warwick uncanny · fact. all that is taken from fact is now deemed ‘truthiness’3 that dissolves...
TRANSCRIPT
Warwick Uncanny: Journal of Literature, Theory and Modernity.
Vol 3, Issue 2. April 2017.
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“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.”
- Charles Baudelaire
*
Warwick Uncanny Journal Editorial team 2016/17:
Co-Editor: Audrey Yick
Co-Editor: Alex Gibbs
Deputy Editor: Carrie Roberts
Deputy Editor: Rebecca Willmetts
Fund Manager: Lillian Hingley
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Contents
Team Members .......................................................................................................................... 2
Contents ..................................................................................................................................... 3
Foreword .................................................................................................................................... 4
Emma Cottrell
Post truth politics in America through Humans of New York and the Tweeter-in-Chief
.................................................................................................................................................... 5
Alex Gibbs
Late Capitalism, apocalypse and the end of sleep in Sleep Donation and Black Moon
.................................................................................................................................................. 29
Rebecca Willmetts
Complicating temporality in Atwood Oryx and Crake and DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
.................................................................................................................................................. 45
Next Issue Submission Information ......................................................................................... 61
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Foreword
I am very proud to present, with my team, this issue of the Warwick Uncanny Journal.
This is my first publication as co-editor and it has been a wonderful ride. It has been brought
to fruition through the collective efforts of everyone on the team and I am immensely proud
of everyone for the work they have put in to finish this issue. Particularly I am really excited
to welcome Beccy back onto the team. Her insights, editing finesse and previous experience
with Uncanny has been instrumental. In terms of team activities, I have very much enjoyed
the termly dinner meetings we have been attending and I hope this new tradition will
continue once we pass the reigns to the next Uncanny team (here’s hoping for a new
generation of editors to take over!).
This issue loosely explores the theme of apocalypse in a submission of my own and a
submission by Beccy, both examining how the end of the world plays out in the context of
capitalism. The third essay is a lovely piece by Emma on Trump and post-truth, perhaps the
first we have had in Uncanny analysing photography! It is always exciting to see WUJ given
the chance to publish essays on mediums beyond literature.
This was a great piece and I want to thank the team and our contributors for making WUJ
possible. Enjoy!
Alex Gibbs,
Co-Editor.
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Post truth politics in America through Humans of New York and the Tweeter-in-Chief
What is certain is that ‘[w]e are not so much traveling as emigrating.’1 What is uncertain is
where exactly we are emigrating to. American society seems to be propelling itself, or perhaps
rather it is being propelled by a certain new force, further into a post-truth state. As defined by
Oxford Dictionaries, ‘post-truth’ describes that which is ‘[r]elating to or denoting
circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than
appeals to emotion and personal belief.’2 It is absolutely evident that emigrating to a new
society dominated by emotion and personal belief is rapidly diminishing the role of objective
fact. All that is taken from fact is now deemed ‘truthiness’3 that dissolves what was once
objectivity, into mere subjectivity. This movement into total subjectivity is what photography
with post-truth American society has noticeably at the moment. Humans of New York is a part
of this trend, a web blog by Brandon Stanton which purports to present ‘real people’ in their
lives in New York through a single photograph of them. The camera removes the natural and
human elements of reality as it has the potential to transform the subject into a commercialised
and commodified object, outside time and outside context, excluding it from truth. Where
photography has always maintained some objectivity from its original context, the
interpretational factors that manipulate the photograph are becoming more and more
pronounced. The manipulation of the meaning and the physicality, as well as the words, of
photography in America is consequently feeding the notion of post-truth as people are led to
manipulate the truth too, since they are encouraged to act in response to their emotions and
personal beliefs. Indeed, there is increasingly a sense of being able to shop around for
1 Fred Ritchin, After Photography, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), p. 9 2 "Post-Truth", Oxford Dictionaries [online] <https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/post-truth>
[accessed 14 January 2017] 3 "Truthiness", Oxford Dictionaries [online]
<https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/truthiness> [accessed 27 January 2017]
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interpretations of photographs, and often the accompanying words, according to what appeals
best to the individual; hence American society is currently left bereft of objective truth.
To begin this discussion of photography and its ties to post-truth America, it is essential that
we return to the workings of the photographic process. Does the way in which the photographic
process itself is overlooked as a concept indicate something of post-truth society in America?
Blouin and Rosenberg eloquently conclude that ‘the photograph […] is at best a two-
dimensional flattening of a multidimensional past reality, one that, like other documents,
necessarily objectivizes its subjects.’ 4 What they are referring to here is the inhuman
photographic process that occurs as the subject is transferred into the lens of the camera. Then
passed through the camera’s mechanisms of refraction and production, the subject is
consequently stripped of its subjectivities and rendered a two-dimensional, constructed object
by the camera apparatus. When it is considered how a photograph is created, it can be seen that
the photograph represents something of post-truth by nature; where it is outside of time and
outside of reality, the photograph can no longer fully present the truth, only a ‘flattened’ version
of it. In the case of Humans of New York, the subject is animate – the person whom Stanton
has approached – and the photograph produced by the camera is clearly inanimate so there is
an important change to consider. A photograph cannot ever be an exact presentation of reality.
Contemporary photography, as it forms such a significant part of the digital age of social media
and extensive internet usage, is an example of how post-truth society in America has concealed
the reality of photography as an inhuman product of camera technology. By definition, a
photograph is outside of real time, always subjected to the inhuman action of the camera. Even
a photograph from a source such as the Humans of New York series cannot truthfully present
4 Francis Xavier Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, Archives, Documentation, And Institutions Of
Social Memory: Essays From The Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor, US: University of Michigan Press,
2011) <http://site.ebrary.com/lib/warwick/reader.action?docID=10455035&ppg=12> [accessed 13
January 2017], p. 3
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the viewer with a living, breathing, feeling human since it can only represent the human in one
dimension. Emerling summarises this idea by suggesting that ‘[t]he still photographic image is
an image precisely because it is unnatural, inhuman’.5 No matter how clear the photograph is,
it has to remain an unnatural image by definition.
With the extraordinary increase in amateur photography, in line with the rise of the internet
and more recently social media, it has become increasingly easy to share photographs on
specifically designed online platforms. This indicates a revolution of the way in which society
perceives photography. As the demographic of those who use social media becomes more
diverse, it is evident that the foundations for a post-truth society get both a representatively
more diverse audience and a larger spectrum of participants. Indeed, the volume of users
dedicated to such platforms is still rapidly increasing. From a survey conducted in spring 2016,
Pew Research Center estimate that ‘32% of internet users (28% of all U.S. adults) use
Instagram’6 and Instagram itself released information in December 2016 that showed that their
‘community has grown to more than 600 million Instagrammers. And the last 100 million […]
joined in just the past six months.’7 When this number is considered alongside the ‘1.79 billion
monthly active [Facebook] users’8, many of whom use the network as a means to share and
view photographs on a daily basis, it is clear that photography has become a fundamental aspect
of American society. What Facebook and Instagram statistics indicate is the digital revolution
of photography. Where photography was once practiced only by the professional elite, the
photography in the digital age along with it an increasingly diverse and active user base. . With
the perpetual expansion of social media and general internet usage which has reached 88% of
5 Jae Emerling, Photography: History and Theory (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 11 6"Social Media Fact Sheet Update 2016", Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 2016
<http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/> [accessed 20 January 2017] 7 "600 Million And Counting", Instagram Blog, 2016
<http://blog.instagram.com/post/154506585127/161215-600million> [accessed 20 January 2017] 8 specified by Facebook ‘as of 30th September, 2016’, "Company Info", Facebook Newsroom, 2017
<http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/> [accessed 20 January 2017]
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adults in America 9 , photography has become far more accessible. Here, assessing the
revolution of photography instigated by social media, the notion of post-truth American society
can be linked directly with such a revolution as individuals compete to be heard and seen
amongst the vast amount of photographic content.
The rapidly growing appeal of publishing photographs, people striving for attention from their
Facebook and Snapchat friends, Instagram and Twitter followers and blog subscribers,
indicates something of the modern individual’s desire for self-representation on what could be
referred to as the world stage of the internet. If post-truth society is the favouring of ‘appeals
to emotion and personal belief’10 rather than ‘objective fact’11, photography as shared online is
a clear example of such prioritisation. Individuals share photographs that are intended to incite
emotion in other users, rather than attempt to portray fact that others could reject. Appeals to
emotion transfer more rapidly across international cultures as they concentrate on shared
human emotion rather than fact, which can sometimes be relevant to a much smaller, often
local, audience and sometimes less emotive. Humans of New York is unquestionably an
example of photographs that are intended to ‘appeal to emotion and personal belief’ rather than
to present ‘objective fact’. Speaking of his reasons for creating the project, this appeal is evident
as Brandon Stanton says, ‘What I really hope to maintain is the culture of positivity, of
celebration and support that these people share.’12 This series can thus be cited as a medium of
photography that links with post-truth American society because of its popularity – it boasts a
following of over 20 million people13 – which certainly demonstrates a telling society-wide
9 "Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet", Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 2017
<http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/> [accessed 27 January 2017] 10 "Post-Truth", Oxford Dictionaries [online] 11 Ibid. 12 Facebook Stories, Humans Of New York [video], 2014 <https://vimeo.com/85667490> [accessed 13
January 2017] 13 Brandon Stanton, "Humans Of New York", Humans Of New York
<http://www.humansofnewyork.com> [accessed 9 January 2017]
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appreciation of photographs that are so emotionally appealing “positivity, celebration and
support” (Stanton).
It is becoming increasingly difficult for social media to host absolute, objective fact since the
online culture at the same time hosts emotional pleas that target followers. If the internet is
interpreted as a world stage, the competition between the increasing number of participants has
become more intense. It is then appealing to engage with the selective measures of
Photoshopping in order to produce content which stands out from the masses. Photoshopping,
as a method of manipulating a photograph, can refer to the manipulative handling of the
photograph as the viewer responds in their own way – doing whatever editing they see fit as
part of their subjectivising of the image. Jae Emerling highlights this as an obligatory response
to all photography which ‘demands of us – as spectators – an engagement more than passive
seeing’.14 Hence, the internet allows billions of people to view a particular photograph which,
in turn, opens it up to billions of subjective viewers coming from many different contexts.
Sometimes having only a two-dimensional photograph to consider, the viewer must then take
the photograph and reconstruct its context. If the reader is part of a post-truth society, this
reconstruction is going to reflect post-truth values, thus perpetuating the cycle of culture and
politics as reflections of each other. This is indicative of the subjectivity of the viewers as they
approach the photograph; as such, Blouin and Rosenberg instead speak of ‘the interpreter’15 as
the role necessitated by photography upon reception. Here we reach an interesting phase of the
photographic process; having seen it change from subject to object, there is then the attempt to
return the object into the subject. As the interpreter contemplates the image, their reflection on
the image is to then try to place the objectivised subject back into its original context; an
objectivised subject is turned into a subjectivised object. Ariella Azoulay furthers this idea as
14 Emerling, p. 84 15 Blouin and Rosenberg, p. 3
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she describes the necessity of reaction that ‘entails dimensions of time and movement that need
to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image.’16 The reductive, two-
dimensional object, having removed the dimensions of reality, needs to be re-placed in a real
context. Surely, then, this will create a multitude of different interpretations because of the
differing contexts of the interpreters. Post-truth society in America dictates that the priority for
interpreters is emotion and personal belief; hence the interpreter subjectively approaches the
photograph and responds in accordance with their emotions. This method of consuming images
I would dub ‘Photo shopping’ has the power to edit a photograph billions of times over, simply
on account of the many lenses through which it is viewed by its many interpreters.
This process of Photoshopping as the manipulation of photographs that experience diverse
interpretations is particularly evident in Humans of New York. The photographic process
previously examined is evident: firstly, Stanton approaches the person on the street who will
be the subject of his story, then the person (the subject) is objectivised as they are passed
through the lens of the camera and turned into the photograph (the object). As Stanton publishes
the photograph on various social media platforms and his blog, each of his 20 million followers
is led to view the photograph. Of course, by appealing to 20 million people across the world,
the human portrayed in the photograph is open to much subjectivity. Indeed it can be said about
Humans of New York that the comments are very important part of the concept as thousands of
people use the platform as a network to respond to, and subsequently interact with, the stories
in the comment section always accompanying the photograph. As such, this leads to an
important discussion about the ways in which the photograph is subjectivised by the interpreter
when they are surrounded by the notion of a post-truth society. The most significant example
of this in Humans of New York is the interview that Brandon Stanton held with Hillary Clinton
16 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli, (New
York: Zone Books, 2008) p. 14 as quoted by Emerling, p. 84
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during the Presidential Campaign of 201617 (see Image 1). Reaching nearly 32,000 in number,
the comments on her photograph were diverse in their reception of her appeal to viewers’
emotions, as would be expected of such a divisive politician, but overwhelmingly, the response
was that her experience as a woman in society was the same for most women. Photoshopping
as a reference to the subjective handling of a photograph has led undoubtedly to much division
around digital photography; emotional responses to photographs sparking online debate, and
clashes with varying personal beliefs are typical of a post-truth society in which this small
aspect of Photoshopping disguises the sense of objective truth.
Moreover, returning to more traditional a definition of Photoshopping, it is usually
acknowledged that disguising fact, by way of Photoshopping an image, is the editor’s privilege.
The manipulation of the photograph, through the use of devices like filters and cropping tools,
is the doctoring of the image to appear different from how it was in reality. This is surely
17 Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York, Facebook, post dated 8 September 2016
<https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/photos/a.102107073196735.4429.102099916530784/
1362236273850469/?type=3&theater> [accessed 20 January 2017]
Image 1 – Hillary Clinton as featured in interview with Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York,
Facebook, post dated 8 September 2016
<https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/photos/a.102107073196735.4429.102099916530784
/1362236273850469/?type=3&theater> [accessed 27 January 2017]
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indicative of post-truth society in America when it is considered how many Photoshopping
controversies have plagued top magazines and newspapers, as well as individuals, who have
not convinced their interpreters of the legitimacy of their images. In discussion of
Photoshopping, Ritchin writes that ‘[i]t can be tempting to seamlessly fabricate imagery, even
in pursuit of what one sees as the greater good, but once the medium’s role as recording witness
is deeply compromised those in power have an even greater advantage.’18Without doubt,
fabricating imagery has become a very significant part of contemporary society. And indeed it
is not unreasonable to suggest that the rise of Photoshop as a means of altering, and fabricating,
photographs – to the extent that they might no longer be comparable to the original subject –
has important links with the increasing sense of post-truth society as a consequence. More
specifically, the rejection of objective fact through
the use of Photoshopping by ‘those in power’19 is
used as a means of controlling public opinion.
It cannot be ignored here that the link between
photography, as an important strand of digital
media now, and post-truth American society has
undoubtedly been strengthened with the politics
that came from the presidential campaign of 2016.
Donald Trump’s campaign was certainly no
stranger to controversy, but notably here, badly
disguised Photoshopping raised a highly
controversial issue. The accusation was that his
campaign had used a photograph of a white-
18 Ritchin, p. 62 19 Ritchin, p. 62
Image 2 – Comparison of two images, revealing the
alleged Photoshopping of a white model (right) to
make her black-skinned (left) as featured by Jess
Staufenberg, "Did Donald Trump's People Photoshop
A White Model To Make Her Black?", The
Independent, 2016
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/
donald-trumps-campaign-accused-of-photoshopping-
white-model-to-make-her-black-a6910986.html>
[accessed 27 January 2017]
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skinned model wearing a ‘Trump – Make America Great Again’ branded t-shirt, but
manipulated it so that the model had dark skin20 (see Image 2). Not only did Trump provoke
outrage that he and his team were lying about the ethnicity of the model wearing the t-shirt,
undoubtedly in the hope that people would credit Trump as a candidate appealing to ethnic
minorities, the Photoshopping was heavily criticised for not even being done to a good
standard; critics were quick to point out that the skin of the black model was far too smooth
and undefined to be real. Further stimulating the backlash, the image was then removed from
the website soon afterwards.21 This kind of publicity is what fueled the post-truth nature of his
campaign and what seems to be propelling America further into the reality of post-truth society.
The pairing of photographs with captions in Humans of New York gives rise to further debate
about editorial manipulation: word shopping. Having seen the impact of Photoshopping in
contemporary American society, as well as how it has contributed to what is now regarded as
post-truth America, it is important to consider the impact of word shopping as a similar process
of doctoring an image. The manipulation of words that accompany photographs is equally
indicative of post-truth society because it is what most guides the interpretation of the
photograph. The subjectivisation of the photograph is orientated significantly by the caption.
This is obvious from simply glancing at the format of Humans of New York. To continue with
the language of photography previously established, the interpreter is directed in how to
interpret the photograph by way of the caption. This is obviously not explicitly directional,
since, given the individuality of the millions of interpreters, that would not be possible; the
direction is inferred by the simple logic that what the person is quoted as saying (this forms the
caption in Stanton’s work as he interviews them at the same time as taking their photograph)
20 Jess Staufenberg, "Did Donald Trump's People Photoshop A White Model To Make Her Black?",
The Independent, 2016 <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trumps-
campaign-accused-of-photoshopping-white-model-to-make-her-black-a6910986.html> [accessed 27
January 2017] 21 Staufenberg, "Did Donald Trump's People Photoshop A White Model To Make Her Black?"
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links in some way to the way they appear in the photograph. This link might be something as
physically obvious as age, gender or race, or it may be a facial expression, but otherwise a link
might be created on an individual basis. When asked about how he decides which people to
photograph and talk to in the street, Stanton reflects on the change in his approach over the six
years since its conception. He began with simply taking photographs, then he started ‘including
a quote or two’22 and he says, ‘Now when I'm approaching somebody on the street, I'm
spending about 30 to 45 minutes with them often.’23 It could certainly be argued here that this
validates a kind of word shopping that is comparable to Photoshopping and its role in supplying
America with post-truth documentary. This might be described as the process that Stanton goes
through in order to get the most emotive and compelling story from the person whom he is
interviewing. Posting a short quotation from someone who has been talking for 30 to 45
minutes might be argued as misleading since the context of their quotation picked by the
interviewer has been removed. Many of the photographs that are published as part of the
Humans of New York series are very sombre testimonies of traumatic experiences that the
subject has experienced, often provoking very emotional responses from people all over the
world. What this also reveals is that photography is evidently undergoing further revolutionary
manipulation: truth shopping.
With the culture of ‘going viral’ in current society, it would be fair to say that both Stanton’s
work and Trump’s controversy, specifically in photographic form, lend themselves perfectly
to being shared all over the internet. The common thread between these two streams of
photography is the emotion that they compel. The most striking photographs from these outlets
are the most emotive in terms of provoking response to personal belief, there seems to be no
22 Brandon Stanton, Interview with Michel Martin at NPR: ‘10,000 Snaps Of The Shutter, A
'Photographic Census' Of A City’ (National Public Radio, 2015) [transcript]
<http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=451184837> [accessed 20 January
2017] 23 Brandon Stanton, Interview with Michel Martin at NPR
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need for photographs that attempt to portray objective fact. Without doubt it can be argued that
viral stories, which are often photographs, have a strong correlation with post-truth American
society. Though much of the internet is hailed for being extremely useful in terms of objective
fact being so easily accessible to users, it is becoming more and more common to dismiss much
of its content as fake and manipulated since, as the definition of ‘post-truth’ indicates, people
are so clearly focused on emotional stimuli and personal belief systems as the lens through
which they would like to receive news. Richard Seymour contends that ‘[i]n this climate, the
argument goes, political discourse is shaped by appeals to sentiment, not facts.’24 Referring to
the unprecedented nature of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Seymour summarises a
widespread feeling that political discourse has been completely upheaved in the way that it has
been both received and portrayed by global media. Returning to the presence of photography
within this discourse, it is clear that the new approach to ‘[p]ractising journalism in a post-fact
environment’25 necessitates image in a way that has not previously been the case. Indeed as we
have already seen, Stanton, his Humans of New York series having increased dramatically in
influence since the last presidential election of 2012, had a significant voice in the 2016
campaign as social media platforms experienced unprecedented levels of political discourse.
Writing in the London Review of Books, Richard Seymour explores how new mediahas been
affected by post-truth society as relating to the current political scene:
New media are also taken to share the blame for the breakdown of the governing
consensus in Europe and the US. The success of Donald Trump and his ‘post-truth
politics’ is seen as, among other things, an effect of the collapse of editorial standards as
24 Richard Seymour, "Schadenfreude With Bite", London Review Of Books, Vol. 38, No. 24
(December 2016) <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n24/richard-seymour/schadenfreude-with-bite>
[accessed 9 January 2017] 25 Katharine Murphy, "Truth And The New Politics", Meanjin, 2016
<https://meanjin.com.au/essays/truth-and-the-new-politics/> [accessed 9 January 2017]
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old ideological monopolies break up and people seek information and opinion from
sources that pander to their prejudices. In this climate, the argument goes, political
discourse is shaped by appeals to sentiment, not facts.’26
This affective summary of post-truth society
in both Europe and the US suggests that new
media seems to be strikingly divisive in its
political discourse. Where the digital age has
given rise to a vast array of news outlets, the
reliability of ‘old ideological monopolies’
has dissipated and instead, people have
turned to sentimental outlets that resonate
with them more personally than perhaps fact
might have once done. Once again, Humans
of New York, specifically its political
features, is an important example of new media that ‘appeals to sentiment, not facts’. It must
first be acknowledged here that Stanton did not set out to convey objective fact in his features,
yet its extreme popularity points to the value people are placing on sentimentality.
Nevertheless, Stanton still did not shy away from presenting his political viewpoints to his
millions of followers. Stanton featured stories from Barack Obama (see Image 3) and Hillary
Clinton during the final weeks of the Presidential Campaign of 2016, thus immediately we can
appreciate his political standpoint. In addition, the week before the election, Stanton’s plea to
his followers to vote did not attempt to mask his own point of view (see Image 4) in which he
said, ‘This is Democracy vs. demagogue’27, and neither did his series focusing on Macomb
26 Seymour, "Schadenfreude With Bite" 27 Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York, Facebook, post dated 1 November 2016
Image 3 – Barack Obama as featured in interview with
Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York, Facebook, post dated 9
November 2016
<https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/photos/a.1
02107073196735.4429.102099916530784/1434626746611421
/?type=3&theater> [accessed 27 January 2017]
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County in the aftermath of the election result, a majority-Trump-voter town that helped Trump
carry Michigan as the first Republican in almost 30 years 28 (see Image 5). Where this
represents the link between photography
and post-truth America is the wider
acknowledgement of the fact that every
part of this new media is projecting
subjective views, sometimes overtly but
often covertly, through its content. What
makes this typically post-truth is the fact
that on the one hand, many readers do not
realise that the news from these outlets is
indeed reported through subjective,
polarised lenses; and on the other hand, many are happy to receive simple affirmations of their
views – they are happy to go truth
shopping and look around for which truth
they like the most.
This idea of truth shopping as prominent
in new media is certainly the case with
Humans of New York, and other Facebook
pages and blogs, since the premise of
following them is that the reader selects
just what they want to follow. By ‘liking’
<https://www.facebook.com/pg/humansofnewyork/posts/?ref=page_internal> [accessed 27 January
2017] 28 Ibid., post dated 15 November 2016
<https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/photos/a.102107073196735.4429.102099916530784/
1441124589294970/?type=3&theater> [accessed 27 January 2017]
Image 4 – Brandon Stanton’s appeal to his followers
to vote in the Presidential Election of 2016, Humans
of New York, Facebook, post dated 1 November
2016
<https://www.facebook.com/pg/humansofnewyork/p
osts/?ref=page_internal> [accessed 27 January 2017]
Image 5 – Introduction to a series on residents of Macomb
County by Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York, Facebook, 15
November 2016
<https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/photos/a.102
107073196735.4429.102099916530784/1441124589294970/?typ
e=3&theater> [accessed 27 January 2017]
18 | P a g e
the page, a person is actively choosing to view its content and be updated on its new content.
This suggests that only those who agree with or want to see such content will be able to see it.
In a similar vein, Susan Glasser contends that ‘[t]he election of 2016 showed us that Americans
are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan
political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.’ 29 Hence the argument that
Seymour puts forward resonates with social media in particular as users search for content that
‘pander[s] to their prejudices’30, with Facebook certainly helping them do so – specifically in
the way that its algorithms are programmed to automatically tailor each newsfeed to the user’s
preferences and favoured social groups. Glasser laments that the photographs, as well as other
mediums within new media, appearing during the Presidential Campaign were only indicative
of partisan views which were then subsequently viewed by people already wearing polarised,
filtering lenses. Furthermore, this post-truth reality that there is very little, if any, place for
unmanipulated, objective fact in new media was demonstrated clearly in HyperNormalisation
which went some way to explain how Donald Trump was able to win the election. Curtis
observes, ‘The liberals were outraged by Trump. But they expressed their anger in cyberspace,
so it had no effect – because the algorithms made sure they only spoke to people who agreed
with them.’31 This idea, given that the truth has already been manipulated into several versions
of ‘truthiness’, that people are only viewing photography that appeals to their own viewpoints,
is for many an alarming example of how photography is becoming victim to the truth shopping
that social media is doing on behalf of its users. Picking and choosing which version of the
truth we read, the control seems to have shifted out of our hands.
29 Susan Glasser, "Covering Politics In A ‘Post-Truth’ America", POLITICO Magazine, 2016
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/journalism-post-truth-trump-2016-election-
politics-susan-glasser-214523> [accessed 14 January 2017] 30 Seymour, "Schadenfreude With Bite" 31 HyperNormalisation (BBC iPlayer: Adam Curtis, 2016) [2:29:53-30:04] [accessed 8 January 2017]
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With the recent inauguration of Donald Trump, the link between contemporary photography
and post-truth American society seems to be getting even stronger as he spends his first weeks
in office. He is actively fortifying the link himself by exclaiming that reporters are ‘among the
most dishonest human beings on earth’.32 In light of this, whilst his dislike of the press had
been very obvious leading up to his election, Trump’s first day in office seemed to have ignite
a new sense of attack against new media, obviously including a lot of contemporary
photography. This gives new emphasis to the idea of truth shopping in current American
society. Being the President of the United States, Trump now stands on the world’s highest
stage and thus guarantees global attention as he speaks. Renowned for his disregard for fact,
Trump is solidifying claims that he ushered post-truth politics into America. Addressing the
CIA, in his first speech as the President of the United States, Trump responded to the media
coverage of his inauguration, criticising networks that showed photographs of empty spaces
and sparse crowds. ‘Mr. Trump said "it looked like" some 1.5m people had been there’33 and
then ensured that his White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, put it very simply in his first
briefing: ‘This was the largest audience to ever see an inauguration, period.’34 President Trump
and his team are actively discounting what is photographic evidence of the ceremony (see
Image 6), as well as video evidence, and statistical evidence from ‘Washington's Metro system
[who] said trips were down on previous inaugurations’.35 In view of this, it can certainly be
argued that Trump is fortifying the sense of post-truth America. Where the subjectivisation of
photographs was initially meant to describe the process through which viewers interpret the
32 Donald Trump as quoted in "Trump Claims Media 'Dishonest' Over Crowd Photos - BBC News",
BBC News, 2017 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38707722> [accessed 22 January
2017] 33 "Trump Claims Media 'Dishonest' Over Crowd Photos - BBC News" 34 Sean Spicer as quoted in ibid. 35 "Trump Claims Media 'Dishonest' Over Crowd Photos - BBC News"
20 | P a g e
caption as relating to the subject, as in Humans of New York, it would appear that photographs
are to take on new subjectivity under the presidency of Donald Trump.
Undoubtedly, there is new depth to the idea of ‘truth shopping’ with regards to photography,
certainly that concerning Trump, as he looks to choose the truth that he wants viewers to
acknowledge. His aide Kellyanne Conway described this selecting of the truth, in response to
Sean Spicer’s press release, as a presentation of mere ‘alternative facts’36. Where does this
leave photography? Certainly it would seem that it cannot be viewed as evidence. Yet perhaps
this is nothing new since the angles at which photographs are taken have always proved a point
of contention with many searching for the most truthful representation of reality. A key and
relevant example of this debate is the picture that Mike Pence uploaded to his new @VP Twitter
36 Kellyanne Conway as quoted in "Trump's 'Alternative Facts': Why The Row About Inauguration
'Lies'? - BBC News", BBC News, 2017 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38716191>
[accessed 23 January 2017]
Image 6 – Comparison of two images of recent US Presidential inaugurations: Barack Obama’s in
2009 (right) and Donald Trump’s in 2017 (left) as featured in "Trump Claims Media 'Dishonest' Over
Crowd Photos - BBC News", BBC News, 2017 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-
38707722> [accessed 22 January 2017]
21 | P a g e
account that was immediately
compared to contrasting angles of
the same moment, depicting an
entirely different scene 37 (see
Image 7); a very dramatic black-
and-white still of triumphant
waving off to the sides where the
crowds are assumed to be, versus
a still of the Pence family against
a backdrop of empty stands with a
small group of supporters looking
in the other direction. This
evidence of truth shopping as a
means of portraying a more
favourable version of events may not be a new development in the photographic world, but it
can certainly be said that the engagement with it at this level is disguising a more sinister part
of post-truth society: the rising discontent of much of America’s population with the
ramifications of such a society. In his documentary HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis suggests
that Trump’s disregard for facts ‘meant that Trump defeated journalism – because the
journalists’ central belief was that their job was to expose lies and assert the truth’38, thus
evidently, ‘with Trump, this became irrelevant.’39 With his dispute with the media gaining
momentum every day, Trump has seen to it that photography they publish no longer constitutes
37 Tweet included in Elle Hunt, "Trump's Inauguration Crowd: Sean Spicer's Claims Versus The
Evidence", The Guardian, 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/22/trump-
inauguration-crowd-sean-spicers-claims-versus-the-evidence> [accessed 27 January 2017] 38 HyperNormalisation (Curtis) [2:28:48-57] 39 Ibid. [2:28:58]
Image 7 – Tweet included to show difference in camera
angles in Elle Hunt, "Trump's Inauguration Crowd: Sean
Spicer's Claims Versus The Evidence", The Guardian, 2017
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2017/jan/22/trump-inauguration-crowd-sean-
spicers-claims-versus-the-evidence> [accessed 27 January
2017]
22 | P a g e
evidence, since he claims it is all part of their vendetta against him. However, it seems fair to
suggest here that Trump would endorse photographs that, in his eyes, support his way of
thinking – that is to say, complement his emotions and personal belief. But in actual fact, is
this defiant challenge of what is portrayed to be objective fact all part of President Trump’s
plan? By dismissing their photographic evidence as false and presenting the ‘alternative’, is he
deliberately calling Americans to reconsider what they have always called factual evidence and
instead rely on his word as being the truth?
Clearly, the place for photographs as evidence in American society seems to be disappearing.
Donald Trump’s presidency has already revealed significant changes in photographic standing
as the world starts to understand the authority he has to dispute what was once counted as fact.
By way of conclusion, then, it is clear that photography and its link with post-truth society in
America is being increasingly fortified by current affairs. The prevalence of word shopping as
well as Photoshopping may have put an end to objectivity in the photographic world, but it
must be said that where it is regarded as sentimental rather than fact, photography will have a
place in American post-truth society, even if it is only credited by certain partisan groups. Yet
the revised perception of truth in modern American society, as something now entirely
malleable given the importance of one’s emotions and personal belief rather than objective
fact, gives rise to a view of photography as even more subjectivised than was true of the original
photographic process. Where there is no longer room for objective fact, the world of the
alternative fact – fact that is boldly generated by emotion and personal belief – is expanding
rapidly, and with that, the alternative evidence. Without objective fact to rely on as the natural
interpretation of re-contextualising a subject, people are free to shop for the truth that appeals
to their emotions and personal beliefs. In a society where truth shopping is becoming a normal
way of life, as it is in fact championed by the President, what is next? What role will
photography have in a society that can shop for any number of truths, alternative or not? No
23 | P a g e
matter what the future has in store for photography, the polarised lenses that filter out what
displeases and sharpen what pleases, will certainly continue to blur the truth. The ‘truth’,
depending on the lens that captures it, is now merely a matter of perspective.
24 | P a g e
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28 | P a g e
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29 | P a g e
Late Capitalism, apocalypse and the end of sleep in Sleep Donation and Black
Moon
In an increasingly developed North America, sleep has come into contention with the
prevailing neoliberalist logic of high-velocity, limitless consumption. Ben Agger catalogued
this new speed of capitalism first in his 1989 text Fast Capitalism, which subsequently
necessitated a sequel Speeding Up Fast Capitalism (2004), as a new framework emerged to
facilitate even further accelerated production and consumption. This new framework is
systematically at odds with the ‘dead-time’ that the process of sleep entails. As Jonathan Crary
aptly puts it, “sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism
[…it] cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability” (10). Sleep is
therefore “wrecked and despoiled” because of the impossibility of extracting value from it
(Crary 17). If we follow the logic of market capitalism, one that “...is not at liberty to suspend
the rule of profit and expansion under any circumstance”, to its conclusion: it would
encourage the abolition of sleep in order to pursue greater ‘productivity’ (Cazdyn 658). Sleep
constitutes the last of what Marx described as ‘natural barriers’ to the “full realization of 24/7
capitalism” (Crary 17). However, the picture of a “dominant” “sleep-negative agenda”
is complicated by market forces espousing “sleep-positive[…]ideas and ideologies,
discourses and debates” hoping to capitalise upon “a burgeoning sleep industry” (Williams
xiv). Sleep is therefore simultaneously assaulted and safeguarded by forces seeking to
maximise the potential for profit garnered from either action.
Many texts have registered the nexus of opposing forces gathering around sleep in the
modern age. They fit into either the “sleep-positive” or the “sleep-negative” discourses as
outlined by Simon J. Williams. Karen Russell’s Sleep Donation presents the destination of the
sleep-negative agenda, and focusses on how sleep will become just another commodity, a
symptom of the crisis of a capitalism which ceaselessly commercialises all that it can until
30 | P a g e
sleep itself can be traded. This is a response to the of boom/bust crisis structure of modern
capitalism that is simultaneously the symptom and the solution of crisis. This is evident in the
neoliberal framework as deciphered by Eric Cazdyn: “there is something necessary about a
crisis, something true to the larger systemic form. Crises occur when things go right [in the
neoliberal capitalist system]” (649). Thus the sleep crisis (rampant large scale insomnia and
elective insomnia) in Sleep Donation is simply the next stop along the progression of
neoliberalist North American society. Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun however, characterises
a sleep-positive narrative by conflating the end of sleep with an apocalypse not dissimilar from
popular zombie horror movies. However, imagining the end of sleep as apocalyptic is far from
a radical move; it results in the novel failing to engage with any sense of revolution that could
push back against this attack on the natural condition. It becomes co-opted into the sleep-
positive discourse that the end of sleep would mean the end of life, because life is now so
solidly defined by production and consumption. Both texts register the cultural phenomenon
of sleep as a contemporary “prism or point of articulation and amplification” for sleep-positive
or sleep-negative discourses under the Neoliberalist framework of modern capitalism
(Williams xii xiii).
Foremost, in Calhoun’s Black Moon, we are ushered into an apocalypse that re-treads
many conventions of the zombie horror genre. The novel features an outbreak of a virus-like
insomnia, that spreads quickly to virtually the entire population, sparing only a few sleepers
(or ‘survivors’). The “sleepless” are drawn to the sleepers like “moths to flame”, and upon
witnessing them sleeping, they descend into “snarling and barking”: consumed by psychotic,
murderous rage (30). In this way, the familiar zombie horror binary of the survivors and the
infected is reanimated, utilised in a new context to explore insomnia. In line with zombie horror
convention, society comes to represent danger. Even the family, rather than a place of security,
is turned into a site of threat. Lila, one of the young sleepers of the novel, awakens to find her
31 | P a g e
sleepless parents screaming obscenities at her: her father shouting “I will bite out your fucking
eyes” (Calhoun 45). Her mother, likewise, “shrieked from the other side [of the car Lila must
inhabit to safely sleep], releasing a piercing, inhuman sound” (45). Lila acknowledges that
“nothing could stop [the psychosis…] not even if the sleeper was your own daughter” (95).
Familial bonds are decisively obliterated as the desire to do sleepers harm overcomes the
sleepless. Thus, the zombie horror narrative conventions are repurposed from a struggle
between the dead and the living to a new binary of sleepless against the sleepers, as sleep
becomes the site of struggle within the text.
This lack of sleep is explored elsewhere, as the harm one can do when unbound by
psychotic rage born of insomnia progresses to its logical conclusion. This harm is explored in-
between consciousnesses as the novella develops the concept of micro-sleeps through formal
breaks in the narrative. Adam, parent of a newly born, experiences a break of consciousness
that is formally represented by a pause in the narrative. He concludes that he “must have had a
microsleep” (109). Immediately after this first microsleep, a tension is raised as the mother,
Jorie, (presumably also experiencing microsleeps) explains that she “can’t find the baby that is
ours!” (109). Later, this splitting of consciousness begins also to split the chronologic
progression of the book, as Jorie is suddenly “pregnant with the baby again” (110). She realises
that her “mechanism that puts one minute after another has broken” and she is now
experiencing time out of joint (110). Freudian conception of trauma would describe trauma as
an inability to form a coherent narrative of stressful events, which echoes these formal breaks
in the text. Jorie, during one of these spurts of consciousness, comes to the realisation that
“Yes, she believed they would eat her baby” (110). The “they” she refers to is the wider
sleepless population, yet, as sufferers of the insomnia ‘virus’ she is of course also referring to
Adam and herself. Sleeplessness further erodes familial bonds as Adam reasons “babies didn’t
have the value they did before” as he desperately imagines trading the baby for sleep (111).
32 | P a g e
This lack of sleep undermines this parent and child relationship to its horrifying conclusion, as
police officers investigating the missing child discover something nearby that causes them to
gasp “Oh, Jesus” (118). The insomniac virus radically reshapes social relations to the point
where parents can kill their newborns in an attempt to fruitlessly extract their sleep.
Elsewhere this apocalyptic lack of sleep can be read in the construction (or
deconstruction) of place. Societal collapse permeates the novel and from the opening page we
are greeted with a society where “even the quieter streets [...] offered evidence of crisis”
(Calhoun 58). Biggs, the protagonist, bears witness to “the total collapse of infrastructure” and
likens it to “chaos – urban order rearranged” (58). In line with apocalypse narratives we often
witness the disintegration of infrastructure foremost. The absence of living bodies to maintain
and operate this infrastructure grinds public transport, roads, railways etc. to a halt. Modes of
fast communication, that have become synonymous with technological progression, now grind
to a halt: “the sky was now without signals, the web of fibers dead in the earth. Networks
expiring without [the] sound human minds needed to maintain them” (2). The death of
communication pathways and the halting of transport sound the death knells of modern life.
This calamitous landscape also possesses no shortage of dead bodies, as: “Biggs would glimpse
a bloodless hand, a foot or clump of hair, entangled in the clutter. Bodies were turning up
everywhere” (58). The urban sprawl is transformed by the presence of bodies, complete or
incomplete. Onto this stage shuffle the sleepless, haunting the streets with incoherent, sleep-
deprived paranoia, hallucinations and garbled speech. This construction of landscape featuring
urban decay transformed by bodies, both living and dead, reveals the genre framework
employed to explore the apocalyptic scenario of the death of sleep.
The logic behind this deconstruction of society is precisely the dismantling of
commodity driven neoliberal North America. Frederic Jameson notes “someone once said it is
easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (Jameson). The
33 | P a g e
sleepless apocalypse here, with its undeniable zombie horror trappings, reveals the limitations
of thinking of a North America beyond capitalism. One of the first scenes we receive is
described first by the sentence “shops were shuttered”, “their shelves inside empty” (Calhoun
1). Consumption has ground to a halt. The logic of the market is undone as sleepless subjects
cannot produce supply or demand. Elsewhere, people have “abandoned cars”, “stalled in a mad
jumble” (1). This certainly reads to the modern subject as both mad and disordered, as people
discarding a status symbol as instrumental to American capitalism as a car sets alarm bells
ringing. As Briggs surveys this opening scene, he witnesses a large flat screen TV (notably
another marker of American consumer status) smash onto the pavement: “it fell like an obsidian
slate, a tile of nighttime sky. He felt the impact in his teeth, the shatter in his chest” (2). So
bound up is the television as a marker of the modern American landscape that it has taken on
a natural permanence. That Briggs would describe it as first an obsidian slate, a glassy rock
produced by cyclic lava flow, bizarrely portrays this intensely modern man-made commodity
as a natural feature produced by natural processes. Secondly, that he would feel its loss so
keenly that it would reverberate within his teeth, and the bones of his chest, suggests a kind of
affinity that disturbingly anthropomorphises it. Here we witness the effects of the steady stream
of advertising that has conjured a reality in which cold slabs of circuitry and glass can become
both natural and a site to project empathy. This is the prevailing parameters of Black Moon’s
apocalypse – capitalism can no longer function, and now, neither can we.
The precarious nature of modern American employment is explored and transmuted
into the embattled nexus of sleep. Increasingly, neoliberal capitalism markets make demands
of the American subject’s sleep to the point where prioritising sleep can risk livelihood. As
many as 7.5 million Americans were working two or more jobs in December 2016, often
working day and night shifts (Bureau). This need to work two jobs simply to make ends meet
invariably puts pressure on and diminishes the quantity and quality of sleep. This has been
34 | P a g e
registered in studies such as Dement’s 1999 investigation which observed that “most people in
advanced industrialised countries[…] are walking around with an accumulated ‘sleep deficit’
of between 25 and 30 hours” (Williams 37). Contemporary work lives increasingly encroach
upon and put pressure on sleep and one needs only to observe the recent rise of the ‘gig
economy’ to witness 24/7 demands on workers. In Black Moon this tension is explored through
the increasingly precarious nature of sleep. While wandering through a community of the
sleepless, Lila, a sleeper, notes that: “it would be suicide to fall asleep” (Calhoun 94). Another
sleeper, Biggs, lying by his wife, had “only slept for what seemed like seconds” when his wife
hammers a lamp against his skull (16). Again, a break in narration mirrors the brief respite of
sleep, before the sleeper is hauled rudely back into consciousness to avoid losing their life. We
might imagine this mirrors the experience of the contemporary American worker, who has slept
for what seems like seconds, before they must return to work to avoid losing their livelihood.
There is a unique vulnerability posed by sleep that is here ruthlessly exploited to ultimately
disturb any security of rest. Here, we witness the conflation between precariousness of sleep
and precariousness of employment, presented by the experience of the sleepers are unable to
sleep for risk of death.
Elsewhere, another sleeper, Felicia, ponders the new-found precariousness of her own
sleep. It is no coincidence that she ponders this precariousness in sleep in a “car sat at the end
of a street for a neighbourhood that was never built ” (Calhoun 233). In many ways this signals
the keen connection between the precarious nature of sleep and employment. The ‘natural’
progression of the American dream - owning a home - splutters out of life, evident in the unbuilt
plans of a house that physically confronts her, now unattainable to a growing precariat. She is
presented with precarious decision of whether to minimize risk to her by adjusting a mirror that
reveals her position to a sleepless. However, in the movement to adjust it, her ‘off switch’, a
device that enables sleepless to sleep by shocking the brain, could activate, thus leaving her
35 | P a g e
defenceless to be torn apart by the sleepless. The burden of this knowledge presses on her as
she is aware “she could hit downtime any minute now” (233). She decides to adjust the mirror
- “then nothing.” (235). The insecurity of this character’s fate is played out in the form as the
text initially refuses to conclude the events. Yet this key flashpoint of total precariousness
reveals the hideous reality, as a security force member later discovers her fate. He relates:
“someone went after her implant, dug it right out of her head. Tried to pound it into his own
skull with a rock. Bashed his fucking brains out” (272). This episode highlights the porous
nature of sleep in the text, as it becomes as a site for the transfer of anxieties of a growing North
American precariat.
Black Moon further highlights anxiety around sleep through the mirroring of
withdrawal effects of popular sleep drugs to the insomnia epidemic itself. Jonathan Crary
highlights the startlingly widespread usage of sleep-aid pills in contemporary America: in 2010
as many as “fifty million Americans were prescribed compounds like Ambien or Lunesta, and
many millions more bought over-the-counter sleep products” (Crary 17). We see this in the
sales figures, as prescriptions of Xanax or other alprazolam-containing drugs rose steadily from
37,600,000 in 2006 to 47,792,000 in 2011 (MacLaren). Xanax is sometimes prescribed to
patients to tackle or relieve insomnia, yet one of the withdrawal symptoms of the drug is
“insomnia” (Smith). Again, we witness the cycle of crisis caused by a solution that haunts
market capitalism, as more drugs are prescribed, purchased and consumed to counter the initial
Xanax withdrawal. The withdrawal symptoms of Xanax coincide with the symptoms of the
sleepless: “insomnia, irritability, heightened anxiety, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, weight
loss” all of which feature in the text (Smith). However, they are often furthered to their logical
extremes, with suicidal thoughts becoming mass suicides, Biggs witnessing bodies “piled
across the lanes below” (219) and irritability becoming a “snarling” - bestial and violent
psychosis (202). Felicia comes across her sleepless boyfriend, his “ribs and abs showing like
36 | P a g e
furrows, face hollowed and gaunt” as weight loss is accelerated to starvation (228). The line
between this unexplained insomnia pandemic and the effects of widespread drug abuse,
particularly benzodiazepines, begin to coalesce. Biggs, the protagonist, notices this,
commenting: “some say this is what started it […] All these drugs we take” (Calhoun 5). Black
Moon’s insomniac outbreak mirrors modern North American swelling reliance on sleep drugs:
highlighting a crisis of sleep that is increasingly remedied through pharmaceutical aid.
The potential for the crisis of sleep in Black Moon to radically reshape relations in its
society unfortunately fails, as the energy of the crisis simply serves to revitalise market forces.
Sleep is increasingly commodified as a resource by many of the characters of the text. Jordan
sets out to “steal sleeping pills from the Sunrise Pharmacy” precisely because “the end of sleep
was near”, thus sensing entrepreneurial opportunity (22). He is attuned to the potential for profit
by the overarching logic of neoliberal free market capitalism, the sleeping pills, he “speculated”
(emphasis added 22) would become “the new currency” (22), a new “bartering tool when cash,
even gold, would mean nothing” (22). Jordan is imagining a new system of relations, but one
that would unfortunately not radically alter the market-orientated system in any meaningful
way. While it would seem a progressive (or regressive, in the neoliberal view) leap into a
bartering economy, it merely solidifies the previous market structures with “pills” as the new
capital (22). As Cazdyn explains, what would seemingly be a “revolution” instead
unfortunately is only a “crisis” of capitalism, as Jordan’s view does not constitute “radical
change”. (649). This merely a crisis forcing a restructuring that arguably strengthens the system
(649). Cazdyn elaborates: “crisis” is “necessary” to the “larger systemic form” (22). Crises
“built into the system” serve only to strip away the weakest parts and allow the mutation of
system into a stronger form. The “boom-bust cycle of capitalism” is just one of the “more
obvious examples of this logical necessity” (Cazdyn 649). Therefore, people with the power to
reshape relations unfortunately simply become agents for a new set of market relations, as any
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political potential for radical change that is summoned by the crisis of sleep in Black Moon
dissipates.
The new proto-society formed following Black Moon’s crisis unfortunately reinforces
sleep as a new state of control under its leader Lee. At the novel’s close, Biggs and a small
group of scientists are the only functioning community we have been made aware of in the
wake of the insomnia apocalypse. Yet the cracks of this proto-society, through its vulnerability
to tyranny, are evident. Foremost, Biggs, whom the rest of the community purportedly relies
on to remain sane, is kept against his will by Lee. He is confined to remain in the institute due
to Lee’s insistence of his status as an “amazing gift” as one of the only remaining dreamers,
and because to release him would “put [him] in danger” (Calhoun 270). Yet this does not ring
particularly true as it is suggested that the sleepless are dying off from starvation or exhaustion.
As the only dreamer in a dreamless society, rather than become a leader or visionary, he instead
becomes involuntary dream cattle. Lee also demonstrates mass deception of the institute
members. Morales, a member of the security team that have become a kind of police force in
this institutional society, relates to Biggs that Felicia is dead (272). Yet hope at her survival is
stoked to maintain morale and keep order in Lee’s “cathedral to dreams” (261). The worrying
spectre of authoritarian control thus looms over the only remaining society in the novel. It
disregards the sleep crisis as possibility for radical change, instead constructing the potential
for an even darker form of relations in the form of a police state characterised by deception,
detention and authoritarian control.
This final society reorganises sleep, but instead of revitalising and replenishing, it has
become a form of hard control over the community. This is achieved through apparatus of the
‘sleep implants’ that all of the sleepless need to be able to able to achieve unconsciousness.
Biggs describes that the pattern of sleep among the institute community who sleep at “exactly
ten at night, when the switch was flipped in their dreamless heads” (260). This becomes most
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disturbing when one considers several possibilities: that these implants could all be controlled
remotely, that perhaps not all implants are set at the same standardized time, that these implants
could be activated outside of the standardized times etc. The choice to sleep, instead of being
eroded as it is in contemporary American society through the imperative to consume for 5, 10,
30 minutes more, is entirely gone. As Jonathan Crary decries, contemporary America is at the
mercy of a life where nothing is “ever fundamentally “off” and there is never an actual state of
rest” (12). This is due to a “prevalent linguistic figure” of the “sleep mode” ubiquitous to
contemporaneous ‘smart devices’: phones, tablets, ‘phablets’, laptops, computers etc. (12).
Instead, a new order of relations has utterly relinquished the choice of the subject to sleep as
all are simultaneously and instantaneously forced into a state of unconsciousness come 10pm.
Black Moon can therefore only imagine that the increasing pressure market consumption will
place upon sleep will produce a new set of relations even more catastrophic and intensely
controlled.
The protagonist’s previous employment, advertising, comes back to haunt the text in a
sense, as we wonder how complicit he is with the current crisis. After acknowledging the
quantity of drugs Americans consume as “seeds of the apocalypse” (Calhoun 5), he recalls his
advertising “agency days” working on “pharmaceutical accounts” (5). He observes that
“notions of truth and fact were never more elastic” in the face of advertising (3). This distortion
of reality that has here turned most people into insomniacs, bears parallels to the distortions of
reality witnessed daily in American pharmaceutical advertising. Biggs however attempts to
remediate this crisis as it manifests itself in his sleepless wife, precisely by further attempting
to distort her reality. He attempts to sooth his wife into sleep by giving her a faux pill, “magic
beans” he glibly dubs them, on the assumption that her illness is psychosomatic (5). Biggs is
“banking on the climate of heightened susceptibility […meaning that the sleepless have] lost
their ability to distinguish fact from fiction” (3). It is “a great time for […] advertisers – his
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abandoned trade” (3). Yet not only does the drug not lull her to sleep, his performance causes
his wife to break a lamp upon his head and leave his life forever by the following morning. In
this way, the progression of the narrative would suggest that it is not, as Biggs suspects, too
many pills that has caused this crisis. Advertising, commodity fetishism and - at a systemic
level - the logic of the market, is to blame. I would posit that the logic of distorting reality for
commercial game has bankrupted any sense of coherent reality. We witness this at play as the
previous techniques of distorting reality no longer function to preserve a community that is
rapidly deteriorating from sleep deprivation.
In portraying the pressures placed upon sleep by contemporary neoliberal America,
Black Moon’s spatial progression towards Las Vegas is logical. In their flight following their
theft of mass amounts of sleeping pills, what they speculate will be worth more than gold,
Jordan and Chase almost inevitably find themselves in Las Vegas. Now in the city that never
sleeps, Chase describes it as the “dreamlike city [...] blazing in the distance. It read like an
illuminated monument of wakefulness – a hive of unsleeping souls” (67). The blazing quality
of Las Vegas highlights one of the main concerns facing North Americans living in cities:
rising levels of light pollution. It is estimated that “80 per cent of North Americans can no
longer see the Milky Way at night” (Stevens). Las Vegas in many ways represents North
American artificial lighting taken to its absolute extreme, with millions of neon lights adorning
almost every building. It is nothing short of an orgy of gratuitous artificial light. It is understood
that humans possess an “endogenous circadian rhythm”, disruption of which often leads to
disturbed sleep (Stevens). It is perhaps then understandable that its denizens are unable to sleep.
Jordan and Chase meet such a worker who cleans at night and wakes up at “three thirty in the
afternoon” (Calhoun 70). Assuming a North American average of 7 hours a night, she likely
goes to bed at 10am. This profound disruption of circadian rhythm speaks to the wider
disconnection from natural states. Elsewhere in the novel, the Institute seeks, as a collective,
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to attempt to return to our “natural state”, although what that would look like when all are
required to have cybernetic implants simply to sleep is perhaps bemusing (Calhoun 268). Las
Vegas as invoked in Black Moon helps to articulate the growing technological pressure placed
on sleep by widespread artificial lighting in North America.
Sleep Donation, alternatively, imagines a world where neoliberalist pressure has finally
transformed sleep into a quantifiable, tradable and most significantly, exploitable commodity.
Rather than imagine the wrecking and dissolution of sleep as the end of the world, Sleep
Donation explores it quite literally as business as usual. The banality seems to logically
extrapolate current attitudes to sleep, such as how lack of sleep is “commonly described
through terms with distinctly capitalist overtones”: sleep debt, sleep deficit, sleep loss etc.
(Williams 50). This has produced Sleep Donation’s world wherein those who possess total
insomnia “file for sleep bankruptcy” (Russel 57). Insomnia generates capital at huge “Night
Worlds” that “cater to sleepless ones with black market remedies: “moonlamps”, “cave
medicines” and even “bio-cures” such as Songbirds (184). These are part carnival, part
sleepless communities and part grey market for sleep ‘cures’, representing the commoditisation
of sleep in its purest form. Elsewhere, this new imperative to commercialise sleep has spawned
other commercial enterprises, such as “The Poppy Fields”, which sell access to a strain that
produces “aromatic hypnotic” (1296). You are given the option of a standard plot, “forty-five
dollars” gets you an “upgrade to plot twelve directly under the moon”, with the further option
for “sheets and a pillow” and/or, “poppy tea” (1331). The protagonist muses that this is
“America’s great talent”, to “generate desires that would never have occurred” naturally and
cause them to become so “painfully real” that “money becomes a fiction” (1331). The Poppy
Fields represent the sum of neoliberal logic applied to the commodity of sleep in its totality:
you are free to choose any ‘unique’ combination of consumption as long as you consume. Sleep
Donation thus develops sleep as the site of anxiety around aggressive commercialisation of all
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primal urges. Rather than the apocalypse, it is a crisis that merely reproduces the same
neoliberal relations in a new format.
Like Black Moon, Sleep Donation refuses to lay the blame for the sleep crisis it
dramatises at one specific cause, yet also gestures strongly at potential suspects. The hysteria
and fear-culture of North American TV media is one such suspect, with the protagonist
referring to the “germ of fear” that “newscasters transmit” to “millions” (Russel 488).
Amusingly, the news media of the text is self-aware of its own complicity: “according to these
professional Cassandras, sleep has been chased off the globe by our twenty-four-hour news
cycle” (165). Through comparison to Cassandra, the protagonist seems very aware of the
opportunity that crisis represents for the media, describing her initial scepticism that the “crisis
seemed more like TV hyperbole designed to keep us glued to our screens, watching mattress
commercials” (165). As Crary notes “television had colonized important arenas of lived time,
but neoliberalism demanded that there be a far more methodical extraction of value from
television time, and in principle from every waking hour” (83). Using this logic, the hysteria
would seem to be intentionally stoked by “fusillades of educated speculation erupt[ing] on our
TVs” to create a positive feedback loop wherein Americans sleep less and watch TV more,
spiking ratings and increasing advertising revenues (Russel 589). The violent language
associated with these media reports - fusillades recalling a bombardment of artillery - would
seem to tap into a concerted attack by the media upon “our circadian rhythms” (Russel 165).
The sensational violence of the media disrupts the “old, glad harmonies that leapt through us”
and interrupts “the master clock that syncs us to one another […and to] the sun and moon” to
bring you breaking news (165). Sleep Donation therefore places sleep at a crisis point by
presenting the current North American 24/7 news cycle as culpable to the death of sleep.
The perversity of market logic reveals itself in its ability to reduce a new-born child to
cattle, and its sleep to a kind of petroleum. Baby A is the designated Sleep Corps code for a
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baby donator whose sleep is a “lifesaving […] cure for insomnia” (Russell 1063). She is mined
for her “blackflow” that “gushes out”, “black sleep” “piped in” that functions as miracle cure
(1063). The petroleum language here is unmistakable, and her incredibly valuable resource is
quickly commodified in language as a pseudo-oil substance. The protagonist promises “never
to overdraw” the child to her parents, yet at the same time is aware that such a promise is made
while “people are plunging their straws” to mine shale, crude oil, uranium, with “indiscriminate
and borderless appetite” (1482). The ethics are further darkened when one considers that it is
not possible for a child to consent. Instead, the parents are coerced to provide legal permission.
Baby A’s personhood is further minimized in the assigning of her code and the child’s father
comments that it “always sounded to me like some damn sports drink” (1215). The damning
conclusion that the protagonist draws is that: “one day soon she [Baby A] will wake up to what
we’ve done, and what we’ve taken from her” (1478). This is a revealing comment considering
Sleep Corps illicitly sold “units of her sleep […] for a dollar sum that left [the protagonist]
reeling” (983). The logic of the narrative reveals that is naïve to assume such a precious
resource would not be misused in the pursuit of profit and expansion. As such, even the sleep
of a new-born can fall prey to the prevailing neoliberalist faith in the market, commercialising
and dismantling the final natural barrier to a kind of hyper capitalism.
These texts place pressure upon a secure notion of sleep, both displaying the increasing
stress placed upon it by producing sleep crises. They demonstrate a cultural registering of a
dominant sleep-negative agenda that neoliberalism increasingly asserts. Sleep becomes a fertile
bed for anxieties of the modern life and work to take seed. Sleep Donation can only
pessimistically envision a world where, as sleep is increasingly eroded, it becomes a highly
sought after resource to be bought and sold, not dissimilar from oil. Black Moon, on the other
hand, cannot imagine anything but an apocalyptic resetting of society, resulting from the
eventual murder of sleep at the hands of capital - yet this new society offers little hope of
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progression. Ultimately, these texts engage with the pressure placed upon sleep by market
forces, yet lack the ambition or vision to imagine any tangible alternative. In engaging with a
potentially radical form of time that leads us elsewhere than to the things we own or are told
we need these authors have stumbled in generating much political energy. Perhaps, somewhat
ironically, what is called for is a collective need to dream bigger in response to the end of sleep
– to try and create a third sleep-positive agenda disconnected from profit motive.
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Works Cited
Calhoun, Kenneth. Black Moon. Kindle edition. New York: Hogarth, 2014.
Russell, Karen. Sleep Donation. Kindle edition. United States: Atavist , 2014.
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Kindle edition. London: Verso,
2013.
Cazdyn, E. "Disaster, Crisis, Revolution." South Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (2007): 647-62.
Web. 23 Jan. 2017.
Williams, Simon J. The politics of sleep: governing (un)consciousness in the late modern age.
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. E-Book.
McGurl, Mark. "The Zombie Renaissance." N 1. Issue 9: Bad Money, 05 May 2014. Web. 26
Jan. 2017. <https://nplusonemag.com/issue-9/reviews/the-zombie-renaissance/>.
Jameson, Fredric. "Future City”. New Left Review 21, May-June 2003. New Left Review 102,
November-December 2016. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Jan. 2017.
MacLaren, Erik. Edited by Amanda Lautieri. "Xanax History and Statistics." DrugAbuse.com.
N.p., 06 Oct. 2016. Web. 27 Jan. 2017.
Smith, Kayla. "Xanax Withdrawal and Detox - Symptoms and Duration." Addiction Center.
N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2017.
"The Employment Situation 2016." Bureau of Labor statistics. US Department of Labor, 6 Jan.
2016. Web. 25 Jan. 2017.
Stevens, Richard G. "BBC - Future - What rising light pollution means for our health." BBC
News. The Conversation, 17 June 2016. Web. 21 Jan. 2017.
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Complicating temporality in Atwood Oryx and Crake and DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
In this essay I am going to explore the portrayal of aspects of the future in Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, both published in 2003. These novels portray
an ambiguous temporality, seemingly both to occupy the reader’s present even over a decade
after publication, and present a darkly speculative, perhaps even dystopian vision of the future,
recognisable as utilising extrapolated aspects of everyday experience. By playing with the
novels’ narrative timelines, as well as through both Jimmy/Snowman and Eric Packer
physically taking journeys to spaces that occupy their pasts, Atwood and DeLillo complicate
ideas of time, memory and progress. I will argue that these novels present apocalypse as
dialectical – both a catastrophic ‘end of the world’ scenario, and a necessary catharsis from
which the future can be built. The novels appear to exist in a liminal space, expressing both
hope and despair at the prospect of revolution and about post-apocalyptic life. Whilst commonly
thought of as “the complete final destruction of the world, as described in the biblical book of
Revelation”, or “an event involving destruction or damage on a catastrophic scale”,
etymologically, ‘apocalypse’ derives from the Greek apokalupsis, meaning to ‘uncover or
reveal’, as in the disclosure of knowledge (“Apocalypse” Oxford English Dictionary Online).
It is thus interesting to consider how an apocalyptic event, while something destructive, may be
something that humanity can learn from.
In order to understand Atwood’s portrayal of the future as complicating temporality, it is
useful to consider how the world portrayed mirrors our own, and thus acts as a warning to her
readership about the potential of apocalypse. In Oryx and Crake, the apocalyptic event is the
release of a disease by Crake. This causes a fatal pandemic which kills all of humankind
except for Snowman (formerly known as Jimmy), the sole survivor who is left in charge of
genetically modified post ‘humans’ known as Crakers. The world is overrun by genetically
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mutated animals such as ‘wolvogs,’ ‘pigoons’ and resources are running out, with Snowman
slowly starving to death. He is alone and haunted by the memories of his friend, Crake, and
his former lover, Oryx. Katherine V. Snyder suggests that this “bleak, post-apocalyptic world
[…] makes the socio-economic disparities and biotechnological threats of his past, a past in
which he was still “Jimmy” and a past that stands as the reader’s possibly inevitable future,
look rosy by comparison” (471). However, the world portrayed through Snowman’s
memories of pre-pandemic life would likely also be seen as typically dystopic to a
contemporary reader, with its environmental issues, genetic modification and consumer
culture. Setting up Snowman’s “rosy” past as our future warns the reader of the fact that time
is running out, and our current behaviour may lead us to this apocalyptic position (471).
Atwood suggests that “[e]very novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The
what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, what if we continue down the road we are already on?
How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?”
(“Perfect Storms” 2). Atwood’s apocalypse is a warning to her readers about their current
behaviour, suggesting we can pre-emptively learn from this potential future apocalypse, and
not have to experience it ourselves. Snyder suggests that “[i]n order to grasp the caution
offered by the tale, we must see the imagined future in our actual present and also recognize
the difference between now and the future as imagined. Thus the reader of such fiction must
sustain a kind of double consciousness with respect both to the fictionality of the world
portrayed and to its potential as our own world’s future” (470). In this respect, the reader
must read the novel as both a present, and a future narrative, which complicates any stable
categorisation of the novel as science fiction or a futuristic dystopia.
Atwood herself describes “Oryx and Crake [as] a speculative fiction, not a science fiction
proper […] it invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent” (“Perfect
Storms” 2). Snyder suggests that “speculative fiction takes what already exists and makes an
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imaginative leap into the future, following current socio-cultural, political, or scientific
developments to their potentially devastating conclusions” (470). When Snowman describes
his pre-pandemic life, it is easy to see Atwood’s extrapolations from our current position.
Communities are split up into ‘compounds’ – gated areas for the wealthy and intelligent –
and the ‘pleeblands’, which are little more than unruly wastelands. Gated communities are
increasingly springing up across the USA and the world, often, as in Atwood’s novel,
physically barring the poor and less privileged from better education and healthcare.
Government authority has been replaced by large biotech companies’ security services, such
as CorpSeCorps, a play on the word ‘corpse’, which turns out to be chillingly prophetic.
DeLillo suggested in 2001 that “[i]n the past decade the surge of capital markets has
dominated discourse and shaped global consciousness. Multinational corporations have come
to seem more vital and influential than governments” (“In the Ruins of the Future”). The
increased influence of the biotech companies in the structure of Atwood’s ‘future’ world –
the compounds, the education system, security, the flow of money and products – can already
been seen to have its beginnings in our present, with the influence of companies and
brands. Ecologically, the pre-apocalyptic world of the novel is in ruins, as the “sea-level rose
so quickly” that beaches “got washed away” (Oryx and Crake 71), “rains stopped coming”,
and forest fires, tidal waves and twisters became more and more frequent (72). The same can
also be seen to be happening today due to global warming, deforestation and pollution of the
environment. Genetic engineering is commonplace in Oryx and Crake, helping to prolong
life, enhance the body and provide enough food, at least for those within the compounds, in
the face of dwindling natural supplies. Oryx and Crake was in fact published on the fiftieth
anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA, and in the same year
the whole human genome was first sequenced (Howells). There are currently many ethical
concerns and barriers surrounding genetic modification, although Atwood provides us with a
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future in which this may no longer be the case. This mastery of science in the novel comes
with issues of access and affordability, as the only way the poor will see these cures is by
being paid to take part in clinical trials, often with painful or indeed fatal results. Eric Cazdyn
suggests the same can be seen in reality today where “who lives and who dies comes down to
simple affordability and access that cuts across national borders. “Sorry, we simply can’t
afford to save your life” is said to the dying. […] [S]o many are dying not because capitalism
is failing but because it is succeeding, because it is fulfilling its logic—a fact that seems more
and more visible today than at any other time in recent history” (656). Atwood’s vision, then,
appears to be how we already operate. Cazdyn suggests that disaster and crises like terminal
illnesses come with a desire to preempt and control them, which can be seen in the novel as
the corporations begin to generate disease and disaster, in order to sell cures and procedures
for profit. Cazdyn also suggests that reality culture is often informed by this desire, as “by
manufacturing disasters and crises, reality culture programs effectively attempt to preempt
them” (658) but that “the danger here is that once a proven market for such crisis events
emerges, the events must then be produced at all cost. It is not too difficult to imagine the
dystopian dimension to all of this, such as the production of crime and murder” (658-9),
which can of course be seen in Oryx and Crake, as euthanasia, beheadings, child
pornography and riots are presented as entertainment. The rise in reality culture, as well as
the profit able to be made selling new products and procedures mean arts and humanities are
vastly relegated in importance; when Jimmy, who is a “word [person]” goes to study at
Martha Graham, he sees first-hand the results of the commercialisation of education and lack
of regard held for culture, comparative to the flashy, high-tech Watson-Crick that Crake ends
up at (Oryx and Crake 220). Even his friend Crake tells him there is no reason for art at a
biological level except as “[a]n amplifier. A stab at getting laid” (198). The beginnings of this
can arguably be seen today, with the majority of funding and research being channelled into
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STEM subjects, which are seen as more profitable. Contradictorily, however, whilst reality
culture is certainly dystopian in nature in this instance, Cazdyn also suggests that “reality
culture offers a utopian dimension; it marks a collective desire for openness, for a
spontaneous eruption of the unexpected, […] the apocalyptic, the revolutionary, and the
Houdini act that performs the impossible escape from our intolerable lives” (659, emphasis
mine). Jimmy and Crake can certainly be seen to do this in the novel, getting high and
watching executions and porn to distract themselves from unhappy home lives. Equally
today, many people enjoy reality TV as a form of ‘escapism’ from stressful work lives. The
use of the words “apocalyptic” and “revolutionary” in close succession recall the “the dual
connotations of apocalypse: it’s popular, contemporary association with a catastrophic end of
the world, and its classical association with the millennial revelation of a new age” (Snyder
486). Hence, the crisis of the pandemic in Oryx and Crake can almost been seen to be built
into this way of life, and in a way, desired and required, much like the boom-bust cycle of
capitalism and finance in Cosmopolis. Thus the “boom in reality culture (in both production
and consumption) [can be seen] as expressing not only the nightmares but also the social
dreams of the current historical moment” (Cazdyn 659) in Oryx and Crake, as well as in our
present-day reality.
The same desire for apocalypse, at least on a personal and financial level, can be seen in Don
DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. This is particularly evident in Packer’s desire to become one with the
technological and capitalist system instead of becoming belated and outmoded. Just as
Atwood complicates the categories of utopia and dystopia and past, present and future,
Cosmopolis plays with temporality and the idea of ‘crisis’. In the novel, the story is split into
two narratives: Eric Packer’s journey through New York to get a haircut, and the confessions
of Benno Levin, which work backwards from examining Packer’s dead body to his vague
plans for killing him. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that Packer almost wishes
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into existence his own killer, who is rather “ambivalent about killing him” until Packer is
conveniently dropped outside a car park opposite where Levin is squatting (Cosmopolis 154).
Thus, Eric’s journey across New York becomes a journey of self-fulfilling prophecy as he
loses his wealth and is killed. Eric’s destruction appears almost predicted throughout,
particularly by his theorist, Vija Kinski, and the visions he sees of the future in his wristwatch
and spycam, initially just moments ahead, but eventually, a few hours ahead of the current
moment. Financial and technological time is seen as being consistently ahead of everyday
clock-based time in this novel. Kinski and Eric for example, watch the electronic display of
market information, with its “hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals,
stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words, of multinational news, all too fleet to be
absorbed”, although they both know that “the speed is the point […] the thrust, the future”
and the flow of information is “pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually
unreadable” (80). The use of the words “sacred, ritually unreadable” suggest that in Eric’s
world, finance, technology and the ability to predict and control the future have replaced
traditional spiritual ideas of hope and faith (80). As mankind can predict the stock markets
and invent increasingly powerful technology, there is the suggestion that the future is being
manufactured by mankind, banishing luck, hope and chance. DeLillo suggests, in an article
written in the wake of 9/11, that “[t]he materials and methods we devise make it possible for
us to claim our future. We don't have to depend on God or the prophets or other
astonishments. We are the astonishment. The miracle is what we ourselves produce, the
systems and networks that change the way we live and think” (“In the Ruins of the Future” ).
Conversely, however, there is the suggestion that technology is operating within a disturbing
inertia, “constantly in the future” , but simultaneously belated due to the constant rapid
advancements in technology (DeLillo “In the Ruins of the Future”). Therefore, Randy Laist
suggests, Eric always views it:
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“in terms of its approaching obsolescence, […] so deftly accelerated that it has always
already passed itself, leaving the physical world behind. The most cutting-edge piece
of technology is already backwards and outmoded by the time it appears because the
pace of the techno-scientific imagination bounds ahead of a debased present that has
been left behind by an evermore vivid future” (263).
The world of finance and technology then, is so fast paced as to outpace the physical present,
hence this novel is also situated in a triple consciousness of past, present and future. This is
also reflected in how Eric himself is so inextricably tied to the technology around him, that he
himself becomes belated and left behind by his cyber-self in his spycam and wristwatch.
Laist argues that “Eric’s chronic impatience with the sluggish failure of the degraded present
to catch up with the imminent future is co-extensive with a wish for the annihilation of the
world itself”, and thus by extension, his own annihilation (264). In being perpetually behind
his digital image, Eric himself becomes “a derivative atavism in relation to the translucent
cyber-self” (268). The use of the word atavism is interesting, as Snowman in Oryx and Crake
can also be seen as such. Snyder suggests that he is “cast away between a human past and a
post-human future, cut off from the past yet unable to move beyond it. Like the abominable
legend after which he renames himself, Snowman is a relic of a lost world, a postapocalyptic
atavism who has lived past his own time and conceivably past the human epoch” (472).
Where Snowman, as the supposed last of humanity, risks being usurped by the post-human
Crakers, Eric is facing “usurpation […] by his cybernetic twin self” (Laist 269). Eric’s death,
as well as his financial losses, seems simultaneously ruinous and necessary, as technology
overtakes human experience. Laist suggests that “technology offers human beings a version
of the future in which there is no death. People die, technology advances. If people can only
identify themselves literally enough with technology; if people can make the definitive
conversion into digital bits, than death will be no more” (268). Eric must die, in order to
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become a part of the technological system, as he himself expresses in his desire to become
immortal and “live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant
spin, as consciousness saved from void” (Cosmopolis 206). In joining with technology then,
Eric can move outside time – no longer belated – and become immortal and ever evolving,
like technology itself. The necessity of apocalypse in both novels can be understood in terms
of Cazdyn’s definition of ‘crisis’. He suggests that “there is something necessary about a
crisis […] crises are built right into many systems themselves; systems are structured so that
crises will occur, strengthening and reproducing the systems themselves. The boom-bust
cycle of capitalism is only one of the more obvious examples of this logical necessity” (649).
Considering the pre-apocalyptic world of Oryx and Crake, Crake could be seen to do
something similar: he creates a crisis to reduce the human population to maximise resources
and minimise wastage and pollution, and give his new species the best chance of survival in
the ecologically damaged world – a chance to totally start over as a (modified) species. In
Cosmopolis, Vija Kinski says something to the same effect about the rioters in New York:
they “are a fantasy generated by the market”, “[i]t breeds these men and women. They are
necessary to the system they despise. […] This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate
the system” (DeLillo 90). The rioters, then, are not separate from Eric Packer and his world
of finance, but a part of him and it, hence the affinity he feels for them – wishing to join them
and finding it “exhilarating” (97) to see they have been reading the same poetry as him, in
which “a rat became the unit of currency” (96). When Eric sees the man on fire, however, he
feels that “[t]he market was not total. It could not claim this name or assimilate his act. […]
This was a thing outside its reach” (99-100). Laist suggests that “this ultimate gesture of self-
destruction appeals to Eric as an ultimate possibility for his own existence. Indeed, in the
wake of this protest, Eric’s actions turn increasingly self-destructive, as if he is bent on
becoming the sacrifice that Vija suggested the future calls for. With increasing momentum,
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Eric slouches toward his own self-immolation” (270). Eric almost conjures into being his
own assassination and his own personal apocalypse, in order to assimilate himself into the
capitalist system more fully and reinvigorate the system itself, using the logic of the ‘boom-
and-bust’ crisis. The end of the novel, where Eric watches a vision of his own dead body in
an ambulance through his wristwatch as he waits for Levin to shoot him is “really only a
more explicit rendering of the implication of all of Eric’s visions of the future in which
human experience becomes redundant and obsolete” (Laist 269). The same can be said for
Snowman, in Oryx and Crake, as he believes himself to be the last human being alive and
thus does not write down his experiences, as “any reader he can possibly imagine is in the
past” (46), as Crakers cannot read. The obsolescence of human experience appears irrelevant
to the larger natural or capitalist system, hence the necessity of apocalypse to reinvigorate the
larger system appears more important than personal notions of memory or experience.
Temporality is complicated in Oryx and Crake by the contrast of official socially constructed
‘human’ time, which is absent in the post-apocalyptic world, and evolutionary, deep,
historical time, as well as the intermingling of Jimmy’s past, and Snowman’s present through
reminiscence. This complication of time also complicates the novel’s presentation as
dystopic, utopic or in between as the endlessness of deep historical time gives the sense that
perhaps humankind can start over again and improve. The ‘Crakers’, with little concept of
time beyond day and night, the tides and the seasons, are attuned to a deeper, natural,
historical sense of time. They continue to grow and breed and evolve against this backdrop,
unlike Snowman who, in clinging to his past and its ‘official time’ is lost in this new post-
apocalyptic system. Now ‘out of time’, he can position himself only in terms of his
memories. The movement in his memories through his life and towards ‘Paradice’ is also
echoed in his physical present journey back to the ruined compound for supplies. Roman
Bartosch suggests that by “doubling the movement towards ‘Paradice’ […] the text presents a
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repetitive pattern that seemingly contradicts the apocalyptic claims of transhistorical
singularity. In fact, the text suggests by this structure as well as by presenting the Crakers’
evolutionary development that history is about to repeat itself already,” such as when the
Crakers make an effigy of Snowman to guide him back to them (241). Temporal reality of the
novel, then, is complicated by its relation to the reader. Bartosch suggests that by using
present-day phenomena projected into the future, a future which is the past to Jimmy,
Atwood “create[s] a sense of urgency (to react before it is too late) and [also] employ[s] a
feeling of (postnatural) deadlock” (223), as the post-apocalypse time seems almost timeless
and without end, with little to distinguish each day from the next. This is emphasised by
Snowman’s watch, which he continues to look at despite being broken: “[a] blank face is
what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of
official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is” (Oryx and Crake 3). This is the
beginning of the novel, and the ending echoes this with the final line: “[f]rom habit he lifts
his watch; it shows him its blank face. Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go”, suggesting
the cyclical nature of time when there is no allotted work hours, other people or points of
reference (Oryx and Crake 433). Bartosch suggests that presenting “a vision of timelessness
that contradicts the message of urgency” (223) creates a tension between utopia and dystopia.
Edward James argues that in the modern day, the utopia has not disappeared but “mutated”
(219) into something like a dystopian vision. Atwood, in her invention of the term ‘Ustopia’,
seems to agree. She writes that “Ustopia is a world I made up by combining utopia and
dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains
a latent version of the other” (“The Road to Ustopia”). Atwood suggests that “true to form,
there is a little attempt at utopia in [her dystopia] as well: a group of quasi-humans who have
been genetically engineered so that they will never suffer from the ills that plague Homo
sapiens sapiens” (“The Road to Ustopia”). The reason, of course, that the society of the
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Crakers is ‘perfect’ is not because of laws or governance or social organisation, but because
they have been designed that way and cannot choose otherwise; the utopic and dystopic is
complicated. Equally, in the pre-apocalyptic society, the human body can moulded and
perfected through surgery and pills, and cured of most ills through advanced science.
However, this is of course only applied to the rich, and the pill is marketed as the ideal
solution to population problems, STIs and low sex drives. However, the BlyssPluss pill ends
up being the very thing used to administer and transmit the fatal virus that ends up killing
most of the world’s population. Even the ‘utopian’ aspects in Oryx and Crake can be seen to
be problematic. Atwood suggests that “this seems to be where Ustopia is moving in real life
as well: through genetic engineering, we will be able to rid ourselves of inherited diseases,
and ugliness, and mental illness, and ageing, and … who knows? The sky's the limit. Or so
we are being told. What is the little dystopia concealed within such utopian visions of the
perfected human body – and mind? Time will tell” (“The Road to Ustopia”). This then,
functions as a warning to the readership that what is marketed to us as wonderful
advancements may too contain dystopic elements. Even the arguably hopeful ending of Oryx
and Crake is complicated in terms of the utopian/dystopian aspects. Snowman learns that
there is a group of three humans nearby, and he goes to approach them, unsure how to react.
His foot is infected, and so the reader is not sure if he himself will live or die, and, if he lives,
whether he will rejoin the humans and attempt to rebuild humanity, or instead kill them in
order to allow himself and the Crakers a better chance at survival. However, this survival is
one that gestures towards repeating history in the Crakers’ manufacturing of art. Snyder
suggests that the novel’s final words “Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go” (Atwood
Oryx and Crake 433) “signal both the strong possibility of a final ending and also the slim
but real chance of a new beginning, one that repeats the past with a difference in order to
make possible a future imperfect” (476-7). Danette DiMarco suggests that the name
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‘Snowman’, a reference to the Abominable Snowman with its “mythic and multi-directional
footprints (they point backward as they move forward)” (170), represents his “liminal
position and potential power-to repeat a past cycle of aggression against nature in the name of
personal profit, or to re-imagine a way for future living grounded in a genuine concern for
others” (170). Here, Atwood offers an ambiguous and thus hopeful ending to this novel, in
which the human race may continue to build a new future.
The ending of Cosmopolis, meanwhile, is also ambiguous. We are left with the image of Eric
Packer “waiting for the shot to sound” (DeLillo 209), but through the vision in his wristwatch
we can already see how the (at least immediate) future will play out: with Eric lying in a
hospital morgue with a tag reading “Male Z […] the designation for the bodies of
unidentified men” (206). Due to the conversation earlier in the novel between Eric and
Kinski, the reader is left feeling that despite the initial problems Eric may cause in his
decisions regarding the yen, ultimately, this will invigorate the financial system. The
capitalist system is seen as somewhat self-perpetuating, enveloping and utilising even rogue
capitalists and anti-capitalist protestors for its own benefit. Despite Packer’s death, (a
personal apocalypse) and a revelation, there is the suggestion that the world of finance will
continue on, ultimately without issue. Like Atwood’s novel however, Cosmopolis can also
function as a warning to the present-day reader about the possibilities of technology. Kinski
suggests in the novel that “[t]echnology […] helps us make our fate […] [b]ut it is also
crouched and undecidable. It can go either way” (95), either, as Laist suggests, “toward the
future or toward the ruins of the future” (260). Science and technology no longer seem to be
within the control of people to decide their own fates, instead, as in Eric’s world, “fate
belongs not to human beings, but to technologies. Rather than enabling you to seize your
future, technology is the future that seizes you” (Laist 269). The same can also be said for the
application of science in Oryx and Crake – science has gone beyond human control, and, in
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the case of the mutated animals, modified Crakers and new viruses, are multiplying and
spreading all by themselves. Jason Cowley suggests in a cover story for New Statesman that
we are living in “the time of fear” in our present day, as “we are, in some way, prisoners of
science, powerless to prevent its hold over our lives (18). For science increasingly alters the
way we think about the world and about ourselves: we know that it can be a source of both
liberation and destruction” (18). In Eric’s’s identification with technology, he brings about
his own destruction, but the opportunities of this technology and the feelings the system
inspires can be seen as points of hope in this book. The protesters are seen as admirable
through Ericr’s eyes, as “[t]he urge to destroy is a creative urge” – but this is true both in
anarchist and capitalist thought according to Kinski, and so there is the suggestion once again
that in the future, there is potential for things to go either way and for change to occur (92).
Eric Cazdyn suggests that it is from a moment of rupture, such as the rise of the yen and
death of Eric, that revolution can occur, as “[r]evolution […] is that moment when a new set
of relations takes hold within a different system” , a system that can only be changed by
bringing down the last one, perhaps (649). It is after a moment of catastrophe, that a new start
can potentially be established, as in Oryx and Crake. Whether the system of society will
change as a result of this catastrophe is hard to say, and so both novels end ambiguously. Will
things return to the way they always have been? Will capitalism continue in its boom and
bust cycle, despite its casualties, or is there any chance of change? Will technology lead us
towards the future, or to the ruins of the future? Will Snowman rebuild society the same as
before with his fellow humans, or give the Crakers’ more utopian society a better chance by
killing his fellow men? The novels leave these questions to the reader, forcing the reader to
envisage their own idea of what the future will be in these novels.
I would argue that even as both Atwood and DeLillo sought to write speculatively about the
near future, but ultimately leave the resolution to the reader, they captured the feeling of the
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moment and thus began to write “parables of the present” (Cowley 19). Jason Cowley
suggests that “[t]he purpose of an ambitious novel or film is to document the present, to offer
a sense of the defining particulars of the age – its tensions and preoccupations, its corruptions
and opportunities. It should carry an imprint of the culture in which we live. If nothing else, it
should bring us news of what it means to be here, now” (19). I would argue that by allowing
the present reader to speculate about the future, the feeling of the present can be revealed. By
writing about the protagonists’ pasts and presents and speculating about their futures, as well
as tying it the reader’s own experiences of the present day and their fears for the future, both
Atwood and DeLillo are able to collapse the boundaries between past/present/future. The
catastrophes in each novel, whilst of course awful, can also both be seen to give rise to new
possibilities. The apocalyptic event – whether on a personal or global scale – can be seen to
be able to usher in some kind of revolution. The term ‘apocalypse’ can thus be seen both as
an obliteration of the established order, and a chance to learn from it and change the future,
depending on the choices made by the present population.
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Works Cited
“Apocalypse”. Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, n.d. Web. 03 January
2016.
<http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/apocalypse>
Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood: the road to Ustopia.” The Guardian. 14 Oct. 2011.
Web. 20
Dec. 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-
road-to-
ustopia>
-------------. Oryx and Crake. London: Virago Press, 2013. Print.
-------------. “Perfect Storms: Writing Oryx and Crake.” http://www
.oryxandcrake.co.uk/perfectstorm.asp?p=4
Bartosch, Roman. “"Zero Time" and the Apocalypse: Postnatural Survival in Oryx and Crake
and The
Year of the Flood.” Nature, Culture and Literature. 9 (2013): 219-254. Web. 21
Dec. 2015.
Cazdyn, Eric. “Crisis, Disaster, Revolution.” South Atlantic Quarterly. 106.4 (Fall 2007):
647-662. Web.
20 Dec. 2015.
Conte, Joseph M. “Writing amid the ruins: 9/11 and Cosmopolis.” The Cambridge
Companion to Don
DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
179-192. Print.
Cowley, Jason. “A Time of Fear.” New Statesman. 132.4647 (21 July 2003): 18-20. Web. 21
Dec.
2015.
DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. London: Picador, 2011. Print.
----------------. "In the Ruins of the Future." The Guardian. 22 Dec. 2001. Web. 20 Dec. 2015.
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo>
DiMarco, Danette. “Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: homo faber and the Makings of a New
Beginning in Oryx and Crake.” Papers on Language and Literature. 41.2
(Spring 2005):
170-195. Web. 21 Dec. 2015.
Howells, Coral Ann. “Margaret Atwood’s dystopian visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx
and
Crake.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann
Howells.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 161-175. Print.
James, Edward. “Utopias and anti-utopias”. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction.
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Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Press, 2003.
219-229. Print.
Knight, Peter. “DeLillo, Postmodernism, Postmodernity.” The Cambridge Companion to Don
DeLillo.
Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 27-40.
Print.
Laist, Randy. “The Concept of Disappearance in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.” Critique:
Studies in
Contemporary Fiction. 51.3 (2010): 257-275. Web. 21 Dec. 2015.
Snyder, Katherine V. ““Time to go”: The Post-apocalyptic and The Post-traumatic in
Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in the Novel. 43.3 (Winter 2011): 470-489.
Web. 21
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