Six Concepts for the End of the World by Steven Beard, and: Being Material ed. by Marie-Pier Boucher etal. (review)

You sit there wondering if there are books that will help, directly or indirectly, to address imminent doom, or thoughts of such, from COVID-19. Tomes on art and post-humanism? No, not in the real world. Camus’s The Plague? Oh c’mon. More people have bought and not finished that even than A Brief History of Time. A Bluffer’s Guide to Epidemiology? Apparently not yet completed, foreword by guess who? Then two come along together: Being Material and Six Concepts for the End of the World—the former with, of course, its implied Derridean opposite of being immaterial, and much about bio, invisibility and even someone in a mask; the latter with one of its six fictional scenarios dealing with an “unprecedented” (© all newspapers) pandemic and another dealing with the birth of an antichrist (perhaps less outlandish these days).

The packages were taken from the never really well-seeming postman with a surgically gloved hand, sprayed with a commonly available fish pond disinfectant having genuine anticoronavirus properties, left for three days anyway and then unwrapped with more gloves on—the irony of catching the virus from such a book would be too much to bear. Your reviewer both wants, and does not want, to die laughing.

Six Concepts is a nonfiction book with fictional aspects (very zeitgeist-y at the moment) and/or an experimental novel with real bits. Whatever else, it is very timely. But this is no academic exercise in futurology, though it treats of such. Two filmmakers want funding for an end-of-the-world movie and get together with some drone scientists who need apocalyptic data to flesh out their models. What could possibly go wrong . . . six times? The exoskeleton supporting the central conceit is perhaps a bit loose, but we live in enforcedly playful times. The filmmakers and the scientists have two kinds of interaction: They are filmed by one man, while the other takes notes that will be developed into scenarios for the scientists whilst also serving as the basis for the film script. Scientists and these kind-of artists need each other.

The themes for the meetings, and the sections of the book, each starting with “Field Notes on a Residency,” are technology, sociology, geography, psychology, theology and narratology. They themselves are divided into subsections such as “Transcript of the Keynote Speech from a UFO Abduction Conference,” “Lost in Algospace” or “Voiceover Script from an Occult Artfilm.” It is by no means clear where fact and fiction intertwine, smear themselves over each other, stop and start. This reviewer found it most comfortable to read it whilst floating above such fuzzy boundaries, a not-unfamiliar feel under lockdown anyway, with bleach one day, demonstrators screaming abuse at nurses the next. Matthew 23:27 in the English Standard Version of the Bible: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” The beautiful and the bones, them dry bones, are the current poles of much creative lockdown activity.

The whole is also informed by the ideas and beliefs of Paul Virilio, the French philosopher and theoretician of culture, who helpfully pointed out that there couldn’t be a plane crash before the plane was invented. He was a military and technological determinist who aided the French military in the Gulf War, though of course to be a war theorist is not to celebrate conflict. Perhaps it is just as well that, according to philosopher and Pataphycisist Jean Baudrillard, that war did not take place. Those seeking more positive views of Virilio can find plenty online, as well as somewhat hilarious criticism, for...