Feeling the Apocalypse

Participating Members:

Katie Barclay

Vincent Bruyère

Jana Cattien

Jenny Stümer

Katie Barclay - What Does Affect do for Apocalypse? 

Apocalypse is suggestive of heightened feeling – whether that is the fear and anxiety associated with living in end times, the melancholia or nostalgia of lost pasts, or the excitement of new futures. Contemporary scholarship on emotion and affect reminds us that such feeling is not just ‘reactive’ – that is, our bodies’ biological responses to our environment – but formative. Feeling structures our engagements with the world, forms part of decision-making and interpretation, and infuses action. Responding to these insights, our working group sought to address the question ‘what does affect do for the apocalypse,’ turning to a scholarship on affect theory for its insights.

Texts that directly address the relationship between affect and apocalypse are rare, but a significant strand of affect scholarship attends to the nature of ‘change.’ Thus, within such works, we considered apocalypse as moments of revolution, both political and personal, considering how such works theorised the role of affect in processes of personal transformation and social and political change. We identified apocalyptic moments as occasions where a shift became necessary, where suffering required relief, but where such possibility remained an object of desire (sometimes unrecognised).

Questions of stability, change, and transformation are central to the work of a number of affect and emotions theorists, who have come to posit emotion as a form of structure. Raymond William’s coined the term ‘structures of feeling’ to articulate the underlying ideas and feelings that came to resist and challenge hegemonic norms, using the term feeling to point to the ways that such challenges were not always fully thought out or articulated. Feelings pointed to processes, ambivalences, and emergences in processes of change, rather than ideologies or systems. Others have posited a stronger role for emotion in the production of social systems. William Reddy has provided an account of the ‘emotional regime’, whereby communities order themselves through an agreed system of emotion, and where divergence of feeling excluded one from the political community. Reddy posited social and political revolution as a transformation of feeling, whereby emergent structures of feeling (to use William’s term) come to cultural dominance and replace old. Emotional regimes experience revolutions, with impacts both personal and political.

By positioning the prospect of revolution, both structures of feeling and emotional regimes open up the possibility of apocalyptic moments – periods where old worlds are ending and new ones remain embryonic or not yet formed. Of gaps between, as it were. Attending to these moments as place of apocalyptic feeling drew attention to process and becoming. Apocalyptic moments were not clearly sites of progressive change but of emptiness, contest, exploration and endurance. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, a number of affect theorists considered the ways that desires and attachments to the ‘old’ interfered with or blocked the possibility of the ‘new’. Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’, for example, spoke to the ways that our pursuit of unachievable goals became cruel as our desires brought only suffering and distracted us from what was possible. Apocalypse became a space where desire was refigured.

Apocalyptic moments might also be moments of negation, or refusals of self. David Hook considered the revolutionary potential of ‘non-being’, whereby a letting go of identity and self provided a space for reimagining and future possibilities – a site from which to grow. Affect theory then led us to ‘quiet’ apocalypses, where worlds required an emptying out to offer space for the new. But where the possibilities of such giving up were hard to grasp or to recognise as sites of safety, opportunity, or joy.

The Low-Affect Apocalypse

Affect theory, with its roots in psychoanalysis and continental philosophy, has long attended to the ‘Other’, as a site of desire and empathetic exchange. More recently however, the field has taken an ‘anti-social’ turn, as it has been coined, as theorists reflect on the opportunities and necessity of limited engagement or disengagement. Considering apocalyptic moments as occasions that require disinvestment in old words, and the opening of spaces for new, leads us to the possibilities of limited or constrained affect.

Affect theory offers a range of possible ways to explore both how and what is offered by such disengagement. Xine Yao points to the political potential of ‘disaffection’, or ‘unfeeling’ – ‘affect that is not recognised as feeling’ – whereby a refusal to sympathetically engage, to recognise another’s tears, becomes a refusal to enter into a particular logic of the world. Disaffection refuses one form of emotional regime, creating space for another. Berlant similarly considers ‘being in life without wanting the world,’ through lenses of disassociation and suicidal ideation. In both conditions, people produce a ‘gap’ or distance between themselves and the world – a space of self-protection or endurance which enables survival but perhaps also perspective or insight. They attempt to lose a world that they nonetheless remain within.

The gap that is created through disengagement – like the possibility of ‘non-being’ offered by Hook above – becomes a site of potential, but one that is, for want of a better term, ‘low affect.’ Here Zupančič’s rereading of Blanchot becomes useful. The apocalypse is disappointing. For the apocalypse to enable revelation and transformation, it requires recognition of the negation offered by the end of the world. But in practice – as with mourning – people live within the apocalypse. They persist, endure, continue, despite the presence of the end.

To live within the apocalypse then points not to heightened feeling or transformative events, but to the everyday. Stories of living with apocalypse become those of rhythm, repetition, pattern-making, and especially endurance. We live within disappointment; we aim for negation, for the courage of hopelessness. If this is the case, affect too might hold possibilities. As Colebrook suggests, the value of affect might not be that it offers a ground beyond or before cognition, but that it provides a “power or force with a tendency to persist or endure” (2011, 55).

Affect too might hold future possibilities. If theorists such as Berlant and Buber have positioned, what we are terming, apocalyptic moments as sites where creativity is forestalled, limited to “scenes of satire, irony, and falling apart” (Berlant 2011, 125), Colebrook offers affects that might suggest new worlds beyond the human.

Jenny Stümer - Apocalyptic Affect  (or Living in the Impasse)

I want to continue with Lauren Berlant, who is perhaps the most prolific affect theorist (although she uses the term sparingly) and also, or, this is my provocation, a somewhat apocalyptic thinker (despite never really using the term apocalypse as such).

Berlant draws our attention to the everyday and to the historical present as an affective parameter that allows us to understand something about how people cope. One of Berlant’s major achievements is that she has given a language to these unspoken dynamics of sentimentality and feeling, particularly as they shape the biopolitical ordering of everyday experience.

Berlant speaks at length about living in the impasse, as a way to theorize what it feels like to be in the middle of a major shift. To her the impasse is an affect world, in which crisis (and perhaps apocalypse) is normalized and people have to negotiate a kind of hyper awareness of potential threats with an acute sense of stuckness and exhaustion that stems from a constant management of what is frightening and overwhelming.

This is useful in thinking about the apocalypse not simply as a spectacular event, but as a form of violent endurance that is tethered to specific experiences and attempts at navigating crisis, rupture, and upheaval. Read through this lens, apocalypse is unexceptional to history and consciousness — and might rather be understood as what Berlant calls a “process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming” (2011, 10), often producing various responses, fantasies (and of course feelings!) that link to efforts of holding on regardless to what has already proven to be harmful in the first place, somehow hoping “that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” ( 2011, 2). In this vein apocalypse can be slow and silent, but it is also multi-scalar, stretching from Morton’s hyper-object to the most intimate of subjective ambiguity.

Apocalypse, as Zupančič puts it “can take time, even a lot of time; it is not necessarily an instantaneous event but can last and last” (2017, 24) or as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2016, 25) remind  us, a world may also ‘fade away little by little.’ What is particularly interesting for affect studies in this regard is the fact that apocalypse read in this vein “is not so much the end of the world as it is itself first and foremost the revelation of a new world” (2017, 24) as Zupančič puts it poignantly once more – and it is precisely this revelation, or the process of finding a language, a genre, or method for individual and collective experience in the middle of world-breaking shifts that Berlant draws our attention to.

This way of reframing apocalypse through the affective matters politically because it avoids treating the apocalypse purely as an object, a noun, or fixed idea. Instead it approaches the apocalyptic as a means of (e-)motion, movement, activity, flailing, tension, ambivalence, etc. and thereby ascribes meaning to the varied experiences, capacities, temporalities, and practices of world-making and world-breaking in different contexts. It is not about what the apocalypse represents – to  use this most evocative slogan of affect theory – but about what it does.

There are political implications of this approach that I briefly want to gesture at. In her essay “The End” Zupančič reminds us that the apocalypse as a framework to contemplate the present politically often serves as a means of ideological consolidation. The looming end either encourages broad efforts to prevent it (we have to do whatever it takes to survive) or it reinstates just how much is needed to change, in the sense that only a cataclysmic event of apocalyptic proportions could bring about any real transformation to our current troubles. Zupančič reads both of these “orientations in thinking” (2016, 9) as symptoms of a collective impotence to intervene in the structural conditions of existence – a frustrating mode of being which resonates with Berlant’s analysis of stuckness and impasse.

While Zupančič envisions radical change as an adequate response,  Berlant is more interested in ”alternative life alongside threat and breakdown” (2022, 120). Both thinkers, however, envision a particular and affective encounter with the negative that is helpful in theorizing apocalypse. Zupančič, for example, is interested in the effects of a confrontation with the negative, which she reads as a possibility to bring about “the choice to fight not simply to preserve the world such as it is, but to unite in creating, in forming a world, for the first time (2017, 22).” To her this “is not so much about “changing the world, but about making it”(ibid). In other words, Zupančič utilizes the apocalypse as a worldmaking (rather than world-breaking) encounter.

Berlant’s work on the other hand provides insight into the affects generated by this apocalyptic encounter. In her recent book On the Inconvenience of Others, Berlant details a particular political affect that she designates as “being in life without wanting the world” and which marks a way of occupying the historical present, while admitting a sense that nothing can really repair the situation despite the fact that no one can actually bear to lose the world. This way of flailing is saturated with an insistent desire for something else and produces a form of “suicidation,” whereby “living, thinking, planning, and scrolling through suicide becomes a way of life for the subordinated in exhausted submission and resistance to wearing out” (2022, 122). It’s a way of addressing a “sense of the unendurable that is endured” (122). A form of life proceeding “as the world recedes as an object/scene for desire (123)” or the formation of a “structure of dissociated continuity” (124). At the same time this impasse (like any impasse) is also marked by its potential for transformation, describing a kind of worldlessness as the scene for life, precisely because suicidation, to Berlant, is not about giving up but a form of “giving out” (145) – and, thereby, again, a form of worldmaking enabled by opportunities to make new attachments possible.

 Similar to Zupančič, Berlant does not give us very much on the passage between giving out and producing these new attachments, or radical change; however, Derek Hook’s work on ‘death-bound subjectivity’ may invoke some helpful bridges. Drawing on the work of Lacan and Fanon, Hook is interested in the agency of radical negativity. Inspired by Fanon’s zone of non-being as that which “connotes an unusual proximity between life and death, an overlapping state in which the circumstances of death are omnipresent in life,” (2020, 356) Hook is interested in the consequences of ontological erasure. Fanon posits that the colonial encounter crafts a death-bound subjectivity for black people, but he also suggests that this form of non-being produces what Biko calls a “method of death,” (356) which is political and potentially agentic. Hook locates this transformative capacity with the help of the Lacanian death drive, which is, according to Žižek, “the opposite of dying” (366) and to Zupančič produces a means of unexpected affirmation, precisely by enabling an underlying passionate attachment, a “drive pursued to the end,” which is at the same time ceaseless, marking “a continuation without end” (367).

Hook explains, alongside these authors that, “it is via the death drive that all unconscious commitments to the status quo of the existing symbolic order can be overcome (370).” In other words, the death drive suspends the hold of the symbolic world in Berlant’s terms, without escaping the urge to continue: “dead but alive” or “living yet dead” according to Fanon, or “being in life without wanting the world” in Berlant’s thinking. In this way radical negativity becomes a form of surplus vitality or agency crucial to understanding the cultural politics of apocalypse.

In saying this I don’t mean to equate the ideas of these thinkers, in particular there are important differences, for example, in the context of the ongoing apocalypse of colonization and racism (unlike Fanon, Lacan had little interest in this topic, Berlant’s aesthetic example centers a queer white man and Zupančič never mentions positionality or racial difference). However, what these thinkers have in common is a particular desire for transformation that can only come about as the consequence of an ongoing apocalyptic encounter or an apocalypse that is enduring. There is a question here of whether or not we can read the present as a time of collective apocalyptic flailing (in Berlant’s sense), where “there is something about the end itself that drives repetition, and repetition is essentially repetition of the end” in Zupančič words (2016, 4) or whether we could also think about the politics of collective suicidation (not my favourite term), of “being in life without wanting the world” or the expression of what I call an apocalyptic drive of our time, which I would define as the radical pursuit of a life that is not in the interest of  self-preservation, both in the sense of what we are already seeing in the form of a collective impasse to change and the imperative to reconsider which kind of world is to be saved and which one truly needs to end so that in the words of Berlant, “it would be possible to imagine a potentialized present that does not reproduce all of the conventional collateral damage” (2011, 263).

Much in the tradition of Berlant and exploring the ordinary apocalypse through a series of aesthetic examples, the next two sections look at an exhibition we visited in Heidelberg and outline some preliminary thoughts on Ling Ma’s novel Severance.

Vincent Bruyère - Paper in Exhibition 

Here it is, behind a glass case in the lobby of the Prinzhorn Collection: the elusive concept of ordinary apocalypse we have been chasing over the past few months. But this time, it is before us in the flesh, so to speak, like an anatomical specimen in a jar of formaldehyde. After all, we are in a space administered by the psychiatric division of Heidelberg University Hospital preserving thousands of objects painted, drawn, and sculpted by mental health patients. Thankfully, there are no discolored bodies or body parts to be found in the building, only an “archive of feelings” – an expression introduced by Ann Cvetkovich precisely to resist the pathologization of trauma in mainstream clinical discourse.

The piece that captured our imagination consists in tidy piles of A4 sheets of white paper, thousands of them, enough to give paper the density of a column. The shorter pile offers a glimpse at the content at eye level, like cross-section of a process that would remain illegible otherwise. Each sheet contains a pencil drawing. The one visible in the cross-section represents uneven bubbles connected by a line like the pearls of a necklace, or perhaps a coarse rosary. The whole thing is scribbled over as if to negate or neutralize an initial diagrammatic gesture. Half a million of these drawings were recovered in the basement of Vanda Viera-Schmidt (born in 1949) in 2005. The bulk of them is now on display at the German Military’s History Museum in Dresden.

The museum pamphlet sheds light on the apocalyptic nature of the drawings. They are a manifestation of Viera-Schmidt psychological war effort in the ongoing battle against the forces of evil in the world. Day in day out, she registers and deflects invisible assaults on paper. The accidental monumentality of the display of drawings in the form of pillars gives a vivid account of what it means for ordinariness to be lived in an apocalyptic register. There is something apocalyptic in the vision of a monumental document sealed on itself by its sheer volume and tucked away in a basement. At the same time, Viera-Schmidt’s choice of medium – scribbled A4 paper –to channel her emotional labor suggests that her feeling for the apocalypse in the present tense is perhaps less theological (and eschatological) than administrative. It is at once tedious, wishful, and routinized. It is textbook magical thinking but outfitted for the age of bureaucracy.  

Vanda’s version of bureaucracy is not a numbing dead end. It is a feeling state that allows her to remain receptive to a world always on the brink without having to be elegiac or sensational about it. Of course, the pillars of papers erected through a quasi-sedimentary process of accrual to prevent a proverbial falling of the sky did not leave us indifferent. But if they are sensational it is also in the sense that Bacon’s screaming figures are sensational insofar as they establish “a relationship between the visibility of the scream (the open mouth as a shadowy abyss) and invisible forces” (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon via Claire Colebrook, “Earth Felt the Wound: The Affective Divide”).

Vanda’s muted commitment to theological accountancy is an antidote to the bucket list ethics that plagues the apocalyptic world of Carol in the Netflix adult animation Carol & the End of the World (2023). As a celestial body hurls toward Earth, Melancholia style, reckoning humans turns or returns to the body and its capacity to feel, be emotionally fulfilled and register stimulation in a final and rather confused embrace of hang gliding, family time, poetry, public nudity, and farewell cruises…Carol is not having it. Six months before the vaporization of everything, she would rather turn or return to the office and its non-descript space of distracting possibilities where deadlines will have to be met and forms be filled. They don’t know it yet but Vanda and Carol are colleagues in spirit by virtue of their apocalyptic relation to paperwork. Their administrative paths are bound to cross eventually in the breakroom or by the copy machine of history, sometimes between now and the end.

Jana Cattien - Severance: A Study in Apocalyptic Affect

Severance, the post-apocalyptic novel by Ling Ma, explores what the apocalypse feels like when one is unable to experience it as an apocalypse.

Published in 2018, two years before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the novel follows Chinese American protagonist Candace Chen as she tries to come to terms with the arrival of a zombie apocalypse that fails to transform her world. Reflected in the deadpan style of her narration, Candace records the facts of the zombie outbreak as though nothing much has changed. Shen Fever has decimated cities and brought the global economy to a halt, but she keeps going to work every day to her office job in New York City, trying to produce glossy bibles that nobody will read. When the bosses at her company offer her a large cash pay-out in return for staying behind long after everyone else has fled the city, Candace agrees. The money won’t be able to buy her anything, but it’s at least keeping her attached to her old life—a life in which she got a job in order to pay the bills, and then kept paying the bills in order to be able to continue working.

 Severance allowed our working group to explore the theme of apocalyptic affect beyond cliché depictions of the profound affective transformations that an apocalypse might bring: spiritual enlightenment in the face of what will be revealed; affective rebirth as we come to terms with all that was lost. Instead of resorting to these well-worn tropes, Severance paints a picture of apocalyptic effect modeled on affective regimes of disaffection and meaninglessness as they already pervade our current world. A world, like ours, in which the meaningfulness of work has been ceded to an overarching imperative to just keep working, is a world in which the apocalypse might not make a difference to how we experience work.

As the apocalypse unfolds without making a difference, Candace’s narration of the outbreak and its aftermath is infused with flashbacks of her life with her Chinese parents when they were still alive, full of hopes and dreams for their new life in the U.S. Nostalgia is an important theme in the novel: it is a trigger for becoming fevered, turning the infected into zombies who endlessly perform the same task. Remembering childhood rituals, or returning to places that have nostalgic significance, is what makes other survivors eventually succumb to the virus. Candace, however, appears to be immune to both the virus and the nostalgia that triggers it. In the context of the novel, this is not salvation, but its own kind of damnation. It condemns her to keep on going regardless, until it no longer makes a difference whether she is already fevered or still her old self.

Conclusion 

When we think about what it might mean to experience an apocalypse, we immediately think of heightened emotional states. Rather than following this intuition, our working group was interested in apocalyptic feelings that are associated with ordinary living and ‘mundane’ questions of survival, both in the face of the apocalypse and as a matter of navigating it in the everyday. In the texts we’ve read and discussions we’ve had, the emphasis was, on the one hand, on the emotional regimes that might allow people to cope with the apocalypse and on the other hand, on the shifts in emotional regimes that might themselves be considered apocalyptic in their impact and scope. Both these dimensions showed us that affects and emotions are no mere epiphenomena of more fundamental political and social states of affairs, but themselves capable of making and unmaking worlds.

Readings

Barclay, Katie. 2022. “Compassion as an Agent of Historical Change.” American Historical Review. Vol. 127, issue 4: 1752–1785.

Berlant, Lauren. 2022. “On Being in Life Without Wanting the World.” In On The Inconvenience of Other People. Durham: Duke UP.

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP.

Colebrook, Claire. 2011. “Earth Felt the Wound: The Affective Divide.” Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture. Vol 8, no. 1: 45-58.

Draft Chapter in Progress by Vincent Bruyère, in a book on Epidemiological Realism. 

Hook, Derek. 2020. “Death‑bound subjectivity: Fanon’s zone of nonbeing and the Lacanian death drive.” Subjectivity: 13:355–375.

Reddy, William. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1997. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yao, Xine. 2021. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in 19^th century America. Durham: Duke UP.

Zupačič, Alenka. 2017. “The Apocalypse is (still) disappointing.” Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 10 & 11: 16-30.

Zupačič, Alenka. 2016. “The End.” Provocations: 1-9.

Ma, Ling. 2018. Severance: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.