From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

4. Between Trauma and Tragedy: From The Matrix to V for Vendetta

Because fear and conspiracy play no part in your daily relations with each other, you imagine that the same thing is true of your allies . . . and when you give way to your own feelings of compassion you are being guilty of a kind of weakness which is dangerous to you and which will not make them love you any more. What you do not realize is that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you. —THUCYDIDES, SPEECH OF CLEON TO THE ASSEMBLY OF ATHENS According to an incisive formation of Slavoj Žižek, it is easier at the present historical moment to imagine the destruction of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Certainly images of apocalyptic destruction abound in contemporary culture, as the increasing interconnectedness of the globe engenders new forms of vulnerability just as it fosters new types of affiliation. In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, a rigorously rational scientist unleashes a plague that wipes out almost all of humanity in order to populate the world with a new, more peaceful humanoid species. The sexual utopia of Michel Houellebecq’s Platform, in which the poor are to be raised out of their difficulties through sex tourism by the rich, is thwarted by a deadly bombing carried out by Islamic extremists. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road focuses on the journey of a father and son through a devastated and diseased landscape in which they are forced to evade those surviving humans who have turned into marauding cannibals. In the far less explicit and accordingly more evocative postapocalyptic tale 123 4 BETWEEN TRAUMA AND TRAGEDY From The Matrix to V for Vendetta The Time of the Wolf, directed by Michael Haneke, an upper-middle-class family is likewise thrown into a harsh world of ubiquitous death, scarcity, and danger by an unnamed universal calamity. The best-selling Left Behind series of end-times novels portrays the events of the book of Revelation playing out in the contemporary world, complete with the establishment of the divine kingdom under the rule of the returned Jesus Christ. Then, there is the so-called eco-apocalypticism of Alan Weisman’s The World without Us and the History Channel documentary Life after People, which imagines the decay and disintegration of buildings and other artifacts of civilization if all human life were suddenly to disappear. Such works take their place alongside myriad manga and anime set in postapocalyptic worlds, as well as the high-tech rendering of catastrophe in any number of Hollywood blockbusters. The never-ending fascination with the disintegration of human society appears nevertheless entwined with an inability to imagine change on the more modest scale of history. What is it that gives the present set of arrangements governing the industrialized world, which brings together an economic system organized around the expectation of perpetual expansion with a form of government based on the principle of equality, such uncanny resiliency and unshakable permanence , so as to render its passing and demise more unthinkable than some universal conflagration that swallows up the entirety of civilization itself? Why has the very idea that the existing sociopolitical order might be transient become inconceivable? This erosion of the historical imagination—the deterioration of the capacity to imagine alternatives to present-day political and economic arrangements—is typically attributed to what Žižek calls the “all-pervasive renaturalization” of social life, propagated by the widespread acceptance of “the liberal democratic capitalist social order” as “somehow the finally found ‘natural’ social regime.”1 The conventional wisdom regarding twentieth century totalitarianism of course asserts that capitalist liberal democracy constitutes the best possible political and economic order, the one that is most harmonized with the inherent restlessness of human ambition and appetite. Communism, it is often repeated, met with an inglorious demise because it restricted individual desire and initiative, underestimating egregiously the strength of the possessive yearnings felt even by the new 124 BETWEEN TRAUMA AND TRAGEDY socialist man for consumer goods and material abundance. Capitalism, on the other hand, flourishes precisely not only because it accepts such selfish passions as greed and the will-to-power as ineradicable facts of human life but also because it enlists them in the creation of a dynamic economy that succeeds far more than communism ever could in satisfying the needs and desires of an...