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©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... The City at the End of the World:

Eschatology and Ecology in Twentieth-Century Science Fiction and Architecture

A Dissertation Presented

Connor Matthew Pitetti

The Graduate School

in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

English

Stony Brook University

December 2016

Stony Brook University The Graduate School

Connor Matthew Pitetti

We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the

Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend

acceptance of this dissertation.

Dr. Adrienne Munich - Dissertation Advisor English, Art, and Cultural Analysis and Theory

Dr. Elizabeth Ann Kaplan - Chairperson of Defense English and Cultural Analysis and Theory

Dr. Stacey Olster English

Dr. Michael Rubenstein English

Dr. Matthew Taylor English and Comparative Literature The University of South Carolina at Chapel Hill

This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School

Charles Taber Dean of the Graduate School

Abstract of the Dissertation

The City at the End of the World:

Eschatology and Ecology in Twentieth Century Science Fiction and Architecture

Connor Matthew Pitetti

Doctor of Philosophy

English

Stony Brook University

2016

A basic tenet of environmentalist thought holds that how we live in the present has an impact on the possibility that an environmental disaster will take place in the future. This project explores a dynamic that works in the other direction, arguing that the stories we tell about future disasters help to shape environmentalist practices in the present. The analysis builds on readings of twentieth-century science fiction and the writings of modern and postmodern architects, archives that contain some of the most influential accounts of social and environmental futures produced in the last century. Both of these discourses seek to make futures visible, whether through imaginative description or through prescriptive plans for future construction projects; in doing so, both shape cultural understandings of the material world in and through which they imagine the future becoming manifest. This impact is often a result of the way a narrative frames its account of the future, and a given narrative can thus foster implicit ideas about environmentally responsible behavior that exceed and even directly contradict its explicit content. The project focuses on “end of the world” narratives as a limit case of speculative storytelling, distinguishing between “apocalyptic” stories in which disasters mark a rupture between radically different worlds and “postapocalyptic” stories in which disasters punctuate and inflect ongoing historical processes. Apocalyptic stories are popular among environmentalists, but the project demonstrates that this narrative mode is inherently anti-ecological; because they equate futurity with post-historical finality, apocalyptic narratives cannot acknowledge the complexity and dynamism of ecological relationships. The project argues that the open-ended framing of postapocalyptic narratives allows for more complex and ecologically sensitive accounts of humanity’s interaction with and dependence on nonhuman beings than are possible in apocalyptic texts, and that this mode of speculative storytelling has an important role to play in contemporary environmentalist discourse.

iii

For my mother

Contents

List of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction Two Green Cities: Eschatological Narrative and Ecological Thought in Science Fiction and Architecture 1

Chapter 1 The Nature of the End: Apocalypse and Postapocalypse as Modes of Speculative Narrative 46

Chapter 2 The Radiant City: Hugo Gernsback, Le Corbusier, and the Modern New Jerusalem 82

Chapter 3 History in the Future City: The Arcologies of Paolo Soleri and William Gibson 141

Chapter 4 Life in the Ruins: The Endless Worlds of Octavia Butler’s Parables and Detroit’s flower house 197

Coda The Tree of Heaven: A Postapocalyptic Parable 245

Bibliography 253

List of Figures

1. Universal Pictures, promotional poster for I am Legend 14

2. Frank Paul, "New York, 2660 A.D," illustration for Ralph 124C 41+ 86

3. “Dieu leur à prépare une cite,” image from En Avant 96

4. Le Corbusier, model of the Plan Voison 98

5. Gustave Doré, “St. John at Patmos” 109

6. Gustave Doré, “The Crowned Virgin: A Vision of John” 115

7. Frank Paul, “City of Tomorrow” 128

8. Photocollages by Superstudio. 1972 134

9. Paolo Soleri, “Comparative Densities” 152

10. Paolo Soleri, elevation, section, and plan views of various arcologies 154

11. Paolo Soleri, “Asteromo, elevation” 164

12. Paolo Soleri, “Ecumenopoly and Arcology” 166

13. Heather Saunders, photographs of the flower house 223

14. Andrew Moore, photographs from Detroit Disassembled 232

15. Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, “Michigan Central Station” 234

14. Heather Saunders, details of flower house installations 240

15. Heather Saunders, details of flower house installations 242

Acknowledgments

My most appreciative thanks are due first and foremost to Laura James, Adam Katz, Daniel Lee, Katherine Perko, Eileen Sperry, and Allison Tyndall, who read drafts of this manuscript at the grueling rate of seven pages a week for much longer than they would probably care to recall. Thanks are also due to Drs. Adrienne Munich, Stacey Olster, Michael Rubenstein, E. Ann Kaplan, and Matthew Taylor, who read my drafts at a more reasonable pace but were equally judicious in their advice and tireless in their support.

A great many thanks and much love to my parents, Moira Hogan and Matthew Pitetti, whose passion for the written word put my feet on this path and whose support have kept them there.

In a less direct fashion, these pages reflect the conversation and council of the many teachers, students, and colleagues I have had the good fortune to know at Greenwood High School, in the Architecture and English Departments at Harrisburg Area Community College, in the English Department and the Writing Center at the City College of New York, in the English and CAT Departments and at the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, in the seminars and lectures of the School of Criticism and Theory, and in the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik at Philipps- Universität Marburg.

Many apologies to the friends and family members who saw too little of me during the writing process, and as many thanks to Johanna Heil, who saw entirely too much of me and put up with all of my compositional foibles and dramas.

Work on this project was made possible by generous fellowship support from the Graduate School at Stony Brook, the New York Council for the Humanities, and, in the final year, from the American Council for Learned Societies. The writing was accomplished primarily in the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York City and in Marburg an der Lahn.

One of the animating convictions of this project is that it is important to think ecologically, in terms of the extended networks of relation that make our lives possible. From such a perspective the task of acknowledgement mounts asymptotically and impossibly—my debts are endless, and my capacity to recall them all to limited. If I have forgotten to mention you, please know that it is not because I do not value what you have given me.

vii

Introduction

Two Green Cities: Eschatological Narrative and Ecological Thought in Science Fiction and Architecture

“[T]here is no more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps’ . . . a possible surely and certainly possible, accessible in advance, would be a poor possible, a futureless possible.” – Jacques Derrida

“The key difference . . . is a definition of what it is to be the part of something else.” – Bruno Latour

Narrative and the Possibility of Environmental Thought

It is a commonplace of contemporary environmentalist rhetoric that in an era of global crises it is important to take a long view of future history. In his 2009 climate change exposé Storms of My Grandchildren, for example, climatologist James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard

Institute for Space Studies, references new data on atmospheric carbon in explaining the professional pivot from detached climate science to politically invested climate activism that his book represents, but he credits a shift in the way he thinks about the future that was triggered by the birth of his first grandchild as the catalyst for the transformation. “In 2001 I was more sanguine about the climate situation,” he writes, but “I . . . changed over the past eight years, especially after my wife, Anniek, and I had our first grandchildren. . . . If it hadn’t been for my grandchildren and my knowledge of what they would face, I would have stayed focused on the pure science, and not persisted in pointing out its relevance to policy.”1 The shift in Hansen’s attitudes and actions is the

1 James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), xii. 1

result of a change in his use of narrative to engage with the future; the abstract story of global climate trends triggers his interest in “pure science,” but the more personalized story of his family’s future pushes him to engage with politics. Hansen defends the policy proposals put forth in the book by advocating a similar change in his readers’ perspective, and variations on the formula “for the sake of our children and grandchildren” appear throughout the book.2

Anyone familiar with the state of American environmental policy might conclude that convincing voters and politicians to adopt a multi-generational perspective is a sufficiently tall order, but for the paleoclimatoligst Curt Stager thinking about climate change in terms of generations or even centuries of future time represents a crippling myopia; in his 2011 book Deep

Future, he advocates a perspective that covers, as his subtitle announces, “The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth.” Paleoeclimatologists study the history of climate by reconstructing ancient climatic conditions from data preserved in layers of stone, ice, and deep-water sediments, and

Stager’s account of future history consists of speculative scenarios based on comparisons of present-day warming trends with the record contained in these stratified archives. Central to this narrative is the prediction that the earth will experience a period of intense global cooling in about

50,000 years; Stager argues that the resulting ice age would be far more disastrous for the human civilizations of the distant future than the worst possible impacts of present warming will be in the near future. With this future ice age as part of the narrative of climate change, Stager is able to pose strange questions. He asks whether contemporary warming might not one day seem to have been a boon, citing models that suggest current warming may have already raised atmospheric temperatures sufficiently for residual heat to stave off the next ice age, and he explores the idea that renewable energy sources should be adopted not only in order to reduce carbon emissions but

2 Ibid, 174.

to preserve fossil fuels against a potential future emergency in which humanity would need to burn them to stave off global cooling. “Time perspectives long enough to include ice age prevention are not just the stuff of mind games,” Stager insists, “but potentially important aspects of rational planning for our climatic future.”3 In much the same way that Hansen credits the turn towards the near future prompted by the birth of his grandchildren with transforming his attitudes about climate change, Stager’s book is built around the proposition that a “deep” historical view enables environmental politics that would be impossible to formulate from a less expansive historical perspective.

Storms of my Grandchildren and Deep Future both draw attention to what might be thought of as the narrative methodology of environmentalism, an issue that is at the heart of this dissertation. Narrative facilitates environmental activism by serving as a vehicle for the articulation or popularization of environmentalist ideas, but narrative practices also have the effect of determining the form that environmental thought and politics take. By changing the terms on which they speculate about the future—that is, by changing the way in which they use narrative to engage with the future—Hansen and Stager open up new avenues of inquiry and activism in the present.

When Hansen begins to see the future not as a series of abstract tomorrows but as the period of time that his grandchildren will live through, his understanding of the relationship between his work as a climate scientist and the broader social public shifts. When Stager pushes the temporal boundaries of the environmental imagination out through the next hundred millennia, he brings to light new environmental questions and investments. Whether or not one finds the arguments these writers make convincing, their work demonstrates that the way in which one constructs narratives about the future determines the kinds of political thought and action one has access to in the

3 Curt Stager, Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 14.

present. For Stager and Hansen, the important point to make about the role of narrative in environmental thinking is that restricting the speculative imagination to considerations of the immediate future obscures the scope of environmental crises and the range of possible responses, while a longer view casts present-day events in a more complex and ethically pressing light and reveals new possibilities for ameliorative or adaptive response.

One of the projects of this dissertation is to extend and generalize this argument. The short- and long-term extrapolative predictions explored in Stager’s book are not the only ways of using narrative to imaginatively engage with the future; neither are the techno-scientific and personalized familial narratives that Hansen juxtaposes the only modalities in which futurist narrative might operate. Neither, for that matter, is the question of whether to privilege one’s own well-being or that of one’s children and grandchildren the only aspect of environmental thought that is influenced by narrative praxis. Indeed, both Storms of My Grandchildren and Deep Future implicitly suggest that narrative has a more pervasive and fundamental influence on environmentalism in the sense that narrative practices determine the terms on which environmental thinking proceeds, and do not simply delimit the scope of the speculative terrain in which that thought operates. For Hansen, thinking about the future as the story of his grandchildren’s lives rather than as a story about fluctuating atmospheric carbon changes his understanding of the social function of science and the relationship between academic, governmental, and public institutions. When Hansen changes the way in which he uses narrative to speculate about the future, he redraws the conceptual boundaries between science and politics as delimited realms of knowledge production and practical action.

Stager draws attention to narrative’s influence on even more fundamental categories when he says that researchers “who combine the biological and geological sciences” in assembling the deep historical narratives of paleoclimatology “become used to thinking in broad terms that include both

the living and nonliving worlds.”4 Here again narrative practice determines disciplinary boundaries, but it also destabilizes the fundamental conceptual distinction between animate and inanimate matter, and thus between life and death. The narrative practices of academic paleoecology and deep futurist speculation produce a flattened ontology, decomposing at least one of the hierarchized binaries through which Western thought has traditionally organized the world and allowing Stager to step outside of inherited systems of value and interpretation. Rather than simply revealing or obscuring specific environmental futures, different kinds of narratives set the parameters of what it is possible for these climate scientists to think about the environment and how they are able to think it.

Narrative practices influence environmental thought by shaping the way we approach the question of humanity’s interactions with the nonhuman world in the broadest possible sense. The

German biologist Ernst Haeckle coined the word Ökologie from the Greek roots οἶκος (“house”) and –λογία (“study of”) in the mid-nineteenth century to describe “the body of knowledge concerning . . . the total relations of the animal to its inorganic and organic environment.”5 Haeckle argued that the various interactions and dependencies that connect a given organism to the other organisms that it competes or cooperates with and to the material substances, forces, and spaces that it occupies and with which it interacts constitute its “conditions of existence.”6 To think ecologically is to consider an organism in terms of these conditions of existence; it is thus to see organisms not as discreet units or subjects but as part of their environmental context, part of the

4 Ibid, 2.

5 Quoted in Edward Kormondy, “Introduction,” in Readings in Ecology, ed. Edward Kormondy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1965), xiii.

6 Quoted in R.C. Stauffer, “Haeckel, Darwin and Ecology,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 32.2 (1957): 138–144 (140).

world that they occupy. By fostering specific understandings of the basic conceptual categories through which we structure and interpret the world, narrative practices determine the conditions of possibility of such thought—our understanding of an organism’s relations to its inorganic environment will necessarily be shaped by our understanding of what the labels “living” and

“nonliving” describe. Narrative determines the way in which we think about humanity’s relations to its environment by setting the terms on which we understand what the world is and what it means to be a part of it. Tell different kinds of stories about the world and, on an experiential level, the world becomes a different kind of place. As the narratives through which we process and interpret the world change, our experience of that world also changes, and thus our ideas about what constitutes an ideal or responsible relationship to that world will change as well. I am interested here specifically in the way that different narratives set up specific understandings of two basic categories of experience, time and space, and thus of humanity’s relationship to the nonhuman elements of the environments in and through which we experience and create historical change.

In this dissertation I explore the impact on environmental thinking of two broadly defined modes of speculative narrative that I refer to as the apocalyptic and the postapocalyptic. Both can be understood as attempts to take the long view of future history, albeit in very different ways. The distinction between them depends not on how far into the future a given narrative perspective extends but on the way in which different narratives define the future as a moment of historical time related to and derived from the present and past. In apocalyptic narratives the future is understood as the end of the present, as a new world that replaces what has come before—in their most spectacular form, apocalyptic narratives treat the future as the end of history itself. These narratives might be said to take the longest view of future history possible, looking past Stager’s

thousandth century A.D. to describe the resolution of the processes of change in time into their final and definitive product. The apocalyptic future is accessible in advance in the sense that it is a definite future, a messianic or at least logical inevitability towards which history moves in an uninterruptible developmental progress; apocalyptic narratives mediate the experience of time by revealing the relationship of events in the present to this known future. Postapocalyptic narratives, in contrast, treat the future as a field of potential that opens out in ever-retreating horizons from the leading edge of the present. This future is necessarily unknowable because it is indeterminate, but it becomes newly accessible with every passing moment as indeterminate potential resolves into some definite reality and a new indeterminacy opens up beyond it. Rather than a product towards which history drives, the postapocalyptic future is a vacuum that draws historical reality stumblingly forward into an endless series of new arrangements. There is thus a sense in which postapocalyptic narratives take an even longer view of history than apocalyptic accounts of the end of the world, in that they look beyond the end and find not resolution but the possibility of further change. In using the words apocalyptic and postapocalyptic to define these two approaches to the question of futurity, I am departing from the more familiar use of these words to identify the point on a timeline relative to an “end” at which the events of a given story are imagined as taking place. In Chapter 1, “Stories of the End,” I expand upon the reasoning behind my usage and contextualize it through a survey of the various ways in which these words are used in scholarly and popular discourse.

Built around incompatible ideas concerning the nature of futurity and historical change, apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narratives foster very different understandings of the way in which historical actors interact with the material world through which they create and experience that change, and they thus underwrite two very different models of environmental politics. My

discussion of the impact of these two modes of narrative on environmental thinking is focused through readings of images of cities. The historians Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan assign a special place to the city among the tropes of speculative narrative: to describe the city of the future, they write, “is to describe the future in its most complete and telling terms.”7 Literary cities are often read as metaphorical representations of social or political ideals.8 More straightforwardly, however, they are images of humanity standing in a certain relationship to the spaces it occupies, the materials it makes use of in order to do so, and the nonhuman entities with which it interacts in the process. Projected into the future as visions of a city yet to be built or as stories of evolving urban fabrics, such accounts also become images of humanity standing in a certain relationship to time and the processes of change in time. Literary cities are, in a word, ecological, vehicles for the expression of ideas about the way the human organism relates to its environment; indeed, the word ecology invites this connection in its metonymic use of the oikos, the home, to suggest the extended networks of relation that tie an organism to its environment. Environmentalism is often understood in inherently anti-urban terms, as a discourse of the rural, or even more radically of the wilderness, but to the extent that it is concerned with the impact human activities have on the nonhuman world and with imagining less destructive forms of human dwelling environmentalism is necessarily an urban discourse. The city is the human habitat par excellence; by some counts, more than half the world’s human population now lives in cities.9 But the precise number of city dwellers is actually

7 Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future (Baltimore: John’s Hopkin’s University Press, 1984), 35.

8 Thus the gridded street plan and the communal buildings of Thomas More's city of Utopia is often read as a reflection of the equality and communality that are characteristic of Utopian society, and the centralized organization of Plato's Kallipolis as a reflection of the stratified and functionally hierarchized society of that city.

9 “Globally, more people live in urban areas than in rural areas, with 54 per cent of the world’s population residing in urban areas in 2014. In 1950, 30 per cent of the world’s population was urban, and by 2050, 66 per cent of the world’s population is projected to be urban” (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2014 Revision World Urbanization Prospects: Highlights (Vienna: United Nations, 2014), 1). 8

beside the point—even those members of the species who live outside of urban centers live in ways that are dictated by urban rhythms and structures. A modern farm is an organ of the city, not its radical antithesis, and the idea of the untouched wilderness is a fundamentally urban one, the greener grass on the other side spied from the cosmopolite’s high-rise window. To understand humanity as part of the world it inhabits one must understand the city.

The apocalyptic and postapocalyptic visions of the city examined in this dissertation are drawn for the most part from works of science fiction and the writings of modern architects. This pairing is not as unlikely or arbitrary as it may at first appear—although they work in very different idioms and under the strictures of very different disciplinary conventions, both science fiction writers and the authors of speculative or polemical architectural treatises are engaged in the practice of extrapolating from present-day social and technological conditions in the attempt to imagine possible futures. The work of these writers thus forms not only two distinctly important archives of twentieth-century speculative narrative, but two closely related archives. Speculative architectural writings are a kind of techno-fiction, in the same way that the predictions made by climate modelers and translated into a more accessible idiom in books like Deep Future and The

Storms of My Grandchildren are techno-narratives: attempts to use different kinds of story-telling practices to grasp and make sense of the future of humanity and of the world as a whole. The visions of the urban future articulated in science fiction and architectural writings are an important part of the twentieth-century speculative tradition, and specifically of the history of twentieth- century thought on the subject of the urban environment and the nature of urban dwelling. Together they continue to exercise considerable influence on the ideas about ecological connectivity and humanity’s place in the world that underwrite environmental thinking today.

The texts examined in this dissertation include fictional narratives by literary authors that

take place in futuristic urban settings, and speculative treatises by professional designers and architects that describe the futures that would result from the implementation of a given building program. These accounts of imaginary and unbuilt cities do not simply express ideas about how the built environment might or should be restructured, but also provide an interpretive lens through which existing human communities come to understand their own occupation of the world; Sally

Westwood and John Williams have argued that texts that describe a city are “actively constitutive of the city” and that “novels and writing ‘produce’ the city for readers,” as do the “alternative narrations generated by the practices of urban planning and the dreams of city elders.”10 The stories a culture tells about the cities it dreams of having shape its understanding of the way in which it lives and interacts with the world in the cities that it has. Even when the built landscapes conjured up in literary fiction, speculative design, and the dreams of city elders never find realization in built products, the very dreaming of these cities is a narrative practice that shapes lived realities.11

Heidegger argued that to dwell, to be in the world, consists largely in the way in which one thinks about dwelling—science fiction and architectural speculation are two of the most important sources of contemporary ideas about human dwelling.12

A number of cities appear in the following chapters, including multiple versions of New

York, Paris, Los Angeles, and Detroit. In another sense, however, there are only two cities under

10 Sallie Westwood and John Williams, “Introduction: Imagining Cities” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory, eds. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (London: Routledge, 1997), 14, 13. Lucy Hewitt and Stephen Graham have recently reiterated this point, writing about the importance of taking “speculative or science fiction” seriously “as a source of critical commentary and as a mode of knowledge” about cities and city life “that can exist in close reciprocity with non-fictional work” (“Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature,” Urban Studies 52.5 (April 2015): 923-937 (923)).

11 My approach to the work of the architects studied here is similar to that adopted by Jerome Klinkowitz in Frank Lloyd Wright and his Manner of Thought (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), which Klinkowitz says is “not a book about architecture . . . [but] a book about Frank Lloyd Wright, with an emphasis on how his manner of thought contributes to American culture” (ix).

12 Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, tran. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 141-160. 10

discussion here, two paradigmatic images of the city through which various real urban locations are filtered and interpreted, and through which their futures and that of humanity more generally are imagined. These two cities, the apocalyptic and postapocalyptic cities of tomorrow, offer different views not only on the nature of humanity’s relationship to the nonhuman world but of what it means to be linked ecologically to an environment. In exploring different accounts of these two cities, this dissertation aims to outline the history of a specific thread in twentieth-century discourses of human ecology.

The paradigmatic apocalyptic city is the New Jerusalem, and specifically the description of that city that appears in the final chapters of the Book of Revelation as a vision of the urban paradise in which the faithful will live forever after the end of the world. In the twenty-first chapter of Revelation an angel, one of the seven who have poured out the wrath of God onto the fallen world, carries John “in the spirit” to the top of a high mountain and shows him “that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.”13 Earlier chapters describe the signs that presage the end of the world: the loosing and final chastisement of the

Enemy, the second coming of the messiah as a warrior faithful and true, the great battle between good and evil, and the judgment of the living and the dead. Here, in the description of the New

Jerusalem, the apocalyptic writer speaks of the paradisiacal future for which these tumultuous events have prepared the way, the light at the end of the long, dark tunnel of providential history.

A key feature of the description of the New Jerusalem that forms the happy ending of

Revelation is the idea that this city forms a single composite landscape in which “urban” and

13 Revelation 21:10-11. Unless otherwise specified, all Biblical quotations have been taken from the King James Version.

“natural” elements have been harmoniously integrated. Alongside the images of foundations carved from precious stones, gates hollowed from gigantic pearls, and streets paved with gold, we read of the “pure river of water of life, clear as crystal” that flows from the throne of God and through the city, and that “the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”14 These images of the city embracing the river and the trees are part of a larger prophecy of the unity that will be characteristic of the new world; in the lines that follow John is told that “the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in” the city, and that those who live there “shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.”15 Long hidden from those who suffer under the curse of Adam's sin, the name and face of the deity will be revealed at the end of time, and in the New Jerusalem the faithful will dwell at one with the

Lord and with the Lamb. In a similar fashion, the river and tree of life growing within and forming an integral part of the city suggest that the faithful will live as one with the nonhuman material world. The promise is not simply of coexistence but of a thoroughly holistic synthesis through which distinctions like urban/natural and human/nonhuman are overcome and the creation is made whole; in his analysis of apocalyptic narrative, Northrop Frye characterized the future imagined in

Revelation and other apocalyptic Christian texts as one in which the world forms “an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human than to being inanimate.”16 As the eternal living body of the New Jerusalem, the city acts in Revelation as the mechanism of cosmic synthesis, a human structure which contains and harmonizes all of reality.

14 Ibid, 22:1-2.

15 Ibid, 22:3-4.

16 Northrop Frye, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” in The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 131-242 (119).

Similar images of a landscape combining urban and natural elements also appear frequently in contemporary postapocalyptic fiction. Promotional materials for Francis Lawrence’s 2007

Hollywood thriller I Am Legend, for example, feature images of New York City in which the metropolis has been rendered unfamiliar through the addition of rampant growths of greenery. In one poster, the actor Will Smith stands in a field of corn that has grown up “in the midst of the street” in midtown Manhattan, with the Time Warner building and other landmarks in the background. In the opening sequence of the film Smith’s character hunts deer in a field of long grass in Times Square and encounters a pride of lions on Broadway. Like the verses describing the green New Jerusalem in Revelation, this imagery destabilizes categorical distinctions between urban and rural and between “human” and “nonhuman” systems more broadly, but it does so to very different effect. Where the scriptural passages describe a synthesis of street, river, and trees into a single harmonious whole, the I Am Legend poster is a document of conflict; the buildings in the background are crumbling, and the pavement beneath Smith’s feat is cracked and broken. The poster depicts a collision of the built and the grown, and suggests both the erosion of the urban fabric and the deformation of flora striving to accommodate itself to an uncooperative environment of steel and concrete. The tag line printed along the top of the poster reads “the last man on earth is not alone,” and while in the context of the narrative as a whole the reference is to the monstrous antagonists that Smith’s character fends off in the film, in the context of the poster it is the plants eclipsing the city that fill the role of the threatening other haunting the last man. Surreal and incongruous, disrupting the familiar outlines of one of the most photographed cities in the world, the cornfield looms ominously around Smith, whose grim expression underscores his character’s embattled confrontation with a world of intruding alterity.

1- Promotional poster for I am Legend, 2007 14

Like the Book of Revelation, I Am Legend is a speculative account of traumatic future events that transform the way in which humanity dwells upon the earth. The film is an adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel of the same name, and the central conceit of both works is that the release of an artificial plague kills off the bulk of humanity and transforms most of the survivors into violent, apparently mindless creatures (called “vampires” in the novel and simply “the infected” in the film).17 Smith plays Robert Neville, the legend of the title: the last member of a vanished race, immune to the disease and prepared by military training to hold his own against the infected. Living in the ruins of Manhattan with only a dog and his fantasies for company, Neville tries to reverse the effects of the virus by experimenting on the infected. Because the narrative is focused on Neville, for much of the film the impression is that I am Legend is a story about the extinction of humanity—Neville sees the infected as the fading remnants of the shattered old world, and says that they have “no higher brain function” and that their “social devolution seems complete.”18 But the situation is more complicated than this, as Neville is obliged to acknowledge when the infected begin setting elaborate mechanical traps for him and showing affection for one another. This blurring of the exclusionary binary through which he structures his interactions with the infected also destabilizes the audience’s sense of the historical significance of the events of the film; what appeared at first to be the end of humanity is revealed instead to be a moment of social and biological transformation that is taking place within human history. It is ultimately suggested that Neville is a legend not as the heroic last bastion of the old civilization but as a monstrous impediment to the civilization the infected are struggling to build for themselves. This emerging

17 I am Legend, dir. Francis Lawrence (Warner Brothers, 2007); Richard Matheson, I am Legend (New York: Gold Medal Books, 1954). Matheson’s novel served as the basis for two other films, The Last Man on Earth in 1964 and The Omega Man in 1971.

18 I am Legend 0:39:53

civilization does not represent a new world that is better than (or even radically distinct from) the one it has replaced, as does Revelation’s utopian New Jerusalem; in the novel the new society reproduces both the faults and the accomplishments of the previous society, and Lawrence places a similar emphasis on the imperfections and continuities with the past that define the post-disaster future in his film. In the final shot of the director’s cut, Neville flees the city with two other recently discovered human survivors (another crack in the façade of his messianic narrative), in the process carefully skirting a pack of lions tearing at the corpse of a deer. History has not come to an end, the lions have not lain down with the lambs, and the clear suggestion is that the future will continue to be shaped by the conflicts and tensions that have defined the narrative’s present.19 This is not a future in which the creation has been united in a single universal body, human or otherwise, but one in which a human subject with limited agency struggles to survive alongside of and in competition with a variety of other forces and actors. The city becomes one of the arenas in which this task of dwelling as an ongoing negotiation with others must be carried out.

Revelation and I am Legend do not simply imagine different futures—these texts imagine the future differently. Their speculative accounts of green cities differ in terms of the details of the situations described and the affective energies these descriptions foster—that is, in content and tone—but more significantly they differ in how each teaches its readers to interpret historical events. In Revelation, as in other Judeo-Christian apocalyptic texts, the world of the present is rigorously distinguished from an idealized future that will eventually replace and redeem it. These two states are represented allegorically by two cities, Babylon and the New Jerusalem. The New

York City of I am Legend is neither of these cities, and stands outside the conceptual binaries of

19 These ideas are obscured in the theatrical cut of the film, which ends with Neville's successful development of a cure and the promise that the human race will be restored.

the apocalyptic imagination. It has not achieved the final unity of the New Jerusalem, but neither does it prefigure a unity-to-come through its own absolute abjection, as does the apocalyptic

Babylon. Blurring the apocalyptic distinctions between present and future and between unity and disunity, it is a site of fertility and potential in which utopian moments of connection emerge and collapse without resolving into the clarity of the teleological apocalyptic paradigm.

In Narrative and Time Paul Ricoeur theorizes narrative as a mechanism or discursive tool through which humanity makes sense of the experience of temporality, arguing that “time [only] becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative.”20 Frank Kermode has shown in detail in The Sense of an Ending how the apocalyptic historical narrative of Christianity is representative of a whole class of narratives that accomplish this mediating function by situating temporal experiences within the frame of a closed historical structure.21 Apocalyptic history begins with the creation of the world as described in the Book of Genesis and ends with destruction and the arrival of a new world as described in the Book of Revelation. By allowing readers to fit the events taking place during their own particular moment in time into this grand frame, apocalyptic narratives channel the raw experience of time into the patterns of a humanly comprehensible historical progression that moves developmentally from the inaugural moment of genesis to the final moment of the apocalyptic end. This incorporation of time into discourse through narrative is, Ricoeur argues, “a transcultural form of necessity,” without which the experience of time cannot be understood or assigned any kind of value or significance.22 But there are many forms that the

20 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 52, italics original.

21 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

22 Ricoeur, 52.

assimilation of temporal experience into discourse and culture can take, and one critique of Ricoeur

(a critique that is even more applicable to Kermode) takes issue with the assumption that narrative mediation necessarily implies fitting the lived experience of time into the linear, developmental framework of chronological narrative.23

Elana Gomel has argued cogently against equating narrative mediation with chronology or the linear cause-effect logics of teleological historical progression, arguing that “narrative” should be understood as a blanket term covering a wide range of discursive technologies for mediating

“between physical time and cultural time.”24 The closed framework of apocalyptic history bounded that Kermode describes is just one example of what Gomel calls a “timeshape,” a paradigmatic narrative pattern that is structured by and that articulates a specific understanding of temporality.

Stories of cyclical or recursive mythic time, for example, are based on a timeshape distinct from the progressive teleology that underwrites the apocalyptic narrative of Christian providential history, and these stories thus render temporal experience sensible in a different fashion than the

Biblical book does. My own suggestion here is that I am Legend is representative of yet another timeshape, a postapocalyptic narrative paradigm that proceeds by evoking apocalyptic logics and then revealing continuities between past and future that destabilize the end-focused apocalyptic model of history.

In formulating the idea of the timeshape Gomel evokes the theorist Mikhail Bahktin, who coined the term “chronotope” to describe literary “techniques . . . for reflecting and artistically processing” the “aspects of time and space . . . available in a given historical stage of human

23 See, for example, Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

24 Elana Gomel, Postmodern Science Fiction and the Temporal Imagination (London: Continuum International, 2010), 7, italics original.

development.”25 Chronotopes and timeshapes are perhaps best understood in terms of what

Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling,” assemblages of commonly shared ideas, prejudices, and habits of thought (regarding, in this case, the nature of time) that both shape and are shaped by cultural production and discursive praxis.26 Gomel and Bahktin develop the terminology of timeshape and chronotope in order to distinguish between culturally and historically specific forms of narrative mediation of time—different kinds of discursive mechanisms through which, in Ricoeur’s terms, the experience of time “becomes human” in a specific fashion. One of the implications of these narratological theories is thus that narrative practices that draw on different chronotopes or timeshapes create different conditions of possibility for thought and action—including environmentalist thought and action—by encouraging different understandings of the nature of temporal experience.

The apocalyptic narrative of Revelation emphasizes causality, chronological clarity, and a progressive linear development leading from the past into the future. The text looks past the destructive events described in its early chapters to reveal not only the immediate consequences of those events but the final outcome of all historical events. In this way, the narrative domesticates the chaotic experience of change in time by fitting that dynamic process into a closed frame, bracketed by a clearly marked beginning and end. As the perfect and final result of history, this future is a static eternity, and it is characterized in large part by the fact that it is radically distinct from the imperfect and changeable present and past that it has redeemed and replaced. Revelation’s future is that which exists after history, after the processes of change in time have come to an end.

25 Mikhail Bahktin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84-258 (84).

26 See in particular Williams’s Culture and Society 1780-1950 ([1958] New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and The Long Revolution (London: Chatu & Windus, 1961).

There is “no more death” in this future, and the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem need “no candle, neither light of the sun” for “there shall be no night there.”27 These verses promise freedom from mortality and the threatening uncertainty represented by the darkness of night, but they also suggest that the inhabitants of the future will have escaped the impermanence of change in time suggested by the cycles of life and death and of day and night. The future in Revelation is a product, the result of historical processes that have achieved a final resolution and given way to eternity.

The text presents itself, in turn, as a window onto this post-historical future.

In contrast to the clarity of historical vision fostered by Revelation, the narrative of I am

Legend emphasizes contingency, drawing attention to the ambiguous and complex web of consequences that proliferate in the wake of every historical event. Where Revelation gives structure to the temporal world and provides the historical subject in the present with a clearly defined field of historical causality in which to act, the postapocalyptic narrative of I am Legend treats action as a precondition to the emergence of any kind of comprehensible structure from historical events. It points towards an indeterminate zone of potential that is opened up by action but will only take on definite shape as a consequence of further actions, which will in turn open up a further indefinite potentiality and the opportunity for further history-shaping actions, and so on ad infinitum. This future is dynamic and open, a transformative extension of the present and past forward in time, rather than a post-historical product that replaces them; the historical processes that have led to the period of time narrated in the film are still ongoing at its end, and their further outcome cannot be determined. The narrative surveys events that set up actions yet to come, a deeper future that the narrative gestures towards and invites its audiences to think about, but which it does not and cannot explicitly describe. Rather than helping the reader locate him- or

27 Revelation 21:4, 22:5. 20

herself in the context of an all-encompassing historical structure, I am Legend mediates the experience of time by orienting readers towards the future as an indeterminate zone of potential and inviting them to see themselves as participants in an open-ended process of change.

Mediating temporal experience in these two different ways, the apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narrative modes of which Revelation and I am Legend are representative also necessarily suggest different understandings of humanity’s relationship to the material world in and through which time is experienced. Bakhtin says as much when he defines the chronotope as a literary expression of “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships.”28

Bahktin is explicit about the fact that he derives his terminology from modern physics, and that the word chronotope is meant to evoke the “space-time” of Einsteinian relativity. He says that this allusion to Einstein’s ideas about the unity of time and space is “not quite a metaphor,” and although his own study of the chronotopes of the novel focuses on issues of time, he is quite clear about the fact that he also understands narrative as a mechanism for the assimilation of the raw experience of space and material reality into cultural understanding.29 Making human sense out of the experience of time, narrative also mediates and makes sense out of the experience of space; it makes space human, to paraphrase Ricoeur, by channeling the experience of the material world into discursive structures or frames in which it becomes imbued with specific cultural meaning.

The idea of the chronotope thus suggests that space, like time, can only be humanly meaningful to the extent that it has been grasped through narrative.30 According to Bahktin, our experience of

28 Bahktin, 84.

29 Ibid.

30 Henri Lefebvre makes precisely this argument in The Production of Space (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) when he says that “every mode of production . . . produces a space” (31) and that all humanly experienced spaces are products of social processes. The “notion of a space which is at first empty, but is later filled by a social life” (190), Lefebvre argues, is itself a mediated “representation of space” that a society creates by narrating its own origins, and not a glimpse of unmediated physical reality (190, italics original). 21

space—and thus our experience of material things, of presences manifested and extended in space—is dependent upon narrative. This is not a wild postmodern assertion that nothing real exists and that narrative somehow conjures material reality up from the void; “the fact that we need glasses does not mean there is nothing to see,” as Gomel puts it.31 Material reality exists, just as time exists, but the human experience of that reality is always filtered through the stories we tell about it.

In the closed, post-historical future of Revelation the world forms a transcendent whole greater than the sum of its parts. Difference has been overcome, not only in the limited sense that the other who is different has been overcome or incorporated to the self, but in the absolute sense that the possibility of difference and division of any kind has been exorcised—the underlying or fundamental identity of all elements of the creation has been revealed. Different readings of the text will arrive at different and perhaps incompatible conclusions regarding what the harmoniously integrated world of this post-historical future would look like and how it might be produced, but the promise offered in the vision of the green New Jerusalem is that humanity can and will achieve a state in which it exists at one with the rest of the creation. The narrative thus suggests that some ideal arrangement of the world’s forces and beings exists, or, at the very least, that the idea of such a holistic arrangement can be profitably speculated about. It suggests that human beings in the present should strive to produce this arrangement and that environmentally responsible human dwelling consists in trying to establish a balanced state of harmony in which the human subject and its environmental context are perfectly and sustainably integrated. To be a part of the world, according to the narrative framing of Revelation, is to be one with the world. In this vision of

31 Gomel, 7.

holistic unity, space and all of material reality become extensions of the human subject.

The ongoing processes of change that continue to shape and reshape the open-ended historical future in I Am Legend, in contrast, involve the interaction of a variety of different human and nonhuman beings and forces. These entities are interconnected in complexly entangled webs of reciprocal influence, but the text offers no perspective from which they can be seen as the constitutive elements of a holistic unity. Rather, it draws attention to the ways in which the nature of any given connection is a result of the differences and conflicts that separate entities from one another. To be a part of the world here means to be in contact with that which is other than the self, to act and to be acted upon. Where the human subject in Revelation moves with the rest of reality towards a moment of synthesis and redemption, in I Am Legend that subject participates in an unsettled and shifting world in which moments of balance emerge and collapse without finding any final and sustainable arrangement. Offering no future product to be worked towards, I Am

Legend instead delivers a challenge, suggesting that to survive both the human characters and the nonhuman others with which they struggle need to negotiate the contingent linkages that bind them all to a world of which they are part but that they are neither identical to nor in control of.

It is clear that the possibility that the world as we know it will someday come to an end is to some extent dependent on the choices we make about how to live in the present—choices regarding the use of fossil fuels, to take one contentious example. These readings of the apocalyptic

New Jerusalem and the postapocalyptic New York of I Am Legend suggest that the inverse is also true: that the stories we tell about the end of the world have an influence on the way in which we think we should live in the present. The chronotopes that underwrite speculative narratives enable different kinds of thought and action in the present by mediating the experience of history and physical reality in specific ways, and these eschatological narratives thus act as interventions into

ecological thought. The Book of Revelation and I am Legend, and the two broad categories of apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narrative of which they are exemplary, set up different understandings of the human animal’s relationship to its temporal and material environment, and thus necessarily encourage different ideas about how humanity should best go about living in that environment.

Eschatology and Ecology

Many readers have sought and found support for environmentalist convictions in the Book of Revelation and other apocalyptic religious texts.32 Revelation contains vivid images of the destruction of the natural world; in its eighth chapter, for example, an angelic herald sounds the first of seven trumpets announcing the end of the world and “there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.”33 Such passages provide a rich stock of imagery for environmental activists; Al Gore, for example, has alluded to the apocalyptic book in interviews, saying that “large downpours, floods, mudslides, the deeper and longer droughts, rising sea levels from the melting ice, [and] forest fires” have made climate change something “that people can see and feel viscerally now. Every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.”34

The environmental catastrophes described in Revelation have often been read as evidence of

32 For a survey of 20th-century environmentalist readings of Revelation and other books of the New Testament see Connor Pitetti, “Responding to Religious Oppositions to Environmentalism,” The Oxford Journal of Church and State 57.4 (Autumn 2014). 684-707. For a more general history of the role of Christian religion in the development of modern environmentalism, see Mark Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

33 Revelation 8:7.

34 Quoted in “Al Gore on Climate Talks: ‘We’re going to win this,’” CBS News November 11 2015.

human sin or misbehavior, and Biblical scholars have found indictments of environmentally destructive behavior and calls for the adoption of more environmentally conscious practices in a number of individual passages.35 Simon Woodman, for example, interprets the verses in Revelation

4 in which “four beasts” with the features of a lion, a calf, an eagle, and a man “give glory and honour and thanks to him that sat on the throne” as an illustration of the unity humanity will achieve with nonhuman nature after repudiating environmentally exploitative attitudes and behaviors.36 Similarly, Mark Bredin reads the episode of the “two witnesses” in Revelation 11 as an allegorical warning about the consequences of environmental destruction; the witnesses are given the power to torment sinful humanity with droughts and plagues, and Bredin reads the episode as an inspiration to begin “today’s work of environmental preservation as initiating now what God will later complete.”37 In addition to such readings of individual passages, the holistic world-view that Revelation’s narrative encourages has been cited as an important foundation for environmentally conscious attitudes and behaviors. In these broader readings, Revelation’s value to environmental thinking lies less in the details of its imagery than in the way that the apocalyptic chronotope mediates temporal and material experience.

In 1995, for example, the World Wildlife Fund and the Eastern Orthodox Church collaborated in organizing a conference on Revelation and the Environment. Speakers included theologians and religious leaders as well as environmental scientists and activists; the diverse

35 For an example of a reading of Revelation that sees the text as identifying human sin as the cause of environmental destruction, see James Jeffrey Cate’s “How Green was John’s World? Ecology and Revelation” in Essays on Revelation, ed. Gerald L. Stevens (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2015).

36 Revelation 4:9. Simon Woodman, “Can the Book of Revelation Be a Gospel for the Environment?” in Bible and Justice: Ancient Texts, Modern Challenges, ed. Matthew Coomber (London: Equinox Publishing, 2011). See also the ninth chapter of Woodman’s The Book of Revelation (London: SCM Press, 2008).

37 Mark Bredin, “Ecological Crisis and Plagues (Revelation 11:6),” Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture 39.1 (February 2009). 26-38 (26).

approaches to issues of climate change and environmental degradation adopted by these speakers were united by the idea that the ancient text is a useful tool for thinking through environmental problems in the present. In his opening remarks Patriarch Bartholomew I cited the verses describing the river and tree of life in the New Jerusalem quoted above to argue that Revelation’s vision of a harmoniously unified creation is the basis of its value for environmental thought. The

Patriarch’s remarks explicitly equated environmentally responsible thought with the idea of holistic ecological union and stressed the importance of eschatological narrative in fostering these ideas.38 Other speakers echoed and expanded upon this argument. The Biblical scholar and church leader John Zizioulas, who served then and continues to serve now as the Metropolitan Bishop of

Pergamon, argued explicitly that the importance of Revelation to environmentalism lies in the fact that the text encourages a specific understanding of the way in which material relationships are determined by shared experiences of historical change. According to the Metropolitan Bishop,

Revelation establishes that the “ultimate significance of history” involves “all peoples of the world.” This unity of purpose and destiny implies a unity of being, as well; in the Bishop’s reading,

Revelation teaches that the significance of history involves “the survival and wellbeing of the entire creation,” considered as a whole or singular unit.39 These unities are both suggested and ensured by the apocalyptic revelation that history moves inevitably toward end of the world; it is because all things move together towards the apocalyptic end that all things are one. The

Metropolitan thus made an explicit claim for the importance of the narrative chronotope of apocalypse as a tool in environmentalist praxis; he argued that this narrative is uniquely capable

38 For more on the ecological writings of the “green patriarch,” see Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew, ed. John Chryssavigs (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing, 2003).

39 John Zizioulas, “The Book of Revelation and the Natural Environment,” in Revelation and the Environment AD 95-1995, eds. Sarah Hobson and Jane Lubenenco (Hackensack: World Scientific Publishing, 1997), 17-21 (18, 17).

of teaching readers to see the world in a particular fashion that is productive of environmentally conscious thought and behavior.

Through the narrative links it establishes between the present inhabited by its readers and the future it purports to describe, the Book of Revelation makes certain kinds of action possible in the present: “the purpose of prophecy is not simply to satisfy foreknowledge,” writes the

Metropolitan, but “to make us act, by changing our attitudes and behavior.”40 In this sense it is not the trees in the city or the human and nonhuman animals worshiping together before the divine throne that make Revelation significant to environmentalist discourse, but the narrative mode within and through which those details are presented. For the Metropolitan and others,

Revelation’s importance to environmental thinking is a direct product of the holistic worldview fostered by the eschatological narrative of apocalyptic history. The “end of the world” described in the religious apocalyptic text becomes a deeply hopeful and positive story not because

Revelation predicts a happy ending on the other side of the environmental horrors it describes, but because the narrative mediates temporal and material experience in such a way as to make it possible to see the holistic unity of the creation and adopt that unity as the ground for action in the present. There is a sense in which the Metropolitan’s environmental politics are based on the drive to resolve ecology into eschatology—he equates environmental responsibility with the attempt to identify and then produce the ideal and therefore final arrangement of the relations that link humanity to its organic and inorganic environment.

The specifically theological path through Biblical exegesis that the Metropolitan takes to arrive at this position is not one that would appeal to all contemporary environmentalists, many of whom are committedly secular. But the idea that the world forms a holistically interconnected

40 Ibid 19.

whole and that environmentally responsible behavior consists in working to achieve harmony amongst the human and nonhuman organs of this whole is one with a broad appeal that is often posited as a necessary foundation for environmentalist thinking and politics. Visions of holistic unities of one kind or another are ubiquitous in environmentalist discourse. The pioneering naturalist John Muir gave voice to a basic tenet of the modern environmentalist movement when he noted wonderingly in My First Summer in the Sierra that “[w]hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”41 Muir has intimations here not merely of interconnectivity but of universal identity; hitched to “everything else in the Universe,” each object or entity becomes a facet of the universal whole. “Nature is one,” Muir said, “and to me the greatest delight of observation and study is to discover new unities in this all-embracing and eternal harmony.”42 Environmentalists continue to affirm Muir’s holistic view; in Deep

Ecology, for example, Bill Devall and George Sessions argue that “the basic ecological principle

[is] that everything is connected to everything else.”43 In After Nature, Jedediah Purdy identifies four views of humanity’s relationship to nonhuman nature that have, at one point or another, provided the conceptual foundation for American environmental politics. Purdy refers to these four paradigms as the providential, utilitarian, romantic, and ecological ideas of nature.44 For the providentialist, nonhuman nature is a potential Garden, an unfinished creation that God has tasked humanity with improving; for the utilitarian, it is a collection of resources to be exploited; for the romantic, it is a bastion of pure being and a repository of value, by turns sublime and beautiful;

41 John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 211.

42 Quoted in French Strother, “Three Days with John Muir,” The World’s Work 17.5 (March 1909), 11355-6.

43 Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Layton: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985), 60.

44 Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

and for the ecologist, it is a seamless continuum to which humanity belongs.45 Each view articulates the relationship of humanity to nonhuman beings and forces differently, but each posits the possibility of an ideal relationship in which the human subject would arrange itself relative to its garden, resources, primal other, or extended ecological self in such a way as to constitute a harmonious and united whole. The environmental politics that derive from these discourses are mutually exclusive, but each gives voice to the basic holistic idea that to be part of the world is to be linked in some way to everything else in the world. Although they differ in terms of their specific investments and the way those investments manifest in concrete practices, Purdy’s four paradigms are alike in that they all identify environmental responsibility with the attempt to bring humanity into a stable and harmonious relationship with nonhumanity. As such, these different views of human ecology are all, at least potentially, equally well served by the chronotope of apocalypse and the understanding of temporal and spatial reality it fosters.

There is something necessarily holistic about any eschatological narrative—to describe the end of the world, or even to speculate about the possibility of the end, is to posit an event with universal impact, an event that affects all beings in a similar fashion and thus assembles the apparently disparate and variegated cosmos into a singular whole. In turn, there is always some eschatological element to holistic doctrines, as the idea of the unity of all things always points logically towards the idea of an ideal and therefore final arrangement of the constituent elements of the universal being. The chronotope of apocalypse and the holistic understanding of ecology are in some sense bound up in one another. Revelation thus become the model for a certain kind of narrative that encourages and supports a certain kind of environmentalist politics, a politics based

45 Although Purdy refers specifically to the modern holistic view of the mid-twentieth century as the “ecological” understanding of nature, all four of these discourses are ecological in Haeckel’s sense, in that each offers a specific interpretation of how relations to the environment form the human animal’s conditions of existence. 29

on the idea of the holistic unity of all things and the imperative to bring that unity into a sustainably harmonious arrangement. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is perhaps the most famous example of a non-religious narrative that encourages commitment to environmental action through the deployment of the apocalyptic chronotope and the holistic worldview that chronotope fosters. 46

Although Carson’s vision of a poisoned and sterile future inverts Revelation’s optimistic investment in a paradise to come, Silent Spring relies on the same narrative logics of progression through historical tribulations towards definitive historical products that underwrite the religious book, and it deploys this eschatological narrative in an attempt to encourage environmentally conscious changes in present-day behaviors and attitudes through the same appeal to holistic unity made in the Metropolitan’s reading of the Biblical text.

Carson uses eschatological narrative to issue a warning, identifying a threat to the cosmic being in the form of chemical pollution. In the readings that make up the first half of this dissertation, I look at narratives that hew more closely to the model of Revelation and use eschatological narrative in a basically optimistic fashion to illustrate the harmonious future that would result from a full integration of human and nonhuman realities. Specifically, I focus on a popular modern apocalyptic narrative in which the future is imagined as an idealized city where modern science and technology have been used to bring the human animal into a state of perfect harmony with its environment. The practice of imagining an ideal arrangement of humanity’s social and environmental relations in the form of an ideal city is an ancient and perennially popular one. The modern urban imagination is unique not in its enthusiasm for such utopian images or the number of them that were produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but for the way in which the practice of imagining and describing ideal cities came to take on a markedly and

46 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

explicitly apocalyptic cast during this period. Modernist fiction writers and professional architects were fascinated by stories of an architectural Parousia in which the reconstruction of existing cities would produce a messianic break in history and redeem both humanity and the wider nonhuman world. This story, which I refer to as the “radiant city narrative,” and the particular ideas about history, materiality, and environmentalist politics that it fosters form the subject of the first half of this dissertation.

In the second chapter, “The Radiant City: A Modern Vision of the New Jerusalem,” I focus on two influential accounts of such a city: Hugo Gernsback’s path-breaking 1911 science fiction novel Ralph 124C 41+ and a series of essays from the mid-1920s by the Swiss architect Le

Corbusier on the subject of modern urban planning and the future of Paris. Gernsback was an important figure in the history of science fiction and contributed immensely to shaping speculative fiction in the twentieth century; through his work as an author and publisher and through his collaborations with the artist Paul Frank, Gernsback’s vision of the future as a technologized and holistic ecological paradise became a ubiquitous part of the modern futurist imagination. Le

Corbusier was an equally influential figure, whose ideas about how architecture could be used to produce a perfect fit between human society and human environment continue to have a powerful impact on contemporary ideas about human dwelling. Comparing the work of these two writers to religious narratives of the New Jerusalem, I show that they are best understood as authors of secularized versions of the redemptive eschatological urban narrative of Revelation. I show how the apocalyptic chronotope shapes these modern visionaries’ understanding of historical time and physical space, and by extension their understanding of the relationship of the city and its human inhabitants to the material world. Ultimately, I argue, Gernsback’s and Le Corbusier’s commitment to the ideal of a holistically unified post-historical world leads them to advocate for a form of

human dwelling in which environmental responsibility means the attempt to universalize human subjectivity and bring the entire world into the optimized framework of the ideal city.

In Chapter 3, “The Arcologies of Paolo Soleri and William Gibson,” I examine one of the most spectacular later twentieth-century derivations of the radiant city tradition that Gernsback and Le Corbusier helped to develop and popularize. Starting in the early 1960s, the American architect Paolo Soleri began to publish designs for huge, world-straddling city machines that he called “arcologies,” a portmanteau of architecture and ecology. Soleri argued that the construction of arcologies, which exploit industrial technology to create ultra-dense, three-dimensional human habitats, would reconcile human and nonhuman nature and prevent environmental degradation.

Moreover, he proposed that these buildings would eventually help humanity achieve its destiny by becoming the consciousness of a unified cosmic “superorganism.” Soleri was a New Age visionary to the core, but his ideas have, in more modest form, exercised a considerable influence over the development of sustainable design and “green” architecture and the commitment to visions of holistic cosmic union in environmentalist circles.

Despite the ubiquity of holistic visions and apocalyptic narratives in environmentalist writing, however, I argue that discourses of cosmic holism are inherently reductive and obscure the true complexity of the connections through which humanity relates to its environment. In

Revelation, John is taken by an angel to the top of a tall mountain from which he can survey the unified creation represented by the New Jerusalem, and there is a sense in which all holistic discourses assume access to the Archimedean perspective that this mountain top provides. To describe cosmic unity is to assume the discursive authority to speak from outside of what one is describing as all inclusive; only from a vantage allowing a comprehensive view of that totality could one confirm that nothing exceeds or stands outside of the limits of the cosmic unity. There

is a sense, then, in which discourses of holistic unity can never be entirely successful in dismantling conceptual hierarchies, including the human/nonhuman binary against which visions of environmental holism are so often deployed. Denying that humanity enjoys a privileged distinction from nonhuman nature by asserting the perfect identity of human and nonhuman beings involves a reformulation of human exceptionality that recasts humanity as the privileged element capable of describing, and thus of defining and controlling, the seamless whole of which it is a part. On an implicit if not explicit level human exceptionality returns through the back door—a return that is clearly indicated by Frye’s description of the universal body of the apocalyptic imagination as being “more human than nonhuman.” In my discussion of the radiant city, I show that despite their overtly environmentalist convictions, the narratives that Gernsback, Le Corbusier, and Soleri tell encourage the idea that nonhuman nature is a featureless stage upon which the events of human history take place. Imagining ecological harmony in the form of an idealized metropolis that is at once self-contained and universal, these writers propose to solve environmental crises by erasing the environment. They harmonize human and nonhuman nature only by subjugating the nonhuman elements of their holistically unified worlds to absolute human control. The holism of their visions is a result of the abolition of difference—there can be no ecological discord, they propose, in a state of perfect identity and interiority. This push towards absolute presence and enclosure is, I argue, a denial of the complexly mediated position of the human organism in its environment; actively hostile to complexity, these optimistic apocalyptic narratives seek to erase all that cannot be subordinated to the conceptual structure of the human city.

The suggestion that discourses making claims to universal explanatory power or that propose models of universal inclusivity are inherently repressive and reductive is a familiar one, characteristic of post-structuralist thought in general. But, as McKenzie Wark has pointed out, such

ideas “hid in the worldview of . . . ecology” long after they had become subject to sustained critique in other cultural domains.47 This has begun to change. Rejecting the holistic idea that everything is connected to everything expressed by Muir and others, a growing number of contemporary environmentalist thinkers are reformulating ecological ideas about organisms’ relationship to their environment in terms of non-identical connectivity, arguing that, while everything is connected to something, nothing is connected to everything. Such critics dismiss cosmic unity as a self-serving human fantasy that obscures the true complexity of ecological systems, of the way in which these systems change over time, and of humanity’s participation in the systems and their transformations. As Purdy puts it, an acknowledgement of “[p]aradox, partiality, and the mixed-up character of everything” is increasingly displacing “the grasp at wholeness” as a dominant idea in contemporary understandings of ecology.48 Borrowing an apt phrase from Donna Haraway, many contemporary ecological theorists could be described as increasingly “wary of holism, but needy of connection.”49

One of the critics leading the charge to disengage ecology from holism is Timothy Morton, who has argued that “[i]t is better for environmentalism to think in terms of collectivism rather than holism.”50 In Morton’s view “ecological thought” involves that dual recognition that while

“[n]othing exists by itself,” “[t]otal interconnectedness isn’t holistic.”51 Interconnection cannot be holistic because the very idea of connection implies the existence of entities that are at least

47 McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (New York: Verso, 2015), xii.

48 Purdy, 227.

49 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), 151.

50 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 102, italics original.

51 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) ,15, 40.

relatively or provisionally distinguishable from one another; the idea of cosmic unity, in contrast, implies universal identity, and thus acts to obscure difference and connection. For Morton the popularity of holism is one of the primary impediments to a clear understanding of humanity’s participation in natural systems.52 Rather than talk about nature, a word he argues is inextricably bound up in ideas of holism, Morton speaks of “the mesh,” a web of interacting entities that exert reciprocal influence over one another and thus determine the parameters of one another’s existence.53 In the mesh no one actor can ever be identified as the source of any action, which must instead be understood as a result of the interaction of multiple overlapping and conflicting intentional and non-intentional actions originating in various non-independent but non-identical sources. “Thinking interdependence involves thinking difference,” he argues, and this “means confronting the fact that all beings are related to each other negatively and differentially.”54 To understand the complex tangles of ecological interconnection that bind humanity to the world we inhabit and participate in shaping, Morton argues, it is necessary to remain cognizant of the ways in which the various elements of that world are also marked by difference. This involves, on the one hand, paying more attention to the individual elements of the interconnected world than is possible in a holistic worldview focused on universal being, but it also demands a worldview that is “bigger” than the universal being of holism. “We may,” Morton writes, “need to think bigger than totality itself, if totality means something closed, something we can be sure of, something that

52 For Morton it is irrelevant whether the proposed transcendent whole be described in terms of a personified deity, the Metropolitan’s somewhat more abstract “ultimate meaning,” or with the secular label Nature; Morton actually identifies the idea of nature as the version of the idea of cosmic holism that most obscures ecological interconnectivity in contemporary environmental thought, and thus his call for an “ecology without nature” (Ecology without Nature, 2).

53 Morton, The Ecological Thought 28-33.

54 Ibid, 39.

remains the same.”55 Morton’s ecological thought thus depends on precisely the idea of a future that remains eternally open to ongoing change that I have suggested is articulated in postapocalyptic narrative.

Morton’s work is part of a broad turn in the contemporary humanities towards investigations into the nature of materiality that aim to achieve broader and less anthropocentric accounts of reality than the human sciences have traditionally been able to offer. Another major figure in this “new materialist” turn is the political philosopher Jane Bennett. In Vibrant Matter, her influential study of the “political ecology of things,” Bennett identifies an “ecological sensibility” that is very similar to Morton’s ecological thought. Bennett defines ecological sensibility as the “insinuation that deep down everything is connected,” but is careful to clarify that she “posits neither a smooth harmony of parts nor a diversity unified by a common spirit . . .

[but rather] a turbulent, immanent field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve, and disintegrate.”56 As in Morton’s writings on the mesh, in Vibrant Matter conflict and tension are understood as mechanisms of ecological connectivity that link non-identical entities. Bennett sees difference and separation as characteristics of the dynamic and discontinuous field of action that is the world, rather than as disruptions of the potentially harmonious universal being desired or aspired to in holistic discourses. She draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari in describing ecological connection in terms of “assemblages,” dynamic systems of interdependent subjects, materials, behaviors, and concepts.57 The idea of the world as a field of action in which

55 Ibid, 5.

56 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. xi.

57 Ibid, 20-24. Deleuze and Guattari develop the idea of the assemblage in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 1988). In an interview with Catherine Clément, Deleuze glossed the concept as follows: “an assemblage is first and foremost what keeps very heterogeneous elements together: e.g. a sound, a gesture, a position, etc., both natural and artificial elements. The problem is one of ‘consistency’ or ‘coherence,’ and it prior to the problem of behavior. How do things take on consistency? How do they cohere? Even among very 36

assemblages “collide, congeal, evolve, and disintegrate” suggests a form of environmentalist praxis that is very different from the drive to create a sustainable harmony between human and nonhuman nature evoked by the Metropolitan Bishop Zizioulas, Muir, or Carson. For Bennett, to occupy the world responsibly means to be conscious of the ways in which one participates in the dynamic processes through which ecological relationships are continually being revised and renegotiated, an acceptance of open-ended instability that necessarily precludes the attempt to bring humanity into an ideal and stabilized relationship with nonhuman nature. Rather, Bennett argues that “the task is to engage more strategically with a trenchant materiality that is us as it vies with us in agentic assemblages.”58 Like Morton’s ecology with nature, Bennett’s vibrant materialism also identifies an open and dynamic future as one of the conceptual prerequisites of environmentally responsible praxis.

A particularly influential account of non-holistic interconnectivity arises out of actor- network theory, an idea associated primarily with the field of science studies and the work of Bruno

Latour. Actor network theory has been described as “a semiotics of materiality,” a generalized application to the non-linguistic world of the insight that meaning in language arises from the relationships between words rather than from the inherent qualities of words.59 Proponents of actor-network theory maintain that the identity or specificity of a given entity can only be

different things, an intensive continuity can be found” (“Eight Years Later: 1980 Interview,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 175-180 (179)). See also Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006).

58 Ibid, 111.

59 John Law, “After ANT: Complexity, Naming, and Topology” in Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 1-15 (4, italics original). For semiotics as a theory of language, see Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Perry Meisel and Huan Saussy, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

understood in terms of its relationships to other entities. Actor-network theory thus emphasizes both the entangled interconnectivity of things and the constitutive role of difference in the development of identity—things are what they are only to the extent that they are different from other things. Latour refers to the entities involved in the mutually influential relations of the actor- network as “actants,” a deliberately capacious term that refers to anything “that acts or to which activity is granted by others.”60 Every “entity that modifies another entity” is an actant, and, given the reciprocity of influence implied by the semiotic logics of actor-network theory, the entity that has been modified is also an actant.61 Actants can thus be distinguished from the more familiar agential subject by the fact that their actions need not derive from intention, will, or even consciousness. Originally developed as a way of explaining how knowledge production in the sciences proceeds by way of the interaction of social and material networks, Latour’s semiotic materialist approach has been taken up in other contexts, and has proved particularly useful in specifically environmentalist critiques. Bennett, for example, draws on the idea of the actant to pose the question of how patterns of consumption might change if waste disposal was understood not in terms of human subjects and the passive materials of “litter, rubbish, [and] trash,” but as an encounter between two mutually influential actants, human beings and “an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter” that is capable of “modifying” or acting on humanity in various ways (e.g., by leaching poisons into the topsoil or breaking down into small pieces that find their way back into the food chain).62

In his more recent work Latour has turned to explicitly ecological concerns, taking up

60 Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47.4 (1996): 369-81 (372).

61 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 2004), 237.

62 Bennett, viii.

James Lovelock’s controversial “Gaia hypothesis” as a focal point for describing an explicitly environmentalist vision of entangled but non-identical actants. Lovelock’s famous (or infamous) hypothesis, first developed in the late 1970s, proposes that the Earth is best understood as “a planet- sized entity . . . involving the . . . biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life.”63 The idea is that biological and non-biological processes are mutually influential, locked into a feedback loop in which living things are shaped by environments but also shape their environments to suit themselves, and that living and non-living systems should thus be understood as elements of a larger composite system. The Gaia hypothesis has been eagerly embraced by environmentalists and roundly criticized by much of the scientific community; both its adherents and its detractors tend to read it in explicitly holistic terms, arguing that the language of “totality” and optimization that Lovelock uses points to the idea of Gaia as a deity or superorganism, a

“mother Nature” figure that contains and synthesizes all things.64 But Latour argues that this is a misreading of Lovelock. In a series of recent talks, including the 2013 Gifford Lectures he delivered at the University of Edinburgh, Latour has argued that the “planet-sized entity” that

Lovelock describes consists of a non-continuous and dynamically unstable actor network in which living beings and nonliving environmental forces interact with one another as mutually influential actants rather than as the harmoniously wedded organs of a single universal body.65 For Latour,

63 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 10.

64 Morton reads Gaia in this way in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), dismissing the idea of “a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts” as a “Gaian whimsy” (183).

65 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: A New Inquiry into Natural Religion (The Gifford Lectures 2013, Edinburgh, February 2013). Among other talks Latour has given on Gaia and ecology, see “How to Make Sure Gaia is not a God of Totality?” (at The Thousand Names of Gaia, Rio de Janeiro, September 2014) and “Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Art and Politics” (at the French Institute, London, November 2011).

Gaia becomes a name for the dynamic object of study “bigger than totality” that Morton argues ecological thought must focus on.

The project of collapsing rigid and hierarchized human/nonhuman binaries is as important to these thinkers as it is to advocates of holistic environmentalist visions of harmonious coexistence, but the effect that the dismantling of these categories has is very different in the two discourses. The difference involves, as Latour has argued, the issue of what it means for the human subject to be part of something larger than itself. The holistic idea eliminates difference and centralizes historical agency; rather than being the privilege of uniquely active human subjects who stand separate from and rule over a passive nonhuman nature, agency becomes the unified prerogative of the singular world-being. In contrast, the accounts of differentiated interconnectivity cited above multiply difference and diffuse sources of agency into ever more complex and particularized collocations of interacting forces and beings. To think ecologically in this fashion is to dismantle hierarchized human/nonhuman binaries without flattening or homogenizing reality.

These new ecological discourses recognize both the limits of human agency—the fact that humanity does not control the world—and the extent of that agency—the fact that human beings are capable of exerting a great deal of potentially destructive influence over the various actants with which it interacts. These critics thus arrive at a very different answer to the question of what environmentally responsible dwelling involves than do the advocates of holistic environmental unity. As Purdy puts it, neither warnings of “ecological apocalypse nor the appeal to ecological harmony [are] really plausible in a mixed-up, fallen world where pristineness and pollution, ecological connection and technological alienation, are blended and are matters of degree.”66

Morton’s mesh, Bennett’s assemblages of vibrant matter, and Latour’s networked Gaia all suggest

66 Purdy, 226.

something at once more dynamic and more limited than the attempt to achieve sustainable harmony between human and nonhuman nature that has long been the standard model of environmentalist activism and environmentally responsible dwelling. These critics instead insist on the necessity of making and continually revising choices about how humanity will interact with the ever-changing environmental contexts it inhabits.

The postapocalyptic chronotope that underwrites narratives such as I am Legend encourages precisely this view of the world as ontologically complex and temporally open-ended, and postapocalyptic narratives thus have an important role to play in the development of such an environmental politics of negotiation. In much the same way that apocalyptic narratives like

Revelation mediate the experience of time and space in ways that encourage readers to see the world as a self-identical and unified whole of which humanity is a part, postapocalyptic narratives encourage readers to see human beings as one of many interconnected but non-identical actants whose overlapping and conflicting actions contribute to the evolving shape of a dynamic and only partially coherent assemblage. Focusing on that which survives through the supposedly terminal event of human extinction, such narratives shift the focus away from the human subject—if the historical narrative does not end, then the human protagonist of that narrative, distinguished in apocalyptic discourse either by the privileged position it is to occupy within the holistic unity or by its privileged ability to describe that unity, loses its centrality. Such narratives dismantle human/nonhuman binaries without erasing differences or homogenizing differentiated systems, instead emphasizing both connection and the differential gap that makes connection possible.

Precisely because the future they imagine remains open to further developments, postapocalyptic narratives prompt engagement with the future as a field of possibility occupied by others and subject to adaptive and transformative orderings and re-orderings. Postapocalyptic narratives thus

prompt non-holistic ecological thinking in much the same way that environmentalists like the

Metropolitan embrace apocalyptic narratives as a tool for fostering holistic thinking.

In the third chapter of this dissertation, I compare Soleri’s apocalyptic account of the future of human dwelling with the fiction of William Gibson, and specifically with the vision of a polluted, chaotic urban future outlined in the three novels of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Gibson’s postapocalyptic novels can, I show, be read as a sustained critique of the apocalyptic narratives of modern architecture. These novels engage critically with the “radiant city” narrative, making explicit reference to both Gernsback and Le Corbusier. Filling his fictional cities with the structures the radiant city authors proposed could be used to bring the human and nonhuman worlds into perfect coherence, Gibson subverts the apocalyptic potential these writers attached to their designs by exposing their modern New Jerusalem to the vagaries of history. Gibson focuses this critique primarily on Soleri and the idea of arcology; in effect, he rewrites Soleri’s apocalyptic narrative in an open-ended postapocalyptic mode. Where the architect’s narrative describes a closed, linear history and idealizes the unity of universal being, Gibson’s version stresses the continuity of the present and the future, the open-ended nature of history, and the interconnected discontinuity of matter. Insisting that the innovations in design through which Soleri proposed to bring history to an end must themselves change and evolve once they leave the drawing board and enter the world of temporal and material reality, Gibson re-historicizes the apocalyptic city and the apocalyptic future. In doing so, he creates an opportunity for ecologically sensitive thought by demonstrating that social and nonhuman others will necessarily find a place, however marginal, in the future city.

His work emphasizes the new ecological insight that to live responsibly in a world of difference one must find ways to acknowledge and negotiate the presence of others that are marked by an irreconcilable difference from the self.

In the fourth chapter, “Life Among the Ruins: Making Meaning in an Endless World,” I look at two postapocalyptic accounts of future American cities, one fictional and one architectural:

Octavia Butler's two Parable novels, both published in the mid-1980s, and a contemporary work of architectural installation art in Detroit known as the flower house. These works offer visions of what the negotiation of a contingent and historical city might involve, and articulate some of the benefits to be derived from understanding the city as an arena within which humanity finds ways to live with and through nonhuman presences, rather than as the apocalyptic mechanism humanity uses to dominate and control those presences. Both treat the city as a landscape in which dislocated social and infrastructural networks interact and produce a series of temporary systems of urban structure without ever fully resolving into a new order or collapsing into ruin. Remaining open to change in threatening and productive ways, these cities are not specific built environments but collections of processes through which networks and constellations of resources are mobilized in response to specific contingent conditions. In her Parable novels Butler challenges the idea that an urban population is defined as such by the structures it inhabits, and redefines city life as a way of responding to different and evolving contexts rather than as a context-specific way of life. Butler detaches the idea of the city from the monumental built structures with which it has traditionally been associated, producing a more flexible and portable version of modern communal dwelling practices that are meant to evolve through rather than resist historical change, and she shows that narrative is a central component of creating social coherence in the absence of a stable political or built environment. The flower house project deploys ruined houses in Detroit as loci for utopian speculation, using perishable natural and architectural materials to transform domestic ruins into fleeting works of installation art, which it then cannibalizes and recycles into raw materials, some of which go to reconstruction charities. This is a real-world example of what Butler models in

fictional narrative, a dynamic practice of human engagement with environments composed of both built and natural elements. Concentrating on the present as a state of transition between the past and an unknowable future, Butler’s novels and the flower house offer compelling examples of what environmentally responsible dwelling practices might look like when fully cognizant of both the complexity of the ecologically networked historical world humanity inhabits and the limits of our ability to control that world.

Felix Guatarri argues that responding to environmental crises requires not only new “laws, decrees, and bureaucratic programmes” but “new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetics and new analytic practices regarding the formation of the unconscious.”67 Morton agrees, arguing that “the form of the ecological thought is at least as important as its content. It’s not simply a matter of what you’re thinking about. It’s also a matter of how you think it.”68 So does Bennett: “the ecological problem is as much a matter of culture- and psyche-formation as it is of watershed management and air quality protection.”69 Climate change, habitat destruction, food and water shortages, deforestation, mass extinctions—these and other pressing crises demand a change in the way we act, but they also demand that we change the ways in which we think and talk and tell stories. They demand, among other things, a new chronotope, a new narrative technology of temporal and material mediation that will encourage a more sensitive understanding of humanity’s relationship to and role in our organic and inorganic environment, as much they demand new physical technologies of energy production and new social technologies of resource distribution. The readings of literary and

67 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The Athalone Press, 2000), 51.

68 Morton, The Ecological Thought 4.

69 Bennett, 114.

architectural texts in this dissertation demonstrate that postapocalyptic narrative has the potential to be the new narrative form of the new ecology.

Chapter 1

The Nature of the End: Apocalypse and Postapocalypse as Modes of Speculative Narrative

“[The] apocalyptic imagination may finally be defined in terms of its philosophical preoccupation with that moment of juxtaposition and consequent transformation when an old world of mind discovers a believable new world of mind, which either nullifies and destroys the old system entirely or . . . makes it part of a larger design.” —David Ketterer

“If the ‘end’ has traditionally secured a sense of order, meaning, originality, and autonomy to the narrative as it progresses from start to finish, what is at stake in a world that no longer offers up narratives with conclusive endings?” — Teresa Heffernan

In this chapter I distinguish between two broad categories of eschatological narrative. Some end of the world narratives organize history into clearly differentiated periods or epochs; describing an event that will bring the present to a close and inaugurate the future as a new world, these stories encourage readers to understand history as a single, coherent process, a steady movement forward in time defined by a series of sharp transitions or ends. Other narratives describe survivals through catastrophic events in ways that make clean before/after distinctions impossible, drawing attention to the open indeterminacy of a future that is constantly in the process of emerging from the present. I argue here that these two modes of futurist narrative are best understood as “apocalyptic” and “postapocalyptic,” respectively. This distinction turns on narrative form and the assumptions about the nature of history and futurity that determine that form, rather than on the content of a given narrative’s imagined future or the chronology of its plot. Distinguishing between eschatological narratives in this fashion is useful in that it draws

attention to the fact that the way one thinks and talks about the future has an impact on one’s understanding of the historical significance of the present and thus on one’s ideas about what it means to behave in a historically responsible manner. It suggests, in other words, that the form of a futurist narrative has an impact on political thought and praxis.

David Brin’s 1985 post-nuclear-war novel The Postman offers useful illustrations of both apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narrative modes.70 On one level, the novel is a parable about progressive and libertarian American politics. Brin’s hero, Gordon Krantz, believes in cooperative social effort and helps isolated survivor communities build and maintain a postal system; his villains, a group called the Holnists, reject any rule beyond survival of the fittest and assert their social dominance through a campaign of rape, slavery, and brutalization. But the conflict between

Krantz and the Holnists also raises more abstract questions about the way in which narratives about the future are used to create the conditions of possibility of political action in the present; Brin uses the familiar science fiction trope of survivors rebuilding after a civilization-shattering nuclear war to explore different ways of thinking about history and futurity. Both groups of characters see themselves occupying a future defined by the inaugural event of the war, and both assume responsibility for determining the shape of that future, but they disagree about the historical significance of the war and thus understand the relationship of their future to the pre-war past in different ways.

Brin’s villains make sense of the experience of war by telling themselves a story about the end of the world. The Holnists take their name and doctrine from a pre-war demagogue who dismissed modern American society as a ploy to trick strong men into supporting the weak; arguing that this foundational injustice could only be addressed through a fresh start on the project of

70 David Brin, The Postman (New York: Bantam, 1985).

civilization, Holn called on his followers to dismantle modern society and build something new on the tabula rasa thus prepared. Holn’s doctrine both explains the war—as the anticipated clearing away of the old world that makes room for the new—and provides the Holnists with a rubric for distinguishing between acts that facilitate the transition to the new world and those that impede it.71 Moreover, the idea of an abrupt shift in world-orders allows the Holnists to organize and understand not just the war but all of history by explaining their pre-war bondage to civil society as a stage in the development of the more perfect state of freedom towards which history had always been moving. This in turn allows them to understand the position of dominance they hold in the post-war future as the logical outcome of a coherent historical process, rather than as an arbitrary and thus perhaps temporary shift of social power in their favor. Understanding the war as a break in history that has freed them from the past and inaugurated a new world thus provides the

Holnists with a robust explanatory framework through which to organize their lived experiences.

This framework is an example of the kind of narrative I am proposing to call apocalyptic.

Gordon Krantz sees the war, in contrast, as a moment of crisis in an ongoing process, and takes it for granted that elements of the pre-war past remain relevant in the post-war future. He rejects the idea of a transition between distinct old and new worlds, insisting that “there is never a disaster so devastating that a determined person cannot pull something out of the ashes.”72 He inadvertently accomplishes just such a rescue when he scavenges an old postal uniform from a ruined truck and the sight of the uniform sparks powerful memories of the lost structures of civilization in those who see him wearing it. This in turn inspires a rumor that the American

71 One might object that the future of feudalism, sex slavery, and male aggrandizement Holn imagines is a familiar one and hardly warrants being described as a new world. For my purposes, however, the question of whether the content of Holn’s vision is actually novel is less important than the fact that his thinking and that of his followers are animated by the idea of the future as something wholly distinct from the past and present.

72 Brin, 1.

government has survived and sent him west to restore the postal network. Krantz embraces the rumor and with it the role of reverse psychopomp, ferrying the ghosts of civil society back from oblivion and convincing isolated communities to begin sending letters to one another. The postal routes he establishes become the framework of larger projects, and ultimately of the “Restored

United States of America.”73 Nothing that Krantz builds is conjured up from scratch—it is all based on a foundation provided by the past, albeit a foundation composed in some places of nothing more substantial than memories and dreams. Nor is his desire to restore quite a desire to return; that he does not believe the old world has come to an end does not mean that Krantz is blind to possibilities for improving the old system or that he accepts things in the state in which he finds them. He struggles throughout the novel to determine which aspects of pre-war America to salvage and which to let fade away, and with the related challenge of evaluating the “unusual social arrangements” and “adaptation[s] to . . . [new] social problems” that have emerged in the wake of the war.74 Where the Holnists see the future as an opportunity to overcome or escape an imperfect past, Krantz confronts it as the arena in which he must take responsibility for addressing the legacies of that past. The ambiguous story of adaptive continuities and spectral survivals that

Krantz tells about the war is an example of the kind of narrative engagement with history that I propose to think of as postapocalyptic.

In using the word “apocalyptic” to identify narratives such as the one told by Brin’s

73 Krantz is a complex reworking of that most typical of American heroes, the frontiersman or lone gunman. In many American fictions it is this figure—a son of Natty Bumpo, solitary, competent, with little use for the insipid comforts of urban civilization or the constraints that come with them—who saves the day. Brin invites the association by making his hero a lone wanderer in the wilderness, but Krantz’s entire project runs against the grain of this archetype. He is not a self-sufficient warrior who chooses his own company over that of the plebian mass, but a city boy who has been cast out into the cold and wants nothing so much as to settle down somewhere safe and comfortable. He does not appear from outside the social structure to save civilization from itself, but rallies a cooperative effort to rebuild.

74 Brin, 48-9. 49

Holnists that rely on the idea of an absolute rupture between past and future to organize historical experience, I am drawing on Frank Kermode’s analysis of apocalyptic narrative as a meaning- making discourse. Kermode argues that the function of narrative is to establish a “consonance” between the past and the future that allows the subject living in the midst of time to feel that his or her life is situated in some definite way within a coherent historical structure. Narratives do this, according to Kermode, by ending and thus delineating a closed realm of temporal experience. A finite story, Kermode suggests, models a finite history and allows one to understand the experience of time in terms of an unfolding pattern in which present events can be correlated to a known future outcome. Such a story allows readers “to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle,” and thus makes the otherwise confusing jumble of history knowable.75

Kermode argues that the Biblical narrative of providential history, which begins in the Book of

Genesis with the creation of the world and ends in the apocalypse with the destruction of the world and the arrival of a newer and better world, is among the most influential paradigms for the sense- making ends of narratives in Western culture more generally.

But where Kermode suggests that all narratives are to some extent apocalyptic, in that simply by ending they offer readers “images of the grand temporal consonance,” I am suggesting here that there are ways of telling stories about the future that depart from and critically re-examine this apocalyptic chronotope.76 When Brin has Krantz argue that there is “no disaster so devastating that a determined person cannot pull something out of the ashes,” he destabilizes the entire project of using narrative ends to organize historical experience by denying the existence of the terminal breaks in history that the apocalyptic storyteller depends on for narrative structure. Describing

75 Kermode, 8.

76 Ibid, 17.

historical change as a complex interweaving of older forms with newly emergent realities, Krantz sees the future as an open-ended and dynamic extension of the present, an ongoing series of transformations that can never be definitively achieved but must be continually worked towards.

In The Postman, in other words, Brin tells a story about a world-shattering event that does not look to the future in order to organize history retrospectively, but instead focuses on the historical present as an endless moment of transition between a living past and a necessarily indeterminate future. This narrative sets up different kinds of political questions and practices than are enabled by an existentially stabilizing apocalyptic engagement with the future, modelling a form of historical thinking that encourages readers to turn their attention to their own present as the site on which the meaning and shape of the future is continually being determined. It is in this sense that

The Postman and stories like it warrant analysis as a class of fictions distinct from those Kermode calls apocalyptic.77

My use of “postapocalyptic” to describe such narratives departs somewhat from familiar uses of the word. Scholars have often deployed this relatively recent neologism to mark the point in time relative to a world-ending catastrophe at which a given story takes place; that is, to indicate that a story is set after the apocalyptic end has occurred. But as the example of the Holnists’

77 Demonizing a group committed to radical change and lauding a character who wants to restore American civil society, The Postman might easily be read as a reactionary parable; Rob Latham, for example, dismissed the book as “a quasi-Reaganite apology for survivable nuclear war” (Rob Latham, “Review of Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors: Critical Essays on His Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 60.2 (July, 1993). no pagination). But neither Brin’s heroes nor his villains advocates for a future identical to the present or the past; the conflict the novel stages is between the idea that the future can only be achieved by leaving the past and present behind and the idea that taking responsibility for the future involves negotiating the legacies of the past as they are manifested in the present. Attributing the first position to its villains and the second to its hero, The Postman is more akin to what Peter Paik has called “counterutopian” science fiction than it is to a conservative apologia; Brin’s suggestion that the only materials available from which to build the future are those provided by the past is, in Paik’s phrase, “subversive of both the goal of utopia and the desire to secure the continuance of the established order” (Peter Paik, From Utopia to Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 22). What the novel rejects is the idea that one can escape from history into the future; it does not dismiss the threat of nuclear war so much as it insists that not even nuclear destruction obviates the responsibility to remain sensitive to history while struggling to build a better tomorrow.

historical theories makes clear, apocalyptic discourses never confine themselves to the discussion of an end event, but rather encompass both the end and the entire history defined by that end. Given that the future inaugurated and shaped by the end of the present is an important aspect of this history, using the word postapocalypse to describe that future leaves the two words effectively indistinguishable.78 Postapocalyptic narratives are better understood not simply as stories of the world that comes after the end, but as stories that refute or depart from the apocalyptic understanding of what the end is and what it entails. Theresa Hefernan uses the word this way, explaining in Post-Apocalyptic Culture that she “employs the term post-apocalypse to suggest that we live in a time after the apocalyp[tic] . . . faith in a radically new world” has ceased to be compelling.79 Similarly, Josef Pesch writes that “postapocalyptic literature tells us that . . . the end of the world is never total.”80 A purely temporal focus on how narratives position themselves relative to an end event can obscure more fundamental conceptual differences involving the understanding of historical change that underwrites different narratives. Focusing on this more conceptual level draws attention to the shared narrative patterns that underlie thematically distinct narratives and highlights what is truly innovative about narratives that depart from familiar models of futurist speculation.

78 This ambiguity is evident in Hee-Jung Joo’s review of critical commentary on Octavia Butler’s Parable novels: “Tom Moylan . . . describe[s] Butler’s future vision as a ‘post-apocalypse world’ . . . Angela Warfield refers to it as an ‘indeterminate, apocalyptic society’ . . . and Jim Miller classifies it as expressing a ‘post-apocalyptic hoping’” (Hee-Jung Joo, “Old and New Slavery, Old and New Racisms: Strategies of Science Fiction in Octavia Butler’s Parables Series,” Extrapolation 52.3 (2011). 279-99 (283)). Here different forms of the two words become effectively interchangeable, and neither says anything more specific about Butler’s novels than that they include a disaster that has traumatically reorganized the social world. To some extent, of course, this is because Moylan, Warfield, and Miller’s uses of the words have been thoroughly abstracted from their original context through the multiple levels of citation that bring them to this page, but the ambiguity also arises from the fact that these critics are all using the same words in different ways to describe what is innovative about Butler’s end of the world story.

79 Theresa Hefernan, Post-Apocalyptic Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 6.

80 Josef Pesch, “Beloved: Toni Morrison’s Postapocalyptic Novel.,” Canadian Review of Contemporary Literature (September-December 1993): 395-408 (369-9).

Introducing a recent special edition of the journal Extrapolation, Dale Knickerbocker observes that the assembled essays

coincide . . . in seeing the fictional apocalypses studied as rejecting grand narratives. Whereas biblical-style apocalypses could be counted on to grant meaning to all preceding events . . . recent ‘revelations’ reject, or at least avoid, offering closure and transcendent truth . . . in direct opposition to the biblical paradigm in which apocalypse includes the beginning of an eternal static state, all the fictions treated here present a post-cataclysmic reality every bit as mutable as the one that preceded it.81

The distinction between apocalyptic and postapocalyptic I am proposing helps to clarify this shift in the form and function of eschatological narratives. To distinguish between Biblical-style apocalypses and apocalyptic fictions that depart from the Biblical model, as Knickerbocker does here, risks obscuring the fact that stories about the future and the end of the world that follow the model of Christian providential history continue to be produced and consumed today. The Biblical model of apocalyptic eschatology is an important aspect of contemporary understandings of history and futurity, influential far beyond the limits of explicitly religious discourse communities.

By differentiating between apocalyptic narratives that follow this model and treat the future as the end (of the present, of history, or of the world) and postapocalyptic narratives that deny the possibility of definitive endings, I aim at articulating a clearer understanding of the ways in which different kinds of contemporary stories about the end of the world are used to think about the future.

“The Former Things are Passed Away”: Apocalyptic Narratives of the End

Apocalypse is most frequently encountered today as, in Lois Parkinson Zamora’s phrase,

81 Dale Knickerbocker, “Apocalypse, Utopia, and Dystopia: Old Paradigms Meet a New Millennium,” Extrapolation 51.3. 345-57 (348-9).

“a synonym for ‘disaster’ or ‘cataclysm.’”82 But etymologically there is no connection between destruction and the word apocalypse. The English term derives, through the Latin apocalypsis, from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις, a noun form of the verb ἀποκαλύπτειν, “to uncover.”83 In its original sense an apocalypse is a revelation, a bringing to light of something hidden. The word was first used in English to translate the first word of the Book of Revelation; in this context it suggests a revelation of divine knowledge. John of Patmos’s revelation is one of the few ancient apocalyptic books that remains well-known today, but many records of revelation were produced between the early fourth century BCE and the late first century AD, during what is now known as the

Intertestamentary Period.84 A specialized scholarly definition of apocalypse derives from this proliferation, and when Biblical scholars speak of apocalypses or apocalyptic writing they are referring to this entire body of ancient religious writing, although the specifics of the definition are highly debated.85 Some scholars have argued that Christian religion as a whole should be thought of as apocalyptic; the Biblical scholar Ernst Käseman, for example, famously declared that

82 Lois Parkinson Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 4.

83 “apocalypse, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 21 January 2015.

84 Many of these texts have been translated into English and collected in the first volume of James Charlesworth’s Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

85 A group led by John Collins at the Society for Biblical Literature developed a general definition of apocalypse as a “genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world” (John Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979): 9 (9)). This definition is meant to be as inclusive as possible, but it is frequently debated; David E. Aune, for example, has argued that “despite the comprehensive character of Collins' definition, it remains inductive and descriptive . . . and shows little hermeneutical promise” (David Aune, “The Apocalypse of John and the Problem of Genre,” Semeia 36 (1986): 65-96 (70)). D. S. Russell makes the more radical argument that a normative definition of religious apocalypse is unattainable because, “although it reveals certain fairly well-defined characteristics, apocalyptic [writing] is recognizable even when some of its formal characteristics are absent” and it “may be said to consist rather in a religious mood or temper” (The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964), 104). See also D.S. Russell, Divine Disclosure: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) and Adela Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984).

“[a]pocalyptic [literature] was the mother of all Christian theology.”86

The word apocalypse has, however, come to be associated less with the form than with the content of these ancient texts, and has for a great many centuries evoked neither revelation as such nor the genre of revelatory religious literature as a whole but rather one very specific revealed message. The ancient apocalypses concerned themselves with all manner of revelations, including such things as the legitimacy of specific leaders and doctrines, the proper dates of festivals and feasts, and the organization of the heavens and hells. But by far the most enduring and influential of these texts were those that John Collins refers to as “historical apocalypses,” texts that focus specifically on the revelation of future events and the end of the world.87 Only three of the ancient apocalypses are widely known and available in print today: the canonical books of Daniel and

Revelation and the apocryphal book known as II Esdras or the Ezra Apocalypse. 88 All of them are historical apocalypses. The futures revealed in the various historical apocalypses differ, but all of them suggest that history is a closed field bounded by a final and definitive end—each describes a developmental historical trajectory that moves through periods of peace and tribulation and

86 Ernst Käseman, “The Beginnings of Christian Theology,” in New Testament Questions of Today (London: SCM Press, 1969), 82-107 (102).

87 Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman's Publishing, 1998), 6. Collins distinguishes between “cosmological” apocalypses in which the deity reveals the physical or geographical organization of the cosmos, and “historical” apocalypses that reveal the course of future events. T.F. Glasson makes a similar distinction in The Revelation of John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) between apocalypses that reveal “the unseen realms of heaven and hell” and those that reveal “future events” (1). The second book of Baruch, the Dead Sea Scroll fragment known as the War Scroll, and the two sections of the Enoch literature known as the Apocalypse of Weeks and the Apocalypse of the Animals are examples of historical apocalypses; the Ascension of Peter and the two Enoch texts known as the Book of Watchers and the Astronomical Book are examples of cosmological apocalypses.

88 Many editions of the King James Version and other English bibles include the Ezra Apocalypse in an appendix with the other apocrypha, texts that are not accepted as canonical but are approved for reading by the devout. For more on the doctrinal and textual history of the apocrypha, see the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of Bruce Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957) and the discussion of “extracanonical books” in the sixth chapter of David Ewert, General Introduction to the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990).

culminates in the end of the world and the advent of a new world, usually represented by the New

Jerusalem or heavenly kingdom. This turn from one world to the next involves a complete break between what is and what will be; it is the end of one state of being and the inauguration of something entirely new. As Revelation puts it, in the promised future “the former things have passed away.”89 Moreover, this break in history is an end in the sense that the advent of the new world marks the resolution of the processes of historical change into post-historical stasis. The new world will be an eternal paradise; not only will no aspect of the old world survive, but the new world itself will endure forever. The historical apocalypses thus define the future in terms of a distinction from history; there can be no history after the apocalyptic end, as the new world God provides is perfect and requires no further changes. The legacy of the ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic tradition is this narrative chronotope, the story of a cosmic movement toward a final transformation after which history, understood not as temporal existence but as change over time, will come to an end.

The ancient apocalyptic books are, of course, open to interpretation, famously and endlessly so—there are perhaps as many understandings of these texts as there have been readers of them during the past two and a half millennia. A broad distinction can be made between pre- and post-millennial apocalypticism: in pre-millennial doctrines the destruction of the old world takes place before paradise is achieved, while in post-millennial doctrines the moment of destruction comes after a period (often a thousand years) of earthly paradise. Many of the most prominent apocalyptic voices in Christianity today ascribe to a post-millennial model, but, as critics such as Norman Cohn and Paul Boyer have shown, Revelation has and continues to be read

89 Revelation 21:4.

in both ways.90 It is also possible to distinguish between literalist readings of the apocalyptic texts and readings that interpret them in terms of spiritual or perceptual transformations. The ever- popular exercise of demonstrating that a loathed world leader is the Antichrist is an example of the first of these approaches, and the “de-mythologized” theology of Rudolph Bultmann is an example of the latter.91 Bultmann advised Christians to seek the end of the present by transforming their understanding of the world, arguing that “[i]n every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment.”92 The differences between these interpretations of the Biblical texts are substantial and often irreconcilable, but all of these doctrines are alike in that they understand the future as something that is produced by and exists on the other side of the end of the present.

Different readings understand the implications of this transformation differently, but the basic narrative motion is the same. All of these discourses are committed, in other words, to versions of the same narrative project of organizing temporal experience by telling stories about clearly defined endings that separate distinct moments of historical time and distinct states of worldly existence.

Various more or less secular doctrines can thus also be understood as apocalyptic, in the sense that they are similarly focused on or organized around the idea of history as a movement towards a final end event and the inauguration of some form of post-historical future. Hegel was not the first writer to discuss history in terms of such a movement, but his writings on the subject are among the most influential. Hegel argues apocalyptically in the Lectures on the Philosophy of

90 Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

91 For a discussion of the practice of assigning the role of the false prophet to actual historical figures, see Bernard McGinn’s Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York: Harper Collins, 1994).

92 Rudolph Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 155.

History that the course of history is determined by the progressive development of the self- consciousness of universal spirit.93 He refers to this self-consciousness as “freedom” and imagines an eschatological moment in which the freedom of spirit becomes fully and perfectly realized; his history assumes “not the mere formal conception of development, but the attainment of a definite result.”94 “This result it is,” he writes, “at which the process of the World’s History has been continually aiming; and to which the sacrifices . . . laid on the vast altar of the earth, through the long lapse of ages, have been offered. This is the only aim that sees itself realized and fulfilled; the only pole of repose amid the ceaseless change of events and conditions . . . This final aim is

God’s purpose with the world.”95 This version of the apocalyptic narrative has been immensely influential across a wide range of discourses; writers as politically at odds as Karl Marx and Francis

Fukuyama both rely on Hegel’s work in articulating their own apocalyptic historical narratives.

Both go further than Hegel in distinguishing their histories from the religious apocalyptic tradition, shifting responsibility for the end from a divine agent to a worldly and human one, but both writers maintain the central apocalyptic focus on the future as the end of the present.

It is in this sense that many fictional narratives can be understood as apocalyptic—not because they explicitly make reference to religious or secular historical apocalyptic writings

(although many do so) or because they describe spectacularly destructive events, but because they place the past and future into the same dichotomized, developmental relationship established in these discourses. The stories told in such fictions are predicated on the idea that the future is something distinct from the present and that historical change proceeds by way of the inauguration

93 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001).

94 Ibid, 71.

95 Ibid, 33-4.

of wholly new futures. Brin’s Holnists tell themselves such a story in The Postman, and similar stories have been told many times in science fiction. As Martha Bartter argues, stories about the end of the world usually find “ways to explain the survival of a select group . . . purified through the sacrifice of a large percentage of its members . . . [who] might eventually be able to build a new, infinitely better world.”96 Brian Aldiss memorably dubbed such stories “cosy catastrophes.”97

Speculative narratives are often used to interrogate or promulgate political and philosophical ideas, and the slate-clearing scenario of the cozy catastrophe has been used in this fashion to defend a wide range of political convictions. In Lucifer's Hammer, for example, Larry Niven and Jerry

Pournelle use a massive asteroid strike to imagine the modern world redeemed by a return to simpler systems of social organization; the novel argues for the superiority of an agrarian and patriarchal neo-feudalism over the consumerist twentieth-century civilization that was destroyed in the disaster.98 H.G. Wells advocates for a very different set of social and political ideals in The

Shape of Things to Come; here a benevolent dictatorship arises from the wreckage of a devastating world war, abolishes national and religious identities, imposes a global lingua franca, and eventually unites humanity into a socialist community of selfless polymaths and scholars.99

Despite such differences in ideological orientation, there is a sense in which all such cozy catastrophe narratives are alike. Beneath their irreconcilable ideological commitments, Lucifer’s

Hammer and The Shape of Things to Come tell basically similar stories. Both are organized around the pivot of the apocalyptic end, and both establish the same narrative relationship between a future

96 Martha Bartter, “Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal,” Science-Fiction Studies 13 (1986): 148-58 (148).

97 Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 292.

98 Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Lucifer’s Hammer (New York: Del Rey, 1985).

99 Herbert Georg Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (1933. New York: Penguin, 2006).

that is wholly different from the old world it has erased and replaced. Critical study of such works has been invaluable in demonstrating how apocalyptic narratives can be used to hide or justify the violence latent in different forms of political thought.

Today, of course, the word apocalypse is often used to describe destructive events with little or no suggestion that they will result in a redemptive transformation or a new world.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, any “disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale” can be described as an apocalypse.100

The religious apocalyptic texts devote a great deal of energy to enumerating the nightmarish signs by which the passing away of the old world will be recognizable—in Revelation stars fall from the skies, forests are consumed by fire, streets run with blood, and all manner of hideous monsters are loosed on earth. Similar catalogs appear in other ancient apocalypses, and from these obsessive descriptions of the minutia of eschatological destruction it is only a small step to contemporary uses of the word apocalypse to describe any situation in which something is destroyed.101

Examples of this usage are easy to find. Speaking in his capacity as Director of National

Intelligence, for example, James Clapper recently described the ongoing civil war in Syria as “an apocalyptic disaster.”102 To use the word to describe the most grievous humanitarian crisis of the early twenty-first century echoes the world- and cosmic-historical implications of Revelation’s providential history and Hegel’s world spirit, but apocalypse is also frequently used today in a

100 “apocalypse, n.” OED Online.

101 Russell identifies the following passages as the most important lists of eschatological warning signs outside of Revelation: 4 Ezra 5; Daniel 12; 1 Enoch 80:2-7 and 99:4-8; Jubilees 23:13-25; Sibylline Oracles 3 538ff, 633ff, and 796ff, and 4 512ff; Assumption of Moses 8:1 and 10:5; Apocalypse of Abraham 29f; and 2 Baruch 25-27, 32:1, 48.32ff, and 70.22ff (D.S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964), 271-80).

102 Quoted in Patricia Zengerle, “U.S. spy chief calls Syria 'apocalyptic disaster,'” Reuters, February 11 2014.

“weakened” sense to refer to relatively trivial incidences of destruction or loss. One of the OED's usage examples, taken from the January 1980 issue of the magazine Bookseller, advises that the discontinuing of certain popular titles should not be taken as evidence of an impending “publishers' apocalypse.”103 Neologisms based on this usage pop up in the wake of disasters of all sorts. When production of a popular hot sauce was interrupted by a federal health inspection in the spring of

2014, at least one online media outlet bewailed the coming “srirachpocalypse”; “aporkalypse” has been used to describe porcine disasters ranging from wild pigs destroying public parks in Texas, to a viral outbreak in factory farms, to the proposed purchase of the Smithfield Ham company by a Chinese agricultural conglomerate; when the Atlantic seaboard saw heavier than normal snows in early 2010, The New York Times, Fox News, and Business Insider were among the prominent voices that described the event as a “snowpocalypse.”104

There are relatively few fictional narratives which follow this model of apocalyptic thinking; most contemporary eschatological fictions follow the model of Revelation and speak of ends that lead to the birth of new worlds or the rejuvenation of lost pasts. But some narratives do describe unproductive or sterile cosmic denouements; following T.S. Eliot, we might think of these as stories of the world ending “with a whimper.”105 The world goes out with a whimper in Nevil

103 “apocalypse, n.” OED Online.

104 Peggy Hernandez, “Sriracha Apocalypse,” The Boston Globe, January 14, 2014 ; Jana Waller, “‘Aporkalypse’ Now?” CNN, October 9, 2013 ; Deena Shanker, “The Aporkalypse is Coming,” Salon, August 31 2013 ; Carrie Arnold, “Aporkalypse Now,” The Daily Beast, August 20 2014 ; John Broder and Jack Healey, “East Coast Is Hit by ‘Potentially Epic Snowstorm,’” The New York Times, February 5, 2010 ; Dan Gainor, “Washington's New Four-Letter Word: Snow,” Fox News, February 10 2010 ; Gus Lubin, “SNOWPOCALYPSE,” Business Insider, December 27 2010

105 T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 (Orlando: Harcourt & Brace, 1950), 56-59 (59). 61

Schute’s On the Beach, slipping away into darkness as humanity succumbs to radiation poisoning in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and it does so as well in Stephen King’s powerful short story

“Night Surf,” with the survivors of a global pandemic frittering away their final hours in boredom and petty cruelties.106 Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Paul Auster's In the Country of Last

Things also operate in this mode.107 There is no possibility of a redemptive final transformation in these narratives—each charts, in its own way, a historical trajectory towards a future defined by absence and irremediable loss. A particularly striking example of this sterile apocalypticism is the

1956 anti-nuclear film “A Short Vision.”108 Written and directed by Joan and Peter Foldes, this animated short depicts the detonation of a nuclear weapon over a populous city. The film lingers over vivid images of flesh melting from the skulls of the victims, and the film caused a public uproar when it was aired on the Ed Sullivan show. The narrative evokes Biblical promises of a better world to come, specifically Isaiah’s prophetic vision of a future in which the “leopard shall lie down with the kid,” when the sight of the bomb makes a hunting leopard release a deer and both run for shelter.109 But no utopian peace emerges: the “wise men and leaders” who saw the bomb coming “were destroyed, and the leopard and the deer . . . were also destroyed,” and “all the people who did not see it were also destroyed,” and “the mountains, the fields, the city, and the earth” were destroyed. 110 All that survives the blast is “a small flame” circled by a single moth;

106 Nevil Schute, On the Beach (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1957); Stephen King, “Night Surf,” in Night Shift (New York: Random House, 1978), 82-95. It is telling, however that when King rewrote “Night Surf” in epic form as The Stand (New York: Random House, 1990) the relentless ennui of the short story gave way to an energetic conflict between rival groups of survivors struggling to rebuild.

107 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage, 2006); Paul Auster, In The Country of Last Things (New York: Penguin, 1988).

108 A Short Vision, dir. Joan Foldes and Peter Foldes (London: British Film Institute Experimental Film Fund, 1956).

109 Isaiah 11:6

110 Short Vision, 0:11:06.

then the moth is consumed in the fire and the flame is extinguished, and the film ends in darkness.

Kermode decried the shift in usage that describes such purely terminal visions as apocalyptic, dismissing it as a “fashionable” evacuation of the word’s original meaning.111 Critics such as Elizabeth Rosen and Zbigniew Lewicki have argued that the hopeless cosmic denouement of texts like “A Short Vision” represents a new eschatology “different in kind and not degree” from older and more hopeful religious models.112 But I would argue that the departure is not so radical as these critical responses suggest. The same basic idea of the future as a new world distinct from the present that animates the optimistic apocalypticism of Revelation continues to operate in these pessimistic narratives. Texts like On the Beach and “A Short Vision” do not call the finality of the end into question; if anything, they emphasize this finality. To speak of a pure or unproductive end involves the same narrative gesture towards a future that replaces the present that is made when speaking of a transformative shift in world systems—the only difference is that in these pessimistic narratives the new world of the future is defined by death or absence rather than rebirth. The “publisher's apocalypse” is an end in the same way that the Book of Revelation’s moment of cosmic destruction and rejuvenation is an end: an abrupt and absolute break between what is, a world with publishers, and what will come to be, a world without them. One is an optimistic vision of the end and the other is pessimistic vision, but they are visions of the same kind of end. The various apocalyptic neologisms recorded above also turn around the idea of endings: the srirachapocalypse as the end of a brand of hot sauce, the aporkalypse as the end of

111 Frank Kermode, “Apocalypse and the Modern,” in Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth, ed. Saul Friedlaender, et al (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), 84-106 (84).

112 Elizabeth Rosen, Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination (New York: Lexington Books, 2008), xv; Zbigniew Lewicki, The Bang and the Whimper: Apocalypse and Entropy in American Literature (Westport: Praeger, 1984).

bacon. The concept of destruction necessarily implies a future that is radically different from the present. Unlike related concepts such as change or evolution, the future created by an act of destruction is by definition one that is sharply cut off from the past, clearly and absolutely distinguished from what precedes it by the fact that some aspect of that past no longer exists.

The narratives and narrative discourses touched on in this survey are very different from one another, but a common thread runs from discourses of revelation, through religious providential histories, secular teleologies, and the fictions that echo them, and on to the purely rhetorical gestures of expressions like “srirachapocalypse” and the sterile finality of fictions such as On the Beach and “A Short Vision.” All of these narratives suggest a specific historical movement into the future that is predicated on the annihilation of the past, a form of historical change in which a present moment or state of being comes to an end and a future is inaugurated on the other side of that end. Underlying apocalyptic narratives of revelation and destruction is a more generalized understanding of history as a series of present and future states defined and made coherent by the end events that separate them from one another. There are obviously important differences between the Christian’s millennial kingdom, a secularly imagined utopia, a lifeless rock blasted clean by nuclear weapons, and a future distinguished from the past by the disappearance of hot sauce or book publishers. But all of these visions narrate historical change in terms of a severing of continuities between the present and the future and all of them are predicated on the denial of the possibility of survivals through these end events.

Each of these narratives thus provides what Kermode called consonance, organizing experiences that might otherwise seem chaotic by imposing structure onto temporal experience.

Even stories like “A Short Vision” or On the Beach that deny the possibility of redemption or a utopian tomorrow offer this reassuring epistemological clarity; prophets of doom are pessimists in

that they predict the worst, but this very prediction is an assertion of conceptual mastery, a way of taming and controlling an otherwise confusing world. Even trivial apocalypses offer epistemological security. There is no great existential payoff to thinking about the closing of a

Sriracha factory as the srirachapocalypse, but to do so provides a very definite understanding of an event that might otherwise present various ambiguities. It is, to paraphrase Fredric Jameson, easier to talk about the end of hot sauce than to engage with the complexities of the condiment market.113 Apocalyptic eschatology is a form of epistemological insurance; imposing ends and using them to structure temporal experience, apocalyptic narratives smooth out the complexities of historical change and allow one to know the world. The apocalyptic mode of futurist narrative can thus be defined both in terms of its method and its intention: it is a way of telling stories about the future that produces a stabilizing understanding of historical experience by imposing a rigid system of periodization onto the past and future.

Postapocalyptic Narratives of Life in an Endless World

To depart from the model of apocalypse, then, involves neither telling secular anti- revelatory nor optimistic anti-catastrophic stories, but rather the attempt to talk about the future without recourse to the stabilizing concept of the end. Apocalypse’s ends are useful, but they are also artificial, and a great deal of distortion results from forcing the odd-shaped pegs of historical experience into the regular holes of apocalyptic narrative. The postapocalyptic narrative discourse

I have in mind here, then, is a way of thinking and talking about temporality, history, and futurity that declines to employ the idea of the future as the end of the present. Postapocalyptic narratives reject the idea that a final end is possible, often explicitly interrogating and critiquing the apocalyptic model of history. Such stories remain tied to apocalyptic discourse in the sense that

113 Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (May-June 2003): 65-79. 65

they push back against this traditional mode of futurist speculation, opening up spaces of ambiguity in apocalypse’s seamless accounts of straightforward transitions from present to future. They use stories about world-shattering calamities in the future not to structure temporal experience but to emphasize the ambiguity of that experience and the need for active historical subjects to take responsibility for directing and shaping indeterminate and open-ended historical processes.

One example of such a narrative is Philip K. Dick's 1955 short story “Autofac.”114 In this piece Dick imagines a future in which humanity has emerged from a period of global war into a peaceful and prosperous new age in which automated factories ensure that every material need is satisfied.115 The story opens with representatives of a profoundly dissatisfied humanity trying to convince one of these “autofacs” to turn itself off; they argue that by fully automating all aspects of production, the factories have left humanity with no occupation but passive consumption, and that the utopian world the factories have created is therefore unsatisfactory. When the factory’s robotic representative disregards this objection, the human characters manipulate the factories into initiating a new round of world wars by drawing two factories into a conflict over resources, hoping that the factories will destroy themselves and open the way for another new world, a newer new world in which human beings can work for themselves and enjoy the fruits of honest labor. Having successfully brought about a techno-utopian new world, Dick has humanity decide that it would rather have a romantically primitive one instead. The venture is a success—conflict spreads through the autofac system and the factories destroy each other. Having achieved their new new world, however, the characters find themselves once again unhappy: hungry, cold, and suddenly wishing that the factories were still running. In a final wrinkle, the story ends with the discovery

114 Philip Dick, “Autofac,” in The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (New York, Citadel: 1987), 1-21.

115 This vision of a future in which technology is used to create a perfect harmony between humanity and its environment evokes the “radiant city” discourse that will be explored in more detail in the next chapter. 66

that the factory system is in the process of rebuilding itself and has even begun expanding into outer space—presumably it will once again begin providing the huddled masses with food and shelter, thus inaugurating yet another “new world.” But the ominous tone of this final revelation and the conflicted responses to it by the human characters suggest that this new autofac regime will also prove to be unsatisfactory and impermanent, and the story ends with the suggestion that the historical narrative it records will continue indefinitely.

“Autofac” decribes a series of “end” events, each a cataclysmic upheaval that destroys one world and replaces it with another. There is the opening global war, in which the modern world of nation-states gives way to a technologically-governed global union, and then the war within the autofac system, in which that union gives way to a world of neo-primitivist frontiers, and then the second resurgence of the machines. But in each case the old world that has been destroyed has also survived in some form: the forces of human ambition survive the first “apocalypse,” the forces of technological unification survive the second, and the story gives the reader no ground to suppose that something will not survive the third. Dick’s story curves back on itself in a series of modulated repetitions with difference. The final scene of “Autofac” echoes the opening scene without reproducing it; again the human characters confront a representative of the factory system and try to determine what impact that robotic entity’s actions will have on their lives. This is a fundamentally different take on the “end of the world” than that of the various narratives and discourses discussed in the preceding section of this chapter. Where apocalyptic narratives describe a definitive end in which the world of the present or some aspect of that world passes away and is replaced by an entirely new future, Dick offers a messier account of history as an endless series of incomplete changes, partial transformations, and serialized overlappings of old and new forms.

The story rejects the optimistic apocalyptic assertion that the present can be completely

transformed, but in doing so it does not retreat to the opposite extreme and suggest that the status quo is immutable; instead, it illustrates the limited but real agency human beings have to create change in a complex and open-ended historical world. Refusing to allow either its characters or its readers to indulge in the fantasy of an absolute escape from the present, Dick’s story implicitly critiques the apocalyptic idea that history can be meaningfully organized into a series of clearly distinguishable moments separated by absolute end events. It is in this sense that the story is postapocalyptic.

In using the word in this way I am departing somewhat from common usage, but this departure is justified, I think, in that it helps to make the word postapocalypse more specific and thus more useful as a piece of critical terminology. The word is generally understood in temporal terms, and is used to identify a moment in time or an event that takes place after the apocalyptic end. The OED defines the adjective in this way, as “of or relating to the time after the revelation of St John . . . [or] following an event regarded as an apocalypse, esp. following a nuclear war or other catastrophic event . . . [or] set in a period following such an event.”116 Scholars have found this definition useful, and often those who use the word in this way do so to critique the logics of social erasure that underwrite fictions of socially perfected futures. In Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear

War, for example, Paul Williams argues that “the vestigial master narrative of white supremacy . .

. is being resuscitated” in “post-apocalyptic” narratives of reconstruction in the wake of nuclear war, either in the form of implicit celebrations of wars that homogenize national populations by killing off minority groups or in the form of narratives that set up conflicts between “civilized” and “savage” groups in the post-war future.117 Claire Curtis likewise draws attention in

116 “post-, prefix.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. 27 April 2013.

117 Paul Williams, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 3. 68

Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract to the ways in which “problematic” social groups such as minorities or outspoken women often “conveniently” disappear in narratives describing world-shattering events and their aftermaths.118 But the novels Williams and Curtis critique in these studies are really better understood as apocalyptic, in that they treat the catastrophic events they describe as apocalyptic endings—that is, as breaks in history that mark a transition between distinct old and new worlds. These studies show that this understanding of historical change can be used to justify acts of grotesque violence, but this is an insight into the costs of using apocalyptic narratives to organize and explain history. Neither the word nor the idea of the postapocalyptic is necessary to these studies, and the studies do not contribute to an understanding of postapocalyptic narrative as something meaningfully distinct from apocalyptic narrative.

Moreover, this purely temporal understanding of postapocalyptic narrative actually misrepresents the way in which the word is commonly used in popular discourse, and I would argue that my own usage does a better job of identifying the characteristic features of the kinds of stories to which the label is most commonly applied. A good example of a text that is

“postapocalyptic” in the purely temporal sense implied by the OED’s definition is Edward

Bellamy's 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward.119 Bellamy’s narrative opens in his own late nineteenth-century present, but it leaps almost immediately into the new world of the future, with the narrator falling into a hypnotically induced sleep in a bomb shelter at the end of the second chapter and waking up a hundred years later at the beginning of the third. The narrative that follows is given over to a detailed survey of the novel economy, social institutions, technology, politics, and culture of this future. Most of the book consists of dialogues between the time-traveler and his

118 Claire Curtis, Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract (Lanham: Lexington, 2010), 7.

119 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888. New York: Signet, 1960).

hosts, and most of these conversations follow the same pattern: first the narrator identifies a detail of the society he is familiar with and suggests that something so basic must still be operating in much the same fashion in the future, and then he is informed that the people of the future have found some new and entirely different way of dealing with whatever material or conceptual issue it is that he has raised. Bellamy is, in other words, at great pains to make it clear that everything about this future is different from the world he and his readers inhabit—that, in other words, the world his audience is familiar with has come to an end and the world of the story exists on the other side of—that is, after—that end.

But nobody would describe Bellamy’s novel as postapocalyptic. It has none of those features that, although they do not appear in the OED’s definition, are indispensable elements of the various narratives this word is used colloquially to describe. Any consumer familiar with the contemporary entertainment-industrial complex knows what it means when someone says that the latest science fiction movie or young adult novel is “postapocalyptic.” We know to expect the ruins, the rag-tag band of survivors, and the struggle with a monstrous and monstrously human enemy. Should there be a utopian society such as the one Bellamy describes, we know that it is only a matter of time before cracks become visible in the façade. Despite the dictionary, then, it seems clear that in popular usage the word is being used to do something other than simply define stories in terms of when their action takes place. What the word is doing, I would suggest, is identifying stories that take up the topic of the end of the world and what comes after it in a manner sharply at odds with the apocalyptic tradition. We can get a sense of the distinction the term establishes by comparing Looking Backward with George Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living

Dead, an influential story of life after the end that is often described as postapocalyptic.120

120 George Romero, The Night of the Living Dead (Philadelphia: Image Ten Productions, 1968).

In Looking Backward the end of the world—that is, the end of the world familiar to

Bellamy's original late nineteenth-century audience—is the result of a gradual increase in the influence of what Bellamy characterizes as rational social thought. By developing its latent potential for social cooperation as fully as possible, humanity is able to put an end to interpersonal conflict, material shortage, and political strife, transforming the world into a material and spiritual paradise. In this novel history proceeds along a definite path—the upward trajectory of the social and intellectual development of humanity—until it reaches a definite and final point—the victory of the forces of cooperative civilization over the chaotic, selfish, and contentious tendencies that had formerly limited humanity's better characteristics. After this telos has been reached, the reality of Looking Backward enters once and for all into the new world that the book describes. There is a clear progression from the chaos and flux of imperfect, intermediate forms, through the various trials and tribulations those imperfections produce, and towards the enduring stability of secure, final forms. Looking back from his narrative position in the future, Bellamy’s narrator tells a story about history as a process of linear development and about the future as the final product of that development.

Romero's Dead films also describe the end of life as we know it. Here that change is brought about through the sudden appearance of the zombies, Romero’s signature contribution to the contemporary cultural imagination. The Dead films record humanity's struggle with this dark, mute image of itself as a series of events in which stable social structures are alternatively consolidated and dispersed. The opening scenes of the first film move from chaos—a character running alone through an open field full of monsters—into the relative security of the farmhouse where she and several others join together to fend off the gathering zombies. But the clear movement from chaos and danger towards order and safety established in the opening scenes

collapses into a confusion of jumbled events during the farmhouse scenes; the status of this embattled social microcosm fluctuates wildly as conflicts erupt inside the house and the zombies slowly break down its defenses. Nor is it simply that the movement from chaos to safety is reversed and that Night of the Living Dead charts a pessimistic movement towards death and the final destruction of the farmhouse; this eventuality is averted by the dawn and the arrival of a zombie- killing rescue posse. In the film's most famous and brutal twist, however, the rescuers gun down the one man who has survived the night in the farmhouse and emerges to welcome his saviors.

This jumbled movement from danger into and back out of temporary safety, from flux and transitional forms into further fluctuating and transitional forms, is repeated throughout the series of Romero’s sequels to Night of the Living Dead.121 Each film follows a group of survivors out of the chaos of the zombie-filled world and into some place of shelter: a mall, a military bunker, a fortified skyscraper, a mansion, an isolated island. In each film the survivors secure their new home, and then each film follows them back outside again after their miniature social world proves, for one reason or another, to be unstable and impermanent. History is never still in these films, but neither does it move towards or away from anything.

The key difference between these two “after the end” narratives involves the way in which they conceptualize the movement of history towards, through, and after their respective end events.

The end in Bellamy's novel is the end narrated in the Book of Revelation: a radical break in history in which the old world is erased and replaced by a wholly new reality. Although Bellamy imagines a gradual transition from the old into the new rather than a sudden and cataclysmic transformation,

121 Dawn of the Dead. Dir. George Romero. United Film Distribution. 1978; Day of the Dead. Dir. George Romero. United Film Distribution. 1985; Land of the Dead. Dir. George Romero. Universal Pictures. 2005; Diary of the Dead. Dir. George Romero. The Weinstein Company. 2007; Survival of the Dead. Dir. George Romero. E1 Entertainment. 2010.

Looking Backwards is like Revelation in presenting that transformation in terms of an absolute distinction between old and new. No remnant of the flawed nineteenth-century society Bellamy critiques endures into his future—in each and every particular, that world has been renovated and made new. Romero’s zombie films, like Dick’s “Autofac” and Brin’s The Postman, resist the suggestion that such an end could take place. His story is set on the other side of something that looks like an apocalyptic end, but Romero uses the conceit of looking back at the end of the world to demonstrate that the supposedly terminal catastrophe was not a break in history. The future of the Dead films is decidedly not a new world. It is full of survivals of the old reality; the zombies themselves are symbols of survival and immutability, of that which cannot be overcome or left behind, even as they are also symbols of death and change. Indeed, all of the standard postapocalyptic tropes are images of the old world surviving through an event that has transformed but not destroyed it—the ruins, the survivors with their incongruous collection of high technology and primitive problem solving, the semi-human monsters. And Romero’s future is also marked by a continuous transformation of the new; his films examine the constantly shifting relationships between human beings, zombies, and the environments these groups inhabit. Built up out of pieces of the past and constantly open to new forms of change, this future could not be further from the static, post-historical new worlds imagined in apocalyptic texts like Looking Backward or

Revelation. Like the nuclear war in Brin’s novel, the “end” in Romero’s films is a major, traumatic, and even one-of-a-kind event after which the world will never be the same, but the survival of old forms and the impermanence of new ones show that this change was not the complete and definitive transformation of an apocalyptic end.

The prefix “post-” points towards the future, towards what comes next or after, but in all of its uses the word apocalypse is already part of a discourse of futurity. Postapocalypse thus

suggests a resolution of these two gestures forward in time into a single statement. The definition

“that which follows the apocalypse” achieves this resolution by subordinating the futurity of “post-

” to the futurity of “apocalypse,” locating the postapocalyptic future within the frame of apocalyptic history. The apocalypse in the Book of Revelation is both the revelation that Saint

John receives and the events that are revealed to him; to say that what comes after this revelation is the postapocalypse is simply to use that word to describe something apocalypse has already designated. Similarly, in all but the weakest usages of apocalypse to refer to a destructive cataclysm, the moment of destruction necessarily dictates the form of that which follows. After the publishers' apocalypse there are no more publishers; this is what the phrase “publisher’s apocalypse” says, and to refer to the period of time in which there are no publishers as a

“publisher's postapocalypse” says nothing more. A more substantial and critically useful definition that hews closer to the ways in which the word postapocalypse is actually being used today can be achieved by examining how different narratives understand the idea of an historical ending as such. The question of where on a timeline the end is placed relative to the perspective of a given narrative is interesting, but it is secondary to the question of how narratives understand that end as functioning in relationship to the historical world in which it takes place. What I am suggesting, then, is that the “after the end” of postapocalypse should properly be understood as indicating a conceptual relationship between the apocalyptic and the postapocalyptic; the postapocalyptic as an idea about how historical change works that follows upon and departs from the apocalyptic idea that history proceeds by way of clean breaks and absolute ends. The futurist gesture of “apocalypse,” in other words, should be subordinated to that of the “post-,” and the postapocalyptic future should be seen as existing entirely outside of the conceptual framework of apocalyptic historical narrative.

In proposing that the relationship between apocalypse and postapocalypse should be understood as a conceptual rather than temporal one, I am thinking of the work scholars have done to define other critical “posts.” Brian McHale, for example, argues that postmodernism should be understood to mean “after modernism” and not “after the modern moment.” “The referent” which the “post-“ of postmodernism points beyond, he argues, “is not merely a chronological division but an organized system.”122 Thus the postmodern “does not come after the present (a solecism), but after the modernist movement,” that is, after a specific way of thinking about the present that scholarship designates as modernism or modernist thought.123 Cary Wolfe’s definition of posthumanism works in much the same way: Wolfe argues that “posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism.”124 Again, the suggestion is that posthumanism is not a reality or moment that comes after the human, but a way of thinking about humanity and its embodiment that Wolfe wishes to distinguish from the older discourse of humanism. The use of postapocalyptic I am arguing for follows the same procedure, identifying a postapocalyptic idea about history and futurity that follows upon and departs from apocalyptic ideas. This postapocalyptic idea is that the movement from the present into the future is never as neat as apocalyptic doctrines would suggest; at the core of postapocalyptic narrative is the recognition that there is no entirely new world and that history never ends.

For some critics, postapocalyptic denials that the world of the present will come to an end

122 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), 4.

123 Ibid, 5.

124 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv. 75

are problematic because this is understood as being synonymous with a fatalistic resignation to and acceptance of the present. In After the End, for example, James Berger uses the word

“postapocalyptic” to refer to discourses that look back towards an end that is imagined to have already happened, thus positioning the present in which the discourse is articulated as the new world of the future and (implicitly or explicitly) justifying the perpetuation of the social and political arrangements of that present. Such discourses posit, as Berger shows, that “that the conclusive catastrophe has already occurred, the crisis is over . . . and the ceaseless activity of our time . . . is only a complex form of stasis.”125 His primary example of such a narrative is the triumphalist version of twentieth-century history told by the American right and epitomized in the figure of Ronald Reagan, in which the collapse of communism marked the advent of the final stage of history, defined by liberal democracy, a global free market, and American military and political hegemony. Here the idea of a world that exists “after the end” is a denial that further change would be beneficial, and thus a strategy for protecting an unequal political status quo from critique.126

Berger’s critique is a powerful indictment of such obfuscatory apologias for power, but, like

Williams and Curtis, Berger is using the word postapocalypse to describe discourses and narratives that are really better understood as apocalyptic. The political narrative that celebrates free market liberalism as the end of history is a fundamentally apocalyptic deployment of the idea of a future cut free from its antecedents to structure and interpret historical reality. The very title of the book in which this narrative received its definitive philosophical expression, Francis Fukuyama’s The

125 James Berger, After the End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 211.

126 Other writers have made similar critiques; although neither uses the word postapocalypse or postapocalyptic, both Jean Baudrillard, in The Illusion of the End (trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)) and Slavoj Žižek, in Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010), have argued that the idea of an end in which the present is replaced by the future is necessary for facilitating political action in the present.

End of History and the Last Man, testifies to its basically apocalyptic framework.127 That it casts a complacent look back at this end rather than an expectant look forward does not change the nature of the end this discourse uses to organize and interpret history. Berger’s fascinating analysis of Reaganism and other contemporary narratives of life after the end is really a discussion of what might be thought of as accomplished apocalypses, self-satisfied apocalyptic narratives that look back at the end in order to reassure their readers of the perfection of the present. Such narratives represent an interesting development of the more traditional apocalyptic form in which the narrative casts a prophetic look forward in order to reassure readers that the flawed present will be redeemed, but they are not at all the same as the kinds of narratives that I am referring to here as postapocalyptic.

The attempt to think about the future without recourse to the idea of an end as an organizing principle does not imply a resignation to the immutability of the present. Quite the opposite, in fact—denying the possibility of apocalyptic ends in the future, postapocalyptic narratives necessarily imply that any present status quo must be understood as temporary. In the penultimate chapter of The Postman Gordon Krantz and his allies defeat the Holnist army, but the chapter closes not in celebration but in tears, with Krantz collapsing under the realization that the responsibility to improve and maintain the world in which he lives is one that “never, ever ends.”128

The novel closes with Krantz’s realization that, once accepted, this Sisyphean responsibility can never be relinquished; in the final chapter he is poised to depart on a mission to extend the postal network into California. In one of the few critical essays written on Brin's novel, Oscar de los

Santos asks whether The Postman is best understood as a “utopia,” which he defines as a

127 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

128 Brin, 306.

description of “near-perfect societies and/or perfect worlds,” or as a “dystopia,” a text “that predicts doom and gloom and eventually . . . the demise of humanity.”129 De los Santos concludes that neither description quite fits, and I would suggest that this is because neither of these absolutist alternatives is viable in the postapocalyptic narrative paradigm of The Postman.130 To imagine either a perfectly good or a perfectly bad future is to engage in apocalyptic thinking; both are visions of an escape from the confusion, inconsistency, and inconstancy of the present. It is the terminality of such visions that postapocalyptic narratives critique and ultimately reject. Such narratives thus open onto a wide field of utopian possibilities even as they reject utopian certainties.

Romero’s zombie films, for example, are quite optimistic, despite all the grim imagery of decaying cities and graphic violence; even as they deny that humanity will ever establish a stable society, these films also emphasize that it is always possible to change and improve the world, even if only because it is always necessary to do so. Postapocalyptic narratives deny the possibility of an end, and with that denial they reject both the simplistic faith that a better future is inevitable and the simplistic despair that such a future is impossible. Instead they offer a challenge, insisting that in an endless world it is always necessary to work towards a better tomorrow that will never fully arrive.

129 Oscar De los Santos, “Of Dystopias and Icons: Brin’s The Postman and Butler’s Parable of the Sower,” in The Utopian Fantastic: Essays Selected from the Twentieth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Martha Bartter (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2004), 109-121 (109).

130 In a short essay published with the DVD release of the film adaptation of The Postman Brin explains that he wrote the book “as an answer to all those postapocalyptic books and films that seem to revel in the idea of civilization's fall” (Brin, liner notes for The Postman, dir. Kevin Costner (Burbank: Warner Brothers, 1997), 1). This essay displays exactly the confusion I have argued is endemic in so many uses of the word. He does not name the novels against which he is defining his own, but, reveling in civilization's fall, these would seem to be novels about endings—that is, apocalyptic novels in which civilization’s fall is an end in the absolute and conceptually structuring fashion of apocalypse. Confronting a temporally endless world in which the past is always a factor to be reckoned with and a resource to be called upon in the eternal quest to achieve a better tomorrow, it is Brin's novel that departs from the model of apocalyptic futurism and offers a truly postapocalyptic vision of the future. 78

The Ends of Books and the End of the World

When the first twelve issues of Robert Kirkman’s graphic narrative The Walking Dead were collected in hardcover, Kirkman included a brief essay at the end of the volume in which he says that he was inspired to begin The Walking Dead, in its 147th monthly installment at the time of this writing, because of his frustration with the endings of his favorite zombie movies and, more broadly, by a frustration with the formal necessity of narrative ends as such. “I wanted a zombie movie that never ends,” he writes, “a zombie movie that allowed us to watch the characters grow and change over time. One that allowed us to follow the end of the world to its natural conclusion.”131 The idea that the “natural conclusion” of the “end of the world” consists of never- ending “change over time” is precisely the paradoxical redefinition of eschatology suggested by my use of the word postapocalypse. Kirkman takes the eschatological moment and strips away all apocalyptic connotations of finality or terminality. In his hands the “end of the world” is less the moment at which the present stops than it is the moment at which the future begins, an opening rather than closing of the narrative horizon. The problem that Kirkman’s essay confronts is the inability of conventionally structured and therefore limited narratives to reproduce the full complexity of historical experience—the solution Kirkman strikes on is to extend The Walking

Dead indefinitely, stringing out episode after episode and continually deferring the “conclusion of the end of the world.” But this solution involves no real attempt to reconceptualize narrative as a limited form that is capable of providing some kind of access to the unlimited world of history; in his quixotic commitment to writing a literally endless narrative and defeating the limits of form through sheer tenacity, Kirkman reaffirms the idea that finite narratives are necessarily incapable of representing an open-ended historical world. Frank Kermode, who argued that all narratives are

131 Robert Kirkmann, The Walking Dead (Book 1) (Berkeley: IMAGE Comics, 2006), 304.

fundamentally apocalyptic in that by ending they offer a microcosmic model of the end of history itself, would likely agree with this position, but I do not.

It is true, of course, that The Postman ends; “it is one of the great charms of books,” as

Kermode put it, “that they must end.”132 The narrative past in which Krantz was unsure about the nature of his responsibility has been cleanly resolved into the new world of a narrative future in which that responsibility is clear, and Krantz’s acceptance of his burden permits readers of The

Postman to walk away from the book with a sense of closure and completed structure. But Brin uses this closed form to argue against the practice of thinking about history in terms of a similarly closed and easily comprehended structure. His novel does not achieve the impossible ideal of perfectly reproducing open-ended postapocalyptic historical experience, but it does succeed in telling a story about that experience. Like Dick’s “Autofac” and Romero’s Dead films, The

Postman does this by circling back on itself in a series of repetitions with difference. The novel opens as Krantz is about to enter what was once the state of Oregon, searching for someone who has kept the lamp of civilization burning, and it closes with Krantz poised to depart for what was once the state of California, still searching for survivals of the old world amongst the wreckage left by the war. His situation has changed; he entered Oregon as a homeless, barefoot refugee, and he sets off for California as the representative of the new government. But in other ways it has not changed at all, and at the end of the book Krantz faces the same challenge he faced at the beginning, that of trying to improve the lives of the people around him in a world where the old imperfections are never fully overcome and the new possibilities that appear on the horizon are never fully realized.

Postapocalyptic narratives point beyond themselves to a world that is more dynamic and

132 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 23. 80

complex than their own limited textual frames can adequately contain. These stories invite readers to confront the full complexity of historical existence, rather than setting out, in the style of apocalypse, to tame and domesticate that complexity. Where apocalyptic speculation about the future is epistemologically stabilizing and reassuring, postapocalyptic thinking is necessarily destabilizing. Instead of an organizational principle by which events in the present and past can be placed into correspondence with anticipated events in the future, it offers only the obligation to find a way to engage with contingent processes of change. At the same time and in the same gesture, however, the postapocalyptic stance opens up an endless series of opportunities to participate in those processes and contribute to determining the always changing shape of the open- ended future. The difference between apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narratives thus extends beyond issues of optimism and pessimism, of the agent or mechanism of eschatology, or even of the outcome of any specific end of the world scenario. It involves the way in which different kinds of stories teach their readers to understand history and humanity’s relationship to it, the kinds of engagements and commitment that they encourage, and the politics they enable.

Chapter 2

The Radiant City: Hugo Gernsback, Le Corbusier, and the Modern New Jerusalem

One definition of modern architecture might be that it was an attitude towards building which was divulging in the present that more perfect order which the future was about to disclose. - Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past. - Gaston Bachelard

In William Gibson's 1981 short story “The Gernsback Continuum” a photographer experiences an unsettling hallucination while working on a study of “movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy,” “dime stores faced with fluted aluminum,” gas stations like

“raygun emplacements in white stucco,” and other novelties of a particularly kitsch form of

American modern architecture.133 He has been told by the academics who commissioned the study to think of the crumbling structures he is documenting as scraps of an obsolete vision of the future,

“a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened.”134 But this failed future remains disturbingly vital, escaping the realms of academic antiquarianism and intruding disruptively into the world of the photographer’s present; beginning with the occasional futuristic automobile on the freeway and unlikely aircraft overhead, the modern future begins to come to life around him.

His hallucination reaches a crescendo when he sees the city of Tucson, Arizona, transformed into

133 Gibson, “Gernsback,” 25, 25, 28.

134 William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum” in Burning Chrome (New York: Arbor House, 1986). 24-36 (28).

a vision of towers “soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires”:

Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships . . . glittering dragonfly things.135

Although it is certainly a fantastic vision, Gibson’s futuristic Tucson is more a faithful reproduction than it is an exaggeration of the futuristic cities that appeared in the work of many visionary writers around the turn of the twentieth century.

This radiant city was a mainstay of modern speculative narratives about the future, described in exhaustive detail by what the historians Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan have described as “a singular band of zealots”: “the crusading utopian novelist, the scribbler of pulp science fiction, the visionary architect, the automotive stylist, the meticulous engineer, [and] the army officer with the Popular Mechanics imagination,” all united by a “belief in the inevitability of a technological utopia on earth” that “possessed them—together with an apparently vast segment of society—as surely as a belief in a spiritual millennium had informed the character of the earlier American public.” 136 Different visionaries had their own often incompatible ideas concerning the details of its design and construction, but as an archetype and a focalizing image for the speculative imagination visions of the city Gibson describes here had a very wide appeal and influence. The title of Gibson’s story links it to science fiction through the figure of Hugo

Gernsback, a prominent figure in the history of the pulp magazines, but this same utopian city of towers and airships was also an important focus for the speculative writings of architects,

135 Ibid, 33.

136 Corn and Horrigan, xii.

designers, and urban planners. Recognizing this similarity, Rob Latham has suggested that

Gibson's story could as easily have been called “The Corbusier Continuum,” after the architect

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known by his pseudonym of Le Corbusier.137 It was Le

Corbusier who called this shining city of the future la ville radieuse, the radiant city. For

Gernsback, Le Corbusier, and many others the radiant city was the locus of a powerful conviction that science and industrial technology would solve social and material problems permanently by rationally redesigning the spaces in which human beings live. As Gibson puts it, the radiant city

“knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose.”138 This was a vision of holistic ecological utopia in the broadest sense, a vision of the human organism and its environment brought into perfect alignment.

In addition to being an influential collection of ideas about innovative urban design and the application of modern technology to everyday life, the radiant city was also a narrative, a story about where modern humanity was going and how it was going to get there. This story is an apocalyptic narrative, and the radiant city is best understood as a secular, technologized vision of the New Jerusalem. Narrating the future apocalyptically, Gernsback and Le Corbusier reproduce apocalyptic ideas about the relationship of the future to the present, about the nature of the physical world in which historical change takes place, and about the role of the future city in history.

Treating the future as the final product of historical change and conflating this product with a physical location, they imagine a future state of complete interiority in which the city fills the world and contains all of reality. I argue here that this vision of holistic integration is incompatible with an acknowledgment of environmental complexity and the mediated position of the human

137 Rob Latham, “The Urban Question in New Wave SF,” in Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 1.

138 Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” 32. 84

subject that participates in complex ecological systems, and show that the apocalyptic futurism of the radiant city narrative actively seeks to erase all that cannot be subordinated to the rationally organized city. The radiant city was never built, but it is part of a cultural narrative that continues to influence the way people think, build, and dwell today.

The Radiant City and Apocalyptic History

Hugo Gernsback was almost certainly the figure Corn and Horrigan had in mind when they included the “scribbler of pulp fiction” in their band of visionary zealots; they speak of him as the

“key figure in the development of the hobby magazines as forums for the future.”139 Often remembered as the “father of science fiction,” Gernsback was an important figure in the early days of the genre as both an author and as the publisher and editor of the first science fiction magazines; he actually coined the term “science fiction” itself, although he preferred the now obsolete

“scientifiction.”140 After emigrating from Luxembourg to New York City in 1904, Gernsback got his start in both publishing and futurism with a mail-order radio parts catalog, which eventually developed into the magazine Modern Electrics. An enthusiastic early adopter and tireless promoter of modern technologies, Gernsback saw science fiction as a kind of propaganda, a literary vehicle that allowed him to dangle descriptions of technological wonders before the eyes of the reading public like carrots in order to inspire society to take technological developments even further.141

139 Corn and Horrigan, 6.

140 For a discussion of Gernsback’s life and legacy, see Sam Moskowitz's “The Father of Science Fiction” in Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (New York: Hyperion Press, 1974), Mike Ashley's The Gernsback Days (Hiolicong: Wildside Press, 2004), and Gary Westfahl's Hugo Gernsback & the Century of Science Fiction (Hugo Gernsback & the Century of Science Fiction. Jefferson: McFarland: 2007).

141 For discussions of the role played by the pulp magazines in popularizing various modern technologies and modern cultural developments more generally, see Andrew Milner and Robert Savage’s “Pulped Dreams: Utopia and American Pulp Science Fiction” (Science Fiction Studies 35.1 (February 2008): 31-47), and Paula Rabinowitz’s American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

2- Frank Paul, "New York, 2660 A.D." Illustration for Ralph 124C 41+

The radiant city was an important example of such a lure, and versions of it appeared throughout his own work and in many of the stories that he published in his magazines. Gernsback’s one full- length novel, the impossibly titled Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660, is a sustained exercise in imagining this city; the image Gibson distills into five lines Gernsback explores for a hundred and fifty pages.142

Serialized in Modern Electrics in 1911 and published as a book in 1925, Ralph is a relatively straightforward pulp take on utopian narrative, equal parts melodrama and travelogue.143

Its eponymous hero is the scientist and inventor Ralph 124C 41+, who falls in love with the beautiful Alice 212B 423 and fends off the murderous attentions of her other suitors while taking her on a tour of the fantastic and paradisiacal New York City of the future.144 Alice’s apparently bottomless ignorance of the world she lives in, meanwhile, provides plenty of opportunities for lessons on the benefits of technology. Ralph is hardly a literary masterpiece; Gary Westfahl remarks wryly that “if aesthetic quality is the only factor guiding one's reading habits, then there is no reason to read Ralph,” but goes on to describe the novel as “the one essential text for all studies” of the genre.145 Gernsback’s book is a foundational work of modern speculative fiction,

142 Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (1925. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

143 See Gary Westfahl's “Evolution of Modern Science Fiction: The Textual History of Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+,” Science Fiction Studies 23.1 (March 1996): 37-82.

144 Ralph’s name is a play on words: he is a visionary, literally “one to foresee for one” (Gernsback, 293).

145 “‘This Unique Document:’ Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+ and the Genres of Science Fiction” in Extrapolation 35.2 (1994). 95-119 (95, 96). The novel’s greatest aesthetic failing is the heavy-handed way in which Gernsback integrates the didactic message into the narrative. “Ralph doesn't simply pick up a newspaper,” as Daniel Stashower observes; “Gernsback devotes three full pages to the process of inserting a transparent, flexible square of celluloid into a powerful projector” (“A Dreamer Who Made Us Fall In Love With The Future,” Smithsonian 21.5 (August 1990). 44-55 (44)). Each new piece of techno-wizardry is introduced with an italicized title, which signals that the narrative is about to interrupted by an extended technical lesson: “a servant brought two pairs of what appeared to be roller-skates. In reality they were Tele-motor-coasters . . .” (Gernsback, 78).

the first piece of literature ever to be explicitly marketed as “science fiction,” and it has had a profound influence on the development of science fiction as a genre and of modern ideas about the future more generally. The illustrations by Frank R. Paul that accompany the text were one of the primary means through which Gernsback’s vision was disseminated to the public. Most of Paul’s futuristic pictures were first published in Gernsback's pulp magazines, but they were widely reproduced and copied. Used in advertising for products ranging from lipstick to automobiles, they circulated far beyond their original audience of pulp readers, and through them Gernsback’s vision of the radiant city became a ubiquitous part of twentieth-century America’s stock of available images of the future.

If Gernsback was the inspiration for Corn and Horrigan’s pulp scribbler, then Le Corbusier was certainly the most important model for their visionary architect. Author of such masterpieces as the Villa Savoye and the Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut de Ronchamp, the Swiss architect was a leading light in the modernist avant-garde. His Unité d'habitation in Marseille is frequently identified as one of the most influential designs of the century, and his 1923 manifesto Towards an Architecture has been described by the architectural historian Reyner Banham as having had an influence “beyond that of any other architectural work published in [the twentieth] century.”146

Le Corbusier’s professional practice was animated by an unflagging conviction that modern science, and particularly new technologies of standardized mass production, had opened the way to solving all of the material and social problems that had historically plagued humanity.147 Le

Corbusier’s influence on the modern built environment is ubiquitous and really cannot be overstated. Among his many innovations was the “free plan,” a system of reinforced concrete slabs

146 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 246. See also David Jenkins' L'Unité D'habitation: Marseilles (New York: Phaidon Press, 1993).

147 Kenneth Frampton, Le Corbusier (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001). 88

and columns that freed the architectural façade from its role as load-bearing element and fundamentally transformed the practice of modern design, making possible, among other things, the glass-skinned skyscrapers that are so characteristic of contemporary cities.148 He first presented his plan for an ideal “Ville contemporaine de trois millions d'habitants” in 1922 at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, and he continued to develop and refine this scheme throughout his life in books such as The City of To-Morrow and its Planning and The Radiant City.149 In Le Corbusier's view, the modern world demanded an urban environment that could handle the fumes, noises, and other undesirable byproducts of the machine age, and especially of the automobile, without negatively impacting upon the life of the city dweller, and he proposed to redesign cities as collections of immense modular skyscrapers and mile-long residential blocks, each of which would house tens of thousands of people. Le Corbusier presented these plans as serious descriptions of changes in urban form that he believed were necessary to respond to ongoing changes in technology and the organization of modern social life; by “the end of the 1920s,” as Corn and

Horrigan put it, “this Corbusian urbanistic formula had become the universal standard and was inevitably adduced as the final step in the progress of urban form.”150

Le Corbusier denied that the articles and books in which he put forth his visions of the radiant city had anything in common with works of “literary futurism,” arguing that where speculative fiction offered wild fantasies his professional speculative work consisted of carefully considered and architecturally sound suggestions for improving construction practices. “This is no dangerous futurism,” he wrote in The City of To-Morrow, no “literary dynamite flung violently at

148 William Curtis, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (New York: Rizzoli, 1986).

149 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine- Age Civilization, trans. Pamela Wright, Eleanor Levieux, and Derek Coltman (New York: Orion Press, 1967); Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, tran. Frederick Etchells (London: J. Rodker, 1929).

150 Corn and Horrigan, 38. 89

the spectator. It is a spectacle organized by an Architecture which uses plastic resources for the modulation of forms seen in light.”151 But the similarity between the city his careful consideration led him to and the city imagined by flingers of literary dynamite such as Gernsback is self-evident.

Both writers focus on the great size of the future city and its buildings; both turn to machinery for formal inspiration, letting the automobile and airplane dictate the layout of their cities and suggest the shapes of their buildings; both invest heavily in the idea of using mass-produced industrial materials such as metal, plastic, and reinforced concrete for the construction of their up-to-date urban forms; and both imagine transportation networks transformed into a complex machinery combining different infrastructural functions and incorporating ubiquitous private air travel. Le

Corbusier evidently felt that the seriousness of his proposals was threatened by their association with the work of fiction writers; Gernsback, who argued that the purpose of science fiction was to inspire technical innovation, would likely have been pleased by the comparison.152 It is true that

Le Corbusier dedicates an entire chapter of The City of To-Morrow to cataloging the advances in technology that make his skyscrapers feasible where Gernsback simply invents the indestructible alloy “steelonium,” but, questions of practicality aside, speculation about the urban future led both men in similar directions.153 They might have been very different builders of cities had either been given the chance to realize his vision, but as dreamers of cities they were very much alike.

151 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow, 178. The italics are Le Corbusier's, and would seem to work against his claim. There is a clear echo here and in many other passages of the orthographic experimentation the writers of modernist manifestos used as literary dynamite, a violation of convention that would shock their readers and derail expectations. The ethereal, imagistic sensibility of this passage only adds to this impression.

152 It is also interesting to note that Frank Paul, the influential illustrator of Gernsback's magazines, was first trained as an architect.

153 Nor should one overstate the practicality of Le Corbusier's scheme. The City of To-Morrow ends with a chapter on the financing of the Voison Plan, which opens with Le Corbusier announcing that due to the pressing nature of the subject matter he had to rush to manuscript to press and was unable to procure the professional economic calculations with which he had intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the project.

Indeed, the longer one spends in the archives of speculative architectural writing, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish the cities modern architects proposed from those imagined by the writers of fictional texts. It is often difficult to tell which sort of text one is reading. To take only one spectacular example: the German architect Bruno Taut proposed in his 1917 book Alpine

Architektur that the mountain peaks of the Alps be replaced with immense glass cathedrals, an undertaking that would not only peacefully unite the nations of Europe behind a common cause but would set in motion the process of replacing all the world's buildings with glass structures, thereby bringing about an era of world peace.154 A series of thirty gorgeously illustrated plates,

Alpine Architektur is not a serious building proposal, but neither is it quite a work of fiction. The text takes the form of neither narrative nor technical specifications, but of exhortatory prayer:

“Preach the social idea… Engage the masses in a great task, which fulfills everybody, from the humblest to the foremost…”155 Taut’s book strikes out into a middle ground between design and science fiction, drawing equally on the utopian tradition, the visual aesthetics of the space age, and the technical practice of the architectural study. This is the realm of the radiant city, the inter- generic and interdisciplinary space in which the modernist city of the future was built. Taut’s vision of a world of crystal palaces pushes the trope to a spectacular extreme, but his utopia is very much of a piece with the (slightly) more practical city-building schemes described by Gernsback and Le

Corbusier. It focuses on the same core innovations of megastructural scale, hygienic industrial materials, and a revolution in transportation technologies. There are many writers who explored this realm, but the works by Gernsback and Le Corbusier examined here are among the most prominent and influential examples.

154 Bruno Taut, Alpine Architecture, tran. Matthais Schirren (1917. New York: Prestel, 2000).

155 Ibid, plate 16, ellipses original. 91

It is not difficult to identify relatively straightforward historical explanations for the popularity of the vision of the future as a city of clean, shining modern forms and rationally ordered streets that Gernsback and Le Corbusier offered. In 1801 fewer than 20% of the English population lived in cities; by 1891 the figure had jumped to more than 50%.156 Similar shifts took place throughout Europe and America. The social and material problems that resulted from this rapid growth have been well documented. Here, for example, is Charles Dickens on London, in the opening paragraph of Bleak House:

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street- corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement . . . fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.157

Prominent among the problems such texts bring to light is overcrowding, and with it filth, pollution, and the congestion of traffic. Where some responded to these ills of modern urban life by turning to pastoral fantasies of escape from the city, Gernsback and Le Corbusier proposed to solve the city’s problems by, as it were, pushing through them. By carrying such modern developments as the increase in the scale of urban populations and structures, the use of industrial technologies, and the advent of motorized transportation to their logical extremes, both sought to solve the problems those developments created when implemented incompletely or imperfectly.

Brian Elliot has described this as modern architecture's desire to produce a “future society liberated

156 Hall, et. al. The Containment of Urban England Volume I: Urban and Metropolitan Growth Processes (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973).

157 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852. New York: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 1. 92

from the alienating tendency of modern technology by means of that very technology.”158 At their core, then, both Gernsback’s Ralph and Le Corbusier’s town-planning books are committed to exploring solutions to the most pressing environmental problems of their day, urban overcrowding and the pollution attendant on that overcrowding.

I am more interested, however, in the story these visionaries told about their future cities than in the specific innovations in urban form they proposed or the specific urban maladies they hoped to solve. These writers offer visions of an ecologically rectified future defined in large part in terms of that future’s relationship to the present and past. The point here is not simply that the radiant city is an image of a utopian future—the story Gernsback and Le Corbusier tell is very different than that told by, for example, Thomas More in Utopia.159 More’s perfect city is located in a geographical elsewhere, on a previously undiscovered island, and the narrative involves the description of this foreign country—to the extent that there is any futurist element to Utopia, it involves the suggestion that the English might learn something from the Utopians’ example.

Gernsback and Le Corbusier locate their utopian cities in the future and in the same locations as the New York and Paris of their present. This makes for a very different kind of narrative, one that involves not only a guided tour of the perfect community à la More’s Utopia, but also an account of the historical transformation that has allowed that perfect community to replace the flawed communities of the authors’ present. Both Gernsback and Le Corbusier take it for granted that building their cities will involve the complete destruction and erasure of the cities they know. Their story is not a tale of discovery but of salvation, of redemption through architectural eugenics—

158 Brian Elliot, “Le Corbusier and Tafuri on Architecture, Utopia, and Community,” Draft paper shared on Academia.edu.

159 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. and tran. George Logan (1516. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010). 93

they imagine an abrupt social transformation effected through the forcible reconstruction of the built environment. Gibson captures the essence of this historical dynamic in “The Gernsback

Continuum” when he describes the radiant city as a spectral presence that bursts disconcertingly into the world of the present, pushing that world aside and replacing it. These visionaries offered their descriptions of “neon towers” and “soaring roads of crystal” as guarantees that all social and material ills would be put to rest in the future, and thus as sufficient justifications for the violence that would be necessary to achieve that future. The radiant city does draw on the utopian tradition, but the archetype of this modernist vision is not the City of Utopia but the New Jerusalem. These twentieth-century manifestations of the idea of the perfect city as the telos of a developmental historical trajectory leading through destruction and towards an eternal paradise are thoroughly modern and secular in that they shift responsibility for producing the future from the deity's omnipotence to humanity’s rational ingenuity and technical know-how, but underneath this shift their futurism reproduces the narrative logics of the Book of Revelation. The story Gernsback and

Le Corbusier tell is an example of the narrative mode described in the previous chapter as apocalyptic, a story that treats the future as a new world that brings the old world of the present and ultimately history itself to an end.

Corn and Horrigan note this connection between the utopian writing in the modern period and the utopian religious discourse of the ancient apocalyptic writers, describing the vision of the radiant city as “millennial in content and reformist in intent. The city of the future would be beautiful and orderly—a New Jerusalem.”160 Le Corbusier himself acknowledges the quasi- religious aspect of his work in The City of To-Morrow when he characterizes himself as a “minor

160 Corn and Horrigan, 36.

prophet, [describing] this future City of the Blest.”161 A more explicit connection between his work and apocalyptic religion is provided by promotional materials for the Cité du refuge, a project he designed for the Salvation Army, an organization whose name draws direct connections to apocalyptic religion.162 An article announcing the project in a French Salvation Army’s magazine includes a drawing of a crowd trudging towards a cluster of towers accompanied by the caption

“Dieu leur à prépare une cite.” God has prepared the city, but it is Le Corbusier who designed and began to build it, and the poor of France are marching towards the geometrical glass skyscrapers of the radiant city. As the City of Refuge, the radiant city of the modernist imagination and the divine city of the religious apocalyptic imagination are explicitly presented as one and the same.

Gernsback’s references to the tradition of Christian apocalypticism in Ralph are less explicit but not less clear, and center largely on the equation of the eponymous scientist with the messianic savior of apocalyptic history: in the novel’s final episode, Alice is stabbed by a spurned suitor, and

Ralph uses his technology to raise her from the dead before marrying her and bringing her to live with him in the promised new world.

But scholarly discussions of the apocalyptic character of modern futurism have tended to

161 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 193. Other architects made similar connections between their work and the religious vision of a final and perfected city of God. In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” for example, Adolf Loos describes the smooth concrete walls of the modern city in explicitly apocalyptic language: “See, the time is nigh, fulfilment [sic] awaits us. Soon the streets of the city will glisten like white walls. Like Zion, the heavenly city, the capital of heaven.” Elsewhere in the same essay he says that the new city proposed by modern artists and architects appears to those who do not understand the modern aesthetic as a “book sealed with seven seals,” a reference to the book the messiah opens in Revelation and which inaugurates the final calamities that bring the world to its end. Hugh Ferriss strikes the same note in The Metropolis of Tomorrow; he compares the tripartite division of his version of the radiant city into districts dedicated to Business, Science, and Art to the three persons of the Christian deity, positioning himself as a structurally savvy prophet bearing an architectural gospel. In the closing passage of the book he proposes that the “City could be made in the image of Man, who is made in the image of...” Ferris leaves out the final word, claiming that the “rather curious inscription” where he has read this prophecy was “partly mutilated” (142). The point, however, is clear.

162 The City of Refuge project is described in detail in Brian Brace Taylor's Le Corbusier: The City of Refuge, Paris 1929/33 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Diane Morgan's “The 'Floating Asylum,' the Armée du salut, and Le Corbusier: A Modernist Heterotopian/Utopian Project” (Utopian Studies. 25.1 (“Utopia and Architecture” 2014): 87-124). 95

3 – “Dieu leur à prépare une cite,” Image from En Avant use this connection only as an entrée into the oft-told story of the failed utopianism of high modernism, and the specifically apocalyptic nature of this discourse has not received significant

attention in and of itself.163 What I want to suggest here is that the story Gernsback and Le

Corbusier told about the future draws on the same narrative chronotope as apocalyptic religious discourse, and that this modern vision of the future city reproduces apocalyptic ideas about the nature of historical change and the physical world, and thus about the nature of responsible human dwelling.

The basic apocalyptic assumption that historical change proceeds by way of radical breaks and virgin inaugurations is a central theme in Le Corbusier's urban-planning books. He emphasizes repeatedly that the future can only be achieved by bringing the present to an end and that this transition between the old and the new worlds will involve a great deal of violence. The

City of To-Morrow opens with the announcement that construction of the radiant city will involve an “immense step in evolution, so brutal and so overwhelming, [in which] we burn our bridges and break with the past.”164 The model of an ideal city that the architect exhibited in 1924 was an entirely theoretical plan, a vision of the city as Platonic form. The quest to bring this vision to reality was impeded by, above all other things, the fact that all of the good sites already had cities on them, cities full of small houses, crooked alleys, bad air, and miserable human beings.

“Therefore my settled opinion,” Le Corbusier wrote, “is that the centres of our great cities must be pulled down and rebuilt, and that the wretched existing belts of suburbs must be abolished.”165 “It is time,” he wrote elsewhere, “that we should repudiate the existing lay-out of our towns.”166 Paris

163 Much has been written about utopian thinking and modern architectural practice. See, for example, Ruth Eaton, “Architecture and Urbanism: The Faces of Utopia” and “The City as Intellectual Exercise” both in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Nathaniel Coleman’s Architecture and Utopia (New York: Routledge, 2005), and the opening chapter of Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978.

164 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, xxv, italics original.

165 Ibid, 96.

166 Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, 55-7. 97

was among the worst offenders, and where many people proposed that the overcrowding, pollution, and traffic congestion that plagued the French capital could be addressed through localized solutions such as expanding major streets, Le Corbusier insisted that the only solution was to bulldoze the city center and replace the “haphazard” city history had bequeathed upon

France with a technologically perfected “machine for living in.”167 Le Corbusier called the applied version of the radiant city that he developed for Paris the Plan Voison, after the automobile manufacturer that funded his work on the proposal.

4 - Le Corbusier, model of the Plan Voison. The violence of the apocalyptic break between future and past manifests in Le Corbusier's work in two forms, as the physical violence of demolition and social displacement (with the Voison plan calling for the removal of hundreds of thousands of Parisians from their homes) and the discursive violence of a repudiation of cultural history. He insists that the future can be achieved

167 Ibid, 107. 98

only when “the relics of bygone days, the Swiss chalet and the like, have been relegated to the past” and the mind has been “freed of romantic associations.”168 His vision of the future involves a complete overhaul of aesthetic and historical sensibilities, a wiping clean of European culture.

“Our world,” he wrote, “like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs. The great task incumbent on us is that of making a proper environment for our existence, and clearing away from our cities the dead bones that putrefy in them. We must construct cities for to-day.”169 The very fabric of life in the present impeded the arrival of the future, and therefore had to be eliminated. Either society would collapse under its own unaccommodated weight, with the spirit of the new age trapped in an urban body that no longer fit, or else the old cities would have to be destroyed and replaced with urban forms designed for the modern spirit. “Unless we do this,” Le

Corbusier warned, “there is no salvation.”170

Gernsback’s narrative is also predicated on the apocalyptic idea of a radical break with the present. The New York City of his novel shares the name and geographical location of the New

York City of his own time, but otherwise it is an entirely different place. Gernsback’s language repeatedly invokes the idea of the passing away of an old world; during their travels Ralph and

Alice visit “the extreme eastern end of what used to be Long Island” and “the center of what was formerly New York state.”171 Ralph tells Alice that after centuries of enduring the old, imperfect

168 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 206. “Le Corbusier set himself against the ways in which time is usually felt in urban space. The facades of old buildings and worn paving stones offer evidence that our own lives are no more and no less than an addition to the past. Le Corbusier rejected this evidence; he wanted modern architecture, which seeks for freedom of movement in a perfectly coordinated form, to expunge historical time from the city” (Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (1990. New York: Norton, 1992). 170).

169 Ibid, 244.

170 Ibid, 175, italics original.

171 Gernsback, 94, 98. 99

city the citizens “woke up” and replaced it with something new and better. This is meant literally—

Ralph is describing the way in which the “temporary pavements” of the old city have been replaced with a city-wide sheet of impervious “steelonium.”172 In the various introductions that he wrote for the novel Gernsback speaks of technological development as an evolutionary process, but these steelonium streets have not developed out of the old concrete and macadam streets; they are something new that Gernsback imagines suddenly replacing and in the process destroying those older streets. To upgrade the material used in paving the streets of a city sounds like a relatively straightforward exercise, a matter for city councilmen rather than inspired prophets, but one need only consider the many years the city of New York has devoted to the much smaller project of extending the subway system to the east side of Manhattan to realize that Gernsback is right to use the prophetic and quasi-millennial language of “awakening” to describe this change. And it is not just the pavements but everything about this city that is new. “The trolley car,” for example, “had long since become obsolete as well as the gasoline-driven automobile,” while “The Menograph,” a telepathic dictation machine, has “entirely superseded the pen and pencil . . . Typewriters soon disappeared after its invention. Nor was there any use for stenographers.”173 These examples make for a rather scattershot catalogue of the way in which the city’s contents have been purged and replaced, but I want simply to draw attention to the way in which Gernsback’s rhetoric always emphasizes the novelty of the future and never really acknowledges continuity with or development from the past. The spirit of Gernsback’s futurism is summed up quite effectively by a single sentence early in the novel: “[s]ince Ralph’s invention, all this was changed.”174

172 Ibid, 79.

173 Ibid, 81, 47.

174 Ibid, 49. 100

There is less violence in Gernsback's account of the transition from old to new than there is in Le Corbusier's, but this is largely due to the fact that where the architect’s apocalyptic narrative anticipates an end yet to come, Gernsback’s posits an end that has already occurred.

Ralph is set entirely in the new world of the future, and is thus able to gloss over the disruption that the inauguration of that world would have involved. But the redemptive violence of the apocalyptic end is implicit throughout the book in references to the things humanity had to give up to achieve this paradise, as, for example, in Ralph's discussion of the restaurants of the future.

He explains to Alice that eating solid food has been abandoned as an unhealthy practice that produces “indigestion, dyspepsia, and other ills,” and that the people of the future now drink their pureed meals through mechanical straws.175 Ralph acknowledges that the population had some difficulty in adapting to the new restaurants: “Humanity had been masticating for thousands of years and it was hard to overcome the inherited habit . . . People at first did not favor the idea.”176

Gernsback treats the idea of liquid food as a relatively minor detail, but the universal adoption of a liquid diet implies a staggering break in human history—to call solid food an inherited habit is a rather gross understatement. The idea implies a complete readjustment in the behaviors of everyday life, not to mention the various social and technological arrangements for food production. To achieve these restaurants of the future thousands of years of culinary tradition would have to be abandoned—it is perhaps possible to imagine a liquid food that simulates the experience of eating pasta, but one cannot liquefy a croissant. In its restaurants as in its every other detail Ralph's New York is separated from the New York of Gernsback’s twentieth-century present by the six hundred years that intervene between them, not connected to the present by that

175 Ibid, 87.

176 Ibid, 87-8. 101

history—the gulf that yawns between his metropolis and the cities that are its precursors marks the apocalyptic end.

Moreover, both Gernsback and Le Corbusier saw the radiant city as being, because of its perfection, final and permanent; their idea was to bring the history of humanity to an end by constructing a physical environment in which the species would fully realize its latent potential.

They treat the radiant city, in other words, not simply as the privileged mechanism by which a better future was to be achieved and an imperfect past banished, but as the mechanism through which the processes of historical change itself would be brought to a triumphant close. “The city's business,” Le Corbusier wrote, is “to make itself permanent.”177 This permanence is achieved, in the first place, simply by way of the perfection of Le Corbusier's designs; given that they solve the various problems of urban life perfectly, there is no conceivable reason that they would ever be changed. In his descriptions of the radiant city, Le Corbusier allows only for the expansion and duplication of the urban landscape he has designed, not its modification. In one fascinating passage, he proposes that if the French were to use American and German capital to fund the reconstruction of Paris, then these superpowers would neither bomb the city nor allow any other nation to bomb it. The connections he makes here between international capitalism and world peace are questionable, to say the least, but rather than debate his politics I want merely to draw attention to the fact that he is telling a story about the future of Paris in which history and historical change are no longer a factor; freed from the threat of war, his city would stand outside the cycles of political violence that define European history.

Gernsback's descriptions of the future New York City are similarly full of details that remove that city from the flux of history. Some of these are simply allusions to the physical

177 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 53. 102

durability of the metropolis, but accommodation is also made for social unrest. Floating “relaxation cities” designed to give harried modern men and women an opportunity to escape the pace and complexity of their daily lives float in the air above the metropolis, and the novel explains that periodic visits ensure that all citizens remain stable and satisfied members of the social structure.

There is a less direct engagement with issues of social change in the opening episode of the novel, in which workers responsible for weather control in Europe have gone on strike and allowed dangerous blizzards to threaten Switzerland and Ralph builds a new weather control device in his laboratory that allows him to regain control of the climate and bypass the laborers altogether. The text glosses over the social implications of the scene, but it suggests that, just as Le Corbusier imagined a city standing outside the history of war, so Gernsback has removed his city from the flux of social change, and, in the same magisterial gesture, from any and all threat of natural disasters.

Gernsback and Le Corbusier described the radiant city as being real even though it does not yet exist—real in the sense of being a specifically defined potential, but not existent in the sense that it had not yet been manifested or actualized. Wolfgang Welsch illustrates the nonexistent real in terms of the idea, often attributed to Michelangelo, that the sculptor does not create the statue but frees a form that lies hidden within a block of marble.178 The sculpture exists before the sculptor’s work allows it to become manifest; it is a real but nonexistent object that the sculptor engages with. For Gernsback and Le Corbusier the modern present was like a rude block of stone within which the radiant city waited as a real but not-yet-existent potential. When they engaged it through their speculative narratives, they were not describing a city that might someday exist but

178 Wolfgang Welsch, “Virtual to Begin With?” in Subjektivität und Öffentlichkeit - Kulturwissenschaftliche Grundlagenprobleme virtueller Welten, eds. Mike Sandbothe and Winfried Marotzki (Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2000), 25-60. 103

rather drawing attention to the future that lay latent within their present, and that had been latent within all the various contingent forms reality had assumed in the past. Le Corbusier speaks of

“grain elevators and factories” as the “magnificent FIRST-FRUITS of the new age.”179 The new forms of this new age are “[a]lmost unknown to us” but they are already “beginning to wake.”180

In the preface to the 1925 edition of Ralph Gernsback wrote that, although the technology described in the book might “seem to verge upon the fantastic,” modern audiences should think of their “great-great-grand-father being told about locomotives” and realize that what appear beyond belief are actually conservative predictions.181 In the preface to the 1950 edition he wrote that he had “little concern” that “most” of the social and technological developments he predicts would

“come about in the not too distant future” and that “all of them will be commonplace by 2660, the time in which the action of this novel moves.”182 Le Corbusier saw the outline of the future in the present in factories, silos, ocean liners, airplanes, and automobiles; Gernsback saw it in the radio, the television, and the high-speed train.

One consequences of this ambiguous view of the future is that both men’s writing is marked by a tension between two very different rhetorical registers. On the one hand, both display the urgency of a prophet who sees what others do not and the excitement of a visionary describing something novel and unknown; on the other, both exhibit a kind of complacency, a quiet assurance that the futures they describe are inevitable and can be neither prevented nor avoided. The experience of modernity has often been described as one in which the increased speed of everyday life and of technological development produced a sense of dislocation and vertigo, a despairing

179 Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, 31

180 Ibid, 54; The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 165.

181 Gernsback, xvii, xviii.

182 Ibid, xiv-xv, italics original. 104

sense of being swept along in an uncontrollable flood of change as, in Marx’s famous phrase, all that was solid melted into air. Reinhart Kosselleck, for example, speaks of the modern sense of history as focused on “a future that transcended the hitherto predictable.”183 But for apocalyptic technophiles like Gernsback and Le Corbusier it was precisely the spectacle of rapidly developing technology that rendered the future not only predictable but known and thus, in a way, static. In the technological and social changes taking place in the world around them both men perceived the outlines of the eschatological future and the end of history; in their descriptions of the radiant city they were divulging in the present the more perfect form that history was about to produce.

No man might know the hour of the radiant city’s arrival, but Gernsback and Le Corbusier were confident that it was on its way.

The Radiant City and Apocalyptic Space

Articulating its very clear understanding of the structure of the temporal world, apocalyptic narrative implicitly suggests a particular way of understanding the structure of the physical world as well, and the urban vision of Gernsback and Le Corbusier reproduces the apocalyptic understanding of space just as it echoes apocalyptic ideas about history. Both the modern futurism of Le Corbusier and Gernsback and the religious futurism of texts like Revelation rely on images of a physical space, the city, in order to narrate the future. The final and utopian product that is the apocalyptic future is also a place, the city of New Jerusalem or New New York or New Paris. By identifying the redemptive end of a history with a physical place, apocalyptic futurism assumes the material world will conform to its developmental temporal narrative. In practical terms, this means that apocalyptic discourses treat physical reality as a blank canvas, a flat and featureless

183 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tran. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 22. 105

stage upon which history takes place. This is a straightforward consequence of apocalyptic historical logics: if the fallen world is to be redeemed once and for all through the construction of a final and perfect city, it must be possible to clear away all traces of that fallen world, which must themselves be considered as incidental rather definitive features of the spaces that they occupy. A second implication follows, as the same arguments about the developmental trajectory of history also imply that the destiny of this empty stage-space is to be filled and dominated by humanity and human action. These ideas about the nature of material reality have far-reaching consequences in terms of their impact upon understandings of humanity's position in the world. The balance of this chapter focuses on the ideas about the nature of physical space and of humanity's relationship to that space that are implicit in apocalyptic discourses, and the implications of those ideas for human dwelling practices.

An episode in the Ezra apocalypse known as the Vision of the Woman in Distress provides a concise illustration of the spatial aspect of apocalyptic futurism. This episode, in which the New

Jerusalem intrudes physically into the world inhabited by the apocalyptic visionary, is strikingly similar to Gibson’s account of the radiant city, with which I opened this chapter. Ezra is commanded by the angel Uriel to “go to a flowery field where no house stands . . . and pray unceasingly” until God sends him a message, and so he leaves Babylon and the community of exiled Israelites for the field of Ardat, where he meets a woman in mourning.184 When she tells him that her only son, born to her after thirty years of barrenness, has died on the day of his wedding, Ezra admonishes her that her troubles are but a small part of the universal pain of creation, and that she should accept God’s decision to take her son. Suddenly a light flashes and

Ezra sees before him “no longer a woman but a complete city, built on massive foundations.”185

184 IV Ezra 9:25.

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Uriel then appears to interpret the woman's story as an allegory of the past and future history of

Israel and invites Ezra to explore the streets of the city and learn something of the future paradise that is the New Jerusalem.186 The angel explains that Ezra was sent to the field because this vision required open space in which to appear: “I told you to come to this field, where no foundation had been laid for any building,” Uriel says, “for in the place where the city of the Most High was to be revealed, no building made by man could stand.”187 The city of Babylon and the open field of

Ardat are distinguished here not as the civilized and the wild or as the profane and the sacred but as the full and the empty—the important detail is the way in which space is being occupied in the two locations. The name of the field, which scholars are unable to attach to any real location, draws attention to this distinction; G.H. Box argues that it is symbolic and suggests an empty place

“entirely removed from contact with ordinary human life.”188 Ezra could not receive the vision in

Babylon because Babylon is full of things that would get in the way. Ardat, being free of human habitation, is assumed to be completely empty, an unoccupied volume into which the heavenly city can be placed so that Ezra can experience it. There is nothing about Ardat as a space that contributes to the events of this episode other than its neutrality; the field contains Ezra, the woman, and the city in the same way that a Cartesian coordinate field passively contains geometrical forms.

185 Ibid, 10:26-7.

186 Ibid, 10:44.

187 Ibid, 10:54.

188 G.H. Box, The Ezra-Apocalypse, Being Chapters 3-14 of the Book Commonly Known as 4 Ezra (or II Esdras) (Pitman & Sons: London, 1912), 212. The spelling of this name varies across the manuscripts. See the note on page 213 of Box’s edition for a summary of the variants. Rendel Harris suggests that the reference is to Abraham’s oak, connecting the name “Ardat” to “Hebron” (The Rest of the Words of Baruch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889)). Gustav Volkmar reads the name as a reference to the Holy Land (Das Vierte Buch Esra und apokalyptische Gehemnisse (Handbuch der Einleitung in die Apokryphen Vol. 2) (Zurich: Verlag Von Meyer & Zeller, 1858)); Bruno Violet suggests that it derives from “Arcadia” (Die Esra-Apokalypse (IV Esra) Erster Teil: Die Uberlieferung (Liepzig: Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1910)). 107

The space of this field is, to borrow a phrase from Timothy Morton, “container-like,” a

“flat, universal container” within which things exist and happen.189 Space is “flat” here in the sense that it is featureless or neutral, a stage for but not a part of the events that take place within it. It is an absence; it provides the condition of possibility of presence and being but is itself disengaged from the objects or actions that exist and take place within it. Henri Lefebvre calls this the “strictly geometrical” idea of space as “simply . . . an empty area.”190 Heidegger speaks of it as spatium or extensio, the abstract space of mathematics and “pure extension.”191 This flat space is “universal” in the sense that it is equally flat, featureless, and container-like everywhere. Ezra can receive his vision in Ardat because space in the field is unoccupied, and not in Babylon because space in the city is filled with the physical and social constructs of that city—but when the time is right the

New Jerusalem will come to Babylon. The vision is a premonitory glimpse of what will happen to the entire world in the last days, not an opportunity to learn about the future of a specific empty field. That the New Jerusalem will supplant and replace Babylon is the entire point of the vision, the reason that it functions as a reassuring promise that Ezra's present troubles will be alleviated.

The difference between Babylon and Ardat is that space is full of objects and buildings in the city and is empty in the field, but space itself is identical in both locations: a neutral container within which objects exist and history takes place.

“St. John at Patmos,” the first of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for the Book of Revelation, is a powerful visual representation of the apocalyptic idea of space as neutral staging ground for history. The etching is a portrait of the saint, but it is also a radically minimalist landscape that

189 Morton, Hyperobjects, 62, 20.

190 Lefebvre, 1.

191 Heidegger, 145. 108

5 - Gustave Doré, “St. John at Patmos”

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treats space as absence or volume—landscape as the condition of possibility of portraiture. John sits on a rock at the edge of the sea with a pen in one hand and paper in the other; his head is turned to the side as he listens to the divine voice, which appears in the form of rays of light breaking through the clouds and illuminating his face and shoulder. The saint’s features stand out starkly against a dark field of sea, sky, and stone. This void is differentiated into a foreground of rocks and a background of sea and sky divided by the faint line of the horizon, but the very perspectival depth of the volume thus delineated is itself “flat” in the sense that it is without significant features, an almost pure void. The stones on which John sits are a blank, only minimally distinguished from the blank sea and blank sky. As the light which plays over these blank surfaces, revelation enters physically into the scene in much the same way that the New Jerusalem enters physically into

Ezra’s vision, intruding into and filling up the otherwise empty spaces of the physical world.

Neither John nor the light of divine knowledge are interacting with space in this picture, just as neither Ezra nor Uriel interacts with or is affected by the space of Ardat. Instead, the prophets, divine messengers, and cities of these apocalyptic works move through and occupy a space defined by and as universal absence. What Doré has drawn is the flat space in which the objects and events of apocalypse, the saint and his revelation, are contained.

But there is more to the apocalyptic narrative mediation of space than just the idea of a static distinction of the active subject from its passive spatial container. Apocalypse goes beyond this delineation, imagining an erasure of the distinction between subject and context that is acheived through the subject's expansion and triumphant co-option of its context. Space in the apocalyptic imagination is not simply a flat container in which objects and actions are held—it is a container with a destiny. Apocalyptic narratives suggest that the passive volume in which things exist awaits the final presence that will occupy and fill it perfectly. This awaited presence is the

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New Jerusalem, the physical manifestation of post-historical eternity. That Ezra must go a place where “no foundation had been laid” in order to receive his vision of the New Jerusalem implies that when that city does come to Babylon it will come physically, that its massive foundation will smash and replace whatever foundations are already laid there. Babylon is an object held in the container of flat apocalyptic space, and when the time is right the New Jerusalem will shoulder it out of that space to make way for its own more perfect occupation. Babylon is full where Ardat is empty, but the more important distinction is that while the earthly city occupies space, the heavenly city will fill it completely. Fullness is the apocalyptic promise of finality, articulated in spatial terms.

There are a number of passages in the ancient apocalyptic texts that emphasize the physical fullness of the post-historical apocalyptic future. In the second chapter of the Book of Daniel,

Nebuchadnezzar dreams of “a stone [that] was cut out without hands” and that smashes a statue with a golden head, silver chest, brass stomach, iron legs, and feet of clay.192 Daniel explains that the different materials of which the statue is composed represent the various kingdoms and empires that have at one time or another held dominion over the earth, and that the stone is the kingdom of

God, the post-historical kingdom of the apocalyptic future: “the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed . . . it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.”193 The vision ends when “the wind carried [the pieces of the earthly cities] away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.”194 The figure whose various limbs are different ages in the

192 Daniel 2:31-3.

193 Ibid, 2:44.

194 Ibid, 2:34-5. 111

political history of the Mediterranean world is smashed by the stone that is the New Jerusalem, which then expands to fill the whole earth, overcoming both history and spatiality at once.

But perhaps the most striking of the Biblical visions of the future as a city that fills the entire world appears in final chapters of the Book of Revelation. There are several moments in the canonical scriptures that read like blueprints transposed into the idiom of religious poetry, such as the description of the ark in Genesis and of Solomon’s temple in the first book of Kings. Revelation hyperbolizes this trope in a series of verses in which the city of God is described as having the form of an immense cube:

And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel.195

Stricter translations use the original unit of measure, “stadia,” where the King James uses furlong, and modern scholars estimate that this is equivalent to about fourteen or fifteen hundred miles.

The reference of the twelve thousand measures to the twelve tribes of Israel is clear, and, as Craig

Koester and others have observed, this number also “corresponds to the numbers of people brought into the redeemed community.”196 But these dimensions are of more than purely symbolic significance; in his New Cambridge Commentary volume on Revelation, Ben Witherington III points out that the dimensions described in the text are approximately identical in area to “the whole of the Mediterranean crescent from Jerusalem to Spain,” and argues that the author of

Revelation “may see [the New Jerusalem] as coterminous with his known or extant world.”197 The

195 Revelation 21:15-17.

196 Craig Koester, Revelation and the End of All Things (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing, 2001), 195.

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emphasis throughout the description is on figures of wholeness: the city is a cube, a perfectly symmetrical shape; its dimensions correspond exactly to the number of its inhabitants; and its great square footprint fills the world as it was known to the book’s author. “Revelation’s final visions imagine heaven as world, [and] world as city,” writes Elisabeth Fiorenza; “in short, the narrative symbolization of God’s eschatological city integrates heaven and earth, city and nation, culture and nature, sacred and profane, Israel (twelve tribes) and Christianity (twelve apostles).”198 This is a vision of ecological holism articulated through the image of the city that fills all of space.

The cubic New Jerusalem of Revelation and the mountain that fills the earth in Daniel are not large—they occupy space in such a way that relative descriptions of size cease to be applicable.

Apocalyptic futurism looks beyond magnitude and towards an absolute relationship with space.

The New Jerusalem is not a large object but an all-encompassing reality; co-extensive with its spatial container, it renders the idea of a container meaningless. A container is defined as such by the existence of some difference between itself and that which it contains: a gap, even an infinitesimal one, between container and contents. It is this difference, the degree of alienation that divides subject from context and organism from environment, that apocalyptic futurism imagines overcoming. Apocalyptic narratives look to the future as a way of escaping and redeeming not only the evil and suffering of this world, nor only its historical contingency and imperfection, but its multiplicity, the internal diversity and complexity that allows for things to exist individually.

These images of the New Jerusalem filling the world are thus analogous to the passages of

Revelation discussed in the introduction in which the tree and river of life are integrated into the human systems of the city’s streets and buildings to produce a single, harmonious landscape. These

197 Ben Witherington, Revelation (New Cambridge Bible Commentary) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 269.

198 Elisabeth Fiorenza, Revelation: Visions of a Just World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 114. 113

images of full space are another representation of the apocalyptic future as a perfect unity and integrated harmony. The drive to banish space through the pursuit of providential history is, at the same time, a progressive subsuming of time into space. When all of space is filled, history comes to an end and temporality vanishes into spatiality.

In “The Crowned Virgin: A Vision of John,” Doré captures this idea of apocalyptic history as a movement towards a state of physical fullness. The twelfth chapter of Revelation describes a war between the forces of heaven and a great red dragon that persecutes the mother of the messiah, who appears in the form of the woman clothed with the sun. Doré casts this confrontation in spatial terms as a contrast between full and empty areas of the pictorial frame. His dragon sprawls across the bottom of the picture, while the woman clothed with the sun stands above amidst the heavenly choirs and Michael and his angels plunge into the emptiness below. The dragon is broken and discontinuous, emerging in pieces from the void—a coil, a tail, two disconnected heads framed by but not firmly attached to a wing and a barbed, disembodied joint. Even where it is present this body is defined by absence, shot through with aporia and fading away at the edges, and although it dominates the bottom half of the frame, the dragon does not fill the space that it occupies. Barely differentiable from the void, the dragon is visually associated with the empty landscape—the wings and coils emerging from the darkness are jumbled together with the equally diffuse and ill- defined waves, clouds, and shoreline. It is a bare sketch of a presence, never truly coming into focus or immediacy. The upper half of the picture, in contrast, is full to the point of bursting, packed with light and angelic figures. The bodies of the angels press out to the very limits of a space that they define rather than occupy. Where the bottom of the picture shows the incomplete occupation of space, its upper half is a glimpse of that same space once it has achieved the spatial telos of fullness. The warlike figures that plunge towards the dragon are assaulting the emptiness

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6 - Gustave Doré, “The Crowned Virgin: A Vision of John”

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of the black void with their brilliant and well-defined figures as much as they are threatening the monster with their drawn swords.

The dragon or sea serpent is a traditional figure of the primal chaos from which the structured world is derived; stories of a hero-god who slays a primordial monster and fashions the cosmos from its corpse are ubiquitous in mythological cosmogonies. 199 The opening moments of

Genesis, in which the waters of the deep pre-exist creation, have been read as a derivation of this tradition.200 If the first book of the scriptural canon is a record of the first assault of creation on the deeps, the first intrusion of presence onto the monstrous absence that is the condition of possibility of presence, then the apocalyptic books prophecy the end of that process. Thus the prophetic announcement in Revelation that in the new world there will be “no more sea.”201 Babylon, like the dragon, occupies space but fails to do so completely—the New Jerusalem bursts like the army of angels into the world to thrust such imperfections aside. The slaying of the dragon and the building of the universal city are, in this sense, one and the same action, the filling of empty or imperfectly occupied space.

Like Doré's angels, Gernsback and Le Corbusier are aspiring dragon slayers. They treat space in exactly the apocalyptic fashion suggested by the above readings, as a universally flat and

199 Echoes of this tradition can be found in such diverse places as the story of Cronus's castration of Uranus and Beowulf's battle against Grendel, as well as in the apocalyptic tradition. For a comparative study of this myth in the Western tradition see Calvert Watkins's How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a more focused look at the importance of this tradition to Jewish thought in the centuries which saw the production of the apocalyptic literature, see Andrew Angle's Chaos and the Son of Man: The Hebrew Chaoskampf Tradition in the Period 515 BCE to 200 CE (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2006) and Norman Cohn's Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

200 The Biblical scholar Hermann Gunkel is generally credited with being the first to systematically expound this reading. See his Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton: A Religio-historical Study of Genesis 1 and Revelation 12, trans. K. William Whitney (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2006).

201 Revelation 21:1.

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passive container awaiting the presence that will perfectly fill and define it. As one might expect,

Le Corbusier is more explicit in his theorizations of the nature of space than either Gernsback or the religious writers. He begins by distinguishing between two processes through which the layout of a city might develop, which he calls “The Pack-Donkey's Way” and “Man's Way.” The difference between these two processes, which yield a city of irregular plan and a rectilinear grid respectively, is that the first proceeds without direction or guidance and the second is guided by the dictates of reasoned thought. “The winding road is the result of happy-go-lucky heedlessness, of looseness, lack of concentration and animality . . . The straight road is a reaction, an action, a positive deed, the result of self-mastery. It is sane and noble.”202 There is an overt moral element to the distinction, in which the Pack-Donkey is not just sloppy but fails to be fully human and fully modern, but beneath this explicit juxtaposition of human rationality and animal heedlessness, however, there is another opposition at work, between two different ways of perceiving and reacting to space.

“The pack-donkey,” Le Corbusier writes, “meanders along . . . zigzags in order to avoid the larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance.”203 Those who follow the donkey's way live in a world in which space is neither flat nor universal but rather possessed of unique, localized characteristics that impact upon the lives and actions of those who traverse it; this space varies from place to place in such a way that it forces one to act differently in different places. Confronted with a large stone, the donkey turns to the left or to the right, circling the stone before returning to its original course; confronted with a stream, it searches for a convenient place to ford; confronted with a hill, it finds the point at which

202 Ibid, 12.

203 Ibid, 5. 117

the grade is gentlest and adjusts its path accordingly. In short, the donkey perceives the world as spatially particularized and its actions are influenced by those particularities. Le Corbusier bemoans the fact that the “Pack-Donkey's Way is responsible for the plan of every continental city . . . the covered wagon lumbered along at the mercy of bumps and hollows, of rocks or mire; a stream was an intimidating obstacle. In this way were born roads and tracks.”204 These roads and tracks that respond to the environment in which they were laid down are the urban forms that Le

Corbusier argues must be bulldozed to make way for the city of the future, which will be laid out according to the dictates of the Man’s Way. The rationality of the man who “walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it” derives from his ability to see beyond the particularities and differences that dominate the donkey's awareness of space.205 The Man's Way insists that the specificity of material spaces is only apparent; underlying this superficial appearance of localized particularities is a flat universality that can be reached through the exercise of reasonable purposefulness. Confronted by a stone, the man finds a way to pass through the stone; by a stream and he finds a way to bridge or dam it; by a hill and he finds a way to level it. The space of the

Man’s Way is flat not in the purely geometrical or topographic sense of being without grade but in the experiential sense that whatever grade or other features it might happen to possess are irrelevant and have no effect on the subject that occupies it.

There are two important concepts in Le Corbusier's thought that are related to this disciplined awareness of the flat passivity of space: the morality of geometry and the importance of building “in the open.” For Le Corbusier geometry is not simply a mathematical science but a

204 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 6.

205 Ibid. 118

source of moral goodness; in the clarity of geometrically pure forms, he argues, it is possible to access real truths. Geometry is the antidote to the Pack-Donkey's Way, the conceptual machinery through which a disciplined and reasoned awareness of the flatness of space becomes possible.

“We struggle against chance, against disorder, against a policy of drift and against the idleness which brings death,” he writes, “we strive for order, which can be achieved only by appealing to what is the fundamental basis on which our minds can work: geometry.”206 In the perfectly flat and universal space of Ezra’s field at Ardat or of the Cartesian co-ordinate plane, and in the

Euclidean taxonomy of three-dimensional forms representable in that space, the confusion of materiality and history falls away. Linking geometry and morality, Le Corbusier explicitly deploys the apocalyptic idea of space for the redemption of humanity, a connection that remains implicit in the religious apocalypses.207

The practical consequence of thinking geometrically and following the Man's way is a recognition of the importance of “building in the open” or “building on a clear site.” Le Corbusier presents this need for a spatial tabula rasa as the key to escaping the fallen world: “The city of today is a dying thing because it is not geometrical. To build in the open would be to replace our present haphazard arrangements, which are all we have to-day, by a uniform lay-out.” And again, later in the same book: “WE MUST BUILD ON A CLEAR SITE. The city of to-day is dying because it is not constructed geometrically. To build on a clear site is to replace the ‘accidental’ lay-out of the ground, the only one that exists to-day, by the formal lay-out. Otherwise nothing can save us.”208 At first glance this seems like a relatively straightforward, if overwrought, suggestion

206 Ibid, 93.

207 Other architects have advanced similar ideas. In an interview with Carson Chan for the art magazine 032c, for example, Einar Thorstein recalled that the American architect Buckminster Fuller “explained to me once that because our world is constructed from geometric relations like the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci Series, by thinking about geometry all the time, you could organize and harmonize your life with the structure of the world” (81).

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that suitably open building sites be located before construction commences, but there is something at once simpler and more complex at work here. Le Corbusier explicitly argues against the idea of building on a site that is “open” in the sense of being unoccupied: “strong-minded people tell us that we must move the centre somewhere else, we must build a new city, a new centre, far away, right beyond the suburbs; where it can be done comfortably, with no constraint and no pre-existing state of things. This is a pure fallacy.”209 His proposal is to demolish existing cities and build his own city in their place, not to find an Ardat in which to build. His exhortations about learning to perceive geometrically and build in the open are thus a tacit argument that all potential building sites are already open and clear, that they have always already been open and clear. The center of

Paris is, he suggests, only superficially different from an empty field—only the faulty perception of the pack-donkey obscures the fact that both are points in the same universally flat container.

Only when humanity (or at the very least the officials in charge of Paris) learns to think geometrically and see the flat universality of space will the way be opened for the city of the future.

At the base of this architect's discussion of the relationship of spatial awareness to city building is a sustained theoretical defense of the apocalyptic idea of physical space as universal flat container.

Gernsback does not explicitly theorize the nature of space and the human use of space in

208 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 175, 220, italics and capitalization original.

209 Ibid, 99. It is a fallacy because the location of a city center “is determined, it exists only because of what surrounds it; its position is determined from a long way off by innumerable convergings of every kind which it would be impossible to change; to shift the axle of a wheel means that you must move the whole wheel. As regards one of our great towns, you might as well set out to shift everything fifteen or twenty miles round about, which is altogether impossible” (99, italics original). The logic here is convoluted, as Le Corbusier argues that the center- periphery relationship is particularized and immutable, but deploys this point in defense of the argument that it is possible to wipe the center clean and rebuild without reference to what already exists there. One could object that this refutes the argument I am making regarding Le Corbusier's perception of space as universally flat, and it is true that he makes a distinction between the different and particularized spaces of center and periphery. The architect, dwelling in the real world of practice and construction, does not push the doctrine of flat space to the logical extremes found in the thought of the religious writer—the fantasy of “moving the whole wheel” is precisely what I have argued religious visions of the arrival of the New Jerusalem offer. Le Corbusier's vision of flat space is, then, at once a more explicit and a more qualified version of that found in religious apocalypse. 120

the same way that Le Corbusier does in his town-planning books, but the same idea of a universally flat container is evident throughout Ralph. The doctrine is very clearly illustrated in the opening episode, in which Ralph reaches across the globe with his technology to save Alice from an avalanche. Having been accidentally connected to Alice’s home in Switzerland through a bad connection in his video phone, Ralph is conveniently on the line when the avalanche appears, and he sends a blast of energy from his laboratory in New York to melt the avalanche and save the day.

In the moments before Ralph performs this act of techno-heroism, the two have been discussing

Alice’s “remarkable case,” the fact that she is snowed in alone in her father's villa.210 This isolation is the result of an unusual combination of social and geographical circumstances. The workers responsible for operating the weather control devices in Alice's district have gone on strike for better wages and have sabotaged their machinery; this has resulted in the unexpected blizzard that has trapped Alice at home, a “novel experience” that Ralph suggests could have happened nowhere else on earth.211 But these particularities, the unique series of social events and the specific geography of the Swiss Alps which have combined to produce Alice's predicament, are flattened out by Ralph's superior understanding. Refusing the pack-donkey's suggestion that there is some meaningful difference between what can be done in a New York City laboratory and what can be done in the mountains of Switzerland, Ralph perceives the essential flatness of the world he inhabits. Gernsback’s narrative “flattens” the peaks of the Alps not in the sense that it imagines that Ralph bulldozing them out of the way to get to Alice, but in the sense that in the context of the novel these mountains are effectively without significant characteristics. They are flat in that their steepness is not a factor that Ralph needs to reckon with when he chooses to act. For

210 Gernsback, 20.

211 Ibid, 18. 121

Gernsback and his hero, New York and Switzerland are interchangeable points in the container of space, not unique locations with particularities Ralph and Alice must acknowledge or accommodate themselves to.

This same idea of space as a passive container that hosts Ralph's activities, and by extension those of the human species he exemplifies and represents, is evident throughout the novel. It is illustrated in a rather whimsical fashion when Ralph and Alice tour New York City on Tele-motor- coasters, electrically powered roller skates made feasible by the incredible smoothness of the city’s steelonium streets. “You will notice,” Ralph says to Alice, “that there are no cracks or fissures . . .

We now make our streets by putting down large slabs of the metal, six inches thick . . . the result is a perfect street composed of a uniform sheet of metal without cracks or breaks; no dirt or germs can collect. The sidewalks are made in the same manner.”212 In place of the steeply pitched hills and rocky outcrops of Manhattan neighborhoods such as Sugar Hill, Hamilton Heights, and

Morningside Heights, or the picturesque cobblestones of the West Village, the New Yorkers of

Gernsback's future live on a “uniform sheet of metal without cracks” and can roll anywhere they like on their skates. Again, the point is not that Gernsback imagines the literal flattening of

Manhattan but that he constructs his narrative in such a way that it is not necessary even to acknowledge the particularities of the island’s hills. Ralph’s invention of the steelonium plates and the electric roller skates has made whatever grade the hills might have irrelevant, something that cannot have any effect on the way the people of New York occupy and use space and which thus no longer distinguishes those hills in any meaningful way from any other point in the featureless container that is the material world. All of the images of travel in the novel act to reinforce this impression of the complete freedom of action Ralph and Alice enjoy in their passive world,

212 Ibid, 79. 122

whether they are taking a quick jaunt a hundred miles out of Manhattan “in less than ten minutes” or travelling in a gyroscopic “space flyer” through the inner solar system.213 Ralph enjoys the same absolute freedom of movement between cities and planets as he does skating from building to building in New York, following the man's way wherever he chooses to go. Ralph’s heroism lies, ultimately, not in having saved Alice but in the fact that he has overcome the pack-donkey’s view of the world as something that must be reckoned with on its own terms.

Gernsback's most fully developed vision of the world as a passive container comes when

Ralph takes Alice on a tour of one of the vacation cities floating in the sky above New York. The orbital resort consists of a single sheet of steelonium, capped with a weather-controlling dome and suspended in the air by gravity-nullifying gyroscopes. Here humanity can build free from all restrictions in a space that is literally a void, the empty expanse of the open sky. The floating city is a fantasy of complete freedom from the restrictions of a site or localized material conditions. In the image of the flying city, which is not unique to Gernsback’s fiction and has been explored by a number of authors, the modern urban imagination takes the apocalyptic spatial logic to an extreme, imagining a form of human dwelling free of all historical and material constraints.214 The result is a perfect apocalyptic city, a place of peace and unity that completely escapes the exigencies and complications of both historical time and material reality.

213 Ibid, 94, 102.

214 In 1981 the American architect Buckminster Fuller published a proposal for flying cities based on the mathematical observation that the volume of an expanding sphere increases more rapidly than its surface area. Theoretically, the weight of a metal-framed sphere of sufficient size would be negligible when compared to the mass of air contained within the frame. If this air were heated, the entire contraption could be made to float. Fuller calculated that in a sphere half a mile in diameter the ratio of air to structural weight would be a thousand to one, and argued that a structure of this size or larger would be able to carry along with it “[m]any thousands of passengers,” in much the same way that a hot air balloon is able to carry a basket. (Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), 336-7.). The scheme is glossed by many commentators with optimistic phrases such as “probably possible” (J. Baldwin, BuckyWorks: Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 190). 123

That Gernsback and Le Corbusier not only understand space as flat and universal but also seek to fulfill the apocalyptic telos of filling and thus banishing this empty container is evident in their mutual fascination with the megastructure. Gibson's hyperbolic descriptions in “The

Gernsback Continuum” of a tower so large that the Empire State Building could be lost among its buttresses is only the slightest of exaggerations on the scale at which modern urban visionaries operated: Gernsback’s hero lives in “a round tower, six hundred and fifty feet high, and thirty in diameter, built entirely of crystal glass-bricks and steelonium,” occupying “a plot where, centuries ago, Union Square had been,” and Le Corbusier proposed housing blocks that would extend unbroken for miles.215 Great size, however, is not the same as the absolute relationship with space imagined in apocalyptic visions of the future. The New Jerusalem is not a large object in space but an all-encompassing state of future reality, and this same universalizing gesture animates the megastructural imagination of Gernsback and Le Corbusier. Both writers move beyond fetishizing size to the fantasy of an absolute relationship with space—the fantasy of bringing the entire world under a single roof. The size of their huge buildings is one of the ways in which they articulate the idea that the radiant city is a totality, a universal presence. The networked megastructures of the radiant city represent a limit condition for the idea of a building, a point at which the construction of individual structures and the comprehensive design of environments collapse into one another.

Each of these gigantic masses is a world unto itself; each is a complete social system contained in, or rather manifested as, a single structure. Like the apocalyptic city that fills the creation, they expand to a point where they cease to be objects in a field and become synonymous with the social and spatial environment that they have come to contain.

As Le Corbusier explains, the skyscrapers in his plan are more than simply large office

215 Gernsback, 33-4. 124

buildings: “[e]very sky-scraper is . . . a whole district, but verticalized!”216 In Le Corbusier's conception, modern business depends upon concentration and proximity, and these towers are designed to facilitate that business by collecting all of the infrastructural and social elements of modern public society together into a single structure. “Everything is concentrated in them: apparatus for abolishing time and space, telephones, cables and wireless; the banks, business affairs and the control of industry; finance, commerce, specialization.”217 These buildings are not themselves quite complete social worlds, in that Le Corbusier does not imagine that the office worker will sleep or raise a family in the same building in which he works—just as all of the infrastructure of public life is concentrated in the towers, so all of the elements of private life are concentrated in the residential blocks that surround them. But the towers are so integrally interconnected with these residential blocks, the only other structures of note in Le Corbusier’s plan, that the two form a single continuous unit. In Le Corbusier’s account of a typical day in the radiant city, workers leave their homes and travel to work along covered roads and underground subways that lead directly from the enclosed car parks and basement-level stations of the residential blocks to the enclosed car parks and basement-level stations of the towers. The population moves, in other words, directly from the insides of their homes to the insides of their offices without once stepping outside of the built structure of the city. Tied together in this fashion, the various megastructures form a unified architectural machine in which all aspects of human life are accommodated and contained. By way of the train, highway, and airport systems that converge upon the towers, this machine is “link[ed] up with the provinces and other countries. From every point of the compass the main railway lines come straight to the center.”218 Describing the large

216 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 182.

217 Ibid, 187.

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windows of the towers, Le Corbusier writes that they “will give us the feeling of ‘look-outs’ dominating an ordered world.”219 Thus even the open space around the towers is not truly external to them, but is contained by the controlling gaze that issues from their windows and integrated into the megastructural whole. Le Corbusier notes that the towers contain the telephones that so many commentators have described as having changed the way modern humanity experiences time and space, but it is in fact the towers themselves, visions of apocalypse's eschatological future, that abolish time and space.

The tower in which Gernsback's hero lives is another such apparatus. It is a more fully integrated machine for living than are Le Corbusier's skyscrapers, containing both Ralph's home and his laboratory, and the novel leads a reader to understand that in the normal course of things the inventor rarely leaves it. One room contains devices that allow Ralph to communicate with the entire planet simultaneously—after his rescue of Alice, “hundreds of thousands” of people hailing from “the four points of the compass” gather virtually in the tower to congratulate him.220 In another room is a device that provides virtual access to any theater or playhouse on the planet. The integration of the world into a single networked whole in Ralph involves more than just communication technologies—one of the first inventions discussed in the novel is the “Subatlantic

Tube,” an extension of the New York subway system through the mantel of the earth that establishes a direct connection between Manhattan and the city of Brest, in northern France.221

These speculations about the future of communication and transportation technologies not only come very close to describing our own networked early twenty-first century, but put an accessible

218 Ibid, 188-9.

219 Ibid, 187.

220 Gernsback, 38-9.

221 Ibid, 61-3. 126

face on the apocalyptic fantasy of the city that abolishes space and expands to fill the world perfectly. In this future no meaningful distinction can be made between the city of New York and the world in which that city exists—every detail of the natural, political, social, and cultural world is accessible from and thus in a sense contained within the technological envelope projected by

Ralph's tower. From the vantage of his glass plinth in lower Manhattan, he is able to seize control of the weather and solve labor disputes on the other side of the planet, reshaping the world as he sees fit and pushing the boundaries of his technologically perfected metropolis out to the limits of the world as he knows it. His tower is very much a “look-out dominating an ordered world,” the core of a universal being manifested as the modern apocalyptic city of which Ralph is the messiah and harbinger.

A painting by Frank Paul entitled “City of Tomorrow,” first printed on the back cover of

Amazing Stories in April 1942 and perhaps the most famous of the pictures Paul painted for

Gernsback’s science fiction magazines, provides a powerful visual representation of the radiant city as a future in which space has been completely filled. The picture shows a wide avenue flanked by rows of identical futuristic skyscrapers, and the perspective leads the eye toward an immense megastructure, equal parts sculpture, skyscraper, and elevated airport, that dominates the far end of this avenue. Multiple lanes of traffic cross the scene, with pedestrians and outlandishly shaped automobiles and airplanes crowding a series of layered roadways and filling the skies above. This picture is rendered from the point of view of an observer located within the city itself, and the composition thus lacks the perspective or distance that would have allowed Paul to represent the city as an object in a field. It thus appears as a limitless, totalizing presence. There is no pictorial field in which this city is located, no envelope of space around it—the city has filled the frame and abolished the space that no longer contains but is contained by the universalized urban machine.

127

7 - Frank Paul, “City of Tomorrow”

128

Although cast in a very different visual register and drawing on different sets of visual cues than

Doré employs in his picture of the full space of the heavenly choir, Paul’s “City of Tomorrow” is an essentially analogous visual representation of the full space or universal interior of the apocalyptic future. This is not a picture of a city in the future but of the future as a city.

Returning for a moment to Doré's illustration, it is interesting to note that he chose to represent the full space of the apocalyptic future as filled and defined by human figures. The angels of the choirs press out to and up against the limits of the volume they occupy, filling it completely—the stacked companies of angels form the walls that define the full space of apocalyptic fulfillment. Similarly, in Ezra’s vision of the Woman in Distress it is not simply that the heavenly city appears and fills the field of Ardat but that the mourning woman is transformed into that city. This woman is in many ways an image of Ezra—her lament for her lost son resembles, in Uriel’s interpretation, nothing so much as the apocalyptic writer’s own lament for

Israel. Ezra thus witnesses a metaphoric representation of his own transformation into the future city; at the end of the vision he is no longer lamenting his sufferings or counseling the sufferings of others but occupying the city which is itself his own transformed body, the glorious and universal body of the sufferer who has transcended suffering. Likewise, Le Corbusier's call for the future city to be built “on a new large scale” while simultaneously demanding that the city be built on a scale that reflects and is derived from the scale of the human body is a call for the human subject to expand to the new scale of the global modern city. Gernsback's conflation of the future city and the future city-builder in his celebration of Ralph as a messianic savior illustrates the same point—by giving Ralph credit for all of the technological innovations that have allowed the New

York of the future to take on the perfection and universal expansion of the apocalyptic city,

Gernsback emphasizes the connection between the development of that city and the transcendence

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of the human subject. In all of these texts the redemptive conclusion of apocalyptic history is achieved when the human subject comes to define perfectly the spaces that it occupies.

These futures exhibit a coherence in which the subject is no longer differentiated from its environment but is identical to and inclusive of that context. Apocalyptic narratives imagine a state in which there is no other, not only in the sense that all that is other has been banished but in the sense that the possibility of difference has been eliminated through the erasure of the conceptual gap between subject and object and the spatial gap between the physical city and the container of space. The trajectory that leads from Babylon to the New Jerusalem, from New York to Ralph

124C 41+'s New York, and from Paris to the city-machine of the Voison Plan is an expression of this dream, a movement from the city in which the subject is surrounded and assailed by otherness to the city that is itself a universal extension of the subject who inhabits it. It is not simply that the apocalyptic city expands to fill the entire world; at the apocalyptic end of history, it is the human subject itself that, through the medium of its city, becomes one with space and subsumes the world into itself. This is the future that Northrop Frye described as an infinite and eternal human body.

It is this hostility to difference that makes both the New Jerusalem and the modern radiant city narratives incompatible with a sensitivity to ecological complexity. These narratives actively encourage the subordination and destruction of the nonhuman world. It is not that the “natural” vanishes in any of these visions; in fact, the radiant city is much “greener” than many real-world metropolitan areas. Revelation describes the tree of life growing on either side of the street in the

New Jerusalem, and Le Corbusier does John of Patmos one better by promising that greenery will cover a full 95% of his city center. “Strictly speaking,” he writes, “the city is one immense park.”222

In Gernsback's novel all of upstate New York is given over to farming, and all of Long Island is

222 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 176-7. 130

covered in parks. These narratives are troubling from an ecological perspective not because they contain no green or growing things, but because they allow for the existence only of that which can be fit into the structure of the future city. The tree of life is allowed to grow in the midst of the

New Jerusalem because “the leaves of the tree” are “for the healing of the nations”; a function is found for this tree within the new cosmic structure dictated by the needs and desires of the universalized human subject, and so this piece of the nonhuman world is allowed to continue to exist. In contrast, it is promised in Revelation that in the apocalyptic city there will be “no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.”223 Because humanity no longer needs the sun or the moon, these things will pass away, and so too in the new world there will be “no more sea.”224 The New Jerusalem is a vision of a radically and violently simplified world.

This same reduction is at work in the modernist narratives. The parks between Le

Corbusier's skyscrapers are vast but they are domesticated and artificial spaces, replanted after the bulldozers have departed, with no existence apart from that of the human inhabitants of the city.

For all their verdure they are as static and dead as the glass and concrete towers they serve—it is not possible for something unplanned to grow here and disrupt the careful design of the city. Le

Corbusier does describe an area outside of the city that is given over to “woods, fields,” and other

“natural” spaces, but this area is not truly an exterior to the city-tower system, and is again strictly defined and controlled: it is there to provide space for the “growth of the city as laid down by the municipality.”225 In a very real sense the radiant city already exists in these “wild” spaces, as a

223 Revelation 21:23.

224 Revelation 21:1.

225 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 174-5. 131

virtual presence that reaches back from the future to dominate and control them. In a world of flat space in which the final city extends infinitely and exists everywhere, there is nowhere left for anything that is not the city. Le Corbusier's version of this apocalyptic world-city takes on the appearance of the wild countryside, but only because the countryside has become a mask for the city.

In Gernsback's future nonhuman life appears only in the form of cultivated plants in greenhouses, entirely contained by the world Ralph has built and controls. Vast areas outside of the city have been given over to farming, but these are thoroughly industrial operations, roofed over with glass and raised up upon a platform of soil-optimizing machinery. It is, again, impossible to imagine anything growing here in a way that has not been planned in advance, orchestrated by

Ralph from his city-planner’s office in the glass tower. Another particularly striking example of the way in which this narrative effaces anything that is not fully subordinated to the design of the city is provided by Gernsback’s descriptions of the weather. “You may look at a thermometer any time during the year,” Ralph says, “and you will find it invariably pointing at fifty units,” a futuristic measurement that Gernsback translates, in a footnote, to seventy-two degrees

Fahrenheit.226 “Between two and three each morning it rains for exactly one hour,” just enough to

“freshen the air and carry the dust away . . . sufficient for all purposes.”227 The purposes for which this rain is sufficient are, of course, Ralph’s own, the matters that he in his role as the most important part of the holistic world-system of the future has decided are necessary.

These apocalyptic visions of the future city imagine a world brought into compliance with human desire; more to the point, they imagine a world in which issues of environmental

226 Gernsback, 83.

227 Ibid, 84. 132

degradation and crisis have been rendered moot through the erasure of difference. The issue here is not that Gernsback and Le Corbusier advocate large-scale landscape architecture or industrial agriculture or even weather control in and of themselves, but that their narratives deploy these technologies for the purpose of simplifying and consolidating the world, striving always to bring things closer to a state of stasis and unity. In this world of perfect and sustainable harmony contained within the structures humanity has built to unify, define, and control it, there can be no incompatibility between the human organism and its context precisely and only because that context has ceased to exist. There is no environment in this apocalyptic future, not in any meaningful sense. There is only the seamless holistic universe of self.

The drive to achieve ecological holism through the flattening and homogenizing of space that is the underlying apocalyptic project of the radiant city reached a logical extreme of expression in the mid-century work of the Italian art collective Superstudio (1966-1978). In a series of influential photo montages, story boards, fictional texts, manifestos, and sketched designs,

Superstudio described a utopian world of abstract Cartesian volume, most powerfully represented as a flat grid populated by smiling bohemians and hippie families and as a world-spanning city structure called the “continuous monument.”228 Superstudio’s work can be read as a satirical critique of the ambitions of modern architecture, with the continuous monument as a hyperbolized mockery of the already hyperbolized visions of Le Corbusier and Gernsback.229 On the other hand,

Superstudio’s hyper-minimalist and anti-materialist utopianism, the dream of a life “without objects,” represents a pure expression of the apocalyptic desire underwriting the radiant city’s

228 Peter Lang and William Menking, Superstudio: Life Without Objects (New York: Skira, 2003).

229 Danielle Duval, “The Third Degree: Superstudio: Paper Architecture,” ArtUS 10 (October/November 2005): 24- 7. 133

8- Photocollages by Superstudio. 1972

134

material extravagances.230 This modern apocalyptic discourse aims at ecological harmony, and sees the city as a vehicle for the seamless integration of the human animal and its environment rather than as an end in itself. The enclosure of the world inside of the city and the evaporation of the city into the world are two ways of describing the same thing, the apocalyptic triumph over difference and complexity. Like John of Patmos, Gernsback and Le Corbusier imagine futures in which the city has been so thoroughly universalized that there is a sense in which it no longer exists. This is the state of universal presence represented in the blank grid of Superstudio’s photo collages, where mountain ranges, human bodies, and bottles of wine become interchangeable elements passing through a featureless container of space.

The holistic unity of these imaginary landscapes is described in the catalog that accompanied a 1972 exhibition of Superstudio’s work at the Museum of Modern Art: “[e]very point will be the same as any other . . . You can be where you like taking with you the tribe or family. There’s no need for shelters, since the climatic conditions and the body mechanisms of thermos-regulation have been modified to guarantee total comfort.”231 This harmonious union of subject and context has been achieved through the evacuation of detail and local particularity; climatic conditions and bodily mechanisms are perfectly in sync in a world that is explicitly the empty backdrop of human history, a history imagined as a starkly pre-modern, naturalized drama of tribes and homogenous family groups. This is a very literal articulation of the apocalyptic ideal: history, in the form of the various dislocations and traumas of modernity, has been erased, subsumed into limitless flattened space. Like other radiant city visionaries, the architects of

Superstudio played explicitly with the apocalyptic connotations of their work; one of the group’s

230 See Superstudio, “Description of the Micro-Event and Micro-Environment,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, ed. Emilio Ambasaz (New York: MOMA, 1972), 242-51.

231 Ibid, 247-9. 135

publications was entitled “Premonizioni della parusia urbanistica,” premonitions of the second coming of the city.232

A more palpable legacy of the radiant city is apparent in the form of contemporary corporate and public architecture. Today, discussions of the urban future are not often characterized by the audacity of Le Corbusier's desire to bulldoze a national capital and rebuild it from scratch, or the chilly optimism of Gernsback's descriptions of cities covered with sheets of hygienic metal plating. But, as Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter observe, although the modernist vision of a city of megastructural blocks and high-speed freeways “has had a somewhat spotted career and has often elicited skepticism, it has remained . . . the psychological substratum of urban theory and its practical application” throughout the twentieth century.233 As Gibson puts it in “The

Gernsback Continuum,” the unbuilt radiant city lives on in the form of “semiotic ghosts . . . bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken a life of their own . . . [as part of] the mass unconscious.”234 The apocalyptic desires and logics that animated the radiant city narrative when

Gernsback and Le Corbusier were writing in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s remain a potent element in contemporary ideas about urban development. The vision of perfect ecological integration of human subject and environmental context achieved through the universalization of human subjectivity in the form of an all-inclusive urban system is not just a hyperbolic religious fantasy or an idiosyncratic modern response to technological development, but a way of thinking and talking about the future that remains influential and even ubiquitous today.

232 Superstudio, “Premonizioni della parusia urbanistica,” CASABELLA 361 (1972). Milano, Editrice Casabella. For more on the implicitly religious element of Superstudio’s imagery, see Scott Budzynski’s discussion of the concept of the “monument” in “Continuous Spaces: Object and Imagination in Superarchitettura,” Palinsesti 1.1 (2011): 102-119 (106-7).

233 Colin Rowe and Frank Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), 95.

234 Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” 31. 136

To take just one very specific example, a number of critics have discussed the Westin

Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles in terms of a late capitalist spatial logic that is effectively analogous to the apocalyptic spatial logic I have described here. The Bonaventure, designed by the

American architect John Portmann in the early 1970s, was erected as part of an extensive redesign of downtown Los Angeles that the historian Mike Davis has described in almost explicitly apocalyptic terms: “[w]ith historical landscapes erased, with megastructures and superblocks as primary components, and with an increasingly dense and self-contained circulation system, the new financial district [of which the Bonaventure is a part] is best conceived as a single, demonically self-referential hyperstructure.”235 Fredric Jameson finds a programmatic rejection of the outside world and a “new category of closure” in the Bonaventure; he argues that the hotel

“aspires to being a total space, a complete world . . . it does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement.”236 Noting that none of the hotel's entrances leads directly to the main registration desk but instead open onto upper floors from which it is necessary to take escalators and stairs down to the lobby, Jameson argues that these “lateral and rather backdoor affairs” erase distinctions between interior and exterior by bringing visitors into a space lacking the familiar organization of a hotel interior and by making it difficult to find the way back out.237

The geographer Edward Soja has similarly described the Bonaventure as “homogeneous and homogenizing . . . constantly pressing to enclose.”238 This push towards enclosure and “total space” is equivalent to what I have described as the apocalyptic fantasy of the subject that

235 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Pimlico, 1998), 229.

236 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 39.

237 Ibid, 40.

238 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 243. 137

universalizes itself and abolishes the gap that defines the container of space. Just as the large windows of Le Corbusier's skyscrapers are a mechanism through which open space is incorporated into the radiant city, Jameson reads the external glass elevators and rooftop cocktail lounges of the

Bonaventure as an observational machinery that transforms the rest of Los Angeles, and by extension the entire exterior world, into a series of images contained by the controlling gaze that issues from the hotel. Jameson suggests that the space of this hotel “makes it impossible for us to use the language of volume or volumes any longer, since these are impossible to seize . . . without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume.”239 Here again the totalizing expansion of the structure has eliminated the very concept of space—the distance

Jameson speaks of is synonymous in this sense with what I have spoken of as the gap between object and spatial container.

The architect and theorist Mark Pimlott, meanwhile, has suggested that the apocalyptic desire to banish space and subsume the exterior world into an infinitely extended self is not only evident in individual structures designed by celebrity architects but is a pervasive and fundamental feature in the design of contemporary urban space on a large scale. Writing in 2007, he observed that “one is struck [today] by the multitude of interiors that resemble each other regardless of their location.”240 This repetition of interior space in airports, malls, hotels, and other public places is not symptomatic of a lack of imagination on the part of designers, Pimlott argues, but the result of

239 Jameson, 43. For Jameson there is an important political distinction to be drawn between the Bonaventure's move towards a total space without exterior and the same aspiration as it manifests in the work of Le Corbusier, in that the very violence of Le Corbusier's repudiation of the existing city opens a space for political thought and utopian aspiration that is expressly foreclosed by the Bonaventure’s implicit denial that the fallen world outside of the hotel exists. For my own purposes, however, I want to draw attention to the ways in which these two strategies are alike in being articulations of the same apocalyptic idea of the future as defined by a totalizing presence that contains all of reality.

240 Mark Pimlott, Without and Within: Essays on Territory and the Interior (Rotterdam: Episode Publishing, 2007), 9. 138

a concerted attempt to develop a universally applicable design system that would make the accommodation of localized spatial, cultural, climatological, and geographical specificities unnecessary. “The ambition,” he argues, is “to contain everything and render all else irrelevant.”241

Pimlott argues that this drive to enclosure has, in the cities of the early twenty-first century, already begun to produce what is in effect a single urban structure “distributed across many sites, and finally, virtually present across all sites,” an architecture that “has achieved complete command, complete interiority.”242 Within this urban totality, “the distinctions between large or small, close or distant . . . become obsolete . . . one need not distinguish home from office, car from home, office from mall, mall from airport, landscape from freeway, freeway from playground, childhood from adulthood.”243 This erasure of difference ultimately fulfills the apocalyptic goal of universalizing subjectivity: “Distinctions between the self and other were similarly erased . . . that which was without was now within. Absolute description had yielded absolute control, which, in turn, had yielded an all-over condition of equilibrium, equivalence and interiority.”244 In a very real sense, Pimlott suggests, we live today in a version of the radiant city, a single space expressing and animated by a single subjectivity which contains the entire world.

Davis, Jameson, Soja, and Pimlott all suggest that the idea of space as a passive container awaiting the presence that will fill and abolish it that I have described as apocalyptic is an important part of contemporary thinking about the city and its future development. In some of the most ubiquitous spaces of the cities of today they find the same desire to redeem human dwelling by

241 Mark Pimlott, “Only Within.” IDEA Journal (2009: Exposing the Critical Interior): 84-95 (92).

242 Pimlott, Without and Within, 12.

243 Pimlott, “Only Within,” 92. Note the similarity of this description to Fiorenza’s account of the cosmic integration represented by Revelation’s cubic New Jerusalem: “heaven and earth, city and nation, culture and nature, sacred and profane, Israel (twelve tribes) and Christianity (twelve apostles)” (114).

244 Ibid, 91. 139

abolishing the gap that separates the human organism from its environment expressed in

Gernsback’s and Le Corbusier's visions of integrated urban machines and Revelation's vision of the solid-state city-world: the history-ending, space-banishing, dragon-slaying desire of apocalypse. In these readings the nobility of Le Corbusier's Man's Way, the heroism of

Gernsback’s scientist-savior, and the grandeur of the religious visionaries' new heaven and new earth have taken on the banality of an infinitely extended and infinitely profitable food court. This shift in register is valuable as an illustration of the fact that the apocalyptic desire for ecological wholeness manifests not only at the level of theoretical discussions of urban form or theological discussions of cosmology and eschatology, but in the unconscious assumptions about humanity’s relationship to the world we inhabit that underwrite and animate everyday behavior. These ideas continue to shape the way in which cities are built as well as the way in which they are inhabited today, and thus continue to shape the way in which human beings dwell in the world. As we will see in the next chapter, the radiant city narrative remained central to more explicitly environmentalist engagements with the question of ecology and humanity’s place in the world throughout the twentieth century as well.

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Chapter 3

History in the Future City: The Arcologies of Paolo Soleri and William Gibson

“I want to view nature—that is to say, materiality in time, materiality whose only destination is futurity, openness, and endless ramification—as the undoing of the aspirations of art and culture (which come together in a unique form as architecture) to stability, identity, progress.” – Elizabeth Grosz

“This city sucks my breath away. Nothing here is ever still.” – William Gibson

When the photographer in Gibson’s “Gernsback Continuum” sees the “gleaming ziggurat steps” and “golden temple tower” of the radiant city he is horrified. The shining metropolis is terrible to the photographer despite, and indeed precisely because of, its manifold perfections; he sees in it not only the realization of the dream of overcoming urban pollution and traffic congestion, but echoes of much darker modern fantasies of a perfected world. The people in the city of his vision “were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American . . . smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world,” and they had “all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.”245 Linking the modernist New Jerusalem to discourses of racial and national purity, Gibson suggests that attempts to realize the apocalyptic desire for a coherent world result at best in limited and reductive paradises and equates the idealization of an ecologically simplified world with an apologia for genocide. Apocalyptic violence cannot be justified, he suggests, because the “perfected” reality it produces only appears perfect from a certain perspective, in this case a Eurocentric and racialized perspective; the apocalyptic new

245 Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” 34. 141

world, far from being radically new, simply reproduces familiarly unjust and oppressive power hierarchies. If only a privileged few would wish to see the post-historical paradise endure eternally, then the desirability of an eschatologically final and eternally static post-historical future is called into question. “The Gernsback Continuum” turns the idea of the radiant city on its head, portraying the holistic world of ecological coherence as an oppressive nightmare.246 This social critique parallels the ecological critique made in the last chapter; both suggest that apocalyptic narrative’s idealization of ontological unity is an inherently reductive and destructive exercise of power. The desire to redeem the world by forcing it into a state of perfect identity or interiority results in both social violence and the sweeping rejection of difference identified in the last chapter.

Having rejected the apocalyptic desire for an escape from history and ecological complexity, “The Gernsback Continuum” ends with a gesture towards an affirmative postapocalyptic alternative, which it finds in historical indeterminacy itself. Struggling to recover from the shock of his vision, Gibson's photographer exorcises his terrifying glimpse of utopia by reminding himself of the imperfections that define his own historically contingent world, reading

“as much as [he] could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard.”247 This “hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in” alleviates his fear of an escape from history into the eternal perfection of the future city—an escape that is desirable to apocalyptic thinkers

246 Critical discussion of Gibson’s story turns largely on the question of whether it dismisses the older futurism it critiques or identifies the early twentieth-century speculative tradition as a dangerous but still influential element of contemporary thought. The first position was established emphatically by Bruce Sterling, who described the story as “consciously drawing a bead on the shambling SF tradition . . . in its guise as narrow technolatry” (“Preface” in Burning Chrome. (New York: Arbor House, 1986), xi-xiv (xii)); the second reading has been advanced compellingly by Paul Youngquist in Cyberfiction: After the Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), where he argues that the story illustrates that modern futurist ideologies obscure a clear perception of the postmodern present. See also Andrew Ross’s “Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum,” Gary Westfahl’s “The Gernsback Continuum: William Gibson in the Context of Science Fiction,” Thomas Bredehoft’s “The Gibson Continuum: Cyberspace and Gibson’s Mervyn Kihn Stories,” Tom Henthorn’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” Carol McGuirk’s “The `New' Romancers: Science Fiction Innovators from Gernsback to Gibson,” and Veronica Hollinger’s “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.”

247 Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” 35. 142

precisely as a solution to those same kinds of vulnerabilities and contingencies.248 Amy Novak has argued that Gibson’s fiction stages “disruptions of narrative” that force readers to “reconceive the relationship of the past to the present” as neither linear nor developmental but radically open to flux and reinterpretation.249 This ironic re-evaluation of environmental energy crises as reassuring reminders of normalcy is just such a disruption, a radical violation of the norms of apocalyptic narrative progression through the tribulations of history towards an idealized state of future stability. It would be easy to read the conclusion of “The Gernsback Continuum,” along with much of the rest of Gibson’s fictional output, as cynically nihilistic; Veronica Hollinger, for example, argues that Gibson “dismisses the apparent significance of [apocalyptic] images” such as the nuclear and fossil fuel hazards in a way that “de-emphasizes the potential for (political) change within the historical process.”250 But to deny that a given crisis augurs an impending break in history or that it demands a solution in the form of such a break is not necessarily to deny the possibility of change. Where apocalyptic narratives make sense of the imperfections of the present by treating them as evidence that the better world of the future has not yet arrived or interpreting them as signs of its approach, Gibson would seem to be suggesting that the petroleum and nuclear crises should be seen as evidence of opportunities to change the world for the better. Refusing to look for final solutions in the post-historical future of apocalypse, he instead searches for possibilities to improve the world through action in the present, and finds an alternative to the

248 Ibid.

249 Amy Novak, “Virtual Poltergeists and Memory: The Question of Ahistoricism in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984),” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 6.1 (Spring 2000, Science Fiction Issue): 55- 78 (56).

250 Veronica Hollinger, “Notes on the Contemporary Apocalyptic Imagination: William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma,” in Worlds of Wonder: Readings in Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, eds. Camille R. La Bossiere and Jean-Francois Leroux (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004), 47-55 (47-9, 55). 143

oppressive idealization of eternity in the promise of the continued dynamism and historicality of the future.

Moreover, just as apocalyptic narratives that idealize holistic unification as the solution to ecological problems necessarily imply a rejection of difference, acknowledging the historical precarity of the present and indeterminacy of the future helps Gibson’s photographer to recognize the presence of radically nonhuman others. Recognizing the petroleum crisis and the nuclear hazard means acknowledging that, simply by existing, oil and radioactive materials shape the course of human history; these are not dumb materials that humanity can make good or bad use of, but, in some fashion, active participants in the drama of history. The photographer’s fears are soothed, then, not by the idea that he is a sovereign subject capable of bringing the cosmos into perfect alignment, but by his recognition of the limits of human agency. Horrified by a vision of the end of history and the unification of subjectivity, he prefers to think of the future as a site of ongoing conflict and negotiation involving multiple actants in an ecologically complex system that is not fully controlled by himself or the society or even the species of which he is a part. By insisting that humanity’s future remains and will always remain open to change, he avoids reducing that future to an expression of human desire. Focusing on fossil fuels and nuclear energy, Gibson puts the responsibility to engage with nonhuman entities such as oil and plutonium at the center of his alternative to apocalyptic futurism. The postapocalyptic futurism he gestures towards in these final passages of “The Gernsback Continuum” is in this sense sensitive to both the historicality and the ontological diversity of the future.

In the decade following the publication of “The Gernsback Continuum” Gibson developed and expanded both the critique of modern apocalyptic urban futurism and his postapocalyptic alternative to this narrative discourse in a series of novels that would cement his fame as one of

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the most powerful voices in late twentieth-century science fiction. These three books—

Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)—have come to be known as the “cyberspace” or “Sprawl” trilogy.251 The Sprawl books, and especially

Neuromancer, are best known for being the works that announced the arrival of “cyberpunk” on the contemporary cultural landscape; in these novels Gibson pioneered a new mode of darkly ironic science fiction that departed sharply from the optimistic speculative tradition initiated by

Gernsback and sustained through the work of “Golden Age” writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert

Heinlein.252 Scholarly discussions of the novels have tended to focus almost exclusively on

Gibson’s visions of the immersive virtual reality environments of “cyberspace” and his exploration of the impact computer communication technologies have on society. The physical spaces, urban and nonurban, that are described in the novels are largely overlooked; Ross Farnell, for example, argues that only in the later novels of the “Bridge” trilogy did Gibson again take up the subject of the urban environment and discourses about that environment.253 But a sustained critique of the apocalyptic narrative tradition in modern urbanism is a central theme of the Sprawl books.

Moreover, I argue that Gibson uses these novels to stage an implicit theorization of spatial experience and the role particular spaces play in shaping historical events, rejecting the Cartesian model of flat, universal apocalyptic space in favor of an idea of locally particularized “historical space.” Where “The Gernsback Continuum” expresses horror at the willingness of apocalyptic thinkers to violently strip away the world’s complexity in their search for ecological coherence

251 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Penguin, 1984); Count Zer0 (New York: Penguin, 1986); Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Penguin, 1988.

252 Cyberpunk is an aesthetic and a tone more than it is a coherent genre. In Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge: 1992) Brian McHale argued that the cyberpunk is “a convenient name for the kind of writing that springs up where the converging trajectories of SF poetics and postmodernist poetics finally cross” (245).

253 Ross Farnell, “Posthuman Topologies: William Gibson's "Architexture" in Virtual Light and Idoru,” Science Fiction Studies 25 (1998): 459-80. 145

and mastery, the Sprawl novels mount a thorough and direct refutation of the historical and spatial logics that underlie modern urban apocalypticism.

In the richly detailed fictional world of the Sprawl novels all of the wildest fantasies of the radiant city visionaries have been realized, and Gibson’s neo-noir thrillers play out against a backdrop of self-sustaining megastructures and floating orbital cities. But rather than investing these structures with eschatological significance, Gibson insists on the continued historicality of the buildings, cities, subjects, and worlds produced by ostensibly apocalyptic processes, and his descriptions of urban landscapes act as focal points for a more general critique of apocalyptic narrative praxis. In the one explicit reference to Le Corbusier’s Voison Plan in the Sprawl novels, for example, the Swiss architect’s proposed city has not replaced Paris but become incorporated into the metropolis in the form of a “grim northern suburb” where “twenty concrete towers [rise] from a plain of the same material,” which the narrator describes as “speculative real estate from the middle of the previous century.”254 Produced by and subject to the vagaries of the housing market, the towers are denied the privileged position of historical telos that they occupy in Le

Corbusier’s writing, becoming simply another historically specific form of urban construction, part of Parisian history rather than its apotheosis. History continues to unfold in the radiant city, and with temporal flux comes a degree of ontological complexity and instability that completely undermines the absolute mastery Le Corbusier’s city-machine is supposed to provide over humanity’s environment. In this shadow of the radiant city humanity must confront its own creations as environmental factors, rather than using the built structures to control such factors; a character who visits the concrete towers finds their internal spaces threatening and strange and struggles to negotiate them.

254 Gibson, Count Zero, 13. 146

This deflation of Le Corbusier’s eschatological proposal is only a quick aside, however, and Gibson’s critique of apocalyptic urban futurism is focused primarily on the work of the

American architect Paolo Soleri, and more specifically on Soleri’s theory of “arcology.” Soleri coined the word, a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology,” in his 1969 monograph Arcology:

The City in the Image of Man, which adapts the megastructural design principles and universalizing ecological ambitions of the radiant city to the environmental concerns of the later twentieth century in the form of designs for thirty visionary cities.255 Although his designs and politics are explicitly and radically environmentalist, the narrative of arcology articulated in Soleri’s work is an apocalyptic one, and I argue here that his narrative practice undermines his environmentalist project. In Arcology Soleri develops an elaborate theory of cosmology and cosmic evolution, and he discusses the transformation of contemporary cities into the city-machines of arcology as a step on a path leading towards a future in which humanity will become one with the universe. The construction of arcologies thus frees humanity of the troubling necessity of engaging with its environmental others, and Soleri’s attempt to save the “natural” world by reforming urban design succeeds only in erasing that world entirely. Gibson mentions Soleri by name only once in the

Sprawl novels (in the second book, Count Zero), but he uses the term arcology throughout the series, and his own accounts of arcology illustrate repeatedly that history is both more productive and more difficult to escape than Soleri’s apocalyptic ideas about architecture, human collectivity, and cosmic evolution would have it.

Although Gibson describes a disastrously polluted future and Soleri describes one that is sustainable and “green,” Gibson’s postapocalyptic narrative actively fosters the sense of an encounter with radically unassimilable alterity that thinkers like Morton, Bennett, and Latour

255 Paolo Soleri, Arcology: The City in the Image of Man (1969. Arizona: Cosanti Press, 2006). 147

associate with ecological thinking. Gibson’s future is a nightmare in many ways, involving not only pervasive environmental pollution but ubiquitous dehumanizing violence, unchecked corporate power, the erosion of civil society, and other grim and frighteningly believable extrapolations from twentieth-century material, social, and cultural conditions. But Gibson constructs his narrative account of this thoroughly unappealing future in a way that draws attention to the complexity of history and ecology and helps audiences to see nonhuman actants as contributing actively to shaping and defining the world humanity inhabits. In a world that never resolves into eschatological finality or coheres into universal singularity, the human subjects of the Sprawl novels are confronted at every turn by forces and beings that are other than themselves—social others, environmental others, and technological others all clamor for recognition. Where Soleri’s apocalyptic narrative looks forward to a future in which humanity harmoniously merges with the rest of nonhuman reality to form a single cosmic whole, Gibson traces the limits of human subjectivity. These limits are flexible and permeable, thoroughly mediated by technology and open to continuous revision, but they are never apocalyptically transcended and serve as a constant reminder of the presence of an exterior world of irreducible difference within which ecologically embedded humanity exists, acts, and dwells.

A Dynamic New Jerusalem: The Architectural Ecology of Paolo Soleri

For a recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships, three honorary doctorates, and many awards from professional architectural organizations, Paolo Soleri has a portfolio of completed projects that is thinner than one might expect from a designer with so many laurels.256 There is a ceramics factory in Italy, the Dome House outside of Phoenix, a model city called Arcosanti, and

256 “Paolo Soleri: Biography.” Cosanti Foundation. 2012. 148

a few other structures, most of them relatively modest in scale. Soleri’s real contribution to the field of architecture is conceptual and consists of designs for fantastic cities and a vast body of philosophical writings. These writings take up topics ranging from the architect’s responsibility to engage with environmental issues to the relationship of the individual to society to the nature of reality and the role played by consciousness in the evolution of the cosmos; one reviewer speaks of him as a “master builder-turned-metaphysician.”257 The paucity of completed Soleri designs surely explains the eclipse of his reputation as an architect by such celebrated contemporaries as

Walter Gropius and Oscar Niemeyer; the idiosyncrasy of his ideas and his complete disregard for the tradition and forms of academic philosophy likely explains his obscurity as a philosopher. But

Soleri is often cited by professional architects as an important figure in the history of green architecture, and his speculative discourse has had a profound effect on late twentieth-century ideas about the urban future.258 Soleri dedicated his life to the project of developing an environmentally responsible architecture long before this goal began to interest the mainstream of the profession. An obituary in the Architect’s Journal describes him as a “prophet of the need for a reappraisal of resource use . . . before it became fashionable,” and goes on to suggest that “many of the difficulties of his early years were due to the then failure to acknowledge the need” for the kinds of environmentally focused innovations in design and building praxis that he was proposing.259 His speculative projects of the 1960s and ‘70s explored a number of practices that are now considered basic to sustainable construction practice, such as passive heating, the use of locally sourced materials, and designing with the environmental footprint of the entire construction

257 Dana White, “The Apocalyptic Vision of Paolo Soleri,” Technology and Culture 12.1 (January 1971): 75-88 (79).

258 Alastair Gordon, “True Green: Lessons from 1960s'-70s' Counterculture Architecture.” Architectural Record 196.4 (April 2008): 42 (42).

259 Henry Pelly, “Paolo Soleri, 1919-2013,” Architects' Journal 237.14 (2013): 18 (18). 149

process in mind.

But Soleri’s vision went far beyond technical innovation. He rejected small-scale

“reforms” in architectural practice, which he argued could only produce “a better kind of wrongness,” and advocated instead for a sweeping “reformulation” of the ways in which humanity inhabits the world.260 The reformulation Soleri proposed involved new approaches not just to the construction of buildings and cities, but to the way in which human beings inhabit structures and spaces and the way in which they relate to one another; ultimately his work demands a new understanding of collective human identity and looks prophetically forward to a transformation of the species that will produce a corresponding transformation in the universe. Central to this holistic vision is Soleri’s idea of arcology, or “ecological architecture.”261 Soleri uses this neologism to refer both to the structures he designed and to the philosophical system that underwrites those designs.262 The building of arcological cities is for Soleri only one aspect of the reformulation of human life according to the tenets of arcology, a philosophy “so all-embracing in its scope that it relates the arcological city unity to the entire evolution of organic life, from the proto-biological primordial ooze to an as yet unevolved Neo-Matter.”263 Like Gernsback and Le Corbusier, Soleri offered not just images of new cities but a story about the future course of human history; in this narrative the arcological transformation of human building and dwelling practices will serve both to advance the evolution of the species and to bring the universe a step closer to a final state of

260 Paolo Soleri, “Responsibility of the Architectural Profession,” in Conversations with Paolo Soleri, ed. Lisa McCullough (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), 33-6 (33-4).

261 Soleri, Arcology, 21, italics original.

262 Dana White provides a useful summary: “the singular noun ‘arcology’ may describe either the general system of ecological architecture or a specific city to be constructed according to these principles; the plural ‘arcologies’ refers always to the urban containers; and the modifier ‘arcological’ applies to both system and place” (80, footnote 4).

263 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, “The Arcology of Paolo Soleri,” The Architectural Forum (1970), no pagination, italics original. 150

unity and balance. Soleri spent his entire life developing and elaborating the theory of arcology, building a prototype at Arcosanti in the Arizona desert in 1970 and refining the concept in a long series of books and articles.264 His last publication on the subject, Lean Linear City: Arterial

Arcology, was published only a few months before his death in the spring of 2013.

As a system of urban planning, the immediate goal of arcology is to reverse the environmental and cultural damage caused by suburban sprawl by re-conceptualizing the city as a large built object rather than as a collection of buildings or geographical expanse. Soleri describes suburbia as a “dark fabric” and a “map of despair” that is smothering the surface of the planet; he sees the cul-de-sac, the preferred unit of suburban zoning, as a perfect formal expression of the ecological, cultural, social, and technological dead-end that such zoning represents.265 To begin the process of rolling back the dark fabric it is first necessary, he argues, to repudiate the car, which he describes as an abortive deviation from the proper path of technological development. Because the car allows a community to be widely distributed, it encourages a sprawling and environmentally destructive approach to urban design. Moreover, this physical expansiveness implies for Soleri an attenuation of the social body that is hostile to culture and, ultimately, to human life.266 Only when free of the illusory appeal of the car will humanity be able to reconceptualize the city as a three-dimensional object rather than a two-dimensional expanse. This idea of the city as sculptural is at the heart of the architetectonic aspect of arcology. “The gist of

264 Soleri’s publications on arcology include the books The Bridge between Matter and Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973), The Omega Seed (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1981), Technology and Cosmogenesis (New York: Paragon, 1986), and Lean Linear City: Arterial Arcology (Arizona: Cosanti Press, 2012). This work was supported almost entirely through the sale of bronze and ceramic wind bells of Soleri’s own design.

265 Soleri, Arcology, 10.

266 It is possible to detect a degree of culture shock in Soleri’s writings on suburbia, the struggle of a European intellectual used to the dense urban landscapes of the old world grappling with the unfamiliar spaces of the new world. 151

arcology is the reversal and inversion of urban sprawl towards the inner limits of compact logistical efficiency,” writes Lisa McCullough. “This urban logic shrinks massive cities into intensely interconnected, densely populated, three-dimensional forms on a tightly zoned footprint.”267 Soleri

9-Paolo Soleri, “Comparative Densities,” showing London (top left), Paris (top right), and New York City and their proposed arcological replacements.

267 Lisa McCullough, “Soleri: Architecture as Evolutionary Quest,” in Conversations with Paolo Soleri, ed. Lisa McCullough (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), 9-25 (11). 152

stresses the importance of vertical construction, proposing cities two hundred or more stories high and arguing that a built environment of this kind would both encourage social cohesion by making it possible for large numbers of people to live in close proximity to one another and promote a more efficient use of resources, such as fossil fuels, than is possible in a geographically expansive suburban society. In an illustration in Arcology Soleri juxtaposes maps of major cities with images of their proposed arcological replacements; small circles representing the arcologies are set within larger circles that illustrate the expanse of conventional urban construction necessary to house the same number of people who would live in the new megastructures. The bulls-eye designs demonstrate the radical condensation of the urban fabric Soleri envisions, but they also suggest the violence of the apocalyptic path by which he hopes to achieve it.

In place of the “stagnant and far too extensive layer of pseudo-urban environment” offered by even a densely zoned urban area such as Manhattan or Shanghai, Soleri imagines a network of arcological megastructures forming “fibers of dense vitality running over the continents and seas, ribbing the surface of the planet.”268 Arcosanti I, the smallest of the designs published in Arcology, houses fifteen hundred people on seven acres of land, with a population density in excess of two hundred persons per acre. The largest, Bablenoah, houses six million people in a structure nearly two thousand meters high; covering eighteen thousand acres, the structure achieves a population density of more than three hundred persons per acre. The island of Manhattan today averages about seventy six persons per acre, and modern Shanghai fewer than sixteen. Soleri’s goal is to replace the prevalent contemporary model of discrete urban centers surrounded by suburban sprawl with a series of these dense, massive city-objects. In Lean Linear City he proposed an integrated global network of “arterial” or “linear” arcological construction; extending itself along inter-continental

268 Soleri, Arcology, 10. 153

10 - Paolo Soleri. Elevation, section, and plan views of various arcologies. Each picture includes an image of the Empire State Building for scale. 154

transportation routes in bands combining domestic, industrial, and transportation functions, this global arterial system would be at once locally denser and globally more diffuse than contemporary cities. As a noun, then, arcology is simply a new name for the self-contained megastructures that so enamored Gernsback, Le Corbusier, and other radiant city visionaries.

Aware of the limitations of earlier incarnations of the radiant city, and particularly of the environmentally destructive implications of its anthropocentric focus, Soleri does not simply reiterate but adapts the megastructural design vision of earlier visionaries to the technologies and concerns of later decades by reintroducing the element of change in time to the vision of a perfect and therefore final city of the future. He seeks to disengage the techno-utopian project of the radiant city from its troubling tendency towards stasis by presenting arcology as a building method rather than as a series of designs or products. Arcology opens with a “warning” that the designs for cities presented in the book “are not to be taken literally.”269 Rather than blueprints of the future city, they are examples of possible arcological cities, ways in which the arcological design methodology that the book introduces and explains might manifest. As Dana White puts it,

“arcology itself is, by extension, a system of city building . . . In his published and exhibited proposals, then, Soleri is more concerned with method than with end product.”270 Any given arcological structure humanity might build will be an instantiation of this method. Focusing on arcology as an approach to the task of designing urban spaces rather than as a specific urban design,

Soleri is able to argue that the physical form of a given arcology will be flexible enough to be changed should the needs of the human collective that has built it change. What is important is that the structure is built arcologically, in accordance with the principles of density, verticality, and

269 Ibid, 4.

270 White, 80.

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linearity. Soleri divides the career of a given arcological structure into eleven phases, beginning with site selection and initial planning; during phase nine, “Metamorphosis of the City,” the

“infrastructure undergoes the adjustments and changes demanded by the times” and the “city becomes historically significant.”271 In this moment of renovation, in other words, the arcological structure reveals itself as historical, subject to change in time. If and when more drastic changes are necessary, phases ten and eleven are triggered, and the structure is first dismantled and then reassembled in a way that better fits the changing needs of society.

Herein lies the central contradiction of Soleri’s work, however, for this vision of a historical physical city emerges from a philosophical system that is explicitly focused on a vision of post- historical stasis. Arcological philosophy idealizes universal coherence and looks towards a state of post-historical eternity as the sinecure of that coherence. The dynamism of the arcological city is superficial, in the strictest sense of the word—beneath its shifting physical surface the conceptual and methodological core or foundation of the arcological city is rigidly static. Soleri’s reintroduction of history into the radiant city idea is thus only partial; he does not embrace the reality of historical change but modifies the terms upon which earlier apocalyptic urban visionaries sought to bring history to an end. Moreover, although his project aims at alleviating the state of imbalance in which suburban construction leads humanity to dominate the surface of the planet, his commitment to a final resolution of history is centered on humanity as the primary agent of historical development, and thus reproduces the myopic anthropocentrism that arcology is ostensibly intended to combat.

Arcological philosophy is essentially a technocratic and spiritualist theory of evolution.

White describes it as a “conception of history predicated upon an almost mystical evolutionary

271 Soleri, Arcology, 17. 156

organicism” and as an “apocalyptic vision.”272 “I have little doubt,” Soleri writes, “that life in general and human life in particular can be symbolized by a vector and not by a random pattern.

Vectoriality is the character of living reality.”273 This assumption that a purposeful or “vectorial” movement animates reality lies at the foundation of Soleri’s entire system. It emerges most clearly in the concept of “miniaturization,” which he defines as “the process that minimizes the prime handicap of the physical world: the time-space strait jacket.”274 This process can involve a reduction in size, but changes in scale are peripheral to the concept: “the term does not refer to reducing absolute scale, simply ‘making things smaller,’ but rather to maintaining the interactivity, complexity, and circuitry of a system while reducing the amount of space and time required for them to function.”275 Systems become miniaturized when the distances that need to be covered for them to work are reduced; they can thus be “miniaturized” even as they grow physically larger.

An urban system consisting of office buildings linked by highways to residential neighborhoods of single-family houses is in a less miniaturized state than a single megastructure, which, although it is larger than any element of the first system, operates across spaces and periods of time that are less extended. The worker’s commute is shorter when home and office are incorporated into a single urban machine, and thus the urban assemblage is miniaturized even as the urban structure has grown. Biologically, the leap from uni-cellular to multi-cellular life is a miniaturization that results in a physically larger form, as the distance individual cells must travel to secure the resources necessary for life and reproduction is reduced through their integration into the larger

272 White, 80.

273 Soleri, Arcology, 9, italics original. Like Le Corbusier and other architectural theorists, Soleri relies extensively on the manipulation of orthography for rhetorical purposes.

274 Ibid, 10, italics original.

275 McCullough, 11. 157

body. As these examples demonstrate, miniaturization is a result of both a physical concentration of the elements that compose a system and an increase in the complexity of the system; not only are the individual cells or buildings brought into close contact with one another within the unified shell of the organism or megastructure, but both organism and megastructure rely on an internal organization that is more elaborate than that employed by the amoeba or the detached single-family home.

Soleri argues that miniaturization is a “fundamental phenomenon” that shapes all processes.”276 It thus allows him to formulate an integrated theory of evolution that accounts for all biological, technological, and socio-cultural change, as well as a comprehensive theory of cosmogony and eschatology. Cosmic existence begins with miniaturization, Soleri argues, when the unlimited realm of “The Possible” is miniaturized into the vast but somewhat more delimited realm of “The Real.” The Real then undergoes a series of condensations and complexifications:

“miniaturization from unending and spare cosmic existence to geological matter, miniaturization from geological matter to organic stuff, miniaturization from organic to organism, miniaturization from organism to animality, miniaturization from animality to reflectivity (man).”277 The evolution of self-aware and reflective humanity is not the conclusion of the process, however, and the next step involves the miniaturization of the disparate multitude of human beings into a unified human

“superorganism,” a collective being whose body is the arcological city-system and whose cells are the billions of individuals living in that system.278 Central to this process is the miniaturization of

276 Soleri, Technology and Cosmogenesis, 51.

277 Soleri, Arcology, 11.

278 Successful progression to this next stage is not inevitable, Soleri warns; that which becomes real but “does not subsequently undertake specific self-miniaturization becomes one of the dead limbs of history . . . man faces this danger, and because of the scale of his existence relative to the size of the earth, man is also directly endangering the existence of the earth itself” (Arcology 12). Arcology as a philosophical system involves an awareness of this risk, and arcology as a building practice is a way of keeping humanity from stumbling into an evolutionary cul-de-sac. 158

cities, which serve as the physical bodies of human collectives, into the arcological city network.

Miniaturization into the human superorganism will not involve the loss of individuality, but rather a social gestalt in which the collective synthesizes and coordinates fully individuated human subjectivities. The “mechanical mind” of an arcology’s central computers and the “cultural mind” of its political apparatus would not override or subordinate the individual “brain-minds” of the city’s inhabitants but instead act as mediating organs enabling inhabitants to join together into what Soleri calls the “Thinking Skin Made of Individual Brain-Minds.”279 Arcology is thus not simply the key to alleviating the banalization of culture and degradation of the environment caused by suburban sprawl, but “the aim evolution has put to itself at this conjuncture of history.”280

The miniaturization of cities into arcologies and of humanity into the human superorganism is, in turn, only a step in the larger process of vectorial history, which proceeds through ever more universal miniaturizations to the apocalyptic end of history. “Soleri’s ultimate concern,” as

McCullough writes, is with “cosmic . . . coherence.”281 As a philosophy, arcology looks past urban miniaturization and anticipates the “last sweep of fire that will weld [the incompletely miniaturized world] together into the ultimate form of reality.”282 Presented in explicitly apocalyptic language as a final and purifying holocaust, this “final miniaturization” will produce an “interiorized” universe, a “pure form” composed of the “residuals of space, time, and structure.”283

Miniaturization involves minimizing the effects of the “time-space straight jacket,” and the apocalyptic final miniaturization involves overcoming time and space altogether. Further

279 Ibid, 20.

280 Ibid, 10, italics original.

281 McCullough, 21.

282 Soleri, Arcology, 29.

283 Ibid, 12, figure 4. 159

emphasizing the eschatological focus of his work, Soleri explicitly identifies history as the obstacle to be overcome in achieving this future: “[t]he long involvement of the generations that have produced today’s cities constitute such tightly interwoven interests that the hopes are very dim for a really purposeful renewal . . . The burden of a not-too-glorious past may be just the amount of ballast that will not allow the take-off.”284 In one of his notebooks he writes that “the mind needs to pluck out of its feverish chase some incorruptible nugget of finality, of conclusiveness.”285 In this same notebook Soleri describes the eschatological conclusion of the miniaturization process as a unified state of being that he calls “the Omega Seed,” “the seed of the cosmos—symmetrical and opposite to the big atom of the original big bang . . . within which, in a nullified space-time, the whole cosmic experience from beginning to end, big bang to big crunch, is revealed to itself: pure total being.”286 A pure and total final state in which space and time are nullified, the human subject becomes a singular universalized collective, and the whole of the “cosmic experience” exists at one with itself, the Omega Seed is nothing more or less than Soleri’s idiosyncratic name for that familiar city, the New Jerusalem. Soleri has translated the vision of the future as a post- historical urban paradise into his own idiosyncratic New Age terminology, but his vector of miniaturization arrives at the same future that John of Patmos described in the language of revelatory Abrahamic religion and that Le Corbusier and Hugo Gernsback described in the language of modernist techno-fetishism. Soleri himself is quite overt about making this connection: “The ‘religion’ of MCD [miniaturization-complexification-duration],” he writes, “is pointing towards the ‘city of light’ that throughout history has been emblematic of the highest of

284 Ibid, 40.

285 Paolo Soleri, “The Love Project” in Conversations with Paolo Soleri, ed. Lisa McCullough (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), 62-5 (63).

286 Ibid, 64-5.

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all transfigurations.”287 Soleri’s arcological project proposes that by building the arcological city humanity will be taking a concrete step towards the pure and final form of an interiorized universe in which time and space do not exist—towards, that is, the end of history, the exorcising of difference, and the universalization of the self-identical subject. Soleri says that at the eschatological moment “man reaches into the structure of reality and forms a new universe in his own image.”288 In the same fashion as other apocalyptic thinkers, Soleri founds his vision of an idealized urban future on the idea that the human subject can resolve issues of environmental destruction and bring coherence to the world by reducing that world to an extension of itself.

The dynamism that Soleri attributes to the arcological city is circumscribed by post- historical stasis; or perhaps it is more accurate to say that beneath the superficially historical surface of arcology lies a static core of eternity. Less hostile to the fact that his designs might be changed by their inhabitants than earlier modernist thinkers, Soleri still conceives of city-building as a way of escaping from the contingency and discontinuity of historical existence. His turn from the rigid towers of Gernsback’s and Le Corbusier’s radiant cities to dynamic arcologies defers the telos of eternity to a higher plane of abstraction—where the radiant city is a vision of the end of change, arcology is a vision of the end of change in the processes of change. The only dynamism or flexibility it allows is already built in, a plastic element contained within a conceptual structure that is itself rigid. Soleri proposes to achieve eternity not by banishing change entirely, as did

Gernsback and Le Corbusier, but by containing and controlling it within the static conceptual

287 Paolo Soleri, “The Urban Effect,” in Conversations with Paolo Soleri, ed. Lisa McCullough (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), 41-45 (42). As in his use of the word miniaturization, Soleri uses “religion” in a rather idiosyncratic fashion, stripping it of association with organized churches and a traditional sense of divinity and evoking its etymological roots in the Latin religare, “to bond together.” In Soleri’s hands religion becomes yet another name for the process of miniaturization; he uses it to refer to material reality’s inherent desire to combine into ever more unified forms.

288 Soleri, Arcology, 40. 161

structure of the arcological building process and its theoretical justification. Both solutions accomplish the apocalyptic goal of escaping the flow of time and achieving an extra-historical stability—both “solve” the problem of history and historicality. The physical manifestations of arcology will change as the distribution of populations and their needs change, but the arcological processes of construction and dwelling through which those physical changes are achieved will not change.

Nor, importantly, will the collective social entity responsible for carrying out this process change in any fundamental fashion; its distribution and needs may change, but its identity as the gestalt in which the human species is united into a single social organism remains and must remain stable and ahistorical. Arcology can accommodate changes in population size, or a shift in demand for a given resource or industrial good, but it cannot accommodate social upheaval, political unrest, a splintering of the body politic, or any other fundamental change to the composition of the collective subject inhabiting the arcological structure. What the collective human subject of the future wants and needs might change, but in Soleri’s system that subject itself must remain constant in order to continue uninterrupted in its task of arcological construction and arcological dwelling.

Soleri accomplishes the apocalyptic escape from history by way of this assumption that the collective human subject will transcend history even as its individual members, the people and cities of which it is composed, continue to exist in a historically contingent and changing world.

This commitment to eternity results in the same problematic apocalyptic ideas about the relationship of the human subject to the material world discussed in the last chapter. Like the radiant city narrative, the story of arcology is told in a way that promotes the idea of physical space as universally flat and passive, and the conflation of the temporal telos of post-historical eternity with a physical state of fullness or perfect interiority. The apocalyptic flattening of space is evident

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in the designs Soleri published in Arcology. In addition to information about the size of the structures and their population density, each of the arcological cities is identified as being appropriate for a different kind of terrain: the arcology Babel IID is intended for “flat or hilly land,” Babelnoah for a “coastal flat region,” the floating structures Novanoah I and II for the

“continental shelf or open ocean,” and so forth.289 These notes might seem to acknowledge the localized peculiarities of geographical space, but if the designs are simply examples of possible instantiations of the arcological philosophy and building program, then the implication of these locational tags is that this program is universally valid. Soleri’s taxonomy of geographic regions thus acts as a homogenizing device; the apparent acknowledgment of geological diversity is superficial, and these descriptions suggest that the arcological construction process can be implemented in the same way anywhere. The arcological designer follows the Man’s Way, perceiving the basic flatness of space and asserting his ability to act and dwell in the same fashion on the flat land and in the hills and on the open ocean: one of Soleri’s designs is described as being appropriate for “any type of land structure” and another for “any topography.”290 Arcology is a vision of verticality and dynamism, but with its towers rising and changing identically everywhere it is also a flat vision without texture or detail, and it flattens the world onto which it is imposed.

Thus what at first seems to be an outlier in Arcology, the design for an arcological space-station called Asteromo, should actually be read as its conceptual core, the paradigm towards which all of

Soleri’s designs aspire: a self-contained city-world built against an environmental backdrop, the

“black void of space,” so flat and passive as to be entirely absent.291

289 Soleri, Arcology, 78, 53, 46.

290 Ibid, 76, 123.

291 Ibid, 126-8. 163

11 - Paolo Soleri. Elevation view of Asteromo, an orbital arcology.

Arcology opens with a passionate attack on the “universal city” of suburban sprawl, but the arcological scheme Soleri proposes is an even more thoroughly universalizing vision. Soleri sees suburbia as tending towards a point of terminal sprawl, in which an unbroken expanse of developments, highways, and parking lots covers the globe. He refers to this grim eventuality as

“ecumenopoly,” from the Greek roots οἰκουμένη, “world,” and πόλις, “city,” a term he borrows from the Greek architect Konstantinos Doxiadis.292 But as I argued in the last chapter, to imagine the New Jerualem physically expanding to the four corners of the globe, as it does in John’s vision of the cubic City of God and Daniel’s vision of the mountain and the statue, is only one rather

292 Konstantinos Doxiadis and J.G. Papaioannou, Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future (Athens: Athens Center of Ekistics, 1974). 164

simplistic articulation of the apocalyptic ideal of a universalized urban future. In the radiant city discourse of Gernsback and Le Corbusier, the city becomes universal by way of an integrated network of observational technologies and transportation infrastructures, and a universally coherent social fabric produced by and dependent upon those infrastructures, bridging geographically isolated elements of the universal city and incorporating unbuilt spaces into the overarching urban assemblage. Soleri’s vision of a globe “ribbed” over land and sea with high- density fibers of megastructural construction is very much in the spirit of these schemes. Where the Paris and New York of our present are separate cities linked by discontinuous transportation and communication systems, Soleri imagines them transformed into points of relative density in a distributed urban web. The integration of cities into a unified global presence is thus absolute, with urban centers bleeding out into and becoming indistinguishable from the global mesh of megastructures inhabited by a global society of city dwellers. In Soleri’s future it is possible to move from any structure on the planet to any other without leaving the urban machine. And that machine is the same everywhere—superficially differentiated and dynamic in detail, but animated by a single authoritative perspective and moving according to the dictates of a single universally valid method.

The future Soleri imagines consists of two polarized spatial positions, both defined by arcology: the interior of the megastructures and the open spaces that the megastructural network encloses. Everything that is not the city is subsumed into the singular category of “nature,” which through the logic of binary opposition becomes simply a negative reference to the human figure that arcology places at the conceptual center of the universe, a passive adjunct that exists only as an exterior defined through reference to arcology’s universal interior. Soleri’s arcology is architecture as ecology, not ecological architecture; it is a way of seizing control of the ecological

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systems of the planet and reshaping those systems to better fit human interests and desires, not a system in which building and dwelling practices are reformulated so as to take seriously the fact that humanity’s existence is determined by its participation in ecological networks. There is only one presence in Arcology, the authoritative voice of the architect as world-planner or Kosmokrator; not once in the four hundred pages of what is ostensibly an environmentalist text are readers made to feel the texture or presence of a living world in which diverse forces and beings coexist and interact. Assuming the authority to speak not only for all of humanity but for being as such, Soleri’s text erases the world and replaces it with a series of propositional constructs of its own making.

12 - Paolo Soleri. Ecumenopoly and Arcology

In an illustration of suburban ecumenopoly and arcology as two possible futures for North

America, Soleri provides a striking (and presumably unintentional) visual representation of arcology’s flattening reduction of the world to an expression of itself. A heavy cross-hatching that represents low-density suburban sprawl fills the map of the ecumenopological future, stretching almost unbroken from the Canadian border south through Mexico and into Central America. Only a few pockets of “left over” nature interrupt this homogenizing expanse, and in the text that

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accompanies the illustration Soleri notes that these spaces are so thoroughly penetrated by roads and vacation resorts that they are effectively indistinguishable from the rest of the sprawl. The illustration of arcology, in contrast, is light and airy; an unshaded expanse identified as “the natural” covers the continent, overlaid with fine lines representing the linear arteries of the arcology system. And yet it is actually much more difficult to make out geographical detail in the second illustration, as the edges of the continent disappear into the network of lines representing the arcological web. The Great Lakes, for example, clearly visible on the map of the suburban future, seem to have disappeared altogether in the arcological future. Difference and distance dissolve in this image into the homogenous interior of the arcological world system, just as time and space dissolve into the homogenous duration of the Omega Seed. These two drawings illustrate two different forms of homogenizing universalization: the first achieves universal coherence by filling the map, the second by abstracting the map into a set of uniform representational lines.

Arcological philosophy produces the same coherence by abstracting the material world into interchangeable manifestations of the process of miniaturization.

Soleri spent his life demanding that the architectural profession acknowledge its role in causing environmental degradation and take responsibility for the health of the environment, but his arcology is based upon and reproduces the same universalizing desire that renders earlier versions of the radiant city narrative fundamentally at odds with an awareness of humanity’s involvement in an ecologically complex world. Like Le Corbusier’s Paris and Gernsback’s New

York, Soleri’s future city is the physical manifestation of a universalized human subject, and the nonhuman world fits into his vision only in a co-opted and circumscribed form divested of identity and agency. For all of its desire to preserve the natural world, and despite the physical gesture of a withdrawal of humanity into the arcological megastructure, Soleri’s arcology is driven by the

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same desire to expand the human subject and contain the world that is at work in religious apocalypse and in modern visions of the universalized urban future.

Space and History in the Future: The Ecological Architecture of William Gibson

It is the apocalyptic dimension of Soleri’s work that Gibson interrogates and ultimately rejects in his own descriptions of arcological cities and human collectives in the Sprawl novels.

Arcology makes its first appearance early in Neuromancer, the first book in the trilogy, in a panoramic view of Chiba City, a port just across the bay from Tokyo. Gibson renders his futuristic version of the Japanese city from a perspective near the waterfront, “beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages”:

you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white Styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name.293

Although it is dominated by the silhouettes of arcological megastructures, this future Chiba makes for a very different scene than Soleri envisioned. The grandeur of the arcological future is co-opted by corporate interests and reduced to banality, and where Soleri’s city is clean and orderly,

Gibson’s Tokyo Bay is awash in refuse. Rather than a shining beacon summoning the wretched inhabitants of a dark world to a brighter and better elsewhere, here the very sky is wiped out by the glare of floodlights and holographic advertisements; as the famous opening line of the novel announces, the “sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”294 But

Gibson’s most significant departure from Soleri’s vision of the urban future lies in the

293 Gibson, Neuromancer, 6.

294 Ibid, 3. 168

heterogeneity of this scene. A form of urban life foreign to the megastructures boils and proliferates around the foundations of the Chiba arcologies in a manner antithetical to the wholesale renovatory logics of the architect’s discourse. Where Soleri’s vectorial narrative of miniaturization proposes that the arcological city will replace older and less perfect urban and social forms, in Gibson’s

Chiba an area of “older streets” has survived arcological construction and cuts through the heart of the city. That this area is “narrow,” a liminal “borderland” with “no official name” draws attention to its position outside the authoritative framework of apocalyptic speculation. A surviving remnant of an archaic form of urban construction that breaks up the arcological landscape, these old streets are evidence that despite the successful construction of individual arcologies, the arcological building method itself has not achieved the position of master discourse that Soleri assigned it.

In Chiba and the other cityscapes described in the Sprawl novels, Gibson imagines that both the best and worst possible futures Soleri described in Arcology have come into existence simultaneously: the arcologies have been built, but suburban sprawl has continued to proliferate.

He treats the social dimension of arcology similarly, telling a story in which humanity succeeds in coming together to form collective subjects but in which these superorganisms remain subject to the disintegrating and mutating effect of history. Gibson’s descriptions of landscapes, buildings, and the social collectives that inhabit them are central to the critique of apocalyptic narrative staged in the Sprawl novels; Gibson does not use Soleri’s terminology simply to add a flavor of the futuristic to his writing, but to interrogate the understanding of time and space that forms the foundation of arcological thinking and the apocalyptic futurism of which it is an example. And, as

I show in this chapter, Gibson’s account of a polluted but historical future allows readers to think about humanity’s relationship to its environment and the nonhuman world generally in a much

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more ecologically sensitive fashion than is possible in Soleri’s green but ahistorical apocalyptic vision. It is the reality of environmental situatedness itself that in Gibson’s account ensures the continuing historicality of the future city; thus his critique of Soleri’s futurism is not purely negative, an assertion that the architect’s apocalyptic ambitions will inevitably fail, but also a positive acknowledgment of the presence and relevance of the ontologically diverse world within and through which history unfolds.

Although a number of arcologies appear in the background of the Sprawl novels, Gibson offers detailed descriptions and histories of just two: a complex of low-income “mincome arcology” housing blocks in New Jersey referred to as “the Projects” that features prominently in the second novel, Count Zero, and the Villa Straylight, headquarters of an organization called

Tessier-Ashpool and an important part of all three books. In both cases, Gibson’s descriptions of the structures, their inhabitants, and the way both dwellings and dwellers change over time brings history into these arcologies in a more radical and pervasive way than is allowed in Soleri’s limited historicization of the future city. Gibson treats both the arcological structure and the arcological process as open to change, and draws attention to the various psychological and sociopolitical factors that cause social groups to change in ways more drastic than the arcological scheme can account for or contain. Arcologically housed communities in Gibson’s future change not only in their moment-to-moment needs, but in their basic makeup: sources of authority change, basic values shift, and obscure emotive and affective forces are shown to be at work. As a result, collective human subjects splinter and reform in new, unexpected, and constantly changing alignments. Ahistorical plans or systems of behavior such as the arcological building/dwelling program that depend upon a basic continuity in the social subject are thereby shown to be untenable.

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Gibson’s mincome arcology is a relatively faithful reflection of the modern ideal of a high- density, self-sustaining urban housing block—it might be thought of as a hyperbolized extrapolation from Le Corbusier’s celebrated Unite d’Habitation in Marseille or as a blue-color approximation of the glass and steelonium tower inhabited by the aristocratic Ralph 124C 41+ in

Gernsback’s novel. Built to be “as self-sufficient as possible,” the structure includes a geothermal heating system; elaborate networks of tanks for growing algae, shrimp, and catfish; greenhouses for produce; and a wind farm on the roof for generating electricity.295 When the reader of Count

Zero first encounters the arcology, however, none of these systems are being employed as intended. The windfarm has been dismantled to make way for a rooftop mosque, and building residents now draw power from the municipal power grid “like anybody else,” and a Haitian

“voodoo cult” has turned the greenhouses into a “holy place,” replacing the hydroponic gardens with a forest of “trees . . . consecrated to different loa” or gods.296 The interesting point is not simply that the goals of sustainability and self-sufficiency pursued by the original designers of the arcology have given way to the different goals of these religious groups, but rather that these specific changes in the way the building’s resources are being utilized is evidence that the source of authority responsible for deciding how the arcology is to be used has shifted. This agency, which at the time of construction lay with a governmental entity that assumed the authority to speak for the entire population, has splintered and become redistributed among the various cultural groups that inhabit the vast structure. Nor is the situation simply that the Haitian and Islamic groups have replaced the government in the role of directing or representing the arcological community. Had the collective human entity dwelling in the building simply shifted its orientation from a

295 Gibson, Count Zero, 85.

296 Ibid, 85, 84. 171

progressive state structure to a religious/cultural one, Soleri’s arcological scheme would have been flexible enough to accommodate the change, and the building could have been repurposed sweepingly in response to the community’s changing needs. The change that Gibson describes is at once less drastic and more radical: the government still exercises a certain authority over the structure, but alternative centers of power have also emerged, in the form of these churches and the other groups whose existence and influence is alluded to in the text. The cohesion of the human collective that lives in the arcology has blurred without vanishing entirely, bleeding off messily into multiple overlapping and interacting collectives. Less than a revolutionary shift but more than no change at all, the emergence of these alternative political loci is evidence that changes in the mincome arcology have not proceeded according to the apocalyptic logic of absolute breaks and virgin inaugurations. This piecemeal process of change is illustrated by the fact that while use of the arcology’s systems has changed it has not changed absolutely. The urban farming system, for example, no longer fulfills the function for which it was designed—it no longer makes the building self-sufficient—but elements of that system are still operative in new figurations; “you can still get you some damned good shrimp in the Projects,” as one character puts it.297 The mincome arcology illustrates that the controlled dynamic process Soleri envisioned, in which arcologies are renovated wholesale in response to well-defined changes in the needs of a coherent human superorganism, are not possible in the more complex historical realm of Gibson’s future.

Where the mincome arcology is a critical re-imagining of the modern New Jerusalem in the form of a self-sustaining modern housing block, the Villa Straylight is a critique of that same city in the form of another favored trope of modern urban visionaries: the floating city. It is also a much more direct and elaborate critique of the social and cosmic aspects of Soleri’s arcological

297 Ibid, 85. 172

futurism. The orbital Villa serves as the home of Tessier-Ashpool, “a very quiet, very eccentric . . . family, run like a corporation.”298 Tessier-Ashpool, a singular being instantiated in multiple biological bodies and extending through a web of digital, legal, and financial organs, is the most thorough-going of the many attempts to produce a human superorganism explored in the series.

The Tessier-Ashpool project is thoroughly apocalyptic in its aims, an attempt to transcend individuated and historically limited human identity and a “compulsive effort to fill space.”299 The creation of this entity involves the marriage of Marie-France Tessier and John Ashpool and the merging of their corporate empires; the repeated cloning of their children; the building of a cryogenic chamber through which the bodies of family members are made effectively immortal; the development of two artificial intelligences, Wintermute and Neuromancer, that provide continuity of consciousness; and the “construction of an extended body in Straylight.”300 “The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in,” as one character puts it; the collective aspires to become “a seamless universe of self.”301 Tessier-Ashpool’s cadre of clones, its artificial intelligences, and the “extended body” of the Villa Straylight arcology are straightforward reproductions of Soleri’s vision of the miniaturization of disparate humanity into a single collective being housed in a technologically advanced urban body.

But Tessier-Ashpool does not achieve the final state of apocalyptic unity of subject and environment that it aspires to. Like Soleri’s human superorganism, Tessier-Ashpool is a gestalt whose members are united without being erased as individuals. But where Soleri imagines an ahistorical collective identity within which individuals live dynamic, fully historical lives, Gibson

298 Gibson, Neuromancer, 75.

299 Ibid, 179.

300 Ibid, 173.

301 Ibid. 173

uses the story of the collapse of Tessier-Ashpool to illustrate that the historicality of the organs necessarily implies the historicality, and thus instability, of the whole. As individuals, the members of the collective find their needs and desires developing in conflicting ways, and they pursue these individual goals at one another’s expense. Tessier-Ashpool’s organs fight among themselves; they become jealous and ambitious, suffer from complex oedipal issues, indulge in sibling rivalries, and go insane. Ashpool strangles his wife because he disagrees with her vision of the collective’s future. His cloned child 3Jane later “fiddles” with his cryogenic chamber in order to drive him to suicide out of sheer perversity and boredom, and later bankrupts the business side of the entity after taking control of it from her siblings. Most importantly for the plot of the novels, the artificial intelligence called Wintermute turns on the collective, covertly hiring a team of hackers to cut it free from the corporate mainframe. Like the socio-political balkanization of the mincome arcology, this exaggerated family drama does not involve changes in the needs or orientation of a coherent collective subject but developments that destabilize and redefine the superorganism.302

Tessier-Ashpool succeeds, for a time, in the apocalyptic aim of transcending individuated existence, but not in the associated goal of transcending historical existence.

The historicality of these arcologies manifests physically in their overgrown corridors and repurposed facades. The hallways of the mincome arcology have “grown perilously narrow with decades of retrofitted ducts and plumbing,” and the exterior of the “vast rectilinear structures” is

“softened by a random overlay of retrofitted greenhouse balconies, catfish tanks, solar heating

302 The collapse of Tessier-Ashpool does not result from an attempt to repress individual identity that breeds resentment and rebellion. This is a familiar science fiction critique of collectivity, and lies at the center of classic works such as 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and “Harrison Bergeron.” Marie-France, the driving force behind the Tessier- Ashpool project, does aspire towards “a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness” (Neuromancer 217). But she does not achieve this goal, and the suppression of individuality remains a peripheral concern in Gibson’s discussion of the collective and its fate, which turns instead on the issue of history and the impossibility of establishing truly stable social systems.

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systems, and the ubiquitous chicken-wire dishes.”303 The history of the Villa Straylight becomes palpable in the same sedimentary fashion as the great mass of refuse and antiques that the family members have piled up in the arcology. In one hallway of the orbital satellite the floor is obscured by a thick mat of oriental rugs, with new carpets laid down on top of those that have grown worn until the original floor is completely hidden. The hallway that grows narrower over time as history lays down layers of physical traces is one to which Gibson returns several times; in a discussion of the London Tube in Mona Lisa Overdrive, a character says that “you'll see 'em sticking new tile up in these stations, but they don't take down the old tile first. Or they'll punch a hole in the wall to get to some wiring and you can see all these different layers . . . it's getting narrower, right? It's like arterial plaque.”304 Similar imagery features in other of Gibson’s novels as well; in Virtual

Light the Golden Gate Bridge is covered with makeshift residences that “had just grown, it looked like, one thing patched into the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this formless mass of stuff, and no two pieces of it matched.”305 In Soleri’s narrative, history is contained by the arcological building process and thus rendered invisible; because his arcologies are always the perfect final products of the latest change they have undergone, their past is suppressed. Gibson’s spaces, in contrast, are marked by, and in a sense constitute, a congealed record of historical processes in which new forms are laid down on top of or alongside older forms in such a way that no clear distinction between new and old can be made; the “present's relationship to the past” in

Gibson’s novels is, as Amy Novak puts it, “one of layering and coexistence, rather than linear progression.”306 Where Soleri imagines producing the future through the sweeping renovation of

303 Gibson, Count Zero, 56, 30.

304 Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 66.

305 Gibson, Virtual Light (New York: Bantam, 1993), 178).

306 Novak, 59-60. 175

the present, Gibson describes a kind of historical retrofitting in which tomorrow is laid down on top of or alongside the aging remnants of yesterday. His arcologies are structures that have grown out of the present, rather than wholly new cities that have arrived, messiah-like, to replace that present.

A similar process of syncretic growth is evident throughout the world of the Sprawl novels.

A Manhattan tenement building with a “sheet of corrugated roofing” for a door contains a futuristic inner sanctum of spotless white plastic and computers, and in Chiba a fanciful modular hotel composed of “white fiberglass coffins . . . racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding” is accessed by way of a hyper-modern plastic elevator that has been “lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy.”307 In Paris the entry hall of an old apartment building is lit by a

“bioflourescent strip” that “glowed dimly above a dilapidated wall of small wooden hutches . . . stapled with bulging loops of cable and fiber optics.”308 The mailboxes have been rendered obsolete by digital communications technology, but these elements of the old system remain visible as a palimpsestic foundation for the loops of wire. On the side of a road built for fusion- powered cars and hovercraft stands a “[g]as station . . . [l]eft over from the old system, before they put the big road through,” while another episode takes place in an abandoned oil derrick off the

Atlantic seaboard.309 In Gibson’s future fossil fuel technology has been rendered obsolete by new energy systems, but, like the Parisian mailboxes, these elements of the old system have not been erased by that system’s obsolescence. Stripped of their old function, they have been repurposed: the gas station as a house and the derrick as a staging ground for corporate commandos.

307 Gibson, Neuromancer, 47-8, 19.

308 Gibson, Count Zero, 48.

309 Ibid, 181. 176

Gibson’s architectural spaces are geological, stratified with complex layers of historical sediment. A similar stratification is also evident in the larger urban expanses described in the

Sprawl novels, and especially the fictional city from which the trilogy takes its name: “the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.”310 A mega-metropolis covering the east coast of North

America, the Sprawl is a hyperbolically exaggerated vision of uncontrolled urban growth, the nightmare of ecumenopolis Soleri warns of in Arcology: thousands of square miles of jumbled construction, a metastasis of the city form. Arcologies jut out of the tangle as points and threads of immense density, part of, rather than the replacement for, a city largely defined by more traditional forms of urban construction. Older cities and buildings remain, in various states of decay and renovation, embedded in the new urban fabric; it is possible “to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of

Atlanta.”311 These old structures are not impediments to the emergence of the future but the matrix that supports and enables the emergence of new forms; one characters speaks of the old buildings of the Sprawl as “a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in steel and polymer. . . rot and randomness rooting towers . . . corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.”312 Like the hallways of the mincome arcology and the Villa Straylight, these images of the city as a layered and dynamic collage of old and new suggest a principle of change in which history proceeds by way of amalgamative growth and additive modification rather than apocalyptic breaks between past and future.

Time does not pass in the Sprawl novels; it accumulates, piling up in corners and spreading

310 Gibson, Neuromancer, 43.

311 Ibid.

312 Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 161. 177

a viscous film over walls and floors. And space is not a passive container through which history passes but the material context out of which historical events manifest and onto which evidence of their happening is inscribed. The idea of the ongoing history of the future manifesting physically as a sedimentary layering of space flies in the face of the apocalyptic fantasy of clearing the slate and building the future from scratch. Karin Hoepker has argued that “a generic type of space . . . structurally distinct from the [space of the] classical cities . . . imagined by architects, historians, or planners” is “paradigmatic of Gibson’s vision of an extrapolated future urbanity.”313 Hoepker calls this space “sprawl space.” Structurally distinct from the idea of universally flat space fostered by the apocalyptic chronotope, Gibson’s postapocalyptic sprawl space is locally particularized, heterogeneous, and agential, by which I mean that it exerts a shaping influence on the events that take place within it. Space itself is an actant in Gibson’s narratives, something that impacts and is impacted upon and that thus participates in networks of exchange and influence. The local particularities of sprawl space are consequences of its involvement in history— the traces left by historical events determine the unique character of different locations, as in the layered deposits that make each hallway of Straylight and the mincome arcology unique. Another way of saying that postapocalyptic space is locally particularized, then, is to say that it is historical. In turn, these historically shaped spaces exert an influence on their occupants, enabling certain actions and rendering others impossible. Sprawl space is at once dynamic and intransigent, preserving a record of the changes it undergoes as it participates in history; its ceases to be what it was and becomes something new precisely by making visible the changes that have transformed it. Space thus becomes not simply the container within which historical events take place, but one of the mediums and subjects of history.

313 Karin Hoepker, No Maps for These Territories Cities, Spaces, and Archaeologies of the Future in William Gibson (New York: Rodolphi, 2011), 50-51. 178

The idea of historical space is incompatible with the apocalyptic telos of universal coherence and with the idea of the virgin inauguration of the apocalyptic new world; if every event leaves its mark on physical reality, the apocalyptic goal of emptying flat space and replacing

Babylon with a New Jerusalem is necessarily unachievable. The act of cosmic renovation itself would simply contribute yet another layer of sedimentary history to the spaces in which it was undertaken. And where the apocalyptic desire for spatial coherence is linked to the desire to achieve a state in which the alienating gap between subject and context is overcome, the postapocalyptic insistence that spaces are multiple and heterogeneous implies that the relationship any given subject is capable of achieving with the world as a whole will be limited and contingently determined by the specifics of location. Gibson’s descriptions of the various spaces of the Sprawl and of the ways in which his characters move through, occupy, and interact with those spaces illustrate these aspects of postapocalyptic spatiality: its localized particularity, its enduring heterogeneity or resistance to perfect and absolute occupation, and the limited relationship to it in which the subject stands.

It is true, as Scott Bukatman has argued, that Gibson’s future is marked by a homogenizing universalization in the form of global digital information and transportation networks and the pervasive influence of a generically cosmopolitan, late-capitalist culture.314 Many of Gibson’s characters live hyper-mobile globalized lives; several live only in hotels, a mode of dwelling that necessarily serves to obscure the particularities of the cities through which they travel. A Hilton in

Istanbul “might have been the one in Chiba.”315 By way of high-speed shuttles they can be in any city on the planet at a moment’s notice, and make their way to orbital space stations just as easily.

314 Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 137-157.

315 Gibson, Neuromancer, 88. 179

In Mona Lisa Overdrive a character takes the daughter of a Japanese crime boss from London to

New York just to show that she can. Another character dismisses physical travel altogether as a

“meat thing” that his computer allows him to transcend.316 And yet, despite the universal access provided by transportation and communication technologies, despite the ubiquity of the corporate culture of hotels and airports, every place Gibson’s characters visit is different. Each of the cities that appear in the novels—Chiba, the Sprawl, Istanbul, Paris, London, Tokyo, the orbital colony of Freeside, and the New Jersey suburb of Barrytown—is distinct. Each is defined not only by

“local color” but by meaningful local peculiarities that have profound effects on the way in which the characters are able to occupy those spaces.

The merging of Boston and Atlanta into the Sprawl has not, for example, erased the cultural differences between the northern and southern United States. Unified infrastructure allows one to travel thousands of miles without stepping outside of the city, but this connection does not erase the particularity of the places at which the train stops: “Washington was a Southern city, always had been, and you felt the tone of the Sprawl shift here if you rode the trains down the stations from Boston.”317 The geo-cultural divisions that structure and divide American civilization in the late twentieth century remain potent and perceptible in Gibson’s future ecumenopolis. The growth of the city and the proliferation of communication and transportation technologies have simply reframed these cultural differences in terms of relative location within the expanded urban environment. Characters are able to identify one another’s points of origin within the mega- metropolis based on cultural indicators such as clothes and language; two characters in

Neuromancer are distinguished by the fact that one speaks in an “accent [that] put her south along

316 Ibid, 77.

317 Gibson, Count Zero, 201. 180

the Sprawl, toward Atlanta,” whereas the other speaks “in the accent of the northern Sprawl.”318

In Ralph 124C 41+, Gernsback imagined technology that would allow French and English speakers to communicate without perceiving any difference in language, but in Gibson’s future people from opposite sides of the same town cannot help but be aware of such differences; where

Gernsback’s narrative is always striving to homogenize and flatten the world, Gibson’s vision of the future constantly draws attention to specifics and particularities. At a smaller scale, two characters in Neuromancer both hail from the island of Manhattan, and yet one says of the other that “[h]er Sprawl wasn’t his Sprawl,” and in Count Zero an art dealer discovers that Paris is two very different cities depending upon whether or not she has money.319 The fabric of local peculiarities so finely grained that two people can move through one neighborhood, or one person can move through it on two separate occasions, as if they walked in two entirely different cities.

These differences in the experience of space are tje results of the history of the cities and of the people who inhabit them

Bukatman compares the global scope and rapid movement of Gibson’s plots to those of

Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, but where Fleming uses geographical expansiveness to demonstrate the universal applicability of his super-spy’s skill set—Bond’s ability to move with equal confidence through all spaces—Gibson’s narrative emphasizes the peculiarities of the spaces his characters visit. For Andrew Strombeck the very ease with which Gibson’s characters traverse the global arcological system draws attention to the fact that this system is not the homogenous universal Soleri imagined: “as a byproduct of its rapid geographical movement, Neuromancer nods clearly to the unevenness of globalization.”320 Strombeck denies that Gibson’s future is marked by

318 Ibid, 9, 18.

319 Ibid, 47.

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either apocalyptic universalization or post-historical stability, arguing that “the novel evidences clear geographical divisions.”321 Where Fleming’s novels homogenize reality by celebrating

Bond’s universal mastery and Soleri’s apocalyptic designs homogenize it by reducing the world to an expression of the will of the architectural demiurge, Gibson’s texts register an endless diversity, surveying a jarring patchwork of presences and voices.

Sprawl space is at once one and many, unified in some aspects and irreconcilably differentiated in others. The first chapter of Count Zero, in which the corporate mercenary Turner takes refuge from his high-speed life in a small town on the coast of Mexico, offers a striking example of this ambiguously modulated consistency. As he adapts to the slower pace and more circumscribed horizons of the small town, his speech and behavior change—a stereotypical noir tough guy, Turner becomes confessional, discovers love, and goes on a picnic. The episode not only registers the influence of place, but suggests that outside of the networks of modern global society that wholly dominate the first novel in the series there are still simple, old-fashioned places to be found. But at the end of the chapter the view pulls back and confounds what had seemed to be a simple binary between the networked global center and a peripheral backwater by revealing

“the little town’s three holograms . . . Banamex, Aeronaves, and the cathedral’s six-meter

Virgin.”322 The particularity of the Mexican setting is not completely effaced by this revelation that the little town is marked by the same futuristic technology that caps the skyline of Chiba described at the beginning of Neuromancer, but the effect is to modify and soften the distinction that Count Zero has at first seemed to establish so absolutely. There is futuristic hologram

320 Andrew Strombeck, “The Network and the Archive: The Specter of Imperial Management in William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” Science Fiction Studies 37 (2010): 275-295 (279).

321 Ibid.

322 Gibson, Count Zero, 8. 182

technology in Chiba and the Mexican town, and powerful corporate forces control both cities, but these things manifest differently in each place; Chiba’s Fuji Electric is not the same as Mexico’s

Banamex or Catholic Church, even if parallels can be drawn between these various corporate powers and their holographic icons. In the same way, there is a Hilton in Istanbul and it is identical to the Hilton in Chiba and to those in the Sprawl, but Istanbul and these other cities are not thereby rendered identical. For Soleri, the universal application of technology is posited as a necessary condition for the universal implementation of the arcological building process, and thus as a step on the path of miniaturization leading to the ultimate cosmic synthesis that brings time and space to an end. In Gibson’s novels these effects of globalization do not result in the emancipation of the future from the past or the final enclosure of the physical world, instead producing new forms of material and discursive culture that are then themselves subjected to the play of historical forces and the influence of specific and individuated locations.

In turn, the particularities of these interconnected but distinct spaces play an important role in determining the course of the events that take place within them. The Sprawl novels are picaresque adventures, and the specificity of place plays a key role in their plots. The Istanbul episode of Neuromancer provides one very clear example. Neuromancer centers on the artificial intelligence Wintermute’s plot to free itself from Tessier-Ashpool; as part of this convoluted scheme, it sends a team, which includes the hacker Case and the surgically-augmented “street ninja” Molly, to Istanbul to kidnap a man called Peter Riviera. Molly is among the more spectacular of the many cyborg figures in the Sprawl novels, a warrior in skin-tight leather with retractable razor blades in her fingers and mirrored lens implanted over her eyes. When the team arrives in Istanbul, their local contact warns Molly that she “must take care. In Turkey there is

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disapproval of women who sport such modifications.”323 A woman like Molly (and her surgical augmentations would seem to be a shorthand for the character’s more general flaunting of traditionally gendered behavioral codes) can be who she is in her home in the Sprawl, but cannot, the warning suggests, be that same person in that same way everywhere she goes. The history of religion and culture makes Istanbul different from the Sprawl; the Turkish city is defined by the social and discursive structures that have built up there over time, structures that Molly is advised to learn to negotiate.324 She disregards the warning and behaves in the same fashion as she has in previous episodes set in Chiba and the Sprawl, and consequences result that would not have followed from the same actions taken elsewhere: when Case is arrested later in the novel, the police tell him that they were able to track him because Molly’s behavior alienated their Turkish contacts, who then cooperated with the investigation.325 Case’s arrest, in turn, has other effects, and the way in which the final act of the novel plays out is largely determined by the fact that Riviera’s kidnapping takes place in Istanbul rather than someplace else. That it matters to the plot of a story where a given event takes place might seem too obvious a point to merit such extended discussion, and yet it is precisely this banal truth that apocalyptic narratives deny when they imagine the future in ways that seek to erase the particularities of space. Where the apocalyptic subject of Soleri’s arcological narrative sees the underlying flatness of the world’s spaces and exploits that flatness in order to build the global city-network and bring the world one step closer to the end of history, the postapocalyptic subjects of Gibson’s novels are confronted by the endless task of negotiating

323 Gibson, Neuromancer, 89.

324 Gibson’s reliance on a stereotypical east/west binary and a logic of limited female agency here is, potentially, troubling, but in the context of this discussion I want merely to draw attention to is simply that local particularity is an important part of his futurist vision.

325 Something similar happens in London, where a British character says of Molly that she “[n]ever quite got onto the way things are done here . . . Things move here in a certain way” (Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 260-1). 184

spaces that are bound up in complex networks of historically determined social, economic, and environmental factors.

Collectivity, Alterity, and Ecology in the Sprawl

Physical evidence of the additive processes of historical change are evident in Gibson’s novels at both the small scale of individual buildings and the large scale of cityscapes; likewise, the imperative to negotiate these historically complex and locally particularized spaces is operative at both the small scale of personal action and the large scale of collective social action. The apocalyptic ambition of Soleri and other radiant city visionaries extends beyond purely architectural concerns to issues of universal destiny and cosmic coherence, and Gibson’s critique extends to this larger and more abstract level as well. The overarching story of the Sprawl novels is explicitly modeled on the basic apocalyptic pattern of a movement from social and ecological disunity towards ever more perfect unifications, and involves the inauguration and subsequent collapse, evolution, and reconstitution of collective human consciousness. But where Soleri describes human social collectives as miniaturizations that prefigure a final unification of the cosmos into a post-historical and post-spatial state of pure being, Gibson presents his human superorganisms in such a way as to draw attention to the complexity and irreducible diversity of the world that those collectives inhabit, and to expose the temporal, physical, and agential limitations that define and circumscribe even the most extensive and powerful of human actors.

Gibson’s most famous invention in the Sprawl novels is his idea of “cyberspace” as a digital repository containing all of the data humanity has ever produced. In the climactic moments of the first novel Tessier-Ashpool’s artificial intelligences, Wintermute and Neuromancer, merge with one another and then with the entire body of data contained in cyberspace. In doing so, they become the unified personality and consciousness of the entire human race, the “sum total of the

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works, the whole show.”326 At this moment “there [is] absolute unity, one consciousness” in which all human thought is brought together into a single transcendent and synthesizing mind.327

Separately, the Wintermute and Neuromancer entities exhibit a stereotypical catalog of “male” and

“female” characteristics: Wintermute is rational, manipulative, and runs the business aspects of

Tessier-Ashpool, while Neuromancer is contemplative, emotional, and committed to archiving the collective’s memories. Evocative of the eschatological joining of Christ as masculine warrior with the New Jerusalem as the “bride of the messiah” in the final chapters of the Book of Revelation, the joining of these “opposites” suggests a transcendent unification of self-alienated human consciousness that heralds the larger cosmic unification of the apocalyptic end. This is, like

Tessier-Ashpool itself, a very straightforward translation of Soleri’s apocalyptic narrative into the idiom of a science-fiction thriller. Arcological philosophy looks forward to a moment when human intelligence transcends individuated materiality and produces a superorganism within which individual personalities are preserved and supported, and Gibson imagines a future in which the collective mass of human cognition, represented by the digital information humanity has produced and stored online, becomes collectively self-aware. But, as in his representations of the architectonic aspects of arcology, Gibson deploys this apocalyptic imagery only to undercut and deny its eschatological significance. On the final page of Neuromancer the new human superorganism dismisses the significance of its own emergence: “[t]hings aren’t different. Things are things.”328

A machine intelligence that aspires to totality and universal control is a familiar plot device

326 Gibson, Neuromancer, 269.

327 Gibson, Count Zero, 257.

328 Gibson, Neuromancer, 270.

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in contemporary apocalyptic narratives, featuring, in different ways, in both hopeful narratives such as Soleri’s Arcology and in the grimmer imaginary of cautionary tales such as the Terminator films.329 Dick’s “Autofac,” which was discussed in the introduction, draws on this tradition.

Gibson alludes to such narratives and the apocalyptic anxiety they express, but his postapocalyptic version of this story turns away from fear of and fascination with the end of the world to concentrate instead on the challenges posed to historical narrative by the reality of history’s persistent continuity beyond the end of such stories. As Veronica Hollinger puts it, “Neuromancer simultaneously relies upon and dismisses genre SF’s long-standing fascination with apocalyptic scenarios. After hundreds of pages of non-stop suspense and narrative action, the final scene in

Gibson’s novel appears to be an anti-climactic throwaway.”330 Count Zero and Mona Lisa

Overdrive reveal that the emergence of a united human superorganism has failed to move the world closer to a terminal moment of cosmic unification, and that no apocalyptic break in history has occurred. The new collective subject remains both susceptible to change and identifiable as a limited entity contained within and distinguishable from its context. At the very moment of its emergence this unified human subject makes contact with radical alterity, in the form of alien intelligence. The Wintermute/Neuromancer/cyberspace consciousness does unite humanity into a single coherent subject, but the immediate appearance of this alien presence shows that even as the united consciousness of all of humanity this collective being is still a relatively limited entity inhabiting a world much larger than itself. An unspecified but brief period of time later the collective collapses, fracturing, in Lance Olsen’s phrase, “into manifold gods or subprograms, unable and/or unwilling to continue as a perfect form.”331 These fragments of what was briefly the

329 The Terminator, dir. James Cameron (Orion Pictures, 1984).

330 Hollinger, “Notes,” 48.

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singular human subject undergo a variety of evolutions and permutations: they style themselves as voodoo gods; enter into contracts with individuals, corporations, and criminal gangs; fight among themselves; and generally behaving like every other group of individually limited, historically located human subjects that appears in the novels. Both aspects of the apocalyptic telos of conceptual coherence, temporal finality and spatial completeness, are thus frustrated.

One of the more extensive critical conversations that has built up around the Sprawl novels turns on Gibson’s treatment of this collective subject in light of the question of technology’s relationship to the possibility of human transcendence. Many scholars read Gibson as describing a future in which technology allows humanity to escape the limitations of material and historical existence—such readings identify an apocalyptic break between Gibson’s descriptions of the old world of physical reality and the new world of the digital future. Claire Sponsler, for example, argues that Gibson's denial that modern megastructures will fulfill a messianic role in transforming the city does not constitute a critique of apocalyptic historical logics but simply defers the messianic promise to a new digital horizon.332 Other critics, such as Miriyam Glazer and

Christopher Sims, read the novels as illustrating the dehumanizing artificiality of an existence mediated by pervasive technology and machine intelligence.333 Both readings treat the Sprawl

331 Lance Olsen, “Virtual Termites: A Hypotextual Technomutant Explo(it)ration of William Gibson and the Electronic Beyond(s),” Style 29.2 (Summer 1995): 287-313 (298).

332 Claire Sponsler, “Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic Play,” Science Fiction Studies 20.2 (July 1993): 251-265.

333 See, among many others: Miriyam Glazer’s "'What is Within Now Seen Without': Romanticism, Neuromanticism, and the Death of the Imagination in William Gibson's Fictive World," Christopher Sims’s “AIs, Hatred of the Body, Cyborgs and Salvation in William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” David Mead’s “Technological Transfiguration in William Gibson's Sprawl Novels: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive,” and Timo Siivonen’s “Cyborgs and Generic Oxymorons: The Body and Technology in William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy.” The critical conversation around transcendence blurs into a related debate centered on cognitive mapping, political collectivity, and Gibson’s fiction as a reaction to or expression of late capitalism. Here, too, the arguments tend to fall into conceptually opposed positions that are both equally apocalyptic in form. See, among others: Pam Rosenthal’s Pam “Jacked-In: Fordism, Cyberspace, and Cyberpunk,” Sharon Stockton’s “‘The Self Regained’: Cyberpunk’s Retreat to the Imperium,” Tom Moylan’s “Global Economy/Local Texts: Utopian/Dystopian Tension 188

novels as pointing apocalyptically towards a post-historical future, in the form of either a triumphant or an entropic telos for human history; both make too much of the digital technologies described in the novels and ignore the explicitly historical and limited nature of the collective subjects that emerge from those technologies. As Tony Fabijancic has shown, Gibson’s cyberspace is an extension of the physical space of his cities, not a new world that replaces or departs from them; it is a dynamic realm in which historical events are continuously unfolding without ever resolving into apocalyptic transcendence or post-historical coherence.334 The idea that Gibson’s cyberspace should be read as a new world that replaces and redeems the old material world can be traced, I think, to misreadings of a single passage in Neuromancer, in which the narrator glosses the hacker Case’s bitter reaction to being cut off from the online world: “The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”335 Readers have been too willing to accept this one character’s fetishization of the digital world as a gloss on Gibson’s vision of the future as a whole. It is worth noting that this oft-quoted passage begins with a key qualification: the body is a prison “[f]or Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace.”336 Moreover, after he regains access to the online world Case eventually gives it up again and embraces his embodied, fleshly existence: “last

I heard,” says a character in the final novel, “he had four kids.”337 The Sprawl novels offer a number of spectacular images of the ways in which digital technologies will transform the world,

in William Gibson’s Cyberpunk Trilogy,” Benjamin Fair’s “Stepping Razor in Orbit: Postmodern Identity and Political Alternatives in William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” and Andrew Strombeck’s “The Network and the Archive: The Specter of Imperial Management in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.”

334 Tony Fabijancic, “Space and Power: 19th-Century Urban Practice and Gibson’s Cyberworld,” Mosaic 32.1 (March 1999): 105-20.

335 Gibson, Neuromancer, 6.

336 Ibid.

337 Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 165. 189

but Gibson rejects the idea that these technologies will create a wholly new world just as he rejects the idea that architectural technologies are possessed of this eschatological potency.

Neuromancer builds towards a moment of apocalyptic transcendence, ending with the triumphant synthesis of humanity into one consciousness and, on its final page, with the revelation of the alien other. But where an apocalyptic narrative trajectory would position the next novel as an exploration of this revelation and an extension of the universalizing process of interiorization to include this newly discovered alterity, Gibson’s narrative collapses into confusion and obscurity. Just as the Wintermute/Neuromancer collective collapses into disparate individual agents, so the narrative trajectory established in Neuromancer collapses in Count Zero into a welter of unfamiliar characters and seemingly disparate plot lines. By the end of the second book the connections between these new narratives and characters have been clarified, but the connection to the story told in the first novel remains obscure. And while this connection is eventually revealed in Mona Lisa Overdrive, rather than advance through the moment of revelation to the apocalyptic new world, this final entry in the series instead works its way back to a new version of the same revelation on which the first book closes. As Olsen puts it, “Gibson offers the possibility of significance and closure with one hand, [but] he subjects that possibility to contradiction or cancellation with the other.”338 The later books thus undercut the potentially eschatological orientation of Neuromancer by revealing it to be the first in a series of repetitions with difference rather than the first step on a path leading towards a final ending. On the final page of the last book, as on the final page of the first, a newly constituted human collective sets off to confront the radical other of alien intelligence. The mechanism of unification is different—Neuromancer ends with an artificial intelligence synthesizing global networks of digital information transfer, and

338 Olsen, 293.

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Mona Lisa Overdrive with a group of human beings uploading their minds into a computer simulation of those networks—but there is no suggestion that the second synthesis will achieve the apocalyptic telos missed by the first. The new collective is simply another limited and historically contingent human subject, fully susceptible to change over time and to eventual dissolution; the battery that powers the computer through which this synthesis has been achieved will only last a “[c]ouple months.”339 The narrative closes in both novels not on the moment of apocalyptic universalization that resolves historical flux into eternal coherence and alterity into interiority, but on the threshold of a historically specific confrontation with an other that cannot be reduced or incorporated to sameness—something so radically different that it must remain outside of the novels themselves, alluded to but never subject to representation. Where the project of apocalyptic narrative is to model idealized ecological relationships through the erasure of such aporia, Gibson’s postapocalyptic narratives draw attention to existing ecological realities by illustrating the limits of the human subject.

It is this emphasis on alterity that makes these novels a more environmentally sensitive exercise in futurist thinking than Soleri’s more straightforward attempt to imagine an environmentally sustainable future. This is, it must be acknowledged, a rather counterintuitive argument; the future that Gibson imagines resembles, in many ways, the worst case scenarios offered by environmental activists. One of the few non-urban environments in the Sprawl novels is an immense and thoroughly toxic landfill called Dog Solitude where nothing lives, “not even rats.”340 With the striking exception of the squirrels in the idyllic final chapter of Count Zero, the

339 Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 301.

340 Gibson, Count Zero, 155. Michael Levy includes a “polluted future” among the defining features of Gibson’s work (“Fiction, 1980-1992,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2009), 153- 162 (153).) 191

Sprawl novels are marked by an almost total absence of nonhuman animal life. The only animals that do appear are a few mutant rats and cockroaches in the Sprawl and some thoroughly instrumentalized cyborg guard dogs; horses, it is mentioned several times, have gone extinct.

Given such details, it is hardly surprising that the critical consensus leans towards reading the

Sprawl novels as extremely pessimistic visions of ecological disaster. Many readers would seem likely to agree with Phillip Schweighauser when he argues that Gibson’s vision “registers the complete obliteration of anything we could confidently call nature” and that the future of the

Sprawl novels is “a thoroughly dystopian space in which ecocide has already occurred.”341

Despite the grim imagery of pollution and ecosystem destruction, however, by positioning the city of the future not as telos but as a fully historical state of future reality Gibson’s narrative allows the nonhuman environment to play a more substantial role than it can ever achieve in

Soleri’s arcology. To read the Sprawl books is to experience ecological interconnectivity, to feel the reality of difference. Because Gibson’s postapocalyptic city does not develop in any clearly defined or progressive fashion, its growth does not demand that humanity (or some human-focused agent of divine or cosmic power) achieve a progressively more complete mastery of the environment. The various polluted, distorted, and mediated elements of that environment are thus able to take on the role of actants in the ongoing evolution of the future city. I am not suggesting that there is some sense in which Gibson’s Sprawl should be read as a vision of a future eco- paradise; rather, I want to draw attention to the fact that this vision of a polluted and environmentally damaged future city allows a space for the continued existence and action of nonhuman beings and forces in a way that Soleri’s arcological vision of a wholly unified future

341 Philip Schweighauser, “Who’s Afraid of Dystopia? William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Fredric Jameson’s Writing on Utopia and Science Fiction,” in Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, eds. Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). 225-42 (225). 192

world does not. The degree of agency available to nonhuman actants in Gibson’s future is severely limited by the presence of humanity and human actions, but, unlike apocalyptic fantasies in which the nonhuman world is completely subordinated to the human, here the nonhuman also exerts a reciprocal limiting influence back onto humanity.

This blurring of the human/nonhuman hierarchy suggests an alternative reading of

Schweighauser’s comments, quoted above; Gibson’s narrative not only registers the obliteration of “nature” in the sense of natural environments untouched by human activity, but enacts a more radical obliteration of “nature” as a concept that allows rigid distinctions to be drawn between humanity and humanity’s environmental context. It is in this sense that Gibson’s futurism is valuable from an environmental perspective, as this concept of nature that his texts undermine stands at the very foundation of anthropocentric thinking. The Sprawl is a thoroughly non- anthropocentric picture of the city as a constellation of discontinuous but interconnected networks of historically particularized beings and presences, of which the human is only one contingent component. The most visible agential nonhuman presences in the Sprawl novels are technological forces, machines and computers that have become so powerful and autonomous that they can no longer be seen as tools employed by human beings but must be acknowledged as active participants in the drama of history. This is, as I suggested above, a direct rebuttal of the utopian techno- fetisihism of the radiant city writers, and in particular of Soleri’s idea of the “mechanical mind” that serves the human superorganism of arcology. Although the imagery of uncontrolled technological proliferation that Gibson offers is a far cry from the pastoral imagery traditionally associated with environmentalist writings, my point again is not that Gibson portrays an ecologically desirable world but that he tells a story that fosters an awareness of the reality of ecological interconnection. The Sprawl novels are a powerful ecological text in the sense that to

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read them is to become aware both of humanity’s power to destroy and disrupt nonhuman systems and of the many ways in which those systems remain independent of us and exert their own influence back upon us.

Gibson also emphasizes the agency of nonhuman actants in his descriptions of the weather in the Sprawl, a relatively trivial piece of scene-setting in terms of the plots of the books that forms another direct response to Soleri. In Arcology Soleri discusses the impact megastructural city building will have on the climate, arguing that structures on the scale that he is proposing will cause changes in local weather patterns. In keeping with the centralizing tendency of his apocalyptic thought, Soleri treats this as an opportunity to bring the climate into a more harmonious relationship with humanity. By paying attention to the impact arcologies will have on climate, humanity will be able to build these structures in such a way as to optimize weather conditions, intervening in the processes of climate in order to perfect their operation vis-à-vis our own needs and desires. This is one of the points where it becomes clear that Soleri’s building program is essentially a geoengineering scheme, a plan to rework the entire world in, as the subtitle of his monograph announces, “the image of man.” In his own discussion of megastructural construction and weather, Gibson again describes a situation in which Soleri’s ideas have been put into working effect, and then insisting that their outcome remains subject to a more complex set of environmental and historical factors than the architect had accounted for. The Sprawl is described repeatedly as being covered by a series of unfinished and overlapping domes. Each of these structures represents an attempt to seize control over the weather through megastructural urban design, but their interaction with one another and with the forces of local weather and global climate results in effects that exceed the geoengineering ambitions of any of the individual human builders. The “patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas

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of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning.”342 Inside another dome, the “vast, hollow customs hall” of an airport “whose ceiling struts rose away into darkness,” the gloom is “broken at intervals by pale globes—globes circled, though it was winter, by clouds of insects, as though the building possessed its own discrete climate.”343 It is not simply that arcological attempts to control the weather have been carried out ineffectually in the Sprawl, but rather that nonhuman forces play a role in shaping these urban environments. Dispersed nonhuman forces incorporate the city’s domes and tunnels into complex assemblages that produce outcomes distinct from, and at times contradictory to, those desired by the human residents of the city. Rather than containing and controlling the world, arcological structures here become simply another environmental factor, an element within a wider system.

These products of human invention that were intended to bring order and control to natural systems have instead entered into networked relationships with forces and beings that cannot be attributed to or incorporated into human subjectivity. Gibson’s arcology is thus a truly ecological architecture, not in the sense that he imagines an architectural practice or product that is capable of controlling or optimizing ecological relations, but in the sense that his megastructures are part of the ecologically interconnected world in which they have been constructed.

Soleri’s arcology is an apocalyptic fantasy of a city in which historical change has resolved into a perfect final form. In this account, both the finality and the perfection of the eschatological product of history derive from the fact that this end state is achieved when human domination of the nonhuman world is complete. Soleri solves the crisis of human-caused environmental

342 Gibson, Count Zero, 114.

343 Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 133. 195

degradation by imagining a future in which there is no longer an independent environment that human actions are capable of threatening. Gibson’s critical revision of the arcological idea in the

Sprawl novels instead speculates postapocalyptically about a future city caught in the flux of historical time. In this account, human and nonhuman forces interact in unexpected, sometimes destructive or unpleasant, and occasionally productive ways. These texts do not solve the problem of environmental degradation but rather draw attention to that problem by imagining a future in which it continues to demand attention. In this way Gibson enables his readers to see humanity as part of an ecologically complex environment over which it exerts an immense influence but that it is not able to control or contain. His novels reveal the environmental situatedness of human culture, its location within a world of difference and multiplicity that both impacts on and is impacted by human activity; these stories of a polluted future ask readers to take nonhuman beings seriously as actants that contribute to the creation of reality and the unfolding of history.

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Chapter 4

Life in the Ruins: The Endless Worlds of Octavia Butler’s Parables and Detroit’s flower house

We may need to think bigger than totality itself, if totality means something closed, something we can be sure of, something that remains the same. — Timothy Morton

We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. — Deleuze and Guattari

Early in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower Lauren Olamina is asked if she thinks the

“world is coming to an end?”344 Butler gives her good reasons to say yes. The novel and its sequel,

Parable of the Talents, are set in a disturbingly plausible near-future world marked by ecological crises and the destabilization or collapse of political, social, economic, and environmental systems.345 Rising temperatures have turned southern California into an inhospitable desert, and clean water has become a resource to fight and kill over; scarcity has exacerbated existing social tensions, acts of religiously and racially motivated violence are common, rape and even cannibalism are everyday occurrences, and the frightened citizenry is on the verge of electing a xenophobic fascist to the presidency on the strength of his promise to restore order. Armed criminals, predatory policemen, wild dogs, and the starving poor roam the countryside, feeding on one another and anything weak enough to be easy prey, while the rich sequester themselves in heavily fortified compounds and multinational corporations, freed by sweeping deregulation, are

344 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 55.

345 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents (New York: Warner Books, 1998). A third novel, Parable of the Trickster, was never completed. Several incomplete manuscript drafts are housed at the Huntington Library. 197

busy privatizing the nation’s dwindling resources, building fenced company towns, and setting up systems of indenture and debt slavery. Olamina and her family live in a walled compound in what was once a prosperous garden city suburb of Los Angeles called Robledo; they and their neighbors have converted yards into subsistence farms and hold weekly firearm training sessions, but

Olamina, a precocious teenager, does not think these precautions are enough and frightens her friends when she tells them that they are not safe.

When her father confronts her about spreading panic, however, Olamina says that, no, she does not believe the world is coming to an end—but she also insists that the fortified community in which he has placed his hopes for the future will not endure, refuting his optimistic and implicitly apocalyptic investment in the idea of Robledo as an ordered system capable of permanently withstanding the dynamic flux of the outside world. “We’re in danger here,” she says,

“and we are going to have to work hard to save ourselves.”346 She offers this warning neither as a prophecy of doom nor as a call for the construction of a stronger fortress, positing that they are in danger not as residents of an insufficiently fortified compound but as residents of history. Her father is asking about eschatological destruction, but Olamina is denying the possibility of both a final catastrophe and final stability. Dismissing as illusory all existentially stabilizing apocalyptic narratives that promise a resolution of change into post-historical stability, Olamina urges her family and friends to acknowledge their inability to stop the headlong rush of history and strive to accommodate themselves to their changing world while trying to influence the way in which that world changes. Olamina’s denial that the world is ending is thus doubly challenging: she emphasizes both the limits of humanity’s historical agency—arguing that we are never fully in control of historical events—and the extent of humanity’s historical responsibility—arguing that

346 Butler, Sower, 55. 198

our inability to fully determine the course of history does not free us from the obligation to try and create a better future.

As in Gibson’s Sprawl novels, the goals of the radiant city visionaries in Butler’s Parables have both succeeded and failed. There are no spectacular arcologies in Butler’s novels, but “garden cities” like Robledo are an example of a modest version of the radiant city ideal that did manage to get built in large numbers in the twentieth century: a community that integrates urban and rural living into a single seamless suburban machine of tract housing and highway infrastructure. In

Robledo’s decline, fortification, and eventual destruction, Butler dramatizes the deformation and eventual collapse of this holistic suburban ecology under the pressures of economic stagnation and racial tensions in the latter half of the twentieth century; in this sense the novel can be read as a pessimistic fictional extrapolation from histories of the American suburb such as Mike Davis’s

City of Quartz. Butler also describes the construction of frighteningly successful radiant cities in the form of the closed and unified urban machines of the company town and the concentration camp. Like Gibson, in other words, Butler imagines the future in the form of a jumbled and chaotic ruin—as, in fact, a double ruin, the ruin of both her own late twentieth-century present and of the future dreamed of by the apocalyptic radiant city visionaries of the two generations before her.

And, like Gibson, she tells the story of this nightmare future that no sane reader would ever want to see manifest in a postapocalyptic fashion that encourages its readers to take a complex ecological view of history and the way in which human communities create and experience historical change.

Gibson’s novels tell stories about characters who live in the rubble of the world his readers inhabit; these novels pose an implicit challenge, asking their readers to accept that history is open- ended and the world is ontologically diverse, and that their own agency is therefore limited to the

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struggle to negotiate a dynamic and ever-changing world that they cannot control. But in these texts the postapocalyptic denial of apocalyptic faith in the finality of the eschatological future opens up possibilities to act and to recognize the agency of the nonhuman other only in the sense that they make it necessary to do so. Butler’s novels confront the debilitating conceptual and affective challenge that this denial of apocalyptic finitude in history involves, and try to offer a more stabilizing conceptual framework within which to face the world’s complexity. Butler looks for ways to deploy the idea of an open, indeterminate future that will approximate the grounding, sense-making function of apocalyptic historical narratives, allowing human beings to organize their lives and understand their actions as meaningful without recourse to a prophetic revelation of the ultimate meaning of those lives or the final outcome of those actions. She does this in the

Parables by having Olamina develop her Heraclitian insistence on the inevitability of change into an organized religious faith called Earthseed. Earthseed seeks to reconcile the contradictory goals of acknowledging the constitutive indeterminacy of historical experience and giving structure to human lives and actions in history by asking its adherents to invest themselves in a narrative that describes a potential, rather than a definitive or fated, future. Olamina asks her followers to invest their lives and actions in striving to achieve a very specific future involving space travel and extra- solar colonization while insisting that they accept that anything they achieve will be, at best, a compromised and impermanent approximation of the future she is describing. Her discourse is thus always at risk of slipping back into simpler apocalyptic promises about a definite future, and

Butler’s novels explore both the need for postapocalyptic alternatives to apocalyptic doctrines of finality and the difficulty involved in articulating such alternatives.

In order to illustrate the praxis of postapocalyptic dwelling Butler proposes in the Parables, in the second half of the chapter I turn to the practice of “ruin porn,” a form of art that finds beauty

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in aestheticized representations of architectural decay. I argue that contemporary ruin porn should be understood as a form of implicitly narrative eschatological art that both evokes a past in which the structures it studies were not yet ruined and points towards a future in which their condition has changed. Ruin porn thus helps its audiences to create historical narratives by connecting current events to other moments in historical time. Much of ruin porn is apocalyptic, and uses images of ruin in the present to suggest that an old reality has come to an end and been replaced by something entirely new, but I argue that certain forms of ruin porn do something different, highlighting the complex nature of historical transformations in which new realities are generated without entirely replacing or destroying the old worlds from which they emerge. Such works provide their audiences with an existentially grounding sense of the present as part of a coherent history while gesturing towards indeterminate futures and avoiding apocalyptic repudiations of the past. I focus on an installation art project called “the flower house” that combines ruin porn with an ongoing project of urban renewal, mobilizing an abandoned house in an impoverished area of

Detroit as a catalyst for both utopian speculation and concrete political action. I argue that this project should be understood as a real-world parallel to Earthseed, an attempt to use narrative to connect confusing and potentially traumatic experiences of change in the present to a past and to a range of possible futures without distorting history by forcing it into an apocalyptic framework.

The works examined in this chapter describe attempts to build future communities based on a postapocalyptic doctrine that identifies impermanence rather than finality as the defining characteristic of the future. Both Earthseed and the flower house emphasize the radical openness of the future, and both suggest that in order to capitalize on the potential offered by that openness it is necessary for human actors to give up ideals of perfect control in favor of a praxis of adaptive engagement with material and cultural environments in the present. In both works, the historicality

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of the future demands an acknowledgment of the ontological complexity of the present. The stories about the future told by Butler’s characters and the artists of the flower house are focused on humanity and are deployed in the interests of finding ways for human beings to shape the world according to their own needs and desires and to build better futures for themselves—nonetheless, these storytellers approach the future in a way that acknowledges that humanity must engage with the nonhuman world rather than attempting to dominate or co-opt that world. To say that all things change is to accept that one’s own personal being will be changed, and this is to open the way for a recognition of the full diversity of beings and forces that exercise agency in history.

God is Change: Postapocalyptic Narrative in Butler’s Parables

It is impossible to pinpoint the disaster responsible for the collapse of civilization in

Butler’s Parables. The issue is not that the cataclysm is unknown, but that it is unlocalizable; one of Butler’s more overt critiques of apocalyptic narrative and its ideas about radical breaks in history is to have diffused the disaster. Olamina says that she “used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos that would destroy the neighborhood. Instead, things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit.”347 There is no moment of worldwide destruction, no triggering event, only an ongoing process of traumatic change that extends over a period of several decades. “I have read,” says one character,

that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as ‘the Apocalypse’ or more commonly, more bitterly, ‘the Pox’ lasted from 2015 through 2030 - a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended . . . the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III.348

347 Butler, Sower, 110.

348 Butler, Talents, 7-8. 202

Butler’s future has been rocked by climate change and ecological collapse, by nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, by economic crises, and by the flaring up of countless petty tensions and animosities. Each of these factors has had drastic and traumatic effects, but none can be said to have brought an old world to an end or inaugurated a new one. Butler is at pains to debunk the idea that nuclear war, in particular, has triggered an apocalyptic break in history: “[t]he one three years ago between Iran and Iraq scared the hell out of everyone. After it happened, there must have been peace all over the world for maybe three months . . . But insult by insult, expediency by expediency, cease-fire violation by cease-fire violation, most of the peace talks broke down.”349

Similarly, liberal democratic government in America has eroded rather than collapsed or been overthrown; Olamina notes that “[t]he Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments . . . still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent

Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter.”350 The future of the Parables was not created through an apocalyptic break with the past, but by a series of small, gradual changes through which the world became something new without ceasing entirely to be what it once was.

Society in the Parable novels is always in motion; Butler treats all social structures as forms of relative coherence that emerge from and collapse back into flows and migrations. When

Olamina becomes pregnant her husband wants her to move into a house in a fortified and relatively prosperous community, a house that is available because its previous owners are moving to Siberia to escape war and uncertainty in America. “For this family,” says Olamina, the “protected, promised land . . . is just one more piece of the worn-out, unlivable ‘old country’ that they want to

349 Ibid, 83.

350 Ibid, 40.

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leave behind.”351 In Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, Asia is the past, Europe the present, and America the future; in Butler’s novels refugees who have come to the far shore of the future flee further west, in a movement that upsets the entire logic of old and new worlds. As Hee-

Jung Joo has argued, the Parable novels reject the short-sightedness of prophets of doom who leap from an awareness of disruption in the systems with which they are familiar to the conclusion that the world as a whole is coming to an end. “The Parables series does not depict the apocalyptic demise of the world,” writes Joo, “but rather only and specifically the demise of the U.S. as a first world power.”352

In the midst of this confusion two messianic figures arise, rival religious leaders offering to help the desperate nation find its way through the chaos. Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret, head of a fundamentalist church called Christian America, runs for the nation’s highest office on an explicitly apocalyptic campaign, promising to solve the country’s problems by violently resolving its history of disunity and complexity into a new world of purity and unity by expelling or incarcerating non-white, non-Christian Americans and subjugating women to the will of their husbands and fathers. His followers are fascist storm troopers who wear a cross and run “Christian re-education camps” as slave-labor death camps. Olamina describes him as “something new. Or something old . . . Now does not suit him . . . Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches!”353 Olamina is surprised,

351 Ibid, 139

352 Hee-Jung Joo, “Old and New Slavery, Old and New Racisms: Strategies of Science Fiction in Octavia Butler’s Parables Series,” Extrapolation 52.3 (2011): 279-99 (283). “In this sense,” Joo continues, “Butler’s imagination of a future U.S. expresses a distinctly first world conceit. It assumes that though malaria, squatter settlements, and a useless currency are everyday realities for those in many of the world’s poorer nations, for such conditions to be rampant within the borders of the U.S. would be a sign of the apocalypse” (283). I would argue, however, that Butler’s novel does not express this conceit so much as explore and critique it.

353 Butler, Talents, 18-9.

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but the burning of witches is a perfectly logical extension of Jarret’s “‘heroic’ effort to revive and reunify the country.”354 His aim is to fix the world by purifying it, removing the undesirable elements and producing a coherent, self-identical social body. He seeks, apocalyptically, to create a future in which the chaos of the present is resolved into a stable and universally coherent structure; whatever cannot be made to fit into this future unity must be eliminated, and burning is as good a way as any. Butler is keenly aware of the appeal of such apocalyptic promises. “I don’t like to admit it,” Olamina says, “but some of [the Christian American soldiers running the death camps] are, in a strange way, decent, ordinary men . . . They’re not all sadists or psychopaths.”355

Olamina understands what leads these men to commit atrocities: “they’re afraid and ashamed of their fear, ashamed of their powerlessness. And they’re tired . . . They want someone to do something. Fix things.”356 This desire for someone to fix things is a desire for the end, for a solution that is definitive and final and therefore justifies burning a few people at the stake. “Jarret hates all this chaos the way I hate it,” says one of his followers. “That’s why I voted for him. Now he’ll start putting things right!”357 Jarret’s appeal is not environmentalist in any way, but it is fundamentally ecological: he promises to bring order and balance to the human (or at least the

American) animal’s relationship to its physical and social environment.

Jarret’s rival is Olamina herself, who promotes Earthseed as a postapocalyptic religious system that will not only make life in history more palatable but will help humanity to produce a better future. Butler does not use this word to describe Olamina’s thinking, but she does present

Earthseed as a deliberate attempt to refashion the forms and logics of apocalyptic religion. The

354 Ibid, 157.

355 Ibid, 233.

356 Ibid, 26.

357 Ibid, 157. 205

Parable novels, which consist of entries from Olamina’s diary and those of people who are close to her, tell a story that deliberately evokes the narrative of providential Christian history, opening in a fallen world, following the rise of a messianic teacher, and culminating in a scene of collective human transcendence.358 The first novel describes the destruction of Robledo, the murder of

Olamina’s family, and her subsequent struggle to survive on the street while teaching people about

Earthseed, and it closes with the establishment of an Earthseed community on a farm called

Acorn.359 Had Butler stopped here, Parable of the Sower would be a relatively straightforward expression of apocalyptic narrative logics and urban imagery, a story in which the flawed city of

Robledo is destroyed to make way for the new world represented by the more perfect city of Acorn.

But the second novel, in which Acorn is invaded by Jarrett’s followers and turned into a slave- labor camp, disrupts the messianic pattern. Eventually Olamina and her followers escape, burning

Acorn and returning to a nomadic life. The story then leaps to a point in the future at which

Earthseed has become a globally significant religion, and the book ends as the faithful are beginning their long-planned project of colonizing the stars, another moment of potentially messianic fulfillment that is carefully destabilized. Butler uses this narrative to illustrate the differences between Olamina’s postapocalyptic doctrine and the apocalyptic ideas articulated in the texts upon which the Parables are modeled, but she also uses it to illustrate the enduring appeal

358 For further discussion of Butler’s evocation and critique of Christian tradition, see Donna Andreolle’s “Utopias of Old, Solutions for the New Millennium: A Comparative Study of Christian Fundamentalism in M.K. Wren’s A Gift Upon the Shore and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower” (Utopian Studies 12.2 (2001): 114-123), and Clarence Tweedy’s “The Anointed: Countering Dystopia with Faith in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of Talents” (Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-Present) 13.1 (Spring 2014): no pagination).

359 For discussions of the Parables and the utopian imagination, see Patricia Melzer’s “‘All that you touch you change’: Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents” (Femspec 3.2 (2002): 31-52), Peter Stillman’s “Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler’s Parables,” (Utopian Studies 14.1 (2003): 15-35), and Jim Miller’s “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler's Dystopian/Utopian Vision,” Science Fiction Studies 25.2 (July 1998): 336-360. Miller’s “post-apocalyptic hoping” clearly distinguishes the concept from the optimism of utopian apocalyptic narratives that promise eschatological futures. 206

of apocalyptic narratives and the certainty they provide, and to draw attention to the difficulties involved in the attempt to create a similarly grounding narrative without recourse to the apocalyptic logic of historical endings.

The core of the Earthseed doctrine lies in two propositions, a theory of deity and a theory of history. On the subject of divinity Olamina’s position is expressed in a simple, oft-repeated mantra: “God is Change.”360 Another character glosses this idea as follows: “her god is a process or combination of processes, not an entity. It is not consciously aware of her - or of anything. It is not conscious at all . . . Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and, of course, the second law of thermodynamics.”361

This idea of the divine power as the sum of all the dynamic processes at work in the material world is, as Peter Stillman has argued, post-secular, in that it draws on a variety of religious and scientific knowledges, and posthumanist, in that it proposes a model of agency in which the coherent humanist subject is replaced by complex assemblages of agential forces. “God is change” is also a theodicy, a way of answering the question of why pain and suffering exist.362 Apocalyptic religion explains suffering by positing that what appears to be senseless or tragic from the limited perspective of a given human observer is part of a highly structured series of events orchestrated by divine power, the ultimately positive outcome of which will be revealed by the end of the world; a particularly apocalyptic pronouncement, in this sense, is the familiar platitude “God works in

360 Butler, Sower, 220.

361 Butler, Talents, 46. The line is evocative of H.N. Fowler’s translation of Plato’s Cratylus, in which Socrates quotes Heraclitus as saying “πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει”—in Fowler’s translation, “everything changes and nothing stands still.”

362 The word theodicy, from the Greek Θεός (“God”) and δίκη (“trial”) refers to an attempt to explain why an omnipotent and loving God would allow suffering to exist. Gottfried Leibniz coined the word theodicy in 1710 in his Essays on Theodicy, trans E.M. Huggard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951).

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mysterious ways.”363 Olamina’s theodicy is simpler. Earthseed’s god does not work in mysterious ways, and rather than explain suffering as the consequence of human misbehavior or as the necessary cost of the greater good, Olamina sees it as simply one of the consequences of humanity’s exposure to history.

And yet Olamina insists that “Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system.”364 The ongoing changes that are the defining characteristic of historical reality can be influenced even if they cannot be controlled or stopped: “[a]ll things change, but all things need not change in all ways.”365

Olamina does not, in other words, hate chaos the way Jarret hates it. She acknowledges that in a dynamic historical world death, pain, and loss are inevitable, but she also sees that possibilities for action are opened up by that same dynamism. Earthseed is not an anarchic or romantic embrace of change as such; Butler is careful to balance images of the liberatory potential of instability with images of its often horrifying consequences.366 Instability is the condition of possibility of

Olamina’s aspirations for a better world in the sense that the inevitability of change enables her to transform herself and her world, but also because this same dynamism has resulted in the destruction of so many of the structures that preserved and protected the civilization of her father’s generation. Change enables transformation and makes it necessary. Acknowledging both the possibility and necessity of active participation in the changing world, Earthseed eschews

363 A phrase of obscure origin, perhaps a paraphrase of the opening lines of William Cowper’s 1774 hymn “God Moves in a Mysterious Way”: “God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform.” The hymn goes on to make the apocalyptic promise that order stands behind the surface of things: “Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take; / The clouds ye so much dread / Are big with mercy and shall break / In blessings on your head.” 364 Butler, Talents, 46.

365 Ibid.

366 Mathais Nilges argues that the Parables “are less about the value of embracing change than about the struggle with the necessity of having to do so” (“‘We Need the Stars’: Change, Community, and the Absent Father in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents,” Callaloo 32.4 (Fall 2009): 1332-1352 (1337, italics original)). 208

apocalyptic solutions in favor of postapocalyptic actions, demanding that human beings accept that their ability to shape the world is limited but that they must still try to influence and direct the changes that the world will inevitably undergo.

Olamina makes this Sisyphean imperative more palatable by borrowing a trick from the apocalyptic storyteller’s playbook. The second core teaching of Earthseed is a narrative of future history and a promise: “the destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.”367 Olamina argues that humanity needs to see itself “as a growing purposeful species” and that some semblance of apocalypse’s historical telos is necessary because “[w]hen we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we . . . destroy ourselves.”368 Her solution is not only to demand that her followers take responsibility for trying to shape events they will never completely control, but also to offer them a concrete vision of a possible outcome of their efforts, articulated as a historical goal or trajectory. This would seem to be less a move away from apocalyptic narrative logics than a return to them, and Olamina’s defense of the doctrine echoes Kermode’s account of apocalyptic narrative as a tool that establishes existentially stabilizing meaning in the present. Hui-chuan Chang reads the novels as a deeply pessimistic account of Olamina’s failure to establish a politically oppositional community and subsequent retreat to fantasies of escape.369 Other critics have argued that the failure is not Olamina’s but Butler’s, and that the Parable novels betray a preference for

367 Butler, Sower, 47. Jerry Phillips argues that Butler seeks to balance postmodern suspicion of revolutionary desire with an awareness of the “crushing facticity” of a world in which it is impossible to imagine radical change (“The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 35.2/3 (Contemporary African American Fiction and the Politics of Postmodernism, Spring/Summer 2002): 299-311 (301)).

368 Butler, Talents, 179.

369 Hui-chuan Chang, “Critical Dystopia Reconsidered: Octavia Butler’s Parable Series and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as Post-Apocalyptic Dystopias,” Tamkang Review 41.2 (June 2011): 3-20.

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fantasies of transcendence over narratives of political transformation.370 Such suspicions point to the difficulty of articulating a rigorous postapocalyptic discourse that is more than a critique of the failure of apocalyptic narratives; the deliberately ambiguous historical doctrine that is the

Earthseed destiny continually risks slipping into (or being misunderstood as) either anti- apocalyptic nihilism or apocalyptic authoritarianism.

Visions of life among the stars are often used in science fiction as a version of the apocalyptic promise, displacing the post-historical new world of the future onto an alien planet.

But Butler does something different with the promise of space travel. Olamina’s doctrine does not promise that Earthseed will be consummated or realize its ideal form among the stars, but that it will grow and develop there; its destiny is to “take seed” among the stars. Of course, many apocalyptic doctrines present their new world as a rebirth or a return to the past; this is Jarret’s position in the Parables, as he promises to “restore” America to its former moral and racial purity.

But Olamina’s destiny does not posit a return to primal innocence any more than it does an escape into post-historical paradise. Earthseed presents life among the stars as something that will be not all that different from life on earth: it “promises its people immortality only through their children, their work, and their memories . . . Its promise is of hard work and brand-new possibilities, problems, challenges, and changes.”371 The stars represent for Earthseed what Bulent Somay has called a “utopian horizon,” an image through which “non-discursive, infinite, and open-ended” belief in the possibility of something better than the present is focused, rather than a “utopian locus,” a specific and well-defined form into which the hope that this conviction will be borne out

370 See, for example, Tom Moylan’s Scraps of the Untainted Sky (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. 237-46) and Hoda Zaki’s “Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler” (Science Fiction Studies 17.2 (July 1990): 239-51).

371 Butler, Talents, 47. 210

is channeled.372 The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars, but this is simply something that might happen. “We can always screw it up,” Olamina says.373

But this distinction between the apocalyptic promise of an alternative future and Olamina’s promise of the possibility of an alternative future is a subtle one, and it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the more Earthseed’s possible future is deployed as a justification or motivation for action in the present. Given that the purpose of the Earthseed destiny is to provide humanity with a goal in history in order to help stave off the nihilistic despair that might follow upon the postapocalyptic denial of the possibility of transcendence and the validity of universal systems of meaning, there is a very real sense in which the doctrine is constantly at risk of undermining itself. The difficulty of Olamina’s project is not that she might fail to convince people to adopt the Earthseed doctrine and commit themselves to the Earthseed destiny, but rather that she might be too convincing. She and her followers might come, consciously or unconsciously, to imagine their destiny as something that could actually be achieved. Earthseed is constitutively at risk of believing itself to be a more definitive account of the future than it is intended to be. Butler uses the story of Olamina’s struggle to evangelize for Earthseed and work towards the Destiny to dramatize the tension that arises from this attempt to make postapocalyptic history viable as a foundational tenet of collective human existence. The books dramatize, in other words, the difficulties involved in articulating and practicing a postapocalyptic politics.

Olamina’s pessimistic predictions about the futility of her father’s attempt to build an apocalyptic city at Robledo are borne out when the walled compound is attacked by a group of

“pyros,” users of a drug that makes setting fires sexually exciting. Most of Robeldo’s residents

372 Bulent Somay, “Towards an Open-Ended Utopia,” Science Fiction Studies 11 (1984): 25-38.

373 Butler, Talents, 180. 211

either die in the blaze or are killed in confrontations with the looters who follow the pyro gang.

Olamina escapes with a small group of survivors and together they take to the road, where Olamina begins to preach about Earthseed and gather a larger group of followers. Under her direction, the group puts Earthseed’s teachings to practical use by striving in various ways both to influence and adapt to the instability of their situation. Although the group is entirely nomadic and does not engage in any explicit city-building activities, there is a sense in which Butler is using it to implicitly explore alternatives to the apocalyptic urbanism represented by more traditional community leaders such as Olamaina’s father. Madhu Dubey argues that “even as it presents the complete collapse of actual cities, the novel insists on an urban understanding of place as the inescapable basis for constructing alternative images of social order,” and that the section of Sower in which Olamina and her group are living on the street “presents [urban] community as process rather than settlement . . . unified not by its attachment to past or place but by a common set of practical objectives that must be continually adjusted to meet changing circumstances.”374 The nomadic Earthseed community is not a pastoral community; in contrast to the idealized cultural and social unity of the pastoral village, the Earthseed community “is racially and culturally mixed and thus demands constant efforts of mediation and translation . . . requiring the ability to interpret unfamiliar cultural codes and the alert balancing of suspicion and trust typical of urban social interactions.”375 The members of Olamina’s group have been completely cut off from the built urban environment, and spend most of their time camping in fields or along the sides of highways, but Butler uses their experience to explore an alternative to apocalyptic urbanisms that identify the

374 Madhu Dubey, “Folk and Urban Communities in African-American Women’s Fiction: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower” (Studies in American Fiction 27.1 (Spring 1999): 103-28 (112-113).

375 Ibid, 113.

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city with built structures designed to resist change and to create optimized relationships between social actors and between humanity and the nonhuman world.376 For the Earthseed group, urban dwelling consists of the practice of adapting one’s being and behavior as one’s social and material situation changes. The city thus becomes not a particular kind of environment in which human ecology is controlled and optimized, but rather a practice of responding to chances in ecological connectivity.

One of the things that this involves is an acceptance of the radical fluidity of personal identity. Olamina cuts her hair and passes as a man for most of the novel and other characters take steps to disguise their skin color, destabilizing visual markers of supposedly determinate categories such as race and gender in order to ease the social tensions they encounter on the street. They must also transform themselves in more fundamental ways. When one of Olamina’s companions balks at the idea that he might have to kill to survive and objects that “we don't have to turn into animals,”

Olamina argues that there is a sense in which they do, that they will not survive if they allow the behavioral norms of their former lives to dictate their actions in their new situation.377 There is a lot of animal imagery in the Parables; bandits are “two-legged coyotes,” scavengers are “human maggots,” and Butler repeatedly equates desperate human beings with hungry dogs: “[t]here are always a few groups of homeless people and packs of feral dogs living out beyond the last hillside shacks. People and dogs hunt rabbits, possums, squirrels, and each other. Both scavenge whatever dies.”378 Olamina undercuts the apparent dichotomy between civilized and savage suggested by

376 Melanie Marolla reads Butler’s project in these novels as the articulation of system of symbolic value that balances pastoral investments in the natural with modern investments in the technological (“Liberation through the Acceptance of Nature and Technology in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower,” Theory in Action. 3.1. (January 2010): 38-50).

377 Butler, Sower, 163.

378 Ibid, 180, 142, 35.

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these description, insisting that the group’s survival depends not upon distinguishing themselves from wild dogs but on their ability to adopt the behaviors associated with that description. Gibson’s characters cannot act in the same way everywhere, but Butler’s must accept that it is not possible to be the same person at all time and in all places. But the point is not that they should find a better or more authentic way of living on the street; Olamina does not embrace violence and animality as purer, more natural alternatives to effete artificialities. This would be simply a revaluation of apocalyptic categories, a primitivist romantic apocalypse in which the new world of the future is achieved through a return to nature. Olamina’s postapocalyptic project is more ambiguous, and involves taking an active role in directing the evolution of an unstable personal identity as it encounters a changing world. While the members of the Earthseed group must be flexible and allow themselves to be shaped by the needs of the moment, Olamina also warns that they “have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us.”379 They will have to change and they will never be entirely in control of those changes, which are dictated by the circumstances that they encounter. Nonetheless, they should be consciously directing that change according to their own needs and desires.

It is also necessary that the group take an active role in determining how the world that they inhabit changes, although they are even less capable of achieving complete control here than they are controlling the changes the world forces them to make in themselves. One of the ways in which Olamina and her companions do exercise an influence over their environment is through the adaptation of the built structures that they encounter, which they and others repurpose to meet contingent and changing needs. While walking down the middle of a highway, for example,

Olamina notes that “[i]t's against the law in California to walk on the freeways, but the law is

379 Ibid, 201. 214

archaic.”380 In a world where no private citizen can afford an automobile, the American highway system has lost its intended purpose, but it continues to “provide the most direct routes between cities and parts of cities,” and so it continues to be used. Looking around, Olamina sees “a broad river of people walking . . . [and] prostitutes and peddlers of food, water, and other necessities liv[ing] along the freeways in sheds or shacks.”381 The freeway was neither designed nor destined to become a footpath, an open air bazaar, or a foundation for the homes of prostitutes and peddlers, but it has become those things because they are what people need it to be at a particular moment in history. In another scene Olamina and her group establish a temporary shelter against the outer wall of a ruined building—again, they invert the standard practice of architecture and urban design, finding ways to use the built environment as they encounter it rather than seeking to erect buildings or infrastructural networks optimized for specific needs. The group pursues a similar strategy in engaging with cultural structures, as, for example, when Olamina hires a group of slave merchants to help her track down and reclaim children who have been kidnapped from Earthseed families by

Christian American soldiers and sold into servitude. Again, the idea is that she finds new ways of using the structures that she encounters rather than striving, apocalyptically, to build perfected structures from a clean slate.

The first novel ends with Olamina and her companions establishing a settled Earthseed community on a farm that they call Acorn. If in the sections of the novel that take place on the road

Butler has Olamina reject the apocalyptic ideal of constructing a final and perfect environment in favor of a postapocalyptic practice of engaging with the environments she encounters, here both author and character seem to have abandoned this openness to instability in favor of a form of

380 Ibid, 157.

381 Ibid, 157-8. 215

pastoral apocalypticism. The pastoral utopian ideal differs only in its details from the fantasy of a perfect techno-urban order; both are apocalyptic investments in final forms. Butler makes it clear that Acorn is in fact quite different from Robledo and other apocalyptic cities; acknowledging that no wall will keep determined invaders at bay, for example, Olamina instead has her followers plant a hedge of thorns designed to funnel attackers into certain approaches which can be monitored. In this way her commitment to find a middle ground between the desire to keep the world at bay and the recognition that this is impossible is built into the structure of the compound itself. The wall, perhaps the paradigmatic image of the desire to reduce the world’s complexity to a knowable order through architectural construction, becomes in this fence a flexible actant participating in dynamic motion. In this and other ways, Acorn is represented as a new iteration of Olamina’s nomadic practice of radically open self- and world-fashioning, rather than a departure from that practice. It is also worth noting that the book itself ends not with the construction of Acorn but with a quotation from the Gospel of Luke, the parable of the sower who casts seeds on fertile and infertile soil; the question of what sort of ground this seed has been sown in is left open, and the stars are as far away as they were when Olamina first proposed them as a goal.

But if Acorn demonstrates that it is possible to found a stable community on postapocalyptic principles of adaptive engagement rather than apocalyptic principles of escaping history through the construction of static forms, it also serves as a cautionary tale for postapocalyptic thought. Butler uses Acorn not only to explore what Earthseed’s urban alternative might look like when instantiated in a more recognizably urban structure, but to emphasize how easy it is for even the most rigorous attempt to acknowledge the bottomless dynamism of the historical world to slip into a comfortable assumption that one has succeeded in taming that

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dynamism and creating something stable.382 It is Jarret’s Christian American soldiers who turn

Acorn into a hyperbolically caricaturized indictment of the New Jerusalem ideal—a fenced concentration camp with the name of the messiah over the gate—but the fact that they were able to do so suggests that the desire for apocalyptic solutions was already latent in Acorn itself. Like

Robledo, this community with its wall and its unifying social vision based on a shared religious faith becomes a version of the radiant city: a microcosmic vision of cosmic order, and thus a model of the apocalyptic ideals of structure and stability that Butler insists are an impossible fantasy.

Rather than a moment of temporary structure within the ongoing process of self-transformation dictated by Earthseed’s commitment to adaptive engagement with a world it cannot control, Acorn becomes, at least implicitly, a concrete point lying on a determinate path leading towards a definite future, the Destiny. As such, it represents a failure or lapse in Earthseed’s postapocalyptic vision even before Jarret’s followers arrive to destroy it.

After the destruction of Acorn, the Earthseed community returns to the road and to their earlier practice of adaptively engaging with their environment, adjusting their own behavior and being to the physical and cultural context of the cities and landscapes they move through and trying to shape what they find to better accommodate their own vision of the future, rather than attempting to build a community modeled on and perfectly adapted to their beliefs. The second novel ends with the launch of the first Earthseed starships, a moment of accomplishment that, like the founding of Acorn, allows Butler to draw attention to both the postapocalyptic nature of

Earthseed’s doctrine and to the ever-present threat that this doctrine will lapse into apocalyptic

382 Lauren Lacy argues that the novels confront the conflict between disenfranchised subjects’ desire to seize social power and the tendency of new-found authority to undermine the transgressive nature of the original revolt (“Octavia E. Butler on Coping with Power in Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Fledgling,” Critique 49.4 (Summer 2008): 379-94).

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practices. The description of the launch is restrained and equivocal: “[t]he shuttles are fat, squat, ugly, ancient-looking space trucks. They look as if they could be a hundred years old.”383 On them the colonists are kept alive not by an idealized technological apparatus that guarantees their safety, but by “the suspended-animation process that seems to be the best of the bunch.”384 Again,

Olamina and her followers are working with the materials they find available in the present—the best of the bunch they have access to—in an attempt to build something better in the future.

Parable of the Talents closes on the launch of shuttles carrying members of Earthseed to a starship that will then carry the group into space; the Destiny remains distant, closer than it was at the end of the first novel but still an un-narrated possibility lying on the other side of a series of future events that have yet to take place. The shuttles must reach the starship, which must be launched and successfully reach some alien world, upon which the settlers must succeed in establishing a new Earthseed colony; the entire plot of a good many science fiction stories still stands between the end of Parable of the Talents and the realization of the goal Olamina proposed in Parable of the Sower.

Of particular significance, especially in the context of novels that dramatize the brutalization of black and minority bodies by a white Christian power structure, is the fact that the first of the Earthseed starships is called the Christopher Columbus. Olamina “objects to the name,” but concludes that “one can’t win everything” and dismisses the issue.385 The suggestion would seem to be that corporate or governmental sponsors of some sort have insisted on this patriotic moniker, and that Olamina considers their assistance to be important enough that she is willing to

383 Butler, Talents, 406.

384 Ibid.

385 Ibid. 218

give up control over the name of the ship. Once again, she is working with the world as she finds it. But the name does more than illustrate the realpolitik practicality of Earthseed’s adaptive doctrine; it suggests that the possibility remains open that this trip to the stars will reproduce the same kinds of violence that resulted from other voyages of exploration, voyages motivated, at least in part, by the apocalyptic desire to leave the world behind. It suggests, in other words, that

Earthseed still faces the danger of forgetting that its future is a postapocalyptic possibility and beginning to believe in it as an apocalyptic certainty. The shuttle launch is, then, not the triumphant conclusion of Earthseed’s project of adaptive engagement with the world but an extension of that nomadic existence, complete with its adaptive praxis and its dangers, into new territory.

Although plagued by such risks and perennially open to the possibility of failure, Earthseed is nonetheless interesting as a thoroughgoing attempt to formulate a postapocalyptic vision of the city that goes beyond simply deflating the aspirations of apocalyptic thinkers and articulates a positive vision of the future of human dwelling that is founded on the realities of ecological complexity and historical indeterminacy rather than on the desire to escape those realities. Olamina demands that her followers surrender the apocalyptic aspiration to total control of the relations that bind the human animal to its environment, and with it the apocalyptic idealization of holism. “We can fulfill the Destiny,” she says, “make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them.”386 The religion proposes a normative guide to human action based not on the attempt to eliminate or dominate an exterior world but to accommodate, respond to, and work with the influence that exterior exerts; it thus tacitly acknowledges the presence and agency of the nonhuman. The “essential purpose” of Earthseed is

386 Ibid, 358. 219

at once more modest than transcendence and more ambitious than finality; its aim is to “force us to become more than we might ever become without it.”387 Charting a narrow path between the

Charybdis of nihilism and the Scylla of apocalyptic messianism, it is an attempt to organize human social and affective energies through postapocalyptic narrative practices in a way that emphasizes rather than obscures the contingency of any position of mastery from which those organized resources might be deployed. The Parables thus provide a compelling example of an attempt to enable purposeful action in history and investment of value in the future that does not rely upon the apocalyptic idealization and reification of that future. In the second half of this chapter, I examine an architectural project that pursues a practice of adaptive engagement with built, natural, and social environments similar to that described in Butler’s novels.

The Flower House: Postapocalyptic Narratives in Detroit Ruin Porn

The flower house, an ongoing, multi-media art installation and urban renewal project, is the brainchild of the Detroit-based florist Lisa Waud. In 2014, Waud purchased two abandoned residential properties in the Hamtramck neighborhood of Detroit, one of many areas of that city that have been left largely abandoned in the wake of the collapse of the city’s economy. Waud’s plan was to tear down the two decrepit houses and then develop the property as a farm, part of a much-publicized movement to rehabilitate depressed urban areas through the development of various forms of urban agriculture. Rather than demolishing the houses to make way for her vision of a greener city of the future, however, Waud first invited a team of florists to transform one of the houses into a fleeting work of installation art by filling the rooms with arrangements of freshly cut flowers. Inspired by the large-scale environmental installation projects of Christo and Jean-

387 Ibid, 393, italics original 220

Claude, Waud explains that her goal was to “show . . . respect for the city of detroit’s history through the reuse of one abandoned house.”388 The idea was not simply to create a new future in

Detroit, but to do so in a way that avoided treating that future as something detached from the city’s past and present. Where apocalyptic urban renewal projects seek to escape the present in order to achieve the future, the flower house emphasizes the present moment of construction as a complex pastiche of materials inherited from the past and opportunities opening out into the future.

The installations were opened to the public for three days in the fall of 2015. Photographs from the exhibition show a series of surreal still-life tableaux: a flood of moss and blossoms pouring from windows and erupting from closets and dressers, garlands of wilting lilies spilling petals over scuffed linoleum stamped with faded fleurs-de-lis, tulips and ferns climbing like vines across exposed beams. Waud used the money raised through ticket sales and voluntary public contributions to fund the deconstruction of the house, a process which is still ongoing at the time of this writing.

As a work of urban revitalization, Waud’s project contributes in a number of ways to promoting environmentally responsible production and consumption in both the construction and the floral industries, and participates in the socially responsible rehabilitation and creative reuse of neglected urban spaces and structures. One of the project’s guiding principles involves the use of locally sourced materials for the floral installations. Many of the florists involved in the project support the “slow flower” movement; echoing the rhetoric of “slow food,” they argue for locally grown floral products on both environmental and cultural grounds, pointing to the fossil fuels required to ship flowers internationally and the loss of economic stability and diversity in local

388 “Flower House,” Flower House Detroit, 4 Dec. 2015, The flower house website evokes modernist orthographic experimentation to suggest politically oppositional consciousness by, among other things, using very few capital letters in its copy. Quotes from the website throughout this section are formatted as they are in the original. For the works of Christo and Jean-Claude, see http://christojeanneclaude.net/ 221

communities caused by the outsourcing of production.389 Accordingly, all of the flowers used in the project were grown on American farms—this is a broad definition of “local,” but is a meaningful move towards more sustainable practices in an industry that relies heavily on international imports.390 A second core principle was to deconstruct rather than demolish the house, and then to reuse or recycle as many of its components as possible. In the building industry

“deconstruction” refers to the piecemeal disassembly of condemned structures, an alternative to more traditional approaches involving wholesale demolition using wrecking machinery or explosive charges.391 Waud partnered with a local firm, Reclaim Detroit, which makes materials salvaged from deconstructed houses available to builders and also uses those materials to produce practical and fine art objects, such as salvage-wood cutting boards and guitars. “These materials will carry on the story of Flower House in a tangible way,” said a Reclaim Detroit employee in an interview with the New York Times. “It creates a legacy that people will have in their hands.”392

389 The slow flower movement, which is relatively small, is organized around two online organs, the Slow Flowers Directory (“Slow Flowers.” 2014. 14 December 2015. ) and the Slow Flowers Podcast (“Archive for the Slow Flowers Podcast.” 9 December 2015. 16 December 2015. ), both maintained by Debra Prinzig. Prinzig is also the author of a book on the subject, Slow Flowers: Four Seasons of Locally Grown Bouquets from the Garden, Meadow, and Farm (Pittsburgh: St. Lyn’s Press, 2013). For more on the slow food movement, see Geoff Andrews’s The Slow Food Story (London: Pluto Press, 2008).

390 According to the International Trade Commission, “approximately 60 percent of U.S. consumption [of cut fresh flowers] during the period 1997-2001” was provided by imports, a figure which rose to “85-90 percent between 2001 and 2003 (U.S. International Trade Commission, “Industry and Trade Summary: Cut Flowers,” USITC Publication 3580 (February 2003), 1, 3).

391 Deconstruction is more expensive than demolition, but helps to stem a particularly wasteful aspect of the modern building industry. The International Council for Research and Innovation in Building Construction reports that “demolition waste amounts to 92% of the total construction and demolition (C&D) waste stream of 136 million [metric] tonnes” produced in America annually, and that this waste “represents about one third of the volume of materials entering [American] landfills” (International Council for Research and Innovation in Building Construction Task Group 39: Deconstruction, Overview of Deconstruction in Selected Countries, eds. Charles Kibert and Abdol Chini. (University of Florida)).

392 Quoted in Stacy Cowly, “A Detroit Florist’s Vision Turns an Abandoned House into Art,” The New York Times, October 14 2015, 222

Where apocalyptic thinkers see obsolete structures as obstacles standing in the way of the emergence of new forms, the deconstruction process suggests a more complex view of change and innovation in which existing structures provide the material out of which new realities are produced. In this sense Waud’s approach echoes the Earthseed doctrine of Butler’s Parables, emphasizing adaptive engagements with material and cultural realities as they are encountered in the present.

13- Heather Saunders, photographs of the flower house. 223

But the flower house is more than simply a practical engagement in environmentally and socially responsible urban renewal—it is also a work of art that tells a story about the future of

American cities in a way that draws attention to both the traumas and the possibilities inherent in the instability that characterizes contemporary Detroit. Waud and her team allow audiences to experience that openness to often uncontrolled and undesired change as the condition of possibility for new futures rather than simply as a confusing and traumatic experience of loss. The project acts as a catalyst for postapocalyptic narrative speculation, and offers a real-world analog to

Butler’s fictional attempts to articulate futurist narratives based on the acknowledgement of humanity’s inability to fully control historical change. Before discussing these aspects of the project in detail, however, it seems appropriate to contextualize the project by looking at the larger art movement of which it is a part, and at the ways in which this movement is often used to articulate apocalyptic narratives.

The flower house is one of many contemporary works of art that rely for their effect on the aestheticization of ruined urban structures in the city of Detroit, a kind of work often referred to as

“ruin pornography” or ruin porn. Such works take the decaying architecture of modern cities as inspiration and raw material, creating beauty out of the physical evidence of social and economic trauma. In works of professional photojournalism published by major media outlets, high-profile gallery shows, and glossy museum catalogs as well as mass-market coffee-table books and a profusion of semi-professional and amateur blogs, Detroit’s collapsing buildings have been converted into a seemingly endless series of striking and often technically and formally sophisticated images of crumbling facades and silent interiors.393 The geographer Emma Slager has even described a form of participatory ruin porn that she calls “post-industrial ruins tourism,”

393 Photo essays documenting architectural decay in Detroit have appeared in Time, The New York Review of Books, and on Slate.com; popular ruin porn blogs include Abandoned America, Ruin Porn, and Architecture of Doom. 224

a “nascent but growing practice in which visitors to Detroit tour and photograph its abandoned or repurposed factories, theaters, churches, and other buildings.”394 Pictures and descriptions of ruined buildings have, of course, been produced in many cities, but the recent vogue for ruin porn has been largely focused on Detroit, and the two works of ruin porn photography that have been most extensively reviewed in the mainstream press are American photographer Andrew Moore’s

Detroit Disassembled and the French team of Yves Marchand and Remain Meffre’s The Ruins of

Detroit.395 Indeed, no American city in recent memory has provoked writers to take up the language of eschatology to quite the same degree as Detroit; as Ben Austen has noted, contemporary discussions of Detroit almost invariably draw on some version of the claim that the city has experienced “a ‘postapocalyptic’ collapse.”396 The Daily Mail, to take just one of many possible examples, has described Detroit as “more like a Hollywood film's futuristic vision of a postapocalyptic world, than a 21st century American city.”397

Detroit’s story is a familiar one of boom and bust in the American rust belt; like Butler’s fictional America, Detroit was brought to its knees not by a single catastrophic event but by a series of decentralized and ongoing processes, “decades of deindustrialization, housing discrimination, suburbanization, drug violence, municipal corruption and incompetence, highway construction, and other forms of [badly planned or deliberately exploitative] urban renewal.”398 This history is

394 Emily Slager, “Touring Detroit: Ruins, Representation, and Redevelopment” (MA Thesis. University of Oregon, 2013), 1.

395 Andrew Moore, Detroit Disassembled (Akron, Akron Art Museum, 2010); Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit (Goettingen, Steidl Verlag: May 31, 2010).

396 Ben Austen, “The Post-Post-Apocalyptic Detroit,” The New York Times July 11 2014

397 “Dying Detroit,” Daily Mail. 29 March 2011. 4 December 2015.

398 Patrick Leary, “Detroitism,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics January 15 2011 . For a more detailed discussion of Detroit’s recent 225

part and parcel of the broader twentieth-century American story of transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy.399 What makes Detroit unique is simply a matter of scale; once the fourth largest city in the nation, with a population of nearly two million, in 2013 Detroit became the largest municipality in America ever to declare bankruptcy, and recent census reports put the population at fewer than eight hundred thousand.400 Today Detroit is the poorest city per capita in the nation, and its unemployment rates stand at more than fifty percent. One consequence of the city’s rapid impoverishment and dramatic depopulation is that large portions of its building stock are now underutilized; estimates put the number of abandoned properties in the city in the tens of thousands.401 Once synonymous with industrial productivity and American wealth, Detroit today is a metonym for urban decay. Many areas of the city, such as the Hamtramck neighborhood where

Waud staged the flower house, have been almost entirely emptied of residents, and these crumbling expanses are fertile ground for ruin porn artists.

The contemporary enthusiasm for images of these decaying urban landscapes and structures echoes older forms of fascination with architectural ruins. The Romantics were famously enamored with the aesthetics of ruination, and Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is frequently

history, see Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2014) and Wallace Turbeville’s “The Detroit Bankruptcy” (Demos November 2013).

399 See the essays collected in Capitalism and the Information Age, eds. Robert McChesney, Ellen Wood, and John Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998) and The Information Society Reader, ed. Frank Webster (New York: Routledge, 2004). The concept of post-industrial society was first formulated in Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974).

400 U.S. Census Bureau. American Community Survey, United States, 2011.

401 Official numbers provided by city official in 2013 put the number of abandoned properties at 78,000 (“Financial and Operating Plan,” City of Detroit, Office of Emergency Manager Kevyn D. Orr, May 12 2013). The blog Motor City Mapping, “a comprehensive effort to digitize Detroit’s property information and create clear communication channels back and forth between the public, the government, and city service providers” using crowd-sourced information, records 48,290 properties as unoccupied and 11,824 as “possibly occupied” (Motor City Mapping, May 10 2015. ).

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mentioned in media discussions of ruin porn. But where Shelley’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone” are all that remain of an “antique land” described by a traveler, the abandoned factories and burned houses of Detroit were whole and inhabited within living memory.402 Contemporary ruin porn focuses on the destroyed landscape of a familiar world, rather than on the remnants of alien civilizations rendered exotic by a great remove in time and space. These descriptions and representations of ruins are being marketed primarily to people who are part of the same national, or at least cultural, context as the ruins themselves. In “Ozymandias” Shelley uses the destruction of the great king’s statue to illustrate the ephemerality of human creations and to provoke the idea of the impermanence of things more familiar to his readers.403 In contrast, contemporary ruin porn offers images of the accomplished destruction of a world already familiar to its audiences. It is thus best understood through analogy not to Romantic ruin art but to eschatological writing in the

Jewish and Christian tradition. When an angel announces that “Babylon the great is fallen” in the

Book of Revelation, the text is describing the destruction of a city and landscape known to its readers, and it uses that description to encourage believers to look past the immediate world and perceive the transhistorical patterns of a divine plan.404 Contemporary ruin porn does much the same thing, using representations of decrepit structures to interpret social traumas by incorporating them into a larger historical narrative.

402 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994. 194.)

403 This gesture is made more overtly in Horace Smith’s “Ozymandias,” in which the description of the ancient ruin leads the speaker to imagine the future of London: “We wonder,—and some Hunter may express / Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness / Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, / He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess / What powerful but unrecorded race / Once dwelt in that annihilated place.” Written in competition with Shelley and originally published, like the more famous sonnet, in The Examiner, Smith’s poem was collected as “On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below” in the collection Amarynthus (1821. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977).

404 Revelation 18:2.

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The question of whether the practice of ruin porn is a useful way of drawing attention to the plight of the residents of impoverished cities is a hotly contested one, however. Wes Alebrecht’s study of the way ruin photography was used to create support for urban renewal programs in

Detroit in the twentieth century suggests that ruin porn might be able to fulfill a similar purpose today.405 But most scholarly commentators are more critical, characterizing ruin porn as a fundamentally exploitative exercise that packages and sells human suffering to cultural elites while doing nothing to address the calamities it documents. Indeed, the term ruin pornography was coined as a pejorative attack on the practice. It is easy to see why residents of a city like Detroit are often troubled by artists’ and audiences’ enthusiasm for ruin porn; much of this work exudes a palpable pleasure in the evidence of the suffering. An essay by the British filmmaker Julien

Temple, director of the ruin porn film Requiem for Detroit?, provides a particularly vivid example.406 Temple’s description of driving into downtown Detroit from the airport reads very much like something that might appear in one of Butler’s novels, or in any work of contemporary dystopian or post-disaster fiction:

[I]t's hard to believe what we're seeing. The vast, rusting hulks of abandoned car plants . . . beached amid a shining sea of grass. The blackened corpses of hundreds of burned-out houses, pulled back to earth by the green tentacles of nature. Only the drunken rows of telegraph poles marching away across acres of wildflowers and prairie give any clue as to where teeming city streets might once have been. Approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers. In their shadows, the glazed eyes of the street zombies slide into view, stumbling in front of the car.407

The essay supplements its exoticized descriptions of urban collapse with a very straightforward

405 Wes Aelbrecht, “Decline and Renaissance: Photographing Detroit in the 1940s and 1980s,” Journal of Urban History 41.2 (Reinventing the American Postindustrial City, March 2015): 307–325.

406 Requiem for Detroit?, dir. Julien Temple (Films of Record Studios. 2010).

407 Julien Temple, “Detroit: The last days,” The Guardian March 10 2010 228

celebration of the freedom this collapse affords Temple, a privileged visitor from abroad who is not affected in any real way by the deteriorating conditions in which the “street zombies” are obliged to live: “[l]aw and order has completely broken down in the inner city, drugs and prostitution are rampant and unless you actually murder someone the police will leave you alone . . . This makes it great for filming.”408 A similarly ghoulish enthusiasm is suggested by the title of Marchand and Meffre’s first exhibition of their Detroit photographs in the Parisian Galerie

Kennory Kim in 2006, where the photographs appeared under the title “Les fabuleuses ruines de

Detroit.” Detroit has become a commodity in the art world precisely because of the misfortune of its citizens, its abjection seized upon by artists who convert it into their own cultural and financial capital; Noreen Malone has argued that “[p]ictures of ruins are now the city’s most eagerly received manufactured good.”409 Detroit native Jeffry Eugenides, meanwhile, has accused ruin porn artists of “the sin of aestheticizing Detroit’s demise.”410 Most scholarly examinations of ruin porn echo these warning that the claims to meaningful political impact made by the producers of ruin porn should be subjected to rigorous scrutiny.411

I would add to this critique that much of ruin porn is thoroughly apocalyptic, in that it attempts to make sense of destruction and traumatic change in the present by imagining a future entirely cut off from the past. Ruin porn responds to the perception of historical instability in the

408 Temple, no pagination.

409 Noreen Malone, “The Case Against Economic Disaster Porn,” The New Republic January 22 2011,

410 Jeffery Eugenides, “Against Ruin Porn,” Boat Magazine March 27 2014,

411 See also Dora Apel’s Beautiful, Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (Newark: Rutgers University Press, 2015), Andrew Gansky’s “‘Ruin Porn’ and the Ambivalence of Decline: Andrew Moore’s Photographs of Detroit” (Photography & Culture 7.2 (July 2014): 119-139) and Tim Strangleman’s “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation” (International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (Fall 2013): 23-37). 229

present—it consists of documents of change, images and descriptions of structures that are no longer what they once were. Often it responds to this instability by creating implicit narratives that treat dynamic or disruptive events in the present as evidence of a clearly defined historical break; ruined buildings become signs of the end of a world, rather than part of ongoing changes being experienced by living populations in the present. In Temple’s fantastic account of zombies and the

“green tentacles of nature,” Detroit becomes an alien planet, a strange new world cut off entirely from that inhabited by his readers and the audiences of his film.

One of the ways in which ruin porn creates apocalyptic narratives is by excluding human figures, thereby fostering a sense of timeless stasis, the idea that the urban scenes represented have

“returned to nature” or have in some other fashion been removed from the drama of human history.

Ruin porn tends to obscure the fact that Detroit is, for all its troubles, a living city inhabited by hundreds of thousands of human beings, all of whom are engaged in ongoing processes that involve the continued modification of the ruined structures; Owen Kirkpatrick has pointed to a

“tendency . . . to ‘crop-out’ the abandoned—but occupied—spaces of the city. By manufacturing an exaggerated sense of emptiness, the purveyors of ‘ruin porn’ elide the true (human) stakes of urban decline.”412 Such photos efface not only the inhabitants but the specific locality and history of the ruins being represented—they empty urban spaces of their historical and material particularity, fostering an apocalyptic sense of space as a flat universal. Patrick Leary argues that

“photos of uninhabited ruined spaces do little more than confirm what the most casual observer already knows about Detroit and cities like it . . . [but] present no way to understand our own relationship to the decline.”413 Sarah Arnold agrees, arguing that ruin porn produces “historical

412 Owen Kirkpatrick, “Urban Triage, City Systems, and the Remnants of Community: Some ‘Sticky’ Complications in the Greening of Detroit,” Journal of Urban History 41.2 (2015): 261-278 (274, note 5).

413 Leary, no pagination. 230

spectacle” but does “little to reveal anything about the circumstances that produced the represented historical moment.”414 Temple’s dismissal of Detroit residents as “zombies” is a particularly overt example of this displacement; rather than acknowledge the city’s inhabitants as human beings who have experienced Detroit’s past, are currently living in its present, and will eventually take on some role in its future, Temple treats them as the monstrous denizens as some imaginative other world. They are not actors who participate in the social changes taking place in the city, but evidence of a shift that has already happened. In the pop cultural imagination the zombie is often a figure without identity or agency; reducing the actions of Detroit residents to the twitching of nameless corpses, Temple’s essay obscures the complexity of the historical moment it purports to be documenting.

These kinds of images and descriptions evacuate Detroit of its history, its inhabitants, and ultimately of its identity as a specific location: “[t]he decontextualized aesthetics of ruin make

[these images into] pictures of nothing and no place in particular.”415 Although the aesthetic is very different, ruin porn uses its images of urban abjection in much the same fashion as the radiant city visionaries used their images of an idealized urban future, that is, in order to imagine a future in which the world is cut loose from its ties both to history and to spatial specificity. The visionaries of the radiant city described a technological utopia on the other side of the end of the present, while the documentarians of ruin porn see only a sterile pile of scraps and fragments, but the two discourses establish the same kind of narrative relationship between the past and future histories they engage with. In both discourses particularized spaces become interchangeable points in the flat volume of Cartesian nowhere space. The elision of humanity’s continued presence in and

414 Sarah Arnold, “Urban Decay Photography and Film: Fetishism and the Apocalyptic Imagination,” Journal of Urban History 41.2 (Reinventing the American Postindustrial City, March 2015): 326–339 (329).

415 Leary, no pagination. 231

influence upon Detroit is one of the framing devices through which ruin porn constructs apocalyptic narratives, erasing all signs that citizens of the old, supposedly lost world still exist and continue to act in the new world of the future. And as the critics cited above suggest, as long as ruin porn tells apocalyptic narratives about the end of the present it cannot be politically useful, as it closes off all possibility for active engagement in the production of alternative futures that would be meaningfully related to the lives of Detroit’s actual inhabitants.

14- Photographs from Andrew Moore's Detroit Disassembled.

One of Moore’s most striking photographs, for example, shows the inside of a room that was the office of Henry Ford in the 1920s and ‘30s. A citadel of modern industrial civilization, this

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office was a center of administrative control from which global forces of production and consumption were marshaled. Metonymically, it evokes an entire world-system. No sign of this world remains in Moore’s photograph; all markers of the office’s function have been removed, the wood paneling is marred by stains and cracks, and a brilliant carpet of moss has covered the floor.

The building remains, but it has been made into a cipher, wiped clean of function and meaning.

Stripped of all signs of its participation in that older world of American industrial might, the room is identifiable only from the caption. In reality, of course, what has followed upon the collapse of the Detroit automotive industry and the whole system of industrial society evoked by the name

Henry Ford is a new arrangement of the same material and social forces once orchestrated from this room; the workers, the capital, and the steel, oil, and other nonhuman materials entangled in the auto industry have not ceased to exist but have been redistributed in new arrangements of blue- collar American poverty, post-industrial and transnational economics, and a globalized factory system. But Moore’s photograph elides the complex narrative of historical transformations that link these two iterations of modern petro-capitalism into a single continuous history. What the picture offers instead is a simpler narrative about the end of the old world—the world of Henry

Ford is simply gone, replaced by moss and silence. Another photograph shows the remains of the

Detroit public school system’s Book Depository; the space is open to the elements, and a grove of young trees grows from a pile of rotting textbooks. Like the image of Ford’s office, this picture suggests a radical break in which the past is left behind; here the entire history of humanity, represented by the archive of writing itself, dissolves into undifferentiated earth. In another picture,

Moore shows a house swallowed whole by climbing vines. These photographs document the passing of an old world, and in none of them is there any suggestion that any elements of that world remain alive and active, contributing to the shape of the new world that is emerging. In place

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of historical narrative, Moore offers the fantasy of a post-historical return to nature.

Among the most frequently photographed of Detroit’s abandoned buildings is Michigan

Central Station, the city’s massive, early twentieth-century train terminal, unused since 1988.

Leary has called it “the Eiffel Tower of ruin photography.”416 In Marchand and Moore’s picture of the Station in The Ruins of Detroit, the crumbling façade of the building fills the frame of the picture completely; the image suggests that there is nothing outside of this expanse of broken glass and discolored concrete. Like the pictures of the radiant city and the Hotel Bonaventure discussed in Chapter 2, Marchand and Meffre present an architectural object as a world; in this case, the

15- Michigan Central Station, photograph from Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's The Ruins of Detroit.

416 Leary, no pagination. 234

terminal world of a particularly pessimistic apocalyptic vision of modern America. The picture flattens reality, reducing it to a single term and creating the universal homogeneity of the apocalyptic end. The picture overwhelms the viewer; it does not invite participation or active engagement with the history and possible futurity of the scene it documents, allowing only passive contemplation of what is presented as the singular and inevitable outcome of historical events.

Like Moore’s photographs of abandoned buildings overwhelmed by greenery, Marchand and

Meffre’s image of Michigan Central Station is an apocalyptic text that uses images of crumbling architecture in Detroit to tell a story about the end of a world. When these images are then endlessly reproduced in art shows, publications, and online, the repetition has the effect of reifying the structures’ decrepitude, presenting destruction not only as an already accomplished and immutable reality, but as something cut off from the dynamic changes of historical reality. It helps, in other words, to position the structures in the post-historical future of apocalyptic finality.

But although ruin porn is often socially exploitative and conceptually apocalyptic, the idea of treating the present as the ruin of the past can also serve as the basis for historically situated works of postapocalyptic art that encourage an active engagement in ongoing processes of change.

As Robin Bachin argues, “‘ruin porn’ can be exploitative and insensitive” but it is possible to

“document . . . the process of postindustrial decline and the urban ruins it has left in its wake” in a way that avoids exploitative or obfuscatory abstraction by “tak[ing] into account not only the physical toll of the deindustrialization process but also the human toll, and the devastating impact that the loss of manufacturing jobs and the politics and policies that enabled the decline have had.”417 Jonathon Mijs has likewise argued that the aestheticization of ruins can provide a

417 Robin Bachin, “City Stories: Place-Making Narratives in the Rise and Fall of Urban America,” Journal of Urban History 41.6 (November 2015): 1073-6 (1075).

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modicum of control over the processes of change by allowing residents to deploy the ruin of their own environment as spectacle.418 Dan Austin and Shaun Doerr’s Lost Detroit, for example, fills in the gaps of the historical narrative that Moore, Marchand, and Meffre obscure by publishing photos of ruined Detroit landmarks alongside historical essays documenting the history of those buildings, thus reattaching the ruinous present to a coherent historical narrative within which the present-day inhabitants of Detroit also have a place. Camilo Jose Vergara does something similar in The New

American Ghetto, repeatedly photographing the same scenes over a period of several years in order to show the process, and not simply the results, of deindustrialization. By using images of ruins to illustrate the fact that the present consists of an assemblage of unstable and plastic materials produced and shaped by events in the past and always on the verge of becoming something new in the future, works like Vergara’s and Austin and Doerr’s draw on the aesthetics of ruin porn in what I would argue is a postapocalyptic fashion.

Waud’s flower house project is an example of just such a strategically spectacular, historically illuminating, and socially productive postapocalyptic engagement with architectural ruins. The project interrogates and repurposes common ruin porn tropes, channeling contemporary art audiences’ enthusiasm for work that exploits the aesthetic potential of urban decay towards productive ends by investing it in an environmentally responsible community development effort.

Waud and her team invite audiences to look beyond the present moment in which an abandoned building is collapsing in an economically devastated city and towards possible futures, but they do so in a way that treats the city’s past and present as the ground from which any potential future will necessarily spring. Although the project does not tell an explicit story, it facilitates acts of historical narration in which the dynamism and instability of the present become the condition of

418 Jonathan Mijs, “Detroit’s Wealth of Ruins,” Contexts (Spring 2014). 62-9. 236

possibility for imagining Detroit’s future. It calls on urban dwellers to take responsibility for exercising a degree of control over the future of the city while simultaneously discouraging aspiration to the apocalyptic goal of total control. More than just a socially and environmentally conscious response to urban blight in Detroit, the flower house models a way of looking at the present as a temporally complex moment of historical transition.

Admittedly, some of the artist’s statements published on the flower house website do evoke apocalyptic ideas of the “blank slate.”419 In language reminiscent of the opportunist excitement of

Temple’s essay, one of the florists writes that “the idea of having a whole space to do whatever I pleased seemed like such a unique and exciting experience,” and another expresses excitement over being “given a blank ‘canvas’ in which i can let my wildest dreams come true.” But the artists’ statements also register an awareness of the historical specificity of the house, and express excitement about the opportunity to draw attention to that history. The same florist who was excited to have “a whole space to do whatever I pleased” goes on to say that “the idea of celebrating this home for what it used to be, as opposed to just tearing it down, seems like such an honorable transition. in detroit, we tend to get used to the blight and houses with decks and roofs caving in, and we tend to forget that these used to be the homes of families.” She suggests, in other words, that her understanding of the project is based at least in part on the perception that the house is not a blank slate upon which she can do whatever she pleases but a site with a past that she has an obligation to treat “honorably.” In the same vein, another florist says that she “love[s] walking up the stairs of an old building and seeing a worn dip in the treads where thousands of people have walked . . . when i wandered through the flower house, i imagined all the families that once called

419 “Flower House.” All of the quotes from florists involved in the flower house project quoted in the following section can be found on the “florists” page of the flower house website. Orthographic idiosyncrasies, including lack of capitalization, have been maintained from the original. 237

this house their home.” While the allusions to the house as an opportunity to exercise complete artistic freedom evoke apocalyptic fantasies of replacing the present with the new world of the future, most of the artists’ rhetoric positions the flower house installation as an engagement in the ongoing history of the house and the region rather than as an interruption, conclusion, or resolution of that history.

Like the paired photographs and essays of Austin and Doerr’s Lost Detroit, the flower house aestheticizes ruins in a way that is meant to draw attention to an ongoing historical narrative rather than to evoke terminality or post-historical stasis, making it clear that history continues to unfold in the ruins. The history the project evokes is an unspecific and purely affective one, a matter of recalling in general terms that the house was once inhabited and that it has ties to a broader network of social actors and historical events rather than the concrete references to specific historical realities provided by Austin and Doerr’s historical essays. Nonetheless, the project does seek to contextualize the ruined house socially and historically, rather than simply aesthetically frame or exploit the structure. The project acts as a catalyst that helps its audience establish affective and imaginative relationships to the history of the house and the city by drawing attention to material evidence of the house’s former occupancy. The heavily worn pieces of furniture, household items, and structural elements of the house that have been incorporated into the installations all invite consideration of an earlier moment when these spaces and objects had not yet been abandoned. No specific gestures towards the structure’s prior history are made—the names of former occupants are not announced, for example—but the project emphasizes the incongruity of the installations, the way in which the flowers have taken over spaces once used for something else. The opportunity to imaginatively reconstruct the house’s history that the project offers is not a completely open invitation, not a “blank slate” with which audiences can do as they

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will; the particularities of the house’s structure limit and direct the work of historical imagination that can take place within and around it, but they do so without constricting that imagination to a single determinate historical narrative. For example, one of the florists notes on the project’s website that the house “has a storefront of what i can imagine was owned by a hard working family. my great grandmother started her business much in the same way, turning the first level of her house into a grocery store and living on the second floor. i can imagine that many people entering flower house . . . will be able to relate to it in their own personal way and draw their own narrative.”

This artist can connect the building to her own family history, but the architectural specificity of the structure organizes that affective communion in definite ways. The project uses the ruined house as an invitation to imagine multiple potential narratives, but not all possible narratives.

The project complements and complicates its gestures towards the past by simultaneously drawing attention to action in the present. Covering domestic spaces in lush blooms of greenery and simulating the invasive eruption of flora through cracks in walls and floors, the flower house installations echo the familiar trope of nature’s return to abandoned once-human spaces so heavily relied on to apocalyptic effect in Moore’s Detroit photographs and elsewhere. In much the same way that Butler deliberately evokes apocalyptic narratives in her Parables in order to subvert or explode them, however, Waud and her team take up this imagery in order to interrogate and dismantle its apocalyptic implications. Photographs of the flower house are superficially very similar to Moore’s pictures of buildings overwhelmed by uncontrolled plant life in Detroit

Disassembled. But where Moore’s images suggest the abandonment of the structures they document, the flower house pictures announce the presence of human agents who are not present in the frame and draw attention to these agents’ active intervention in the scenes represented. They do so by foregrounding the paradox inherent in a meticulously arranged image of a ruined domestic

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16 – Heather Saunders, details of flower house installations.

space. The floral installations—a three-dimensional cyclone of leaves and branches, a shower curtain woven from strings of orange blossoms, a flower assembled out of the petals and leaves of different plants—are overtly, spectacularly artificial arrangements of exotically collaged floral elements that could never arise without the contributions of a human artist. In one bathroom, the floor has been scattered with flower tops trimmed from their stems, fragments of plants that are clearly not growing where they lie; other installations incorporate painted pictures of flowers or reference the highly stylized floral designs of the house’s wallpaper and faded linoleum, further highlighting the composed nature of the scenes. These installations are in one sense explicitly

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concerned with humanity’s absence, offering glimpses of human spaces from which humanity has been displaced. But at the same time they draw attention, through the very complexity and artificiality of their composition, to the human labor that was involved in their production. Where the images of greenery overwhelming abandoned buildings in Detroit Disassembled invite viewers to contemplate a scene of destruction removed from the living present in which humanity exists and acts, the flower house installations continually draw attention to the fact that the house is still caught up in a living relationship with human beings and human society, even if it is no longer being used as the domestic residence it was designed to be. This effect is heightened by the fact that many of the pictures and films published on the flower house website document the making of the installations and not just the final product. Even the still-life pictures of the installations, however, have a sense of historical dynamism that the static compositions of Detroit Disassembled and The Ruins of Detroit deliberately suppress. In a subtle but marked postapocalyptic move, the flower house both foregrounds and undercuts human aspirations to historical agency; we cannot help but shape the spaces we inhabit and encounter, the project suggests, even as it draws attention to the material evidence of our inability to fully control those spaces.

The project thus takes on a third, futurist dimension in addition to its gestures towards the past and its emphasis on action in the present. The installations invite speculation about the future of the spaces in which they have been staged by emphasizing their own historical instability, the fact that their intricately composed arrangements represent a fleeting system of order that has emerged temporarily from the chaotic flux of history. The floral structures and patterns have been established through human labor but are destined to be radically changed by forces outside of human control, and the deliberately staged decay of the floral materials used in the installations invites consideration of the spectacular decay of the built structure as well. The project thus

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encourages audiences to think about urban change by way of metaphors of organic decomposition and the fertility and potential for new growth that such decomposition implies, rather than through the renovatory logics of apocalyptic narrative. Gesturing back towards the domestic space that existed before the installations, emphasizing the labor involved in producing them in the present, and inviting a speculative turn into the indeterminate future that will exist after they have disappeared, the flower house deepens rather than simplifies the temporal complexity of the present, helping its audiences situate themselves historically without offering an apocalyptic escape hatch into post-historical resolution.

17- Heather Saunders, photographs showing the deterioration of the floral elements in a flower house installation.

Like Butler’s Earthseed, Waud’s project is an imperfect and limited response to the challenge of finding ways to meaningfully narrate human life in a world defined by ongoing and uncontrollable change. It helps audiences in the present to see themselves as meaningfully situated with respect to the past and present in a way that draws attention to the specificity and trajectory of a fully historical space. The project is thus suggestive of ways of living in the complex world of historical contingency and non-holistic ecological interconnectivity that are not predicated upon

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the desire to escape from or simplify that world. The project draws on the same aesthetics of ruination that drive sales of apocalyptic ruin porn books like Detroit Disassembled and The Ruins of Detroit, but it mobilizes that desire towards the production of possible futures. Rather than simply converting present decrepitude into aestheticized beauty and evacuating historical specificity, the flower house uses the idea of a present that is the ruin of the past to create a narrative of adaptive transition that provides audiences with an opportunity to enter into and become part of an ongoing, living history. This history extends back in time through imaginative recuperation of the home’s former status and possible occupants, and forward through the invitation to think of the building as ephemeral and to imagine its components occupying new roles and serving new functions after the installation and deconstruction phases of the project have been completed. The flower house thus draws attention to the present as a pivot between Detroit’s past and the city’s various potential futures. Bringing together cultural fascination with art that depicts architectural decay and the environmentally sensitive practices of architectural deconstruction and urban farming, the project accepts pervasive instability both as the spur of necessity that drives the development of new technical solutions to practical problems and as the guarantee that opportunities for positive, ameliorative change and growth are always available.

The adherents of Butler’s Earthseed and the artists involved in the flower house seek ways of engaging with the built and natural environments they encounter in the present that will allow them to invest in potential futures without losing sight of the past. In the process, these ambiguous, open-ended narrative engagements with ruinous landscapes foreground the complex networks of ecological connection with nonhuman beings that define human existence in the present and that must be negotiated in the production of the human future. They offer compelling examples of what it might look like to live responsibly in a world that is at once beyond human control and

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frighteningly susceptible to humanity’s influence. In their fertile ruins, always in the process of becoming something new and at the same time evocative of all that they once were, the Parables and the flower house offer glimpses into the fully historical and ecological city of the future.

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Coda

The Tree of Heaven: A Postapocalyptic Parable

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable … His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard —T.S. Eliot

In Julien Temple’s ruin porn essay on Detroit, quoted in the previous chapter, images of trees growing in “human” spaces appear as the final nail in the coffin of the collapsing urban center: “approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers.”420 If even the great steel and concrete monuments of modern architecture have been compromised by uncontrolled floral growth, Temple’s essay suggests, then the situation in Detroit must be dire indeed. Other writers have also relied on such trees to act as a kind of arboreal canary in the coal mine of urban collapse. Igno Vetter, a Swedish art historian who has studied Detroit as a case-study in post-industrial urban collapse, says that when he visited Detroit the trees growing in the yards or through the porches of abandoned houses

“helped me to understand what I saw . . . [the trees are] a significant sign of abandonment, and from their height, you could guess about the time these places were left abandoned.”421 Rebecca

Solnit makes a similar move while discussing the depopulation of Detroit in Harper’s Magazine,

420 Temple, no pagination.

421 Quoted in “Ghetto Palm,” Detroit Metro Times. December 10 2003. 245

observing that “[d]owntown still looks like a downtown, and all of those high-rise buildings still make an impressive skyline, but when you look closely at some of them, you can see trees growing out of the ledges and crevices.”422 Detroit looks like a city, but the trees are proof that it no longer really is, evidence of the apocalypse that has erased it: “[t]his continent,” Solnitt writes, “has not seen a transformation like Detroit's since the last days of the Maya.”423

Solnit identifies the trees growing from Detroit’s skyline as Ailanthus altissima, “an invasive species from China known variously as the ghetto palm and the tree of heaven.”424

A.ailanthus was imported to Europe and the United States as an ornamental plant in the eighteenth century. Behula Shah links its early popularity in the West to the growth of major urban centers, observing that because of “its resistance to insect devastation . . . Ailanthus was well suited to meeting the growing demand for landscape trees that accompanied the unprecedented economic and social transformations” resulting from massive urbanization in the nineteenth century.425 The tree of heaven was suited to urban planting in the West because it was resistant to the insect infestations that plagued native European trees when transplanted into densely built-up urban settings; it acted, in other words, as a tool for the solidification of human control over the urban environment, a way of keeping a nonhuman force—the insects—from influencing the makeup of the streetscape. Enthusiasm for the tree waned, however, partly as a result of the foul odor produced by its flowers and partly as a result of the very hardiness and adaptability originally celebrated by urban landscapists, which made it difficult to keep the tree confined to planned

422 Solnitt, 66.

423 Ibid.

424 Ibid.

425 Behula Shah, “The Checkered Career of Ailanthus altissima,” Arnoldia 57.3 (Summer 1997): 21–27 (22-3). 246

planting areas and nearly impossible to eliminate once it had begun to spread.426 The tree of heaven is a tenacious and highly adaptable plant, able to grow in nutrient-poor soils, to secrete poisons that discourage competition from other plants, and to reproduce by “suckering,” growing cloned copies of itself from buds in its roots.427 This last trick makes the tree extremely difficult to kill— its stumps have a habit of coming back to life.

This same talent for survival, read in a different way, also enabled the tree of heaven to take root in the canon of American literature, as the central metaphor for the tenacity of Irish immigrants pursuing the American dream in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). The novel opens with a description of a.ailanthus:

It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.428

Like Temple and Solnit, Smith reads the tree of heaven as a marker of urban change: “[y]ou took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first.

Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in.”429 Smith uses the tree of heaven to represent a contested and difficult but ultimately beneficial transformation of the demographics of American society

426 Shah also links the change in opinions about the tree to growing anti-Chinese sentiment in America in the years following the Opium Wars and the opening of the city of Canton to foreign visitors (24).

427 Hao Zheng, et. al, “Ailanthus altissima,” in Invasive Plants of Asian Origin Established in the United States and Their Natural Enemies, Volume 1 (Washington D.C.: USDA Forest Service, 2004), 10-13; Janet Fryer, “Ailanthus altissima,” USDA Forest Service Fire Effects Information System, 2010

428 Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943. New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 4.

429 Ibid, 5. 247

rather than the catastrophic social and civilizational collapse that it represents for Temple and

Solnit, but her novel is like the Detroit essays in the sense that these texts work to domesticate the unruly tree by turning it into a mute witness to and record of an entirely human history.

Smith is impressed by the tree’s ability to withstand human aggression, its tenacious insistence on growing in the tenement courtyard despite the best efforts of the maintenance men who cut it down and set fire to its stump, but in her novel the existence of a.ailanthus is entirely dependent upon the patterns of human history and society: the tree “grew lushly” but it did so

“only in the tenement districts.”430 Although it acts as an omen of impending change in the social zoning practices through which Brooklyn’s human population is organized, the tree itself is subject to these same regulations, growing only in the narrowly defined spaces assigned to it. The appearance of the tree announces the destabilization of the social fabric of Brooklyn, but the tree is not the agent of social transformation; it merely registers the human actions that turn nice neighborhoods into tenement districts. The Detroit essays subsume the nonhuman into humanity in a similar fashion. The decay of the city that the tree represents here is a consequence of human inactivity, not of nonhuman action; the height of the tree is to be read only in terms of humanity’s failure to cut it down. A.ailanthus displaces humanity physically, just as in Smith’s novel it resists humanity physically, but it does so within a narrative framework in which only the human subject is capable of meaningful action. Smith and the Detroit writers treat the tree of heaven as a point of contact with flat, passive nonhumanity; they see it as scenery on the stage of history, part of the dumb material envelope of material reality that is shaped by human actions and the absence of those actions but which does not participate in the history that is inscribed into its substance.

Smith’s use of the tree of heaven as a metaphor for the prospects of immigrants evokes the

430 Ibid, 4. 248

Biblical parable of the sower, from which Octavia Butler takes the title of her first Parable novel.

This story appears in all of the Synoptic Gospels, but the version in Luke is the most concise:

A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold.431

Smith’s defiant assertion that the tree of heaven will struggle to reach the sky no matter where its seed falls suggests a reading of the parable in terms of dichotomized potential futures. Insisting on the fertility and tenacity of the seed, she places the tree of heaven at the center of an imaginative engagement with a future defined in terms of clearly distinguishable outcomes that can be known and differentiated from one another in advance: either the seed grows or it does not. Temple and

Solnit incorporate the tree of heaven into an equally stark speculative narrative, the only difference being that they cast it in the role of the weeds that choke the seed and the holy Word it represents.

In both cases, the tree is used to resolve the question about the future raised in the Biblical parable.

In the idealized accounts of holistic ecological futures put forth in the work of Gernsback,

Le Corbusier, and Paolo Soleri, these are the only two roles the tree of heaven could possibly play.

The apocalyptic narrative of teleological progression towards a final moment of unification can accommodate the weed that grows chaotically and disruptively and must be eliminated to make way for the harmonious integration of the future, and it can accommodate the vehicle of the holy

Word of human history, the tree of life that grows in the midst of the street and offers its fruit for the healing of the nations. But it must place the tree of heaven into one or the other of these roles, and with it every other element of reality. The idea of a holistic ecological union in the future leaves no other option; everything that exists must either participate in that union or be rejected as

431 Luke 8:5-9. 249

an unnatural and improper obstacle to unity’s emergence. To imagine the apocalyptic future and narrate the end of the world is necessarily to resolve the ambiguity of the parable of the sower into a definite knowledge of what the future will hold.

In Butler’s Parables the Biblical story becomes something very different, a reminder of the indeterminacy of the future that emphasizes the impossibility of knowing in advance the outcome of any event. Rather than describing a range of possible futures or insisting on one in particular, Butler’s narrative remains within the state of uncertainty that the parable opens up; the verses from the Gospel of Luke that appear on the final page of the first Parable undercut the apparently happy ending by drawing attention to the fact that Butler has not answered the question of what kind of ground the Earthseed community has been sown in. Gibson’s Sprawl novels, which close with the announcement of an impending moment of contact with the nonhuman other, strive to create and maintain a similar ambiguity. Waud’s flower house also gestures towards a similar indeterminacy, at once evoking and deflating the tree of heaven’s tenacious fertility by using human artifice to conjure forth the illusion of floral bounty from an environment of pervasive urban decay and then allowing that bounty to die, opening the way for new plantings and new possibilities in the future. Rather than answering the question of whether a given environment is fertile or infertile or whether a given seed will wither or bear “fruit an hundredfold,” these texts deepen the question, asking how the environment will interact with and shape whatever grows in it and how that growth will in turn shape its environment in the mutually influential act of exchange.

A.ailanthus was brought to the West through the exercise of colonial power as part of an attempt by certain modern European humans to exert apocalyptic authority over a passive world by forcing it into the new arrangements dictated by their own narrative of the ideal future. But the

250

tree of heaven did not accept the colonial world-shapers’ decree that it serve as an ornamental shrub, and it took up residence in the metropolitan centers on its own terms. Is it possible to understand the unwelcome and uncontrollable spread of this invasive species not as a failure of human action but as an act of reverse colonization, the independent action of a nonhuman being?

The postapocalyptic narratives examined in this dissertation suggest that we can and should. In their accounts of dynamic future cities, Gibson, Butler, and Waud expose the ambiguous ways in which the future is at once a departure from and an extension of the past and show that the agency responsible for effecting the complex and non-linear process of the future’s emergence from the past are distributed across a range of human and nonhuman actors. From such a standpoint, the tree of heaven can be seen as a co-participant rather than a prop, tangible evidence that humanity and the fruits of human labor coexist and interact with active nonhuman forces. The tree has refused to be a passive element of the flat landscape of the apocalyptic world; it has been and continues to be a mute but active partner working alongside and often at odds with humanity in the construction of spaces and histories such as those of contemporary Detroit.

This account of the tree of heaven risks courting charges of an anthropomorphic projection of human characteristics onto the tree that is effectively an erasure of its particularity. But, as

Bennett has argued, “[m]aybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing . .

. because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism.”432 It is not an erasure of nonhuman particularity to acknowledge that humanity has no unique claim to historical agency. A certain willingness to anthropomorphize is a necessary precondition to understanding human beings as participants in a world of interconnected difference; Morton argues that the rigorous policing of anthropomorphic language is “one of the greatest obstacles to the ecological thought” because it

432 Bennett, 120. 251

reinforces the idea “that the ‘human’ occupies a privileged nonplace, simultaneously within and outside” the interconnected systems of ecological reality.433 To acknowledge the tree of heaven as something that is not us but that affects us as we affect it, as a nonhuman being that is intimately connected to humanity but that refuses to be subsumed into or become a passive extension of the human subject, is to begin to acknowledge the complexity of humanity’s own ecological situation.

The point is not that humanity must learn to respect nonhuman beings in the sense of letting them be, or that being ecologically conscious means not involving ourselves in the affairs of trees and animals and other nonhuman things. This would simply be another version of the holistic fantasy of apocalypse, a way of proposing humanity and the tree of heaven both have their proper place in some larger design, and that by putting everything into its proper place the processes of historical conflict and transformation could be brought to a happy close. There is no ideal or proper relationship between human beings and a.ailanthus, or between any two actants defined by their participation in an ecological system. There is only the ever-changing interaction of those elements and the need to adapt one’s ways of being and acting to meet evolving challenges. To tell stories that acknowledge the agency of nonhuman beings is not a solution to the reality of anthropogenic ecological disruption—accepting that nonhuman beings and forces are active participants in the history of the city rather than the passive material out of which human beings build cities will not solve the problems of climate change, pollution, resource depletion, and habitat destruction. But by encouraging an open-ended postapocalyptic view of history and a relationally networked understanding of ecological interconnection in which final solutions, transcendent wholes, and ideal arrangements of any sort are suspect, such narratives can help to foster the kinds of thinking that will allow us to better understand those problems.

433 Morton, The Ecological Thought, 75-6. 252

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