As you know, my new book, Escape Philosophy: Journey's Beyond the Human Body, is available as an open-access .pdf or a lovely paperback from punctum books! You should snag a copy, if you haven't already.
Here's a playlist I put together featuring all of the songs and artists discussed in the book, including Godflesh, Deafheaven, Wolves in the Throne Room, Celtic Frost, and Jawbox, among others.
Play it loud while you read this edited excerpt from the book.
Enjoy!
Don't Believe the Hope
“The human race sucks. Human nature is smothered out by society, job, and work and school. Instincts are deleted by laws. I see people say things that contradict themselves, or people that don’t take any advantage to the gift of human life. They waste their minds on memorizing the stats of every college basketball player or how many words should be in a report when they should be using their brain on more important things. The human race isn’t worth fighting for anymore.” — Eric Harris, journal entry, May 6, 1998 [1]
“These premonitions of disaster remained with me. During my first days at home, I spent all my time on the veranda, watching the traffic move along the motorway, determined to spot the first signs of this end of the world by automobile, for which the accident had been my own private rehearsal.” — James in J.G. Ballard, Crash [2]
“Through fiction we saw the birth
Of futures yet to come
Yet in fiction lay the bones, ugly in their nakedness
Yet under this mortal sun, we cannot hide ourselves.”
— Isis, “In Fiction” [3]
“My first love was science fiction films and the music that went along with them,” Justin K. Broadrick of Godflesh says. “My next love was horror movies, and I became fixated with the brutal, dark, and brooding sounds that went along with those as well.” [4] Godflesh’s 2014 reunion record, their first release in over a decade, is called A World Lit Only by Fire. The title evokes a flaming planet, nations and nature scorched in ruin. It’s actually a reference to a book by the same name by William Manchester about the darkness of the Middle Ages. [5] Both visions work well for Godflesh’s sound: it's dark, brutal, and could have come from a tumultuous past or a post-apocalyptic future. The hard, cold sound could be bones or stones as easily as it could be bricks or concrete blocks.
"Have you ever participated in genocide?" was the question on one of the forms Broadrick filled out on his first trip to the States after 9/11. “I always said Godflesh was, to some extent, protest music. It comes from an anarcho-punk background.” Then, echoing Columbine High School gunman Eric Harris above, he adds, “but after all the idealistic sloganeering and stuff, I sort of went the opposite way. I started to feel like the human race wasn't worth saving after all.” [6] As he sings on “Life Giver Life Taker” from A World Lit Only by Fire, “the dying sun / Is all ours / It will reclaim / Our fallen earth.” [7]
Future-minded science-fiction writers have recently been comparing the dearth of mentions of the twenty-second century so far in the twenty-first to the many mentions of the twenty-first at the same point last century. [8] It is as if we can’t even imagine our future anymore, but dystopic doom was around back then, too. “I abhor humanity,” Birkin says to Ursula in D.H. Lawrence’s 1920 novel, Women in Love, “I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better.” [9]
I distinctly remember an episode of The Twilight Zone I watched as a kid. It was called “Time Enough at Last” and starred the late Burgess Meredith. I don’t remember all of it, just the end: there’s a man, a bibliophile, the last person left on earth, and he’s ecstatic because he’s surrounded by books, mounds and mounds of them. He finally breaks his reverie in order to get started reading. Then he breaks his glasses.
The trepidation of that tragic moment, recombinant with worries of the apocalypse, was a seed planted in my head. And more than any other Cold War-era image of imminent destruction splashed on the television during my childhood, the nerd in me nurtured that single idea, that the apocalypse seemed inevitable, and it did not look like a particularly good time. In fact, it looked like a tailor-made, personal purgatory.
Barry Brummett writes that apocalyptic orators “claim special knowledge of a hidden order, to advise others to make great sacrifices on the basis of that knowledge, even to predict specific times and place for the end of the world.” [10] In spite of The Twilight Zone episode, I’ve always considered myself more concerned with my own demise than with the end of the word, but the latter is clearly hanging heavy in the mass-mind. Brummett also writes that the strategy of apocalyptic rhetoric is “to respond to a sense of chaos and anomie, whether acute or potential, with reassurances of a plan that is ordering history.” [11] Between looming pandemics, postponed human holocaust, and all the other global weirding, there are certainly those who would have us believe that our doom is imminent. As far as the darker strains of heavy metal music are concerned, we deserve the anxiety, as it’s likely our own fault.
This Mortal Soil
As human population continues to grow, humans are more likely to be used as a resource, raw materials for any use whatever. Moreover, the human rights in question diminish as the resources grow as well. In what Broadrick calls the “constant repetition of existence,” [12] we are the mistake that keeps on mistaking, mistaking ourselves as exceptional, mistaking ourselves as unique, mistaking ourselves as important. Even when we recognize ourselves as fallible, we still make more; the crumbling façades of buildings and the crumbling flesh of bodies.
Humanity doesn’t scale, and human nature is a farce. People will do what people will do, but we will rarely surprise you. That complete lack of surprise is all that could be called human nature. The sad predictability of the species is its nature. As Eugene Thacker puts it, “on the one hand we as human beings are the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human.” [13] Where posthumanism is most often associated with the biotechnical augmentations of cyborgs discussed before, fixing us up rather than following after we’ve gone, this is the posthumanism of extinction. [14]
In Alan Weisman’s 2007 book, The World Without Us, which speculates what life on Earth will like after humans cease to exist, he describes us as senders rather than receivers of signals, and that radio waves dispatched and drifting through space will be our final legacy. The human brain is also a transmitter, broadcasting electric impulses at very low frequencies that some believe can be focused to exact actions at a distance. “That may seem far-fetched,” Weisman writes, “but it’s also a definition of prayer.” [15]
On a more grounded note, David Leo Rice writes,
absurd as this hope surely is, I wonder if there might be a grain of truth in it. Since we, too, are creatures of the earth, made of earthly materials (as are our digital devices), perhaps there is something in our nature that can reach beyond our limited time as humans, and partake in the larger cycle of dust returning to dust. Perhaps some part of the consciousness of the earth itself exists within us, and will go on existing. [16]
Weak transmitters, antennae for sound, or just sentient meat, how ever we seek a way beyond them, we are bound by our bodies: malleable yet mortal, elastic yet earthbound. We are soil as much as we are souls. [17] The dust of this planet is people. [18]
Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body
The above excerpt is from my new book, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body. Get you an open-access .pdf or a lovely paperback from punctum books!
As always, thank you for reading, responding, and sharing.
More soon,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com
Notes for the excerpt above:
Peter Langman, ed., “Eric Harris’s Journal,” School Shooters .Info (October 3, 2014).
J.G. Ballard, Crash: A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, [1973] 1985), 50.
Isis, “In Fiction,” on Panopticon [LP] (Los Angeles: Ipecac Records, 2012).
Quoted in Garth Ferrante, “Godflesh Explains ‘Selfless’’s Song Titles,” Godflesh.com, August 1994, https://godflesh.com/articles/int2.txt.
See William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1992).
Quoted in Jason Heller, “Justin Broadrick of Jesu,” AV Club, April 5, 2007, https://film.avclub.com/justin-broadrick-of-jesu-1798211103.
Godflesh, “Life Giver Life Taker” on A World Lit Only by Fire [LP] (London: Avalanche Recordings, 2014).
See Abraham Riesman, “William Gibson Has a Theory About Our Cultural Obsession with Dystopias,” Vulture, August 1, 2017, https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/william-gibson-archangel-apocalypses-dystopias.html; SCI-Arc Channel, “Bruce Sterling & Benjamin Bratton in Conversation,” YouTube, November 5, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0__x5SG8WY.
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1920), 143.
Barry Brummett, Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric (New York: Praeger, 1991), 87.
Ibid.
Quoted in Jason Heller, “Justin Broadrick of Jesu,” AV Club, April 5, 2007, https://film.avclub.com/justin-broadrick-of-jesu-1798211103. Douglas Coupland calls it “Strangelove Reproduction,” that is, “having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.” Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for An Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 135.
Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Volume 1 (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2011), 158.
Daniel Lukes, “Black Metal Machine: Theorizing Industrial Black Metal,” in Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory Issue 1, edited by Amelia Ishmael, Zareen Price, Aspasia Stephanou, and Ben Woodard (Earth: punctum books, 2013), 71–73. See also Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Jussi Parikka, “Planetary Memories: After Extinction, the Imagined Future,” in After Extinction, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 27–49.
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), 274.
David Leo Rice, “The Overlook Hotel,” The Believer, October 31, 2017, https://believermag.net/logger/overlook/. He continues, “to believe this is to believe in an afterlife of time, rather than space: to believe that human consciousness, once it has become disembodied, will not travel upward or downward to heaven or hell, nor into space as radio waves, but rather that it will linger here on earth, as earth, even when that earth is transformed into a planet that, if we were to perceive it while still human, would have to be called alien. This is the dream of the entire species being present at its own funeral.” As Roberts puts it, “the end is final, and yet it also represents a strange new beginning.” Adam Roberts, It’s the End of the World, But What Are We Really Afraid of? (London: Elliott & Thompson Limited, 2020), 9. See also Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
As William Bryant Logan writes, "human bodies belong to and depend on dirt. We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. But the soil is all of the earth that is really ours.” William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 97.
Like much of the rest of this book, this final line owes its existence to both McKenzie Wark and Eugene Thacker. It combines and pays homage to the last lines of Wark’s Dispositions (Cromer: Salt Publishing, 2002) and Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Volume 1 (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2011).