Short of the World, Short of Self

“Part of our series Worlds Apart, exploring cosmology, ecology, science fiction, and the many ends of capitalist society”

“I share in this Adornian affirmation of philosophy and want to suggest that one of our exigent philosophical tasks is to elucidate the time of catastrophes”

“When not a mere synonym for disaster, catastrophe refers to the end of the world. Most philosophical and non-philosophical accounts of catastrophe therefore formulate it as singular and futural”

“But what are we missing in the reduction of catastrophe to an event to come? What worlds do we forsake or foreclose? It seems to me that by framing things in this way we actually perpetuate the very world whose end we’re attempting to think”

“If we want to orient ourselves toward an intervention in the present, then I propose that we must think catastrophe in the plural and in multiple temporalities other than the future. There is not one but many catastrophes, and they aren’t all waiting for us down the road; some have been with us a long time, others don’t belong to chronological time at all”

“I propose that we think of the eternity of catastrophes in Althusserian terms. Althusser (in)famously claims eternity is “not transcendent to all temporal history, but omnipresent, transhistorical, and therefore immutable in form throughout history.””

“Samuel Beckett’s late play Catastrophe offers a useful starting point for such an investigation. As Adorno observes, “Beckett’s once-and-for-all is…infinite catastrophe.” For much of his corpus “the end of the world is discounted, as if it were a matter of course.””

“In the words of Endgame’s Clov, “the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit. […] All is in a word…corpsed.””

“What is performed in Beckett’s work is an ethos of the end of the world, or, more accurately, the ends of worlds, whose central question is: how does one go on, when one cannot go on?”

“Beckett’s literary and dramatic methodology depends, as Adorno notes, upon a “universal annihilation of the world,” one that “does not leave out the temporality of existence…but rather removes from existence what time, the historical reality, attempts to quash in the present.””

“Put differently, as Alain Badiou, the great thinker of eternity in our time, has argued, Beckett’s literary method could be characterized as one of ascesis: it reduces characters to their generic function in history in precisely the sense Althusser proposed when speaking of eternity”

“In his methodus aeternitatis, Beckett positions us to take a stand against the omnipresent “corpsed” condition of life today, or, as Adorno would demand, to “withstand the horror,” in neither hope nor despair for the future”

“The reception of Catastrophe points toward the form of catastrophe itself. Against the interpretive consensus on salvific dignity, I think we need to frame the play in terms of its structural relations as a whole — without (I hope) submitting to the “craze for explication! Every i dotted to death!””

“There is in fact a dramatic turn in Beckett’s work in Catastrophe, but it is not what the dominant reception would have us believe; it is rather that the play takes place in a particular worldly location: the theater.”

“Most of Beckett’s plays take place nowhere in particular: in a room or desert, on a country road, street corner, or scorched grass, or, as is more often the case, literally nowhere, insofar as there are no preliminary stage directions emplacing the characters, just faint, diffuse light, gray light, or darkness.”

“In their generic function, Beckett’s plays could be anywhere. The theater as the location for the theatrical production of Catastrophe suggests that all catastrophes are a human production”

“While most scientists now acknowledge the anthropogenic nature of the climate catastrophe, what I have in mind here is something stronger, namely, that all catastrophe is a form of social relation”

“Indeed, I want to read the metatheatricality of the play as an apocalypse21 of catastrophe: the play as play is the revelation that catastrophe consists in the staging of social relations we call politics — the spectacle of oppression and pseudo-resistance — a staging which itself perpetuates catastrophes”

“In the play there are four characters, not two. The other two named characters, A and L, perform the complexity of catastrophic social relations — actors both human and a-human, seen and unseen (or “offstage,” as Beckett’s character description has it). Indeed, D cannot do what he does without A and L; perhaps more to the point, he doesn’t do anything”

“In the proliferation of characters, there is a dissipation of the image of centralized Power; it is emptied out, dispersed. The multiplication of characters multiplies fronts. This multiplication pushes against the fixation on sites of Power, which fix the fight and limit what should be its generic openness. Such fixation often leaves politics caught in the wrong battle, under the illusion there is one — or a primary — front”

“L is as absent from the reception of the play as he is from the stage. This silence on his character, as is so often the case with silence, says a lot. In the dispersal of characters power is de-personified”

“As the technician, L operates the machinery of catastrophic social relations. In his absence he embodies the anonymity of the apparatuses of power, the institutions in which name is fungible with function”

“Or maybe, thinking with Günther Anders, he is that machinery, the figure of the co-mechanization of the capitalist global machine: “the triumph of technology,” Anders writes, “has led to our world — though it was invented and built by we ourselves — reaching such an enormous magnitude that it has ceased to be really ‘ours’ in any psychologically verifiable sense. It has led to our world becoming ‘too much’ for us.””

“L disembodied “offstage,” then, would be the embodiment of that “infernal rule” of disproportionality between our capacity to act and our capacity to conceive, perceive, and feel the catastrophic effects of the capitalist global machine — the Promethean gap that is not peculiar to but is arguably accelerated and scaled through the technology of the present”

“It is the staging before an audience that constitutes the metatheatricality of the play: all the named characters only perform their function for and before the unnamed character of the audience”

“In this way, the structure of the play anticipates its reception, not only the applause of the audience internal to the dialogue, but by those watching its performance. In the stage directions we see that P raises his read in response to the audience’s applause, acknowledging that he is the product of their fantasy of catastrophe; his face is summoned by their ovation”

“He is their Protagonist, not D’s. “Distant,” the audience watches without witness in the reproduction of the conditions of catastrophe, driven by this illusion of Power as the Director of action and the consequent figuration of resistance, a subject turning from “crippled” hands to raised head”

“Like the applause itself, this figuration of politics is condemned to falter and die except in the reproduction of that which it claims to resist. It is this desire for a Protagonist, the spectacle of a victim or martyr and the performance of impotent rituals of pseudo-resistance, that Beckett’s play reveals to be the real catastrophe”

“For Adorno, we must confront the damaged reality that damages the subject, not by applauding some false image of resistance, but by undoing this image of the subject”

“While someone like Anders wrote against the obsolescence of the human, Beckett’s work already occupies that place — and asks us to join him. Instead of turning tail and staying on the same course, which, in a variation on Benjamin, consists in the “catastrophe[s], which [keep] piling wreckage upon wreckage,” Beckett’s work unfailingly fails better”

“Only in turning toward the a-subjective rigor of “a fugitive ‘I’…the non-pronounial,”38 only in the fade-out of light on the face, self, and world, can we make the exigent political strophe or turn, which he describes as “turning from [the plane of the feasible] in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.””

““My work has to do with a fugitive ‘I’ […] It’s an embarrassment of pronouns. I’m searching for the non-pronounial.” Lawrence Shainberg, “Exorcising Beckett”, The Paris Review, 29, Fall 1987, no. 104, 134”