Genre and Bewilderment
The “White Bear” (2013) episode of Charlie Booker’s anthology television series Black Mirror instructively stages this sense of bewilderment as it straddles the genres of post-apocalyptic lawlessness and dystopian surveillance. In a pivotal moment of reversal, this episode ends by drawing back the curtain to reveal a hidden audience and a novel environment of carceral punishment. The episode’s point of view, up until this moment, is tightly aligned with a young unnamed black woman suffering from amnesia. Evoking representations of deserted post-apocalyptic backdrops like in 28 Days Later (2002) and Shaun of the Dead (2004), “White Bear” begins with a confused protagonist wandering through a desolate neighbourhood. As she walks further down the street, she notices people standing creepily at their windows, filming her with their cell phones. When a masked-man with a shotgun inexplicably appears to chase her, the silent onlookers flood out into the street to record the action. Like the zombie horde, this panoptic mob refuses to speak or engage the young woman’s pleas for help. Following the conventions of contemporary post-apocalyptic narratives, the protagonist then escapes into a convenience store where she befriends a cynical and resourceful survivor. This young white woman goes on to explain that nine-tenths of the world’s population has been infected by a hypnotic signal broadcast to every cell phone, television, and computer screen. She also convinces the protagonist to help her knock-out the local signal emanating from the “White Bear” “television transmission compound” located in the nearby woods. And it is here, during the climactic scene of violent confrontation inside a cell tower control room, that a concrete wall unexpectedly splits open to reveal a small stage and live audience. This collapsing fourth wall not only stuns the protagonist, but as a metafictional stunt, it also opens up a shared space that repositions the television viewer within the auditorium.
The audience-members, we learn, are customers at “White Bear Justice Park,” a hybrid punishment-amusement park that allows citizens to spend the afternoon watching a drugged prisoner race around an elaborate set, until, in the final instance, she is strapped to a chair and confronted with news footage about her forgotten crime. In this instance the criminal is Victoria Skillane, and she has been convicted of recording her fiancé kidnap and murder a six-year-old girl. Significantly, however, Booker never shows the protagonist experience a moment of guilty recognition. Because she is placed in a state of drug-induced amnesia, she is prevented from actually feeling guilty. While listening to a harrowing account of her crimes, Booker shows Victoria trying and failing to remember the incident. Indeed, the punishment here actively reproduces Victoria’s innocence and her bewilderment, rather than a feeling of self-knowledge and guilt (Fig. 6.1).
Fig. 6.1The collapsing fourth wall and Victoria Skillane’s bewilderment in “White Bear,” Black Mirror: Season 2, Episode 2 (2013)
In this way, Booker’s critical depiction of contemporary punishment stands in contrast to Michel Foucault’s formulation of a disciplinary society. Discipline uses enclosed or partitioned spaces to judge people as individuals. Institutions likes schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons contain and “assess [individuals] with precision,” until the rituals of surveillance become internalized by workers, students, prisoners, and patients. A “society of discipline” emerges when, across these institutions, a subject “inscribes in herself the power relation in which she simultaneously plays both roles [as the omnipotent judge and the exposed inmate]; she becomes the principle of her own subjection” (1995: 202–203). In other words, she becomes an individual by discovering and judging her own guilty soul.
“White Bear,” however, articulates an alternative relation to enclosures and subject-formation. The White Bear prison is not principally concerned with producing a guilty conscious within a disciplined subject; instead, it is much more interested in prompting and provoking the prisoner to unwittingly entertain the paying audience. While this might recall pre-industrial forms of spectacular punishment, such as public lynching and guillotining, it’s worth highlighting that Victoria is not killed for her supposed crimes. Instead, Victoria is forced to live out the same torturous routine on a daily basis. Moreover, what Victoria experiences as a struggle for survival in a lawless, post-apocalyptic environment is in fact a performance of labour within a lawful but dystopian space that disguises work as merely living. Without doubt, these dynamics speak specifically to prisoners’ forced and appallingly undercompensated labour; nevertheless, I argue that the episode’s implications extend beyond the prison-industrial complex to capture key aspects of post-industrial labour writ large.
This concealment of labour inside the automatic, everyday performances of “just living” echoes definitions of neoliberalism that redescribe work as an act of self-enterprise or life building. The neoliberal worker does not labour per se but instead invests her capacities (her capital) into the enterprise of her own individual health and satisfaction. Even Foucault, late in his life, began to recognize the consequences that this historical shift to a post-industrial economy had on disciplinary modes of subject formation. In his lectures on biopolitics Foucault speculates:what appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by … normative mechanisms … On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society … in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, … in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals. (2008: 259–260)
This video-game-like description of neoliberalism as an “environmental technology” never gets fully articulated by Foucault in his lectures, but it is clearly echoed in twenty-first-century writings on behavioural economics.
For example, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, authors of the book Nudge, promote the use of environmental technologies to subconsciously guide individuals into making more effective decisions. Instead of laws and regulations, Sunstein and Thaler favour what they call “libertarian paternalism”—an ideology that ostensibly preserves individual choice while at the same time conditioning the environment or “choice architecture” to coerce specific actions (2009: 3, 4). For Sunstein and Thaler “the false assumption is that almost all people, almost all of the time, make choices that are in their best interest”—a lie promulgated by classical economics in the figure of homo economicus. For this reason, Adam Smith’s invisible hand must be assisted by a second invisible hand that “primes,” “prompts,” and “nudges” citizen-consumers into taking rational actions. Or, as Thaler and Sunstein put it, “choice architects can make major improvements to the lives of others by designing user-friendly environments” (2009: 11). In effect, this means that individuals take on all the systemic risks and formal responsibilities of their private decisions even as their agency is everywhere qualified and diminished. The fact that Sunstein and Thaler were hired by the Obama and Cameron administrations, respectively, suggests that “libertarian paternalism” increasingly serves as the ideological basis of neoliberal policy1.
Indeed, the “White Bear” episode ends by dramatizing the role of environmental technologies in nudging post-disciplinary subjects into productive living. As the credits roll, Booker shows a crew of workers preparing the White Bear Justice Park for the next day’s performance. Victoria is sedated in her bedroom; her sneakers are carefully placed next to a sliding glass door, which is left partially ajar. Her jacket is also placed next to this door. In every way her environment is coded to draw her out into the backyard, down the street, and towards the convenience store. This is what ensures that her everyday life will function as productive performance, transforming her survival in the open field of lawlessness into a dystopian form of continuous work (Fig. 6.2).
Fig. 6.2Nudging and performance in White Bear Justice Park. “White Bear,” Black Mirror: Season 2, E
pisode 2 (2013)
However, where “White Bear” uses the image of post-apocalyptic survival to reveal the dystopian reality hidden behind it, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One moves in the opposite direction. Here the novel’s dystopian social order is built on a slowly unfolding apocalyptic reality. After the collapse of the state, a new military and corporate government seizes power by seemingly containing the zombie-like horde. Set in the traumatized space of southern Manhattan, Whitehead’s novel alternatively evokes the events of 9/11, the great recession triggered by Wall Street, and, anachronistically, the flooding of southern Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy. Likewise, the abject zombies that surround this securitized zone are intermittently figured as immigrants, workers, and students, until, in the final third of the novel, they are equated with extreme weather and climate change: “They blew in, they’ll blow out,” Jerry said. “The monsters were a kind of weather after all” (2012: 221). And later: “In every raindrop on his skin and the pavement, sullying every edifice and muting the blue sky: the dust of the dead. It was in his lungs, becoming assimilated into his body, and he despised it” (2012: 232–233).
Against this imagery of an environmental threat, the novel draws on the optimistic language of rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of Katrina and Sandy, as the bulk of the novel is taken up with the military’s attempt to reboot the social order using big data: “Numbers permitted Buffalo to extrapolate the whole city … The truths of the grid’s rectilinear logic, how people moved and lived inside boundaries, had already been applied … anywhere human activity and desire needed to be tamed and made compliant” (2012: 42). And it is precisely this diagram of power that is overturned by the Dionysian energies of apocalyptic storytelling. Whitehead brings the wars, recessions, droughts, and hurricanes of the early twenty-first century together to cast a massive and messy non-human counterforce lurking monstrously behind everyday circuits of power and control. In the end, a slow-moving apocalypse finally swamps the novel’s dystopian structures—symbolized by a massive wall—with an influx of chaotic materiality: “The ocean had overtaken the streets, as if the news programs’ global warming simulations had finally come to pass … Except it was not water that flooded the grid but the dead” (2012: 302). The narrator concludes, “The wall had kept this reality from him … a dam, suppressing the roiling … wasteland. It would not hold … There would be no rescue” (2012: 304). While this scenario of collapse is not desirable, it is also a moment of relief for the protagonist who seems to endorse the observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of a dystopian, capitalist, social order. Here the protagonist of Zone One doesn’t “know if the world [is] doomed or saved, but whatever the next thing was, it would not look like what came before” (2012: 320). The political energy, the desire for something new and different, is so bottled up by capitalist realisms that it can only find expression, perhaps ineffectually, through an apocalyptic narrative of non-human insurgency.
Although they form a chiasmic relation, both “White Bear” and Zone One hinge on a moment of undecidability where the narrative changes genre from an apparently post-apocalyptic setting to a dystopian one or from an apparently dystopian setting to an apocalyptic collapse. In both cases, this moment of bewilderment is experienced, first and foremost, by the black protagonists of these texts, whose relationship to hegemonic white supremacy exposes them to both intense surveillance and social abandonment. Both Victoria Skillane in “White Bear” and Mark Spitz in Zone One are uncomfortable with the identities that have been affixed to them. Victoria cannot remember the violent past that supposedly justifies her unending punishment, and “Mark Spitz” is a nickname the otherwise unnamed protagonist earns by fighting off a horde of attacking zombies, rather of swimming away with a group of white survivors. The white survivors give him this nickname, which refers to an Olympic Swimmer, because, Mark explains, of the whole “black-people-can’t-swim thing,” “a stereotype” (2012: 287). In this way, both characters can only find recognition in a social order that misrecognizes or stereotypes them. They are certainly not sheltered from the risks of social abandonment. Subject to racism, Mark and Victoria endure an unresolvable vacillation between imprisonment and collapse, which captures a generic tension about the future as a bewildering site of both intensified dystopian control and sudden catastrophic abandonment. Moreover, as black characters, they signal how this bewildering, controlling, and apocalyptic future is already acutely experienced by marginalized populations.
Lauren Berlant’s observation that “for most, the overwhelming present is less well symbolized by energizing images of sustainable life … than it is expressed in regimes of exhaustion” not only describes the states of so-called slow death or small vacations from the will that episodically interrupt everyday life, but it also helps frame a feeling of bewilderment that permeates two dominant genres of futurity (2011: 119, 116). What appears to be the dystopian rise of digital surveillance and behavioural controls can also sometimes look like a rather fragile and attenuated form of power in the face of deteriorating infrastructure and acidifying oceans. Likewise, dire warnings from the Pentagon about threats of global warming clearly function to excuse, expand, and intensify networks of surveillance. “White Bear,” Zone One, and many of the novels I examine in this book embed such moments of entangled double-vision and exhausted bewilderment, causing the environment to resolve and dissolve undecidedly between the dystopic and apocalyptic. To the extent that these two genres have become mutually dependent, while still remaining irreducibly distinct, they orient readers towards a future that appears both predictable and contradictory. At their best, the narratives I examine diagnose and frame bewilderment as a symptom produced by a generic engine that represents future catastrophes as alibis for more exacting forms of dystopian control, and represents dystopian control as precipitating ever more catastrophic catastrophes.
Bibliography
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Booker, Charlie. 2013. White Bear. Black Mirror: Season 2, Episode 2. Netflix.
Connolly, William. 2013. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Hold and Company, LLC.
Martin, Theodore. 2017. Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present. New York: Columbia University Press.
McClanahan, Annie. 2018. Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-first-century Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Medovoi, Leerom. 2010. The Biopolitical Unconscious: Toward an Eco-Marxist Literary Theory. Meditations 24 (2): 122–139.
Pasqual, Frank. 2015. Black Box Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York: Penguin Group.
Whitehead, Colson. 2012. Zone One. New York: Anchor Books.
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs and Hachette Book Group.
Footnotes
1Annie McClanahan’s excellent book Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture explores the historical and structural interaction between behavioural economics and contemporary literature further. Her chapter on the “Behavioral Economics and the Credit Crisis Novel” rightly points out that: “For the behavioral economists, only decisions (and not the interior states of feeling they emerge from) are observable, modelable, and therefore legitimate as the object of economic analysis. Affect, in other words, is meaningful not in its concrete specificity (in discovering why a house is regarded as handsome or pretentious)
but simply as a foil for economic rationality” (2018: 27).
Index 1
Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels Page 24
