THE END OF THE WORLD (ENCOUNTERS AT)

With “Encounters at the End of the World” Werner Herzog gives us one of the most poignant –bone chilling in the warmest possible way– representations of the correspondence that exists between catastrophism and utopia. It comes without saying that this dialectic doesn’t actually put in question the reality of global warming. What I am talking about here is culturally digested catastrophe. Perceived catastrophe, which generates, for better or worse, its autonomous fantasies. Global warming or not, entropy has been one of the watchwords of contemporary artistic culture for quite a while now. In turn, entropy or not, every generation has imagined its own apocalypse, religious or lay as it might have been. Yet, it is probably fair to say that in our age the daunting telos of the end of the world underwent an important revival. I am thinking for example of the mesmerizing entropic anti-hero Robert Smithson. One of Smithson’s favourites also comes to mind, the English sci-fi novelist J.G. Ballard. Ballard is one example –particularly in vogue today and deservedly so–of a genre which emerged after the Second World War in response to the diabolic mix of ominous Eisenhowerian serenity and nuclear terror. However, if retrospectively Ballard exemplifies the genre, at the time his was a lonely voice. He was uncommonly hostile to mainstream, i.e. American, science fiction, in alternative to which he proposed a ruthlessly critical vision of post-war reality. In his last book, the autobiography entitled “Miracles of Life”, Ballard explained how his crave for post-atomic fantasies was directly proportional to the passivity, complacent at best and narcoleptic at worse, with which the Western hemisphere greeted the advent of hardcore capitalism. At the cost of unpopularity, Ballard refused to wage another war against anti-democratic aliens, aka cold warriors, terrorists, etc. Instead, his fictions targeted mass production and its standard prerequisites: consumerism, materialism, automatism, spectacle and so on. For Ballard, sci-fi represented the new realism. The world as his saw it was suffering a massive, if mute, mental breakdown. What he did was to put into words the loud sonority he imagined this psychic collapse to have. By inflating the real hyperbolically, his novels obtained the critical effectiveness of a cunning subversion. In this way, Ballard redeemed entropy, turning its ruinous landscapes into vehicles for cultural antagonism. “Science fiction had a huge vitality that had bled away from the modernist novel”, wrote Ballard in his autobiography, “it was a visionary engine that created a new future with every revolution, a hot rod accelerating away from the reader, propelled by an exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealist.” Sci-fi catastrophism signalled a radical rebirth. Just like Herzog, Ballard associated dystopia with utopia. A dis-topos can become a promising fantasy when pushed in the mind and once pushed far enough it might become a beautiful place that exists in reality. This place is a cave in the South Pole and Herzog has found it. One day, recites the director, humanity will perish and inside this cave a team of aliens will find the archaeological remnants to which we are doomed. At that moment, entropy will be overturned and the South Pole will become a Smithsonian “ruin in reverse.” In view of this reversal, entropy is necessarily anticipated as a redeeming promise. Ruins-in-reverse-to-be are utopias in actuality. Those aliens will find something compelling down there.