The Anti-Extinction Engine: Actuaries of the apocalypse

146 n good morning revolution—a volume of Langston Hughes’s contributions to revolutionary magazines— there is a small poem, “Johannesburg Mines,” about a big question: In the Johannesburg mines There are 240,000 natives working. What kind of poem Would you make out of that? 240,000 natives working In the Johannesburg mines. essay The Anti-­ Extinction Engine Actuaries of the apocalypse Anne Boyer I The Anti-­ Extinction Engine | 147 The poem isn’t only a question for poets, though it is also that. It’s one-­ third a question for poets, two-­ thirds the truth for everyone, and also, because one-­ third of the poem operates doubly, in that the question in the middle is also a kind of answer, one-­ third an answer for poets and anyone else who wonders what poems can do. The poem does not sentimentalize the suffering of the colonized workers in the name of politics and likewise does not aestheticize this suffering in the name of art. It also resolutely does not forget these workers or allow them to be forgotten, nor does it forget to mark its own place in the history of the class struggle. It retains the compelling anti-­ style of the Communist magazines in the United States, a mode which opened itself up so generously to readers that it offered little protection for its writers (including Hughes) as they met with devastating government repression in the years to come. The poem does all of this and yet also retains an intrinsic formal genius—in short, it is loyal to poetry, in that it offers a world, and loyal to the collective material struggle for a better world, in that it has a fundamental relationship to history. This poem is generous to the future, too, because of the portability of its form, by which I mean it is a form that can now travel from person to person and era to era, allowing for new poems to be made. As cunning as the inventor of the first sonnet, Hughes has in this poem given the world an enduring form, one with which each of us can write our own version of the poem, substituting for the first and third couplet other brutal facts of the world. Through its portability, the poem both continues as a literary form and expands as a social form, locating and re-­ locating itself in the revolutionary struggle as it moves with the changing shapes of history. The volta of the poem, and any of the poems that follow after it, remains intact in the poem’s possible rewritings: What kind of poem / would you make out of that? The poem turns on these lines and becomes its largest version, and as it does, it reflects the facts back as a mirror to themselves, forced into a devastating encounter. The contradiction of a world that holds both poetry and exploited labor is exposed. The poem’s question is the poem’s own answer, which 148 | Anne Boyer is that things must not continue like this, and yet they do. Global capitalism, which produces miserable fact after miserable fact, will meet Hughes’s poem in this and its other variations for as long as its miserable arrangement of the world exists, and this poem, in Hughes’s version and all that follow, will always intercede with its unrelenting, proliferative answer. i know someone whose job was to write code for a program that predicts population decline and extinction of various species under various sets of climate possibilities. For forty hours a week, every week, he attempted to model these future systems of death, to automate anxious imagination about the worst that could happen, and in what proportions and to whom or what. I called him an actuary of the apocalypse. His job was an attempt to teach machines a relationship to the future, to create for them the sinews and binary trees of extinction—if this bad thing, then that one, or not that—so that the machines could imagine a world more terrible, more full of sorrow and loss than this one. Even though imagining the worst was once a profoundly human activity, it is...