Ludwig on Horn, 'The Future As Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age'

H-Environment Ludwig on Horn, 'The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age'

Review published on Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Eva Horn. The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age. Translated by Valentine Pakis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 296 pp. $105.00 (cloth),ISBN

978-0-231-18862-3; $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-18863-0.

Reviewed by Jason Ludwig (Cornell University) Published on H-Environment (October, 2020) Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54978

Eva Horn’s new book is an insightful meditation on fiction and futurity. Horn analyzes a range of fictional disaster scenarios from works of art, literature, and the sciences to examine how the anticipation of catastrophe has come to shape modernity’s orientation toward the future. Through insightful analyses of diverse texts, the book traces the emergence of a modern catastrophic imaginary in nineteenth-century Romanticism and tracks its transformation into present-day collective anxiety about the consequences of atomic weapons, nuclear accidents, and anthropogenic climate change. The book’s major strength lies in the diversity of texts analyzed, which underscores the pervasiveness of the catastrophic imagination that Horn seeks to uncover. At the heart of this analysis is her concern with the kinds of fiction that underpin the prediction of future catastrophes. As she writes, “all knowledge of the future contains a degree of non-knowledge,” to the extent that all predictions of catastrophe place fictitious narrative structures upon phenomena that cannot yet possibly be known in their totality (p. 15).

Horn argues that the modern catastrophic imaginary first emerged in the apocalyptic works of writers and artists associated with Romanticism. The Romantics dismissed the eschatological model of history prevalent in Christian thought, which depicted the apocalypse as the ultimate triumph of divine justice over evil. Instead, they imagined catastrophes that would reveal the inherent fragility and meaninglessness of contemporary social and political institutions, implicit critiques of Enlightenment notions of infinite human progress. Horn produces a novel reading of Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816), arguing that its depiction of humanity in the throes of famine and violence draws on Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population(1798) as well the poet’s own observation of the volcanic winter that struck Europe in 1815 due to the eruption of Mount Tambora. The protagonists of the apocalyptic works of Byron and other Romantics were the “Last Men,” the final survivors of numerous imagined catastrophes whose perspectives their authors adopted to reflect on the mechanisms that would bring about an end to human history. Horn shows how Cold War films like Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Fail-Safe (1964) revived the “Last Men” trope to shed light on the self-destructive nature of the nuclear arms race.

One of Horn’s major arguments is that present anxieties concerning climate change can be distinguished from the catastrophic scenarios imagined during the Romantic era and the Cold War by

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Ludwig on Horn, 'The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age'. H-Environment. 10-21-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/19397/reviews/6617087/ludwig-horn-future-catastrophe-imagining-disaster-modern-age Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Environment their “eventlessness.” This, she argues, is a result of the complex modes of knowledge-making that shape contemporary understanding of anthropogenic climate change, a topic she delves into in chapter 2. Unlike Cold War think-tanks that sought to predict the damages incurred by specific acts, such as the detonation of a nuclear bomb, knowledge-making about climate change applies computational models toward comprehending the drawn-out processes marking human disruption of planetary ecological processes—a catastrophe without event. This eventlessness, Horn argues, has challenged researchers, artists, and science communicators to develop images and narratives that can convey the ubiquity of disaster brought about by climate change. She analyzes a diverse set of works that do exactly this, from the apocalyptic fiction of Cormac McCarthy and J. G. Ballard to Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), all of which present climate as the “medium that contains and preserves humanity,” the disruption of which threatens the basis of all existence (p. 88).

Chapter 3 turns to an examination of how catastrophic imaginaries shape regimes of survival. Horn analyzes imagined disaster scenarios that probe the steps necessary to ensuring the preservation of human species. She argues that such imagined disasters index a biopolitics of catastrophe in which the survival of life itself is purchased only through death, and she insightfully contrasts two modes in which this ideology has appeared. She locates the first in “war of the worlds” narratives inspired by the Great-Power conflicts of the twentieth century, in which the survival of a community is assured only through the death of an enemy Other. The second biopolitical imaginary emerged amid neo- Malthusian debates in the postwar period over unchecked population growth and resource scarcity, and is characterized by a “Lifeboat Earth” ethics in which group survival hinges on deliberations over who within the group must live and who must die. Following Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitics, she argues that such narratives open up a “‘zone of undecidability’ between the realm of the law and the realm of mere physical necessity” (p. 115). She finds the consequences of such arbitrary choices over who lives and dies best comprehended in the postapocalyptic melancholy of fictional works like Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957), in which the resultant perishing of communal connections and norms renders the very prospect of survival meaningless.

Horn moves on in chapter 4 to analyze technical safety regimes, arguing that efforts to control the potential catastrophes latent to complex technological systems constitute a ubiquitous fear of technological disaster, the “white noise of modernity” (p. 173). This is the most ambitious and challenging chapter of the book as Horn ties together such thematically and temporally disparate works as the German philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s ideas on the “malice of objects,” Charles Perrow’s seminal analyses of high-risk technologies, and theFinal Destination film series (2000-11). While she does not always make the connections between these works fully apparent, Horn’s broader point in this chapter is an important one: that imagined accidents in literature and film evince a modern desire for latent catastrophes to manifest themselves so that they might be made available to human understanding and control.

The final chapter draws together many of the threads of the previous ones to argue that knowledge of catastrophic futures can only exist in the form of disaster scenarios, speculative models, postapocalyptic texts, and other kinds of fiction “that look back on the future as something in the past” (p. 174). Horn proceeds to catalog films and literary works in which imaginations of a catastrophic future animate efforts to prevent it and argues that no text better captures this aspect of modernity’s fearful relation to the future as Franz Kafka’s short story “The Burrow” (1931), whose narrator relentlessly probes the vulnerability of his home and fruitlessly attempts to secure it. She

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Ludwig on Horn, 'The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age'. H-Environment. 10-21-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/19397/reviews/6617087/ludwig-horn-future-catastrophe-imagining-disaster-modern-age Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Environment brilliantly examines the story as a parable of the impossibility of achieving perfect security—no matter how much the narrator shores up the defenses of his home, an interminable array of threats reveal themselves. This analysis of what Horn describes as the “paradoxes of prediction” perhaps sits uncomfortably with her conclusion, which makes the case that disaster fictions like “The Burrow” can serve as tools for spurring action aimed at preventing the worst consequences of looming environmental catastrophe. As she herself asks, however, how might we integrate these fictional catastrophes into our own imagining of the future “without succumbing to the epistemic, political, and ethical pitfalls of alarmism or remaining stuck in comfortable interpassivity” (p. 236)?

Regardless of one’s answer, Horn’s book is a valuable contribution to environmental studies insofar as it urges one to consider such questions. The Future as Catastrophe is theoretically rich and its arguments are bolstered by the sheer breadth of texts with which it engages. Skillfully combining methods from intellectual history, literary criticism, and the environmental humanities, Horn’s breathless analysis of a diverse corpus of texts constitutes the book’s main strengths, but this may also make it too challenging of a read for undergraduate or introductory courses. The best audience for this stimulating book would be those already well versed in the ever-expanding literatures on risk and disaster.

Citation: Jason Ludwig. Review of Horn, Eva, The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020.URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54978

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.