We're Doomed. Now What?

by Roy Scranton

  “There are . . . three arenas of damage in war, three arenas of alteration: first, embodied persons; second, the material culture or self-extension of persons; third, immaterial culture, aspects of national consciousness, political beliefs, and self-definition.” Scarry, Body in Pain, 114. Discussion of the Heideggerian sense follows.

  Martin Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 8, 16–17.

  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 97.

  Ibid., 101.

  Ibid., 104. I would add, as a point of interest, the possibility that aesthetic withdrawal opens another path to the gestalt of Things, an epiphanic meditation that allows the Being of things to disclose itself without the imposition of instrumental utility.

  Ibid., 105.

  Scarry, Body in Pain, 61–63, on the “civilization-destroying” or “culture-destroying” aspect of injury.

  Ibid., 135.

  Gray, Warriors, 179.

  Jünger, Storm of Steel, 255–56.

  Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare,” 61. The preceding text reads: “In contrast to [a] ‘humanist’ vision of modern warfare, a vision of the faceless gray warrior emerged. Linked to the disintegration of the bourgeois ego and its meaningful psychological construction was the reconstitution of man as a fighting machine. The hardened man with his steel helmet, emotionless, experienced, with no morality apart from the value of comradeship and no obligation or attachment other than to his immediate group of warriors, fitted the imagery of futurism and soon degenerated into the fascist myth of the new man. However, this ideological straightjacket, with its looming deformation into fascist attitudes and the Nazi killer mentality, was only the most openly menacing but short-lived political materialization of this experience. Jünger’s idea of the Arbeiter, for all its now-dated characteristics, is a typified construction with considerable significance for western man in the second half of this century.”

  Kittler, “From Gestalt to Ge-Stell,” 92. For more on the relation between Heidegger and Jünger, see Eduardo Mendieta, “Imperial Geographies and Topographies of Nihilism: Theatres of War and Dead Cities,” City 8, no. 1 (2004): 20; and, of course, Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Boston: MIT Press, 1992).

  Gray, Warriors, 103.

  Weil, Iliad, 22.

  The Terror of the New

  Translation by Christian Hänggi, “Stockhausen at Ground Zero,” Fillip, Fall 2011, http://fillip.ca/content/stockhausen-at-ground-zero.

  Anthony Tommasini, “The Devil Made Him Do It,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/arts/music-the-devil-made-him-do-it.html.

  Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1970]), 6, 8, 29, ibid., respectively.

  Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Viking, 1991), 41.

  The Idea of Order I Can’t Breathe

  It turns out that I was conflating various quotations. One is from The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias where she writes: “Americans . . . are like spaniards, they are abstract and cruel. They are not brutal they are cruel. They have no close contact with the earth such as most europeans have. Their materialism is not the materialism of existence, of possession, it is the materialism of action and abstraction.” In other places Stein compares Spanish and Russians and finds them similarly “oriental” and “callous.” She writes in Everybody’s Autobiography: “And then it came to me it is perfectly simple, the Russian and the Spaniard are oriental, and there is the same mixing. Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar. Scratch a Spaniard and you find a Saracen.”

  M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 117.

  Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman. Notes on Conceptualisms (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), 17.

  Place and Fitterman, Notes, 18.

  Ibid., 15.

  Philip, Zong!, 43.

  Evie Shockley, “Is ‘Zong!’ Conceptual Poetry? Yes, It Isn’t,” Jacket 2, Sept. 17, 2013, http://jacket2.org/article/zong-conceptual-poetry-yes-it-isn%E2%80%99t.

  M. NourbeSe Philip, “Wor(l)ds Interrupted: The Unhistory of the Kari Basin,” Jacket 2, Sept. 17, 2013, http://jacket2.org/article/worlds-interrupted.

  Ned Parker, “Hamas Denounces Killing of Bin Laden,” Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/02/world/la-fgw-bin-laden-hamas-20110501.

  Association of Writers and Writing Programs, “Update Regarding the AWP Los Angeles 2016 Subcommittee,” May 18, 2015, www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_news_view/3716/update_regarding_the_awp_los_angeles_2016_subcommittee.

  Timothy Volpert, “Remove Vanessa Place from the AWP Los Angeles Conference Committee,” Change.org, May 2015, https://www.change.org/p/association-of-writers-and-writing-conferences-remove-vanessa-place-from-the-awp-los-angeles-conference-committee.

  Vanessa Place, “I Is Not a Subject: Part 5 of 5,” Harriet: A Poetry Blog, May 1, 2013, www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/05/i-is-not-a-subject-part-5-of-5.

  Vanessa Place, “Artist’s Statement,” Drunken Boat 10 (Summer 2009), www.drunkenboat.com/db10/06fic/place/statement.html.

  Keith Gessen, “On PEN and Charlie Hebdo: Why I Signed the Letter Protesting the PEN Annual Gala,” N+1, May 5, 2015, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/on-pen-and-charlie-hebdo.

  Acknowledgments

  These pieces were written over the course of the past eight years, and several were published elsewhere before being collected here. I’m deeply grateful to the editors who helped me think through what I was trying to say, challenged me on unresolved obscurities and half-baked assumptions, and sometimes even gave me the opportunity to do the work in the first place: thanks to Jo Anne Colson, Nikki Columbus, Will Dana, Jodi Dean, Kali Handelman, Paavo Järvensivu, Michael Kazin, Lee Konstantinou, Sarah Leonard, Davide Panagia, and the anonymous reviewers, unsung copy editors, and stalwart fact checkers who back them up. My greatest thanks go to Peter Catapano, at the New York Times, who published my first major piece, in his Home Fires series, and who has since been not only an exemplary editor but an advocate, an advisor, and a friend.

  Thanks go as well to other readers, interlocutors, guides, and friends along the way, including Aziz Alwan (RIP), Jane Arraf, Charles Bernstein, Patrick Blanchfield, Dominic Boyer, D. Graham Burnett, Meehan Crist, Andrew Cole, Tagak Curley, Borzou Daragahi, Timothy Donnelly, Jeff Dolven, Maria DiBattista, Nadia Faydh, Matt Gallagher, Rachel Galvin, Christopher Hitchens (RIP), John Houston, Cymene Howe, Dale Jamieson, Josh Kotin, Quil Lawrence, Meredith Martin, Eduardo Mendieta, Ian Miller, James Miller, Peter Molin, Melissa Monroe, Tim Morton, Maggie Mustard, Deak Nabers, Perry O’Brien, The Order of the Third Bird, Ned Parker, Vanessa Place, Hilary Plum, Ross Poole, Ahmed Qusay, Lisa Robertson, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Zach Savich, Jacob Siegel, Susan Stewart, Cedar Swan, Ian Tamblyn, Diana Thater, Dorothea von Moltke, Bruce Weigl, Martin Woessner, and everyone aboard the MS Ocean Endeavour. Much gratitude as well goes to Mark, Bronwen, Abby, Rachel, Juliet, Janine, Amara, Steven, Paul, Rudy, Kevin, Monica, Gary, and everyone else at Soho Press, a superb team putting out brilliant, exciting work. I’m exceedingly proud to be working with them. In addition, I am gratefully indebted to the American Councils for International Education, the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, Princeton University’s Program in American Studies, the Russian State University for the Humanities, and the Whiting Foundation for research and travel support that made this work possible.

  Finally, Sara: what can I say? None of this would be imaginable without you. Even as the world rushes to its doom, your love and courage fill each new day with light.

  The previo
usly published essays in this collection are reprinted more or less as they first appeared, as of the date noted at the end of each piece in brackets. Aside from three exceptions, only minor edits have been made, mainly to clean up nagging infelicities. Those exceptions are “We’re Doomed. Now What?,” “Arctic Ghosts,” and “Back to Baghdad.” The former two were updated to include information that emerged after publication, in the one case the winner of the 2016 US presidential election and in the other the Arctic’s continued death spiral. The last of the exceptions, “Back to Baghdad,” is notably different from the version that was published in Rolling Stone in 2014, and nearly three times as long: it is the version I wish the magazine could have published. I’m grateful to Will Dana and to Rolling Stone for helping me craft the version that saw print that summer, and I’m very pleased to be able to offer readers the rest of the story today.

  One piece in this collection is exceptional in another way: “Rock Scissors Paper” plays with fact and fiction in ways that betray the standard, which holds in every other case, of fidelity to evidence and sources, a fidelity born out of both scholarly concern for citation and journalistic respect for verifiable facts. This Borgesian bastard is included not because I mean to fuck with the reader but because it is relevant to the topic of climate change and, despite its factitiousness, still an essay, faithful in its wayward way to the need to see things clearly.

  “Anthropocene City” was originally published in significantly different form as “Another Storm Is Coming,” in the New York Times (October 2, 2016), and published in its current form in Mustarinda (2017).

  “Arctic Ghosts” was originally published in slightly different form as “Tourists at the End of the World,” in The Nation (November 9, 2015).

  “Back to Baghdad” was originally published in significantly different form as “Back to Baghdad: Life in the City of Doom,” in Rolling Stone (July 31, 2014).

  “Climate Change and the Dharma of Failure” was originally published in The Revealer (October, 19, 2015).

  “The Fantasy of American Violence” was originally published in the New York Times (July 3, 2016).

  “Memories of My Green Machine” was originally published in Theory & Event 13, no. 1 (March 2010).

  “My Flesh and Blood” was originally published in Parkett 99 (2017).

  “The Precipice” was first presented as a talk at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, on February 23, 2017.

  “Rock Scissors Paper” was first presented as a talk at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on February 16, 2016.

  “The Terror of the New” was originally published in Sierra Nevada 25 (2014). It was recognized as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2015.

  “The Trauma Hero” was originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books (January 25, 2015).

  “War and the City” was originally published as a five-part essay in the New York Times (September 3, 6, 8, 10, and 12, 2010).

  “War of Choice” was originally published in Dissent (Winter 2016).

  “We’re Doomed. Now What?” was originally published in the New York Times (December 21, 2015).

  These pieces are reprinted here with permission.