden possibility, the descent into nothing will follow. Have we already lost the opportunity of actualizing the possibility, or is the possibility still alive?” (121)
This lost or living possibility, suggests Berardi, is the possibility to “break the spell of impotence and despair that overshadows the psychosphere of our time” (122). For Berardi: “Rather than a year, ‘68 is the name of a mindset which actually prevailed in the world throughout two decades. … In this sense, ‘68 means the opening of the heart and of the brain to the emergence of countless possibilities, the participation of millions in the same process of discovery, experimentation and universal friendship” (9). It is this spirit of possibility, of “discovery, experimentation, and universal friendship” that Berardi suggests becomes possible under apocalyptic conditions, the legacy of ‘68 that Berardi embeds within his otherwise-grim prognosis of the contemporary moment.
“Now an apocalyptic model seems the best suited for describing the surrounding landscape, from many points of view. I won’ forget that the apocalypse is an event that reveals the hidden rationale of the cosmos: chaos. But the apocalypse is also the moment in which a hidden possibility comes to be revealed. If we are unable to see and to actualize the hidden possibility, the descent into nothing will follow. Have we already lost the opportunity of actualizing the possibility, or is the possibility still alive?” (121)
This lost or living possibility, suggests Berardi, is the possibility to “break the spell of impotence and despair that overshadows the psychosphere of our time” (122). For Berardi: “Rather than a year, ‘68 is the name of a mindset which actually prevailed in the world throughout two decades. … In this sense, ‘68 means the opening of the heart and of the brain to the emergence of countless possibilities, the participation of millions in the same process of discovery, experimentation and universal friendship” (9). It is this spirit of possibility, of “discovery, experimentation, and universal friendship” that Berardi suggests becomes possible under apocalyptic conditions, the legacy of ‘68 that Berardi embeds within his otherwise-grim prognosis of the contemporary moment.
That night, the third precint burned, visible across media platforms and devices again and again just like the rest of the protests, and the riots, and the lines and lines of police: digitally replicated endlessly until all meaning was forever lost. All that remains is chaos. The end, the burning of police-station-as-symbol: the seeming collapse of an attempt at control and order—policing—rooted in a colonialist history of oppression and violence for the sake of capital, profit, surplus value. I didn’t go back to watch the building up in flames, I watched the campfire instead. I sat in the simple dark to keep your child, and my own.
At the third precint building, the flames leapt and the cops fled, pushing open the chain-linked gate, kids throwing rocks, masks or phones up. As if the kids stood a chance: couldn’t they see, it was a strategic, official decision to cede the third precinct building? After all, the side of the police that retains the ability to destroy us all. The military, your candidate with his finger on the button, that remains true. Go ahead and throw your cell phones kids, and rocks.
Our governor with a wartime affectation, official announcements: anyone left in the street past evening curfew was an ‘outside agitator,’ an ‘infiltrator.’ Those words used in 2020 as in ‘68 to kill uprising. But I obeyed: Doodle arrived from Chattanooga to stand all night, face-to-face with the riot cops and take the rubber bullets.
But after dark, I wouldn’t let him leave.
Like your child, I wouldn’t let him wander into the catastrophe, to be arrested or shot, looking like a Boogaloo Boi here to destroy, even though he’s not. Doodle, protector of water protectors. Doodle, up all night, the rifle loaded beneath the children’s bed, the children asleep upstairs in my arms—their bodies myself—as if I can do anything at all, when the real end arrives.
At the third precint building, the flames leapt and the cops fled, pushing open the chain-linked gate, kids throwing rocks, masks or phones up. As if the kids stood a chance: couldn’t they see, it was a strategic, official decision to cede the third precinct building? After all, the side of the police that retains the ability to destroy us all. The military, your candidate with his finger on the button, that remains true. Go ahead and throw your cell phones kids, and rocks.
Our governor with a wartime affectation, official announcements: anyone left in the street past evening curfew was an ‘outside agitator,’ an ‘infiltrator.’ Those words used in 2020 as in ‘68 to kill uprising. But I obeyed: Doodle arrived from Chattanooga to stand all night, face-to-face with the riot cops and take the rubber bullets.
But after dark, I wouldn’t let him leave.
Like your child, I wouldn’t let him wander into the catastrophe, to be arrested or shot, looking like a Boogaloo Boi here to destroy, even though he’s not. Doodle, protector of water protectors. Doodle, up all night, the rifle loaded beneath the children’s bed, the children asleep upstairs in my arms—their bodies myself—as if I can do anything at all, when the real end arrives.
All day and night, K. was withheld, flattened and truncated by the digital, hidden behind the screen and an ocean away, or locked up alone, isolated somewhere on the prairie. K. was rapt by the digital, the screens, the images, the feeds and livestreams of the protests, riot, uprising, suppression and repression, tactical operations and conspiracies in action. K. was watching it all unfold, watching the eruption of angles, footage across screens and platforms—Unicorn Riot and all the rest, who only show up when shit gets hot. K. was displaced, absent, while I was present: boots on the ground, blistered, hoarse, not weeping, dry-eyed, confused, shouting. K. was at a distance, watching the streets as though through my eyes, through these very photos. K.’s voice disembodied, K.’s flattened image on the screen. K. an ocean away, trapped alone in the silence and boredom and solitude of interminable lockdown.
You were withheld too, flattened and truncated by the ditial, hidden behind the screen, and silent, nothing but an endless end. No body, no voice. Nothing words can grasp or trap.
The only one wild, reckless, uncaptured enough to be unable to surrender.
You were withheld too, flattened and truncated by the ditial, hidden behind the screen, and silent, nothing but an endless end. No body, no voice. Nothing words can grasp or trap.
The only one wild, reckless, uncaptured enough to be unable to surrender.
According to Berardi, against this spirit of “discovery, experimentation and universal friendship” stands the dominant paradigm of the twenty-first century, that in which the uprising for Black lives, and against the legacy of global colonialism arose. It is also the dominant paradigm in which white nationalism and misguided neo-totalitarianism have smoldered, including among those who used the protests against the death of George Floyd as a cover to extend inhumane, destructive goals and narratives, sewing destruction and chaos. Berardi describes this paradigm as inherently digital, as “the automated technical infrastructure of the networked brain of semiocapital, the social body, separated from the connected brain, infuriated by political impotence and fragmented into cells of affective isolation, is reaching with an aggressive assertion of identity and a suicidal drive” (76). Indeed, the tool of semiocapital and the netoworked brain is the smartphone—dividing and bringing together, allowing for meetings in person, and for connection from afar, and yet as Byung Chul Han writes in Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power: “Smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers” (39). This is the case, because, as I hint at here, the digital, the smartphone, both exacerbated and alleviated the apocalyptic elements of lockdown, protest, riot, uprising.
Violence in the air, swirling. Your candidate threatening to send the military, or militias: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Your candidate threatening to kill your child, your friend, your lover. You?
Radio on: reports of caches of weapons and incendiary devices hidden around the city, in alleys and trashcans, reports of unmarked vehicles with no plates. I saw them myself, driving in formation on my block; I’ll call it evidence that there were those here using the murder of a Black father, George Floyd, as cover, to loot the pharmacies, the Black-owned businesses, to burn them to the ground. It’s a fine, dangerous line to take.
The zealot across the street, with her souvenir prayer shawl wrapped close about her, told me nothing would protect us but to circle my house seven times. God told her so.
I organized the block instead—for comfort or self-defense. I wasn’t thrilled for this opportunity to see my research in action. I wasn’t delighted for this opportunity to see, first-hand, what a community would do in catastrophe. It was all average, daily, dull, chaotic, confused, and unreal. We stood in the yard—the neighbors—the sidewalk and the street, masked, preparing for attack. We vowed not to call the cops. Did we drink from plastic bottles of water?
Radio on: reports of caches of weapons and incendiary devices hidden around the city, in alleys and trashcans, reports of unmarked vehicles with no plates. I saw them myself, driving in formation on my block; I’ll call it evidence that there were those here using the murder of a Black father, George Floyd, as cover, to loot the pharmacies, the Black-owned businesses, to burn them to the ground. It’s a fine, dangerous line to take.
The zealot across the street, with her souvenir prayer shawl wrapped close about her, told me nothing would protect us but to circle my house seven times. God told her so.
I organized the block instead—for comfort or self-defense. I wasn’t thrilled for this opportunity to see my research in action. I wasn’t delighted for this opportunity to see, first-hand, what a community would do in catastrophe. It was all average, daily, dull, chaotic, confused, and unreal. We stood in the yard—the neighbors—the sidewalk and the street, masked, preparing for attack. We vowed not to call the cops. Did we drink from plastic bottles of water?
A key work in anticolonial apocalyptic theory, and a cornerstone for this project, is A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, by scholar of inhuman geography Kathryn Yusoff. On the notion of dismantling and of tearing down toward possibility, she writes: “I question how starting with the ‘End of the World’ might release a more exacting critique of this geologic epoch and its material register of being, liberated from liberal subjectivity into an alternate geophysics of being by a reworking of gravity” (21). Here, Yusoff’s articulation contrasts with much work on apocalypse in that she does not refer to apocalypse in its teleological or biblical guise, or as corresponding more generally to Western narratives of History, Nation, and Man. Instead, Yusoff finds, in a different kind of end of the world, a way backward, toward a renewed embrace of the potentials contained in the etymological roots of apocalypse—first through revelation, and then into transformation. Yusoff’s end of the world is tied up with critiques of the characterization of the current epoch as the Anthropocene. In this effort, Yusoff specifically works “to challenge the racial blindness of the Anthropocene” and illuminates the racialized elements of the extractive economies that have altered landscapes and climate, and have continued to exploit the majority of the world’s population, especially those racialized as ‘non-white’, where whiteness is overlooked and taken as a universal standard. This racialized and widely exploitative history embedded in the current epoch is, according to Yusoff, also embedded in the discipline of geology itself, and what’s more, is uncritically embedded within the era’s characterization as the Anthropocene. “If the Anthropocene is viewed as a resurrection of the impulse to reestablish humanism in all its exclusionary terms of universality, then any critical theory that does not work with and alongside black and indigenous studies (rather than in an extractive or supplementary mode) will fail to deliver any epochal shift at all” (18). In this simple phrase, Yusoff sets her own theoretical work against much of white, Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment, rejecting widely-accepted claims to universal applicability of associated theoretical frameworks—‘the universal rights of man’, for example, but also the biblically-tinged, teleological apocalyptic undertones of the concept of the Anthropocene. For Yusoff, the contemporary historical moment demands a fundamentally new, composite starting place for perception, interpretation, action, and interrelation—an alternatively-rendered apocalypse—a radical ending of what has come before, one with the potential to incite transformation toward a different kind of reality. What Yusoff offers readers is a hint that, latent in the end of this world—a world characterized by violence on a global scale, expressed through colonialism and ecological and geological exploitation—there lie potentials for something else.
Neither here, nor elsewhere in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, does Yusoff go on to unpack at great length the nature of this alternative ‘end of the world’ that she suggests offers the opportunity for “an alternate geophysics of being.” Instead, she focuses on the inadvertent way that the framing and basis of both the Anthropocene, and the discipline of geology as a whole, are rooted in ideologies of white-dominance. These, she argues, have caused rampant destruction of myriad types, around the world. Yusoff writes: “As the Anthropocene signals alarm bells over human-planetary ends, the search is under way for new beginnings” (23). She writes scathingly of these alarm bells—alarm bells like the recent revelations about the inequities deeply embedded in society resulting from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic—implicit, but often ignored in theorization on the concept Anthropocene. According to Yusoff, the concept:
“Anthropocene … continues … the progressive narrative arc, which is also a narrative of the asymmetries of colonial possession (of subjects, land, resources) and indigenous and black dispossession. This ‘exchange’ is the directed colonial violence of forced eviction from land, enslavement on plantations, in rubber factories and mines, and the indirect violence of pathogens through forced contact and rape. Invasion instigates the disruption of ecological belonging and viable food economies and the introduction of famine and permanent malnutrition. It is the mutilation of land, personhood, spirituality, sexuality, and creativity” (30).
These asymmetries, violences, dispossessions, and mutilations are not merely harbingers of an immanent end, but are also precisely what must end: they are that which apocalypse can make—or cause individuals and societies to make—anew, that which “should be embraced, reworked, and reconstituted in terms of agency for the present, for the end of this world and the possibility of others, because the world is already turning to face the storm, writing its weather for the geology next time” (101).
Neither here, nor elsewhere in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, does Yusoff go on to unpack at great length the nature of this alternative ‘end of the world’ that she suggests offers the opportunity for “an alternate geophysics of being.” Instead, she focuses on the inadvertent way that the framing and basis of both the Anthropocene, and the discipline of geology as a whole, are rooted in ideologies of white-dominance. These, she argues, have caused rampant destruction of myriad types, around the world. Yusoff writes: “As the Anthropocene signals alarm bells over human-planetary ends, the search is under way for new beginnings” (23). She writes scathingly of these alarm bells—alarm bells like the recent revelations about the inequities deeply embedded in society resulting from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic—implicit, but often ignored in theorization on the concept Anthropocene. According to Yusoff, the concept:
“Anthropocene … continues … the progressive narrative arc, which is also a narrative of the asymmetries of colonial possession (of subjects, land, resources) and indigenous and black dispossession. This ‘exchange’ is the directed colonial violence of forced eviction from land, enslavement on plantations, in rubber factories and mines, and the indirect violence of pathogens through forced contact and rape. Invasion instigates the disruption of ecological belonging and viable food economies and the introduction of famine and permanent malnutrition. It is the mutilation of land, personhood, spirituality, sexuality, and creativity” (30).
These asymmetries, violences, dispossessions, and mutilations are not merely harbingers of an immanent end, but are also precisely what must end: they are that which apocalypse can make—or cause individuals and societies to make—anew, that which “should be embraced, reworked, and reconstituted in terms of agency for the present, for the end of this world and the possibility of others, because the world is already turning to face the storm, writing its weather for the geology next time” (101).
I shared the picture in the flattened, truncated, digital ‘social’ space so you could see. So you, silent, could understand what violence I’d absorbed, from which I’d tried to shield your child, and mine. This photo of neighbors—mostly white—organizing for self-defense received more likes than anything else I’d shared: not the murals, not the streams of protesters, not my children in the street shouting “justice.” I shared the picture to show you I was taking care of my own, and others’, and yours. I shared the picture to show I was trying in vain to be mother to the world, an extra in this movie, and yet, caring for the other-as-self: my children, yours.
Building a geology for the weather next time means responding to “the mutilation of land, personhood, spirituality, sexuality, and creativity,” as Yusoff puts it, and scholarship oriented in alignment desires to reclaim the ability to think in ways expansive and attentive enough to withstand and work with the tragedies and urgencies of this moment. As Yusoff’s list suggests—“personhood, spirituality, sexuality, and creativity”—under siege today are not only ecological phenomena, or public health, but also those parts of human life that can be loosely characterized as, or are deeply influenced by, the psychological, the internal: under siege today is the expansively-defined ‘mind’. Yusoff’s work then opens the opportunity for scholars to explore in greater depth the ways that “personhood, spirituality, sexuality, and creativity” are impacted by a world that must end, and how those facets of experience might be reimagined for a world to come.
I shared the picture to prove wrong the images of burning buildings and angry faces, multiplying exponentially across the internet for all the world to believe only rage prevailed. Rage there was, but it wasn’t the whole story. Instead the story was fractured, multiple, parts of it hidden, others revealing in their destructive force the potential of something else, for better or worse. You’ve almost led me to surrender the single pure idea I’ve held onto for years now, this belief I’ve had in the non-rational glimmer just past the rubble and the smoke. But I cling to it, at least to the end of these lines.
So I’ll repeat myself: if what happened in Minneapolis was an expression, a fractal of alchemical apocalypse, let me maintain the simple argument I’ve been cultivating for years: destruction is a cause of coming into being, a cause of another world born like humans in blood and feces and piss. Apocalypse like that reveals, too, the fantasy of distinctions between us: human and non-human, us and them, me and you.
In the morning, I returned to the burnt, changed streets again, not one but multiple in body, mind, story, text: my child, yours, my friend, my lover, myself, telling this story coming true, to you.
So I’ll repeat myself: if what happened in Minneapolis was an expression, a fractal of alchemical apocalypse, let me maintain the simple argument I’ve been cultivating for years: destruction is a cause of coming into being, a cause of another world born like humans in blood and feces and piss. Apocalypse like that reveals, too, the fantasy of distinctions between us: human and non-human, us and them, me and you.
In the morning, I returned to the burnt, changed streets again, not one but multiple in body, mind, story, text: my child, yours, my friend, my lover, myself, telling this story coming true, to you.
Nontraditional formats like this one are a part of the work of coming into being through destruction of those forms that no longer serve. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten argue for scholarship that does not continue to uphold or rely on these paradigms that have dominated, and wreaked destruction, for centuries. They uphold “the downlow low-down maroon community of the university ... the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong” (26).
In their introduction to The Undercommons, Jack Halberstam also evokes the point of entry for alchemical, apocalyptic scholarship, which intersects with what these scholars identify as the undercommons. Halberstam writes:
“If you want to know what the undercommons wants … what black people, indigenous people, queers and poor people want, what we (the ‘we’ who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this—we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls” (6).
This dismantling and tearing down of structures offers openings for forms of knowledge, scholarship, and art that work to “reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility,” or at least gesture toward these horizons. Such openings appeared, often fleetingly, in moments, encounters, and experiences through the COVID-19 pandemic and into the George Floyd protests and the uprising for Black lives of 2020. Though the final result has not been the sudden creation of a radically transformed world order, traces do linger: in community organizing, in greater awareness of colonialism’s lethal legacy, in the interior lives and intimate relationships of those who lived through this fractal of alchemical apocalypse. At the very least—as in experiences of love—attempts to dismantle a radically unjust and destructive system, and labor (of all kinds) that intends to build the foundation for “the geology next time,” begin to lay bare the falsity of boundaries presumed intact for centuries, especially those between the creative and the academic, the concrete and the abstract, the human and the animal, the other and the self, the mother and the child. The I and the you.
In their introduction to The Undercommons, Jack Halberstam also evokes the point of entry for alchemical, apocalyptic scholarship, which intersects with what these scholars identify as the undercommons. Halberstam writes:
“If you want to know what the undercommons wants … what black people, indigenous people, queers and poor people want, what we (the ‘we’ who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this—we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls” (6).
This dismantling and tearing down of structures offers openings for forms of knowledge, scholarship, and art that work to “reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility,” or at least gesture toward these horizons. Such openings appeared, often fleetingly, in moments, encounters, and experiences through the COVID-19 pandemic and into the George Floyd protests and the uprising for Black lives of 2020. Though the final result has not been the sudden creation of a radically transformed world order, traces do linger: in community organizing, in greater awareness of colonialism’s lethal legacy, in the interior lives and intimate relationships of those who lived through this fractal of alchemical apocalypse. At the very least—as in experiences of love—attempts to dismantle a radically unjust and destructive system, and labor (of all kinds) that intends to build the foundation for “the geology next time,” begin to lay bare the falsity of boundaries presumed intact for centuries, especially those between the creative and the academic, the concrete and the abstract, the human and the animal, the other and the self, the mother and the child. The I and the you.
References
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2007.
Badiou, Alain, and Giovanbattista Tusa. The End: A Conversation. Translated by Robin Mackay, Polity, 2019.
Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. The Second Coming. Polity, 2019.
Bruckner, Pascal. The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings. Translated by Steven Rendall, Polity, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)” Diacritics. vol. 14, no. 2, 1984, pp 20-31.
Estes, Nick. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Verso, 2019.
Gilmore, Timothy. “After the Apocalypse: Wildness as Preservative in a Time of Ecological Crisis.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 24, no. 3, 2017, pp. 389-413.
Hage, Ghassan. Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Polity, 2017.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Halberstam, Jack. “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons.” The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, edited by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Minor Compositions, 2013, pp. 2-12.
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso, 2017.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.
Heffernan, Teresa. Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Irigaray, Luce. “Women on the Market.” The Sex Which is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Byrne, Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 170-191
Jay-Z, and Kanye West. “No Church in the Wild.” Watch the Throne, 2011, Spotify,
https://open.spotify.com/track/3Osd3Yf8K73aj4ySn6LrvK?si=ETBBvdlSRYupPITiYar1jw.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.
Malabou, Catherine. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Polity, 2009.
McGowan, Todd, and Ryan Engley. “Competing Universalities.” Why Theory, 14 Jul. 2020, https://soundcloud.com/whytheory/competing-universalities
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology at the end of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf, 2015.
Noname, “Song 33.” Single, 2020. Apple Music.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W.W. Norton, 1995.
Rose, Jacqueline. Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. Farrar, Straux, and Giroux, 2018.
Savoy, Lauret. Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape. Counterpoint, 2015.
Tegmark, Max. Humanity 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Knopf, 2017.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Virno, Paolo. Déjà Vu and the End of History. Translated by David Broder, Verso, 2015.
Winnicott, Donald W. “Fear of Breakdown.” International Review of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 1, 1974, pp. 103-107.
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2007.
Badiou, Alain, and Giovanbattista Tusa. The End: A Conversation. Translated by Robin Mackay, Polity, 2019.
Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. The Second Coming. Polity, 2019.
Bruckner, Pascal. The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings. Translated by Steven Rendall, Polity, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)” Diacritics. vol. 14, no. 2, 1984, pp 20-31.
Estes, Nick. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Verso, 2019.
Gilmore, Timothy. “After the Apocalypse: Wildness as Preservative in a Time of Ecological Crisis.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 24, no. 3, 2017, pp. 389-413.
Hage, Ghassan. Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Polity, 2017.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Halberstam, Jack. “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons.” The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, edited by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Minor Compositions, 2013, pp. 2-12.
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso, 2017.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.
Heffernan, Teresa. Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Irigaray, Luce. “Women on the Market.” The Sex Which is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Byrne, Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 170-191
Jay-Z, and Kanye West. “No Church in the Wild.” Watch the Throne, 2011, Spotify,
https://open.spotify.com/track/3Osd3Yf8K73aj4ySn6LrvK?si=ETBBvdlSRYupPITiYar1jw.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.
Malabou, Catherine. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Polity, 2009.
McGowan, Todd, and Ryan Engley. “Competing Universalities.” Why Theory, 14 Jul. 2020, https://soundcloud.com/whytheory/competing-universalities
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology at the end of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf, 2015.
Noname, “Song 33.” Single, 2020. Apple Music.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W.W. Norton, 1995.
Rose, Jacqueline. Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. Farrar, Straux, and Giroux, 2018.
Savoy, Lauret. Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape. Counterpoint, 2015.
Tegmark, Max. Humanity 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Knopf, 2017.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Virno, Paolo. Déjà Vu and the End of History. Translated by David Broder, Verso, 2015.
Winnicott, Donald W. “Fear of Breakdown.” International Review of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 1, 1974, pp. 103-107.
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.