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via Possum Ego by Dale on 3/11/09
I found this entry on Collapsitarianism via John Robb's always-insightful blog. Kevin Kelly writes:
The idea of progress has been slowly dying. I think progress lost its allure at the ignition of the first atom bomb at the end of WWII. It has been losing luster since. Even more recently the future has become boring and unfashionable. No one wants to live in the future. The jet packs don't work, and the Daily Me is full of spam. No finds the Future attractive any longer.
The only thing left to believe in is collapse. That's not boring! The end of civilization would be terribly exciting, and unlike any future we could imagine, probably more likely. Dystopias are a favorite science fiction destination now.
We all are collapsitarians these days.
Zizek (somewhere in his expanding vastnesses) says something similar, noting how thirty years ago there would be passionate discussions on the Left about the future, but now, he asks, where have those conversations gone? No one offers thrilling visions of a future.
It is exciting to think about collapse—and the freedom—and hardship this would bring. I think there are very real climate and resource indicators to suggest that some kind of collapse is certainly possible, but the psychology of collapse, and the desire for it, compel me to think about my own attention to the gloom-n-doom fringes of contemporary culture. It's been a long time since I read Freud, but does anyone still talk about the death drive? Collapse, biologically, belongs to everyone's individual future. Perhaps the fantasy of the collapse of civilization provides a way to sooth the ego's horror of death. If I go, it all goes!
But Collapse is also itself a vision of restoration. If systems, and not only bodies, fail, some promise remains in the rearticulation of narratives of adventure that have become stale in the contemporary, cubicle-fated West. I've been looking at the folklore of the colonists who settled Texas. That corn pone world offered serious considerations of, say, how to move bodies through space, or how to track an enemy, or what to eat when there was little to be had. The lack of narratives of adventure makes life thin and uninviting in the present. Perhaps one reason for the post-War growth of Creative Writing departments had something to do with a need for adventure. Poetry promises to move us forward into new possibilities. Our other contracts with pre-Collapsarian life are fragile, delicately maintained, practicing attention to morals and manners in a world of boredom, where meaningful labor is rarely achieved. Instead, we contribute to the system's ongoing need to expand, satisfying its needs based on growth at any cost over more human needs to reveal our experience through stories and images.
On a related note, mass murders announced in Alabama and Germany today. Lone gunmen. Adventurous perversions. Maybe it's better to ask: when did the Collapse begin?
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