The postapocalyptic imagination

Passing beyond – catastrophe without revelation

Postapocalypse focuses on decay, disaster and ruin. It emphasizes the possibilities that emerge within these settings over the desire for deliverance from them. Its expressions are found in postapocalyptic literary texts, but also in theory that looks beyond revelation and lays its stakes beyond the end of capitalism, not in the sense of finding an alternative to it so much as imagining what passing its horizons might look and feel like. As such, postapocalypse is distinct from utopian and dystopian literature, as well as being beyond critiques which charge the imagination with responding to the present with a viable and desirable vision of replacement.

While traditional apocalypse deploys revelation to cover over the ruined world with a new, oftentimes divinely designed world – such as that which the Christian Bible’s ‘Book of Revelation’ described as ‘adorned as a bride for her husband’ – and represents an ‘elect’ as inheritors of this world, in postapocalypse focus is directed to the remnants (Revelation 21:2; King James Version). Here, the old world is not replaced in the wake of catastrophe but refigured by it. Postapocalypse, then, is not a teleological end point but is positioned as transitional and haunted by memories of the pre-catastrophe world. The life forms that emerge from the wreckage to dwell in the ruins negotiate the terms of their survival in a traumatized but not amnesia-inducing setting and, I argue, the explorations of the postapocalyptic imagination are properly explorations of the various break-downs of capitalism itself.

If we are, as Fredric Jameson (2003: 76) suggested, to revise the ubiquitously unattributed quote that ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, to allow us to ‘witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world’, what we are also attempting to do is bear witness to the remainders on which both capitalism and apocalypse are predicated. In a capitalist society, these remainders imbricate: Non-human waste pumped into the sea carries the stateless human who leaps from a makeshift asylum-seeking boat to escape military retaliation. Apocalypse too requires a separation of the excluded and the elect in order to represent its new world. The postapocalyptic imagination is that which focuses on the excluded and the ruined, without providing redemption or revelation.

Both the capitalist and apocalyptic remainder form the substance of the postapocalyptic imagination. If we imagine the end of the world as a defence against the apparent immutability and permanence of contemporary socio-cultural and politico-economic oppression, we necessarily bear witness to the apocalyptic logic that underpins capitalism itself. This system offers itself as the end of history and as revelation for an elect at the expense of a concealed and excluded majority. It claims the status of saviour from the totalitarianisms of the 20th century as well as the ‘exhaustion’ of historicity. But every apocalyptic horizon casts a long shadow across our imaginations. If we are able to imagine beyond the revelatory ending, beyond capitalism itself, it may be because, as Stoler (2013: 591) insists, capitalism cannot account entirely for ‘where people are left, what they are left with, and what means they have to deal with what remains’.

Exploring contemporary catastrophes, alongside the broader connection between the apocalyptic and capitalism, in terms of social and political consequences, Slavoj Žižek (2011: x) describes the contemporary capitalist system as ‘approaching an apocalyptic zero-point’. He claims the contemporary ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are ‘the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself […] and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions’, and describes the dominant cultural mode as grief and mourning (Žižek, 2011: x).

However, instead of focusing on potential sources of revelation or salvation (green technology perhaps, or the increasingly vague goals of sustainability), Žižek (2011: 430) uses this ‘apocalyptic zero-point’ to launch properly postapocalyptic explorations such as the need for ‘living in a more “plastic” and nomadic manner’ due to local and global environmental change and consequent large-scale social transformations. When Žižek (2011: 431) poses the ‘disturbing questions’ of where the Icelanders would live if another volcanic eruption renders Iceland uninhabitable, or the sub-Saharan dwellers, should their homeland become too dry, he is precisely challenging us to engage our postapocalyptic imaginations. He notes that when catastrophes such as these occurred in the past ‘social changes occurred in a wild and spontaneous way, with accompanying violence and destruction’, prospects that may well prove ‘catastrophic under today’s conditions, with weapons of mass destruction available to all nations’ (Žižek, 2011: 431).

Other theorists have noted the significant link between the productions of late capitalism and postapocalypse. Mary Manjikian (2008) attempts to frame apocalyptic literature as a critique of imperialism within and through the disciplinary bounds of international relations. She sees the ‘anarchic’ postapocalypses of today as ‘a representation of a wish to undo what may be regarded as the worst excesses of capitalism and globalization’ (Manjikian, 2008: 139). In this way, apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narratives are ‘a vehicle for creating new discourse and interrogating old myths’ that ‘allows us as analysts to do “work” in the sense of inventing and analysing possible futures and considering their ethical implications’ (Manjikian, 2008: 158). For her, an apocalyptic text is not defined by its revelation or lack thereof, but rather by the emphasis it places on human relations and on how people come to understand their changed circumstances, environments, and futures.

Mark Fisher (2009) also frames capitalism as a postapocalyptic space when, evoking both Debord (1983) and popular film, he argues that late capitalism is ‘what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and relics’ (Fisher, 2009: 4). However, trudging can be a fruitful and thought provoking activity. In his After The End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, James Berger (1999) makes a case for reading the writing of Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard as dealing in some way with the postapocalyptic. All these writers, he argues, ‘take as their stating point some cataclysmic and irrevocable shattering or flattening or decentring that infiltrates and rearticulates all areas of culture’ and use this to ‘diagnose a post-apocalyptic condition’ (Berger, 1999: 31). Arguing for an invigorated understanding of the postapocalyptic, Berger (1999: 14) claims that ‘post-apocalyptic discourses try to say what cannot be said (in a strict epistemological sense) and what must not be said (what is interdicted by religious, ethical or other social sanctions)’. Hence, it is the very lack of hope as horizon that marks the postapocalyptic as a transgressive and resistant space.

In Postapocalyptic Culture, Teresa Heffernan (2008: 22) closes in on this space. She explores the modern literary turn away from endings as a source of revelation and suggests that its expressions prompt pertinent questions such as: “What does a world that has abandoned a sense of an ending look like? Is it about ruins and ghosts? Is it about possibility and plurality? What does it mean to be stuck in the game? And what does it mean to try to ‘pass beyond man’?” These are the questions staked by the postapocalypse. However, the impossibility of revealing answers and solutions frustrates critics and marks the difference between postapocalypse and apocalypse or utopia.

Stuck in the game – postapocalyptic obsessions

Postapocalypse, while often depicting an ambiguously situated and destroyed future, belongs with science fiction in that it also functions ‘to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present’ (Jameson, 2005: 286). Jameson (2005: 286) observes how science fiction visions of high tech, streamlined megatropolises are long dated, replaced by visions that are influenced by our experience of ‘urban decay and blight’. The postapocalyptic imagination, which focuses on human life after catastrophe, can be seen to be a defamiliarized exploration of the smaller scale, though no less significant social and environmental breakdown and disorder that define the contemporary moment. Postapocalypse is a valuable site for examining and enacting the dangerous possibilities for human and nonhuman life beyond the artifice of revelation. Precisely because of its inability to resolve or reveal, it becomes a site to express polyvalent critiques of the present and explore fears and fantasies about the future.

In Ben Zeitlin’s Beasts of The Southern Wild (2012), an apocalyptic event (for one small community) is the catalyst for the emergence of a different kind of intellect as represented by protagonist Hushpuppy, a child who resists an anthropocentric view of the world and begets a crude cosmology in which human and animal actors are interconnected in real and liminal spaces with important outcomes for all.

As a genre, the postapocalypse does not focus on presenting new, totalizing visions of utopia. The scattering effects of catastrophe mean that texts often focus on small groups, individuals, and local responses. Scarcity and ruin necessarily constrict the plans of would-be utopians. There are always sects, conflicts, and dangers. In the example of Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), for instance, the language and process of contemporary disaster response clash with the desires of a small community eking out life in an unstable environment and, while this tension doesn’t resolve, it is assimilated into the protagonist’s ontology. The film also reflects the concerns of real communities, such as the Isle de Jean Charles, in Southern Louisiana, which – due to a confluence of environmental and industrial threats, coupled with economic neglect – is facing its own fatal catastrophe and whose residents might already be described as a postapocalyptic community, excluded from the driving narratives, revelations and redemptions of contemporary capitalism.

Witnessing different postapocalyptic becomings means engaging questions without adequate answers: What happened? What meaning do the fragments of the old world retain, both in the world of the text and in relation to the context of the reader? Postapocalypse is often focalized via a group of survivors who continue to live on in the hardship of a ruined environment. This conceit structures the films A Boy and His Dog (1975), The Book of Eli (2010), Hardware (1990), Mad Max (1979), The Road (2009), and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). This focalization, rather than signalling what Elizabeth Rosen (2008: xv) describes as a ‘literature of pessimism’ or ‘a cautionary tale’, allows an exploration of social and environmental breakdown at a subjective level.

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006), the postapocalyptic world functions as much as a setting to critique paternal relationships and contemporary masculinities as to warn about any imminent environmental catastrophe. In The Road revelation is denied and, as Shelley Rambo (2008) argues, the very concept of redemption is radically destabilized, leading the reader to wonder how to discern meaning in a text that situates itself as post-redemption.

In JG Ballard’s The Drought (1965) postapocalyptic survival is depicted as a matter of chance and perhaps further evidence of the chaotic and non-anthropocentric character of life. Here, the destabilized environment is explicitly linked to a destabilization of human conceptions of history, time, and identity. As protagonist Ransom’s postapocalyptic journey along the drought ravaged coast comes to its (anti)conclusion, the arid environment offers up new possibilities: The future of family is reimagined as a couple riding a lion toward a mirage and a brood of idiot savant children who communicate with birds. Here, survival is not represented in terms of recognizable human standards, social or religious dogma. Rather, it necessitates the collapse of all categories family and gender to morality.

Even a text such as The Rover (Michôd, 2014), which appears to do little more than rehearse the conventions of the Western in a postapocalyptic, Australian outback setting, also expresses contemporary anxieties about immigration, globalization and the culture of industries like mining, in which men become isolated. The film’s ending, which seemingly justifies the protagonist’s gratuitously violent quest via a trivial and somewhat amusing conceit, can also be read as a parody of the redemptive moment in both Western and apocalyptic narratives.

All these texts explore the disintegration of the human in a postapocalyptic space and posit emergent and imperfect possibilities for humanly coded ways of understanding the world. They also perform contemporary anxieties over identity, environmental collapse, and the alienating and exploitative mechanisms of contemporary capitalism.

Other examples of postapocalyptic texts that do this include Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005), JG Ballard’s The Crystal World (1996), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Joon-Ho Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). The visions of aftermath found in these texts include apocalyptic elements such as prophetic visions, nomadic quests, new and violent communities, decadence, and the demise of empire. They describe events that alter species-specific, communal, or individual life on Earth. They present groups on the brink of catastrophe to add gravitas to social crises and frame the apocalyptic event as catalyst to contemporary ruin-dweller becomings in which readers pick through detritus and reconsider their histories and futures. These texts present serious ruminations on what it means to be human and how we think about environments and community.

In Michel Houellebecq’s (2005) Possibility of an Island, the clones of a postapocalyptic future spend their interminable lives reinterpreting and commenting on the lives of the humans from whom their genetic blueprints were derived. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, new languages are described as ‘heathen script’. And in Kevin Reynold’s blockbuster flop Waterworld, the coincidence of banal clues, ranging from an old airline brochure to a tattoo, map the route to a promised land that the audience knows is but a tiny remnant of the pre-catastrophe world.

Although characters in postapocalyptic texts may remain only tenuously connected to pre-apocalyptic events, postapocalypses are not ahistorical. Often, as is the case in McCarthy’s The Road and Ballard’s The Drought and The Crystal World, the crisis is not defined and survivors can only speculate on what brought them to this point. The reader, then, brings their own historicity to their reception of the text. Postapocalyptic scenarios do not typically revise or restore what has come before catastrophe, but attempt to figure what remains after and emerges from it.

Passing beyond ‘man’

The identity of survivors in postapocalyptic worlds becomes a central point for reading the explorations and critiques that are taking place. Most postapocalyptic texts destabilize identity in a way that mirrors the affirmation of particular identities that occur through the device of an ‘elect’ in apocalyptic texts. While the elect in an apocalypse inherit a version of God’s Kingdom on Earth (New Jerusalem), in postapocalyptic texts the survivors continue into a dangerous and difficult wasteland, without the promise of salvation.

Perhaps the most common character trope of postapocalypse is the drifter or nomad familiar from Mad Max, The Road (2006), The Drought, Hardware, The Book of Eli, A Boy and His Dog, and Waterworld. Despite its having earned the status of cliché, particularly in relation to representations of survivalism predicated on normative gender performances, I link this figure to Rosi Braidotti’s (1994, 2011, 2013) refiguring of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983, 1987) nomad, a deterritorialized figure who traverses national boundaries and categories of subjectivity.

Bradotti, too, links the present moment to the postapocalypse, and makes the case that this should not narrow our thinking within it. For Braidotti (2011: 4), the myriad ‘posts’ that characterize our present moment – postmodern, postsecular, postfeminist, postcommunist, postindustrial – sound an apocalyptic resonance but fail to clarify their implications except as ‘the pretext for the populist dismissal of high theory’. ‘Post’ does not have to signify a narrowing of the possibilities for radical thought, however. Even if (apocalyptically) after poststructuralism ‘we appear to have entered some sort of afterlife’, Braidotti (2011: 215) argues that

post does not spell the end, but the generative start of a new phase of the fundamental idea of nomadic affirmative politics and the empowering feminism, antiracism, and environmentalism it sustains. Nomadic subjects require and produce nonunitary, multiple, and complex politics.

I read Braidotti’s conception of ‘post’, alongside her (re)figuration for nomadic navigation of this territory, as an exercise in postapocalyptic imagining. Braidotti’s refigured nomad is one of the radical figures that I seek to find through acts of postapocalyptic imagining. Even if her description cannot easily be mapped across the protagonists of the texts I listed above (many of the films cannot be divorced from the North American entertainment industry from which they emerge), new possibilities for human becomings do exist within the concept of nomadic existence in an eternal ‘post’. For Braidotti (2011: 794), ‘the nomadic subject signifies both vulnerability and affirmation’. She elaborates on her conception by claiming nomadic subjecthood for a litany of bodies including ‘a gang member in any slum of the world’s metropolises, a communist in the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio, a pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone in any neighbourhood in any city of any country’ (Braidotti, 2011). This list emphasizes the sense of being a remainder, of living beyond the borders of any promised land or totalizing liberation narrative, such as the above example of the South Louisianan Isle De Jean Charles. However, there are many cogent examples, such as those who live in nuclear test sites and disaster-prone areas made more dangerous by mining, industry or war, a ubiquitous postapocalyptic experience of contemporary life.

Alongside nomads, other figures that populate the postapocalyptic space include the cyborg, which we encounter in films like Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner, and on which Donna Haraway famously pinned ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’; the germ or virus from films like I Am Legend, The Omega Man and Blindness, considered for its radical implications in Keith Ansell Pearson’s (2002) Viroid Life, the mutant, familiar from films like A Boy and His Dog and Tank Girl, which signifies a vision of evolution without a teleology of perfectibility and posits survival at a cellular level in relation to environments and (human and non-human) others, and the zombie, from films such as Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, which has been read as emblematic of our anxieties about consumer culture (Hall, 2011).

These figures necessarily relate and intersect. For example, Braidotti (2011: 25) makes the claim that ‘cyborgs and nomads are traveling companions: they are productive figurations that stress the impact of creativity in the thinking process. Both exemplify the notion that we need new forms of literacy to decode today’s world’. It is these bold new literacies that the postapocalyptic imagination moves toward.

Ghosts and ruins

While all of these figures have complex relationships with power and, more explicitly, with war, the way they are treated by theorists exemplifies how each bid for control made in the name of security, empire, or military and economic gain can simultaneously become a site for imagination and resistance. Particularly in the postapocalypse, the nightmare of a ruined earth becomes a place to enact dangerous possibilities for human and inhuman becomings and a means for imagining radically othered selves.

The postapocalyptic setting is as important as the figures that populate it. While much scholarship on the ruin (Stoler, 2013; Gordillo, 2014) focuses on these sites as the nexus of imperial nostalgia, on the one hand, and evidence of the processes of colonialism and inequality, on the other, I contend it is a mistake to ignore the ruin as a site of critique and of creative possibility. Fascination with ruins is not simply a case of performed awe in the face of the destruction of empire or a perverse impulse designated by the term ‘ruin porn’. The exclusive consideration of ruins as remnants of crimes perpetrated by large forces – state, ‘nature’ – relies on separations of human bodies from a vital environment or notions of empire as near-divine sources of damnation or salvation, origin and apocalypse. To think of the ruin as a site of creativity in which alternative communities and subjecthoods might develop is to think beyond empire or nature as the distributors of salvation. It formulates thought as a process contingent on a continually changing environment.

Affirming the experiences of agency and creativity or witness and survival should not reduce recognition of the latent violence of remnants as illustrated by the reality of poison-soaked fields in Vietnam or picked-over spaces beyond the Green Zones in present day Iraq and Syria. Rather, it insists that the experience of living in ruin constitutes thoughts, desires, and practices that should neither be ignored and invalidated nor analysed in terms that define its subjects solely as victims of war, colonialism, and globalization. Acknowledging the connections between our dwellings and those that resemble what João Biehl (2005) calls ‘zones of social abandonment’ requires valuing the experience of those who live in ruins and imagining the future ruins of our everyday. There is no insurance that keeps wealthy cities and nations from catastrophe or war and there is much to learn from people who have developed tactics for living in ruin. Following this, Tarkovsky’s ‘Zone’ from his 1979 film Stalker becomes an important imaginative space that intersects with real zones such as those that surround the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear reactors.

Joseph Masco (2008: 362) argues that the North American psyche has been shaped by the contemplation of ruins through his reading of Cold War visual culture, including Operation Cue photographs and apocalypse films of the 1980s and 1990s. During the Cold War period, Masco argues, ‘it was no longer a perverse exercise to imagine one’s own home and city devastated, on fire, in ruins; it was a formidable public ritual – a core act of governance, technoscientific practice, and democratic participation’, for which the only acceptable conclusion was a doctrine of strict emotional discipline and faith in a new kind of nationhood forged in the fall-out. This reading, in which imagined ruins are productive of population control measures that render bodies docile, is particularly interesting in light of present cultural trends that figure the postapocalyptic relationship between individuals and authority as fraught.

The television shows The Walking Dead (2010–) and The Leftovers (2014–) are good examples of this. The Leftovers, particularly, explores whether social bodies can be organized by the state once the basis of science and governance has been radically destabilized. The show’s premise of a rapture-like event in which a large section of the population disappears without accompanying revelation encourages the viewer to consider the extent to which our faith in social institutions and governance is underscored by a belief in human history as ordered by apocalypse and revelation (Kermode, 2000) as well as a steadfast understanding of the rational and the real. In The Lefovers, as the remaining human survivors search in vain for a pattern in the event (it is not the rapture, as the disappearances were not limited to the religious or those conforming to traditional morality), many find themselves falling into organized nihilism, as epitomized by the growing popularity of the cult of the ‘Guilty Remnant’, whose activities culminate in a spectacular recreation of the catastrophe to underscore its traumatic significance and its status as unassimilated into any human historical narrative.

Likewise, in The Walking Dead (2010), small groups of survivors coalesce, navigating a postapocalyptic landscape in which the human contains the possibility for a radical and dangerous transformation into an inhuman predator. It is these small groups rather than the inhuman ‘zombie’ figures that ground an exploration and critique of the social structures and relationships that characterize late capitalism, defined and performed via categories of race, class, age, gender and sexuality. The kinds of allegiances and breakdowns that result are therefore also explorations of the dangerous possibilities that already haunt our present realities.

If, as Masco (2008) asserts, imaginations were manipulated during the Cold War to control emotions, a postapocalyptic wasteland populated by zombies, nomads, self-repairing cyborgs, powerful mutations, and even the ‘test dummies’ of Operation Cue (mirrored in the rapture-dummies of The Leftovers) can be read as a transition to, or radical proclamation of, emotional autonomy from the state, and resistance to control, as readily as a dystopian culmination of terroristic military programs. Indeed, a possible reading of the journey of characters through postapocalyptic worlds – such as those that occur in the above television programs and in the novels The Road and The Drought – is as an existential struggle wherein the very conceptualization of order, governance, and authority are rendered vitally unstable.

The postapocalyptic setting is as important as its characters and concerns. Attempts to imagine or articulate the conditions of life in a ruined world beyond divine or ideological salvation can become a radical proclamation of the importance of human creativity outside or prior to social contexts and power relations. Laura Ann Stoler (2013: 377) looks for ways that we might ‘turn to ruins as epicentres of renewed collective claims […] as sites that animate both despair and new possibilities’. The postapocalyptic imagination might be a way to rethink ruins and ways that the human exists and emerges within them.

As I have suggested, postapocalypse often repeats the motifs of apocalypse, framing chaos as a result of decadence or immorality and focusing on artificial ends of epochs rather than considering processes of change. However, postapocalypse as a narrative, imaginative, and philosophical space lends itself to other kinds of expressions and readings that might have application in terms of how we make meaning and respond to our present contexts.

In mapping the postapocalyptic imagination as a space that exists across literary texts and human experiences of contemporary capitalism, what remains to be seen are the implications it might have in terms of praxis. This is an interesting exercise in textual analysis but also in considering the many ways we already behave postapocalyptically, such as in the above examples. Towards this, Table 1 posits features of apocalypse in relation to postapocalypse. It seeks to model movements of interconnection and contingency between the two, and demonstrate a way to read postapocalypse as a creative rather than oppositional response to apocalypse. Between the dyads figured here, there is always space, always the multiplicity of iterative practice. While this table does not seek to offer alternative, better practices or ways of living, I have included it in order to further illustrate ways in which the postapocalyptic imagination can become a way of speaking back to a conceptual system that seeks to be totalizing and preclude social change through pre-empting its failure to do ‘better’.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Apocalypse	Postapocalypse
Invention	Reinvention
Use	Reuse
Money	Exchange
Purchase	Theft/scavenging
Property	Refuse
Accumulation	Loss
Disposing	Repurposing
Production	Deconstruction
Settler	Nomad
Birth/rebirth	Aging
History	Stories
Global	Local
Territory	Deterritorialization
Biblical Archive	Postliterary Partial texts
Resurrection	Death
Exclusionist community	Community in flux
Homes	Ruins
Desire	Need
Symbolic	Imaginative
Old/new	Present
Seasons	Weather
Agriculture	Gardening
Factory	Workshop
Centralized power	Decentralized power in flux
Rural/urban	Deserted space
Disaster	Occurrence
Statistics	Rumours
Family	Groups
Morality	Necessity
Revolution	Resistance
Abundance	Scarcity
Progress	Improvisation
Science	Fragment
Immunization	Germs
Pristine	Toxic
Origin and apocalypse	No discernable beginning or end
Environment teleology	Environments emergence

While neither an exhaustive view of the possibilities for postapocalyptic imaginings nor an assignation of moral or political values, this table constructively identifies characteristics of the postapocalypse to both imagine a praxis and to identify the ways that this praxis is already an experiential mode in late capitalism. It also seeks to consider the experience of those who are left behind, disenfranchised or remaindered from the apocalyptic vision, whether this vision is presented as a literary narrative, a social narrative about late capitalism as end of history or limitless growth, or the lived experience of capitalism, such as living in a rapidly developing city in which luxury hotels spring up around slums.

We can identity these features in texts or, following Braidotti (1994), we can speculate on groups positioned in the present moment to develop such a praxis: residents in any metropolitan ruin, community farmers in deindustrialized cities, squatters, retirees living in vehicles, drop-outs of any educational system, computer game enthusiasts living in user-generated realities, communalists, artists working outside arts industries, undocumented immigrants and refugees, citizens of warzones, or people who live in areas ravaged by disaster. The list itself might become so vast as to, ironically, leave little remainder, reminding us of the slogan of the Occupy movement: ‘we are the 99 percent’. There are, however, many examples I would miss and misconstrue due to the disconnecting and remaindering mechanism that I am theorizing.

Abandoned endings – reading postapocalyptically

Postapocalypse, as I have argued, refers to a genre (or a subgenre), related though distinct to apocalypse. The postapocalytic imagination is concerned with the creation of these textual spaces. However, it can also be utilized in order to read apocalyptic texts with an eye for what their specific revelations simultaneously cover over. In other words, acknowledging the multiple worlds and experiences that are annihilated beneath the glistening New Jerusalems (whether concrete or abstract) that predicate revelation. When we read postapocalyptically, endings do not turn narratives into moral and ethical proofs. Reading postapocalyptically, therefore, engages Lee Quinby’s (1999) apocalyptic scepticism, and questions totalization and its accompanying truth claims.

Like apocalypse, postapocalypse is a genre that contains common tropes, metonymies, and symbols deployed to guide the reader through the text. In this sense, as James Berger (1999: 6) has observed, a postapocalypse is ‘easy to read and write and therefore more inclusive than other genres which seek to describe alternative worlds (manifestos, critical theory, political agendas)’. Unlike apocalypse, however, the alternative worlds of postapocalyptic literature are not presented as educational, a map to salvation via the threat of extinction. In the postapocalyptic space, eschatology is replaced with the fragment, the memory or the absence. Despite a few notable exceptions (such as Operation Cue, the nuclear test operation that framed the aftermath of potential nuclear attack as a site for renewed US nationalism), the postapocalypse does not generally signify the consolidation of national power or the apotheosis of religious dogma (Masco, 2008). It lends itself, therefore, to expressions of resistance distinct from the emancipatory claims of apocalypse that saves an elect at the expense of a remainder.

The postapocalypse does not reconcile the contradictions of the old world in a drive toward revelation. Rather, contradiction remains an inherent part of human experience in a catastrophe-marred setting. Reading postapocalyptically, then, involves looking toward a remainder that cannot be reconciled with the apocalyptic project. To put this another way, thinking beyond revelation does not involve erasure of what has come before but engages with the past in a necessarily flawed and incomplete way to imagine different kinds of presents and futures that have no jurisdiction over humanity as a whole and remain incomplete as visions, treatises, critiques, (dis)organizations, and what-ifs.

Both the apocalypse and postapocalypse can contain normative claims and expressions of resistance to them. This contradiction is crucial to engaging with postapocalypse. Here, ideology exists alongside its decay, utopian visions beget dystopian nightmares, and one method or experience of survival is not awarded the status of a doctrine through divine or other forms of redemption. Postapocalypse is a space for offering up imagined tactics without awarding salvationist judgements. It recognizes that world-ending catastrophes are multiple, interpretive, and uncontained within narrative structures and temporalities. Despite this, through the postapocalyptic imagination we are able to play out various (often dangerous) scenarios for life beyond the present political and social structure that we allegedly find ourselves so unable to imagine the end of. The postapocalyptic imagination, which both critiques and mourns, is a response to the totalizing, revealing drive of apocalypse and a site in which to play out aberrant possibilities in a wasteland.