Who's Carrying the Flame?: Philip K. Dick's "Dr. Bloodmoney"

In the post-apocalyptic landscape, the place of commercial activity is always worth noting. When the world has been turned upside down, whether by plague or natural catastrophe, locating the material and ideological remnants of an impulse toward buying and selling, and especially reinvestment, is a telling sign of how intimately the features of the present have been made to appear unthinkably natural. 

There are many interesting features of Dick's 1965 novel Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb: Walter Dangerfield, the preserver of culture who remains in orbit around the Earth transmitting radio signals to the listeners down below; or Hoppy Harrington, the phocomelus who tries to use his psychic powers to compensate for his physical handicap in order to punish the able-bodied around him; or the ultimate cause of the nuclear destruction, which remains a mystery despite reappearing, or seeming to reappear, at the end of the novel. 

But for all of its features that seem rare for a Dick novel, and for all the features that are familiar, I was struck by the sole African American character Stuart McConchie. On the fringes of a main narrative about psychosis and transmigrating identities, McConchie's character becomes the driving force for the rebirth of capital, overcoming the hesitations of those around him who have become resigned to simple survival.

As the other survivors in the San Francisco Bay area scrounge for food or medicine, McConchie finds himself hoarding money, stuffing bills into pillow cases: 

"...in five days he had collected thousands of dollars in money from the pockets of dead people he had found in the ruins of houses...from their pockets and from the houses themselves. Others scavengers had been after food and different objects such as knives and guns, and it made him uneasy that he alone wanted money." 

Despite a latent realization that the "money was worthless," the next scene finds McConchie scurrying into the street to collect money from a purse. McConchie is unwilling to part with his money, or try to utilize it for any transactions. He simply hoards it and resigns himself to eating dead rats, an image that calls to mind the miser.   

Combating the simplistic notion that hoarding money is the essence of capitalism, Marx, in Volume One of Capital states:

"Withdrawn from circulation, [a sum of money becomes] petrified into a hoard, and though [it remains] in that state till doomsday, not a single farthing would accrue to [it]."

Of course, here Marx has put aside the idea of an interest bearing account, presuming a fairly simplistic banking system that may be unrecognizable to us now. But his point about circulation remains. In a footnote, Marx further clarifies why hoarding money prevents it from performing its funciton as capital capable of producing surplus value: 

"Exclusion of money from circulation would also exclude absolutely its self-expansion as capital, while accumulation of a hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery."

Circulation is the key word here, a point that Marx explores further in Volume Two. McConchie's hoarding of money is nothing but the misrecognition of wealth under capital, of what distinguishes the black salesman from the white owner. One of the key differences is the ability for the white owner to have accumulated enough money to actually get rid of some of it through the process of circulation, whether of buying more materials or hiring more laborers. 

Years after the nuclear explosions, as society begins to rebuild, McConchie finds himself back in a familiar position. He has abandoned the bags of cash and become the salesman of small, electronic vermin traps designed to catch the hyper-intelligent cats and rats. Moved by the entrepreneurial spirit, and disgruntled by the lack of job mobility, McConchie approaches his boss, and maker of the traps, Dean Hardy, and suggests taking the business from the city to the surrounding rural areas. In response to Hardy's reluctance, McConchie explains:

“Listen, I’ve got my eye on the big time; I don’t want to mess around with selling any more—I’m fed up with it. I sold aluminum pots and pans and encyclopedias and TV sets and now these vermin traps. They're good traps and people want them, but I just feel there has to be something else for me."

McConchie sets out on his own, arriving in Marin County, the central seat of main narrative revolving around the scheming phocomelus. Upon arrival, McConchie approaches Andrew Gill, who runs "the largest commercial enterprise in West Marin." His small batches of hand rolled cigarettes and distilled brandy are predominantly sold in the Bay Area, but are said to slowly trickle toward the East Coast. 

McConchie wastes no time extolling the virtues of Gill's Gold Label cigarettes, which he describes as "first in its field." Gill notes how happy this commercial discourse makes him and how long ("seven years") it had been since he had heard similar talk:

"Perhaps the world, at last, was really beginning to regain some of its old forms, its civilities and customs and preoccupations, all that had gone into it to make it what it was. This, he thought, this talk by McConchie; it’s authentic. It’s a survival, not a simulation; this man has somehow managed to preserve his viewpoint, his enthusiasm, through all that has happened—he is still planning, cogitating, bullshitting ... nothing can or will stop him."

In this passage, the business discourse becomes an indicator of approaching civility: McConchie, the black salesman, is unstoppably carrying the fire of capital back into a dark world, and with it, necessarily, civility. Gill, initially content to persist as a small manufacturer with a few employees, is soon convinced by McConchie to not only utilize a "systemaic network of outlets" to distribute his goods all the way to North Carolina by integrating with the burgeoning mail system, but also to introduce mechanization (electronic cigarette-rolling machines) into the production process. 

Here we have the transition from handicraft manufacturing to automated production. On the one hand, we might read this transition as Marx does: 

"Entirely new branches of production, erecting new fields of labor, are also formed as the direct result either of machinery or of the general industrial changes brought about by it."

In a landscape devastated by hydrogen bombs, the potential for machine production to not only proliferate the material comfort provided by cigarettes but also to spread to other areas signals the re-birth of civilization. On this reading, the novel equates civilization, or society, with capitalism. Rebuilding is inevitably to recreate the operations of capital. With this reading, capital has been thoroughly naturalized, a historically necessary component of any form of human progress.

But what I want to highlight is the specific vehicle of this ideology. What does it mean for the novel to use an African American, one who serves a marginalized place in a system when functioning, whose role as salesman is a by-product of the automated production process, whose racial lineage contains the systematic and brutal exploitation of a labor force for the purposes of accumulation and expansion; what does it mean for this character to be the driving force of capital expansion in the post-apocalypse?

I want to suggest two answers to this complicated question. Perhaps we could read this as an ironic commentary on the racial turmoil of the mid-60's: the race thought to be naturally uncivilized becomes the vehicle for reinstating a form of civility thought to be lost in the nuclear catastrophe. The novel would then attempt to position itself on the right side of history.

But I want to point toward a more complicated reading along the lines of, "Why do people recreate the conditions of their own subjugation?" One response might want to turn to Lacan's discussion of the "compulsion of repetition" to shore up an ambitious reading identifying a latent feature of the modern human that returns again and again to the traumatic alienation of capital, incapable, even in the most extreme conditions, of imagining a new mode of living.

An equally ambitious reading could turn to Hegel's discussion of the master and bondsman. In this reading, the subject of capital, McConchie, you, I, are all in the place of bondsman. In the place of master is the system of capital with its myriad components, material and personal. Supersession of this relationship is incapable if the two sides do not achieve mutual recognition, if they do not "recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another."

The reproduction of capital by McConchie in Dr. Bloodmoney would therefore be a byproduct of the impossibility of recognition by a system that functions through subjects but does not take a stabilized subject position. Capital is the master incapable of experiencing absolute fear, even in the face of mass death. It persists in its impersonal lordly place structurally incapable of recognizing its infinite working bondsmen, who without this recognition find themselves returning again and again to their structurally subservient place. 

Absent Bodies: George R. Stewart's "Earth Abides"

Continuing with a theme that I began in the last post, I want to juxtapose the images of excessive death from Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man and Max Brooks' World War Z with the mid-century American post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides. 

 Beyond the constitutive scene that I recounted from World War Z, where bodies are stacked around a battalion, literally forming a fortress, there are several places in the novel where even after the situation has become manageable, zombie body parts liter the landscape. Here is a description of a Canadian Wildnerness Park: 

"The natural beauty has been replaced by wreckage: abandoned vehicles, debris, and human corpses remain partially frozen into the gray snow and ice."

As in the previous accounts, the remnants of death become literally woven into the fabric of post-apocalyptic life. Bones, limbs, and bodies become features of the natural landscape along the same lines as DVD sets, Sponge Bob sleeping bags, trees and rocks. 

In contrast to this, Earth Abides is unsettling bereft of death. A plague has swept over America, and presumably the entire planet, leaving an uncertain amount of survivors, the most important being the main character of Isherwood, or Ish, whose reason for survival, like the cause and nature of the deathly virus, remains a mystery. 

Ish, who had been in the wilderness as a graduate student "working on a thesis" about the ecology of the Black Creek Area, slowly comes to realize that something drastic as happens as he moves from the wilderness back to the city. Almost every town he goes to has been deserted, populated more with stray dogs and chickens than any signs of human beings. After reading in a newspaper about the "Great Disaster," Ish takes off across the United States to survey the land before returning to his childhood home and beginning a community. 

Despite his extensive travels, the novel almost never finds Ish facing the remnants of the disaster in the form of dead bodies or even skeletons. In fact, there are very few places where death is even discussed. Here is the earliest instance:

"Here and there he saw bodies, but in general he found only emptiness. Apparently the onset of the disease had been slow enough so that people were not usually struck down in the streets. Once he passed through a town where the smell of corpses was thick in the air. He remember what he had read in the newspaper; apparently there had been concentrations at the last upon certain areas, and in these the corpses were now to be found most thickly." 

Olfactory alerts will dominate the remainder of Ish's relationships to the death caused by the Great Disaster, as happens when he arrives in New York where "his nostrils" tell him that he is near a "Medical Center." By envisioning such a perfectly functioning State, which capable of ushering almost every infected person into a hospital or specific area, the novel is free to bypass the very deathly matter so ubiquitous in World War Z. 

Just a quick bit of simple arithmetic to drive home how striking this quarantined vision is: the population of the United States in 1950 was roughly 150 million. If a virus killed off 99.9% of the population, a rough guess considering the absence of survivors that Ish runs into despite driving across the country twice, that would mean 149,985,000 bodies found their deathly bed in a hospital, which would be an impressive feat of bureaucratic engineering.

By envisioning a post-apocalyptic landscape empty of deathly remains, the novel is capable of accomplishing the title's promise: the Earth begins to take back over the World of Man, meaning hedges grow wildly, roads succumb to natural erosion, and various species that were parasitic to man begin to die off.

This last point regarding species populations becomes somewhat of a not uninteresting obsession of the novel. There are successive waves of species over population that threaten Ish and his burgeoning Tribe: ants, rats, cows. At the peak of rat infestation, Ish guesses that the number of rats is "somewhere in the nieghborhood of fifty million," calling this guess "conservative." However, shortly after the rats seem to disappear, but no bodies remain:

"Day by day, the numbers of rats became fewer, and then one morning they seemed to be gone entirely."

Similar to the Great Disaster, the novel references a death that would have to be into the millions, and yet no bodies populate the landscape to serve as a reminder of the infestation. 

The absence of dead bodies, both animal and human, is a stark contrast to World War Z. On the one hand, this could be read as symptomatic of Earth Abides' historical myopia, which finds the human race devolving into a "primitive" state only fifty years after the Great Disaster. In this case, the remnants of history remain inside designated unexplorable areas, beyond the purview of the post-apocalyptic subject. A piece of evidence from the book to support this perspective is the way in Ish guards the library as a personal, sacred temple to be entered by no one else. 

On the other hand, the absent bodies could be indicative of death's peculiar place along the natural/artificial continuum. In this case, the novel would be incapable of seeing the decay of deathly bodies as equivalent to the natural processes of wind and water erosion or species selection. 

Not to say that death doesn't have a place in this novel, simply that mass death is something that never finds visual representation; its presence is safely located on the margins of a world that is returning to naturalness. Even before he gets to these mass graves, Ish knows not to go and see; he is beyond the pull of the desire that sends Leontius rushing to look at the dead corpses.

Empty of living bodies and dead, Earth Abides isolates deathly human remains from the natural landscape rather than incorporating them. The animals hunted by the sharpened nickel and penny arrowheads of Ish's great grandchildren will never be found gnawing at the rotting flesh of another animal or human, but always remain idyllically back in their natural environment: eating the green grass that grows out of a cracked and empty road.    

Excessive Death: Grainville's "The Last Man" & Brooks' "World War Z"

There is a strand that runs through the modern imagination, the obverse or compliment to the infinite multiplication of consumer goods. It is a strand that is easily picked up in apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic literature, and for me it is one visual captured in the final scenes of Antonioni's 1970 Zabriskie Point: 

As the clip showcases, the impulse I am gesturing toward has to do with the obliteration of our consumer society. When consumer goods and domesticity are unable to fulfill their utopic promise, there is something comforting in the spectacle of fragmentation, the glittering shards, splinters, and scraps of televisions, refrigerators, and wardrobes. But while the catharsis that accompanies this imaginative destruction might offer a liberating vision of a more simple life free from the trappings of excessive goods, what happens when the material surplus takes another form? What is the imaginative impact when there are an excess of human matter? 

In Cousin de Grainville's 1805 novel The Last Man, the reader is given a quasi-fictionalized account of the Book of Revelations. Omegarus, the Omega to Adam's Alpha, lives through the final gasps of an increasing sterile Earth despite the falsely prophesied hope that he may start humanity anew with his Brazilian wife Syderia. With the Last Days in full swing, Omegarus beholds a truly bizare sight: 

 "Released from His promises and from the laws He had imposed upon Himself, God gave the signal for the resurrection of the dead...The graves opened and they came forth -- from shattered trees, split rocks, collapsing edifices. The earth resembled an immense volcano from which, through an infinite number of fissures, human bones and ashes were ejected...Three hours were enough for the resurrection of all human remains, so swift and violent had the eruption been." 

The account goes on to describe how the earth had been "disfigured" by these "human remains," and that "entire cities had vanished beneath the covering ashes." Unsurprisingly, upon seeing the Earth vomit up the semi-processed dead, Omegarus is frozen in place with terror. 

In lieu of the familiar image, seen in plenty of post-apocalyptic depictions, where the excessive detritus of the previous world lies in splinters, The Last Man offers a somewhat different vision. The problem here is not too many things, a somewhat simplistic critique of capital. Nor is it another familiar critique of too many people, a population crisis that is the alibi for biopower's racially-biased operation. Instead, there is a literal and transformative excess of dead human matter. The remains of the dead come to possess and transform the world of the living, making it nearly unrecognizable.  

This vision of the excess of dead human matter finds an echo in Max Brook's zombie-apocalypse novel World War Z. While the Last Man vision is the distressing signal that the end has truly arrived, within the narrative of World War Z, the vision is one that signals hope. The following account is part of a battle that becomes a turning point in the novel as the United States Army begins to fight back against the zombie threat, taking back the land east of the Rocky Mountains. 

"They started piling up, forming this artificial palisade at the first range marker, this ridge of corpses that got higher and higher each minute...It was kinda eerie, the sun rising over this mountainous ring of corpses. We were totally walled in, all sides were piled at least twenty feet high and over a hundred feet deep...When we started burying the bodies they came tumbling out."  

As in The Last Man, there is such an excess of raw matter that it becomes constitutive, building a fortress that surrounds the soldiers. Not only does it pile up to the point of building a barrier, but the re-killed dead bodies overflow the places of internment, or as The Last Man account states, "the graves opened and they came forth." Not simply the dead, as in the accumulation of names no longer living, but the signifiers of death serve to construct a new world around the living.   

On the one hand, these visions can easily be shuttled into a ready-to-hand historical explanation. The living always abide in a world made by the dead, a testament to the inescapable power of historical continuity as one generation inescapably inherits the goods and evils of its fore bearers. And I believe this is not an inaccurate reading, as much of World War Z is about the perpetuation of transgenerational trauma as one generation inherits the inability to sufficiently process a variety of events that strike at the heart of representation: genocide, the horrors of the Soviet Union (however disputed), the atomic bombings of Japan, and the Holocaust.  

However, what I think this account may threaten to leave out is the very real material impact that these visions present. In both novels, dead human matter literally changes the lived environment, in the one case acting almost like napalm to eat away at the earth and in the other to build a fortification. These apocalyptic visions challenges us to consider the question: What do we do when there is an excess of death? When death, not simply as a theoretical negation, but deathly material, non-animated material bodies, bones, ashes, no longer stay put but actually come to be constitutive elements along the lines of stone, steel and brick? What is life in the face of living with excessive death?

At its heart, as the subtitle of World War Z ("An Oral History of the Zombie War") testifies, the novel is about being at war. It is shot through with military acronyms, discussions of military maneuvers, and the inadequacies of military equipment. At its core, this is a novel that paints an intimate portrait of trauma, the mental repercussions of being actively engaged in an extended armed conflict with a non-traditional enemy. It presents a poignant commentary on the seemingly endless continuation of the war in Afghanistan, which has nearly lost its temporal conjunction with the purportedly inaugural events of 9/11. 

As a way of conclusion, I want to cite a passage from Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel Falling Man, which I believe has echoes with both The Last Man and World War Z. As Keith, an "average" guy who was working in the Twin Towers when the planes hit, returns to his apartment near Ground Zero days later, he looks out at steel girders, the last vestiges of the towers:

 "The dead were everywhere, in the air, the rubble, on the rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and drizzled on the windows all along the streets, in his hair and on his clothes."

This might just as easily have been a description of Omegarus as the ashes of all humanity poured out in the apocalyptic realization. In both cases, the ashes of the dead are no longer bound to the urns or burial grounds where we expect them to be. Instead, their literal presence covers the world, a corrosive material that eats into the urban fabric, changing the city landscape. And not simply an external element, but something immerse, seeping into the very fabric of life, part of the air that is breathed. 

Perhaps the comfort that is comes at the moment of destruction of inorganic matter, the fragmentation of consumer society, is difficult to reproduce in the face of an excess of organic matter. In all three novels, The Last Man, World War Z, and Falling Man, the excess of bodies, bones, and ashes traumatizes those who inherit this world of excessive death. The vision that these novels present challenge us to consider the vision of a world where a surplus of dead human matter no longer remains pushed to the proscribed areas, but becomes part of the constructive fabric of everyday life.  

Are you Ready for the Great Atomic Power?(The Louvin Brothers Imagine the End)

Over thirty years before Ronald Reagan thought he discerned the signs of the impending Armageddon, with the Soviet Union cast as the great Red Dragon, the Louvin Brothers taped into a global anxiety opened up by the destruction caused by the United States' use of atomic weapons. 

 The Louvin Brothers, a quasi-evangelical mid 20th century country music duo, released "The Great Atomic Power," a meditation on the relationship between the atomic bomb and the end times, in 1952. Despite being a fan of their music for years, and having previous noted their ability to combine cheery music with the macabre, I share this song as a recent discovery.

At the end of the first verse, Ira Louvin (ch)eerily sings, "Are we all in great confusion?/Do we know the time or hour/when a terrible explosion may rain down upon our land/Leaving horrible destruction, blotting out the works of Man?" The vision is not established on a hypothetical: there is no "if" regarding the possibility of nuclear annihilation. This conviction can easily be connected to the Louvin Brothers' evangelical commitment: a prophesy of the end to implore belief in the present.

The second verse offers this religious path around destruction, but only by re-troding embattled ground. Giving "heart and soul to Jesus" becomes the "one way to escape" the impending doom of atomic power. However, as the verse's final line explains, Christ will "surely stay beside you" while "your soul flies to safety and eternal peace and rest." It is easy to ignore the theological battles that have been waged over the question: How does the Resurrection, or the Second Coming, reflect particular visions of Christian identity? To articulate just one such position, in the mid-17th century, John Milton wrote in his extensive meditations the Bible:

"The idea that the spirit of man is separate from his body, so that it may exist somewhere in isolation, complete and intelligent, is nowhere to be found in scripture, and is plainly at odds with nature and reason." (1206, from Christian Doctrine in Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton)

This quote is only intended to point out that the particular dualist vision contained in the song is one of several theological positions on the relationship between the body and soul. I'd also note: the song's construction of a soul-less body that remains as the apocalypse proceeds is strangely similar to ready-to-hand descriptions of zombies: animated corpses without "souls" or "minds." 

In closing, I would argue that the song's assurance of being saved possesses less conviction than its assurance of destruction. For example, the closing lines of the song: "When the mushrooms of destruction fall in all its fury great/God will surely save his children from that awful, awful fate." If the Lord's ability to protect the believers were as certain as the arrival of "mushrooms of destruction," shouldn't their fate be described as something other than "awful." The use of the word "surely" to describe the redeeming acts of Christ in the second verse and God in the last verse rings with a hollow hopefulness better suited to describing the arrival of Godot who "won't come this evening but surely tomorrow."

In less than three minutes, the Louvin Brothers capture the mid-century anxiety about the impending doom of nuclear power by asking, "Are you ready?" While the question surely is intended to provoke the audience into considering the Savior's return, it just as easily captures a secular sentiment of uncertainty regarding an inescapable man-made End.

Five on "Five"

1. "Five" is a post-apocalyptic film released in 1951, only six years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film opens with a series of atomic explosions followed by a sequence of iconic sites (Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, etc.) being swallowed up by black clouds. Robbed of the spectacle of tourist attractions, the viewer sees a lone woman, Roseanne, in tattered skirt and blouse aimlessly wandering down a long and empty stretch of California road. And so the journey begins...

2. "Five" manages to conveniently push aside the essential concerns for surviving the post-apocalypse. Roseanne finds Michael, a bearded man still disgruntled with his choice of getting an MA in English Lit. from Dartmouth ("Gave me diction and a job as a barker on the top of the Empire State Building.") in a pristine, modern house. The waterfall flowing through the middle of the house presumably carries a fresh rather than irradiated stream. Supplies are easily replenished from the local country store’s shelves, which seem to offer an inexhaustible treasure trove even once Michael and Roseanne are joined by the three other survivors: the elderly Oliver B. Barnstaple, an "assistant cashier at Santa Barbara Bank," Charles, the African American doorman from the same bank, and Eric, the unamused, French mountain climber whose plane crashed conveniently close to the scenic California coast a stone’s throw away from the survivor’s house. Even when the group finds a gasoline-powered generator, it is used unflinchingly to not only power electric lights but also to power a record player. Michael assures Charles’ worried glance, “There’s plenty of gas in the generator.” Lulled by this assurance, Charles proceeds to pirouette for the gathered. Their comfort belies that survival is never an issue in "Five"'s vision of the post-apocalypse. With access to seemingly infinite natural resources and infinite country stores, the survivors can turn to what is really important: constituting the proper family. 

3. Early in the film, Roseanne reveals she is pregnant while fighting off the sexual advances of Michael. Her persistent delusion that she will be reunited with the baby’s father is just as persistently refuted by Michael and Eric, the two men whose ideological battle is indivisible from the battle for legitimate stake in Roseanne’s body. That Roseanne's womb is truly the central concern of the movie is poignantly captured in the film's poster which shows her running away from four looming shadowy figures. 

Michael’s early sewing of a patch of corn seeds shows his commitment to nurturing new life, coded by Eric as a “return to primitivism” in contrast to his hope to return to the city. Their sniping is charmless and in the end, Eric’s body is found wanting: the boils are not only a death sentence for his radiation poisoned body, but an ethical punishment for murdering Charles and tricking Roseanne to runaway with him. Roseanne’s affective flatness and wispy voice anticipate the horror of not only finding the skeleton of her dead husband, but also the ensuing mysterious death of her baby.

With the playing field cleared of historical and foreign transgressors, the film closes with Roseanne and Michael in the corn fields subversively destroyed by Eric. She approaches as he plunges his shovel deep into the rich soil. Taking the shovel into her own hands, Roseanne says, “I want to help you.” This consent is what was missing from Michael’s previous attempt to sow seeds. With the white, American, heterosexual couple reunited, the Earth will be legitimately made anew.  

 

4. There is a fleeting moment, where Charles and Michael till the fields together, side-by-side, that seems to offer a truly hopeful vision: a small, agrarian community where white and black work together to create a new world. However, this vision quickly gives way under the film’s facticity.

Our first sight of Charles is driving Mr. Barnstaple. With no discussion, he quickly moves from chauffeur to the group's manual laborer. No longer simply opening doors for bank customers, he now does the group’s laundry and other chores. The film circumscribes a precarious circle around this black male body: it has to be both working and emasculated, productive but not reproductive. 

If Michael’s refusal to wear a shirt is to showcase his virility for Roseanne, Charles’ lack of the same performs the opposite task. With the arrival of Eric, it is clear that either he or Michael will become the father of the new world. This shows how deeply entrenched the fear of mixing blood is even after the end.

Eric raises the specter of Charles’ blackness, a fact that the film had politely navigated up to that point. Eric voices his irritation with having to eat and sleep in proximity to Charles, concluding that, “it is a mistake that he is alive.” I would argue that Charles' death at the hand of Eric finds the film agreeing with this assessment. In addition, neither Roseanne nor Michael intervene to explain how the strictures of racism may require renegotiation in the post apocalypse.

5. As a final observation, probably the most interesting thing about "Five" is the house where most of the film's action takes place. It turns out that Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house for Arch Oboler, the director of "Five." 

In comparison to the devastation within the cities, with their cars and buses askew, the high modern house seems an unlikely destination for the rebirth of human beings. As with most features of the movie, it's particularity is never directly engaged. The audience merely learns that Roseanne's aunt, who loved literature, lived in this edifice. 

Well stocked with running water, books, and presumably food from the infinite number of country stores, the house becomes the locus of living. It's comfort is not only the reward for a hard day of sowing seeds or constructing a shack, but is the perfect place for a baby to come into the world. It's sterility ensures that no medicines are necessary for either mother or baby. Dancing to records and even electric lights powered by a generator: the trappings of the modern house comfortably slide into an age of global devastation. 

Like the closing scene of "Five," which shows the white, heterosexual couple as the legitimate heir to the kingdom of the world, locating the action within this unique structure shows that survival in the post apocalypse will not entail sacrificing the comforts of home or transgressing upon the sacrosanct laws of maintaining property within an historical lineage. 

Raider Camps and the Ethico-Political Imagination of Fallout 3

To revisit the argument of the previous post, Fallout 3 presents a critique of the State and the ability for its power, no matter in whose hands, to lead inevitably to tyranny and unjust violence-unto-death. Surrounded by the debris of a former sovereign superpower, the Enclave's attempt at forceful national reconstruction confirms familiar suspicions: the State’s monopoly on legitimate violence is wielded in order to preserve the existence of the nation as an entity in the face of internal or external perceived or constructed threats.

Despite Fallout's critique of the State form and the “abuse” or expression of power associated with this form, the game is incapable of envisioning an oppositional form of political community. Instead, it marks out the group who lives in a de-centralized manner, the Raiders, as a de facto enemy along the lines of animals and insects. 

The question is: What makes the Raider encampments different than other communities? I would argue the answer is related to the game's over-investment in the ethical in the face of its political sterility. Though their encampments include the usual trappings of life in the Capitol Wasteland, such as soiled mattresses or cardboard bedding, first aid kits, and ammunition boxes, the proximity of empty liquor bottles and mangled corpses hung from crude hooks is intended to provoke the horror of the human turned non-human. That the Raiders are shown to be outside the laws of humanity de-legitimizes not only their “way of life” but also their form of political communality. 

A Raider encampment

In the "Factions and Bestiary" section of Fallout 3's Official Game Guide, the Raiders are described as follows: 

"Chaos and anarchy. Or if you prefer, anarchy and chaos. Raiders revel in both…Most [Raider groups] are no more than a handful of people scraping out a living by preying on anything weaker than them. They have no driving purpose or goal, other than to live to see tomorrow and raise as much hell as possible today."

On the one hand, the Raiders embody the fear of post-apocalyptic lawlessness: marauders who exploit a disintegrated security system for the purposes of subsistence and dispensing random acts of violence or torture for the purposes of entertainment. Covered in grime and adorned with bones, beyond the bounds of reason, the Raiders are the return of the primal at the eve of civilization. 

However, the above quote also captures the ways in which the Raider encampments are formed for the same purposes as other communities around the Wasteland: to sustain life. The notion that a political community originates in securing bare biological need is found as far back as Aristotle. Therefore, I would argue that the Raiders encampments, both sporadically located and officially titled, are political communities as much as Megaton, Rivet City or Underworld, political community here being defined as any location where a group of two or more people cohabit together for the purposes of sustaining life. However, the Raider’s unethical nature circumscribes them from the benefits that come from other sympathetic post-apocalyptic humans, including the benefit to testify to being human. 

As de facto enemies, the Raiders are denied the ability to bare witness. In a game rife with characters, including Super Mutants and ghouls, who are supposed to challenge us to consider the boundary of humanness, in a game where even quasi-humans are given a voice with which to testify to the ongoing trauma of life in the post-apocalypse, in the Raiders we have a group of human beings whose dialogue is relegated to exclamations that function more like the bark of a dog than participation in dialogue. Their discursive silence relegates them to the boundary between human and non-human where they become silent enemies who must be silenced.

My intention is not to say that we should all rush to imitate this group of men and women who live without a leader, hierarchical structure or centralized location. My point is to demonstrate the way in which the Raiders ethical status becomes a judgement on legitimate forms of political life. Instead of the "bad" semi-nomadic encampments, what Fallout finds “good” is other, more recognizable forms of political community: the diverse city, or even the city of people who share a similar sense of identity as slaves, ghouls, etc.

Despite the games thorough critique of the State form, it ultimately fails, in its imaginative space, to legitimize a new form of people living together in an egalitarian manner. Fallout ultimately clings to the register of ethical decision making because it cannot think through its political critique far enough to do the impossible: to use its imaginative space to create a truly novel vision of people living together. With the Raiders, it ushers in the hopeful specter of equality only as another enemy object that threatens the transitory individual. 

Fallout's Critique of State Power

Since Fallout acts as the island from which I hope to launch a thousand ships of inquiry, it is only appropriate to start this blog there. Accordingly, I will try to articulate a thought regarding Fallout's critique of State power, specifically focusing on Fallout 3, as a preliminary step to discussing how it relates to visions of communal life within the game, which I will reserve for the next post.

In Fallout 3, the Enclave represents State power. The Fallout wiki, the one-stop destination for all things related to the series, describes the Enclave as "a secretive political and military organization who are said to be descended directly from members of the pre-war United States government." Diegetically, the appeal to historical descendency is mobilized in an attempt to ordain the Enclave as the legitimate sovereign. Through the re-establishment of law and order at the end of a plasma rifle, the Enclave seeks to re-create the economic and cultural hegemony of the pre-war United States that surrounds the player only in obliterated fragments.  

As part of the main narrative of Fallout 3, the player is captured and held captive by the Enclave. President John Henry Eden, an artificial intelligence computer mainframe, asks the player to place a modified virus (FEV, or Forced Evolutionary Virus) inside the water purifier associated with Project Purity, a project to cleanse the Wasteland's irradiated water supply. The Enclave intends to use the FEV to kill all that have been tainted by radiation. This includes not only the Super Mutants and feral ghouls, which are de facto enemies, but also the stigmatized Gob who serves as bartender in Megaton and the residents of the peaceful city of ghouls called Underworld. 

It seems to me that one way to understand the Enclave's attempt to re-appropriate Project Purity for the purposes of population control is in relation to Foucault's discussion of biopower. Unlike the scientists of Project Purity, whose egalitarian intention is simply to provide clean water to all who want it, with the FEV, the Enclave possesses the power to discipline the irradiated body to its farthest reaches: death. If Project Purity mobilizes the power to sustain life in the Wasteland, the addition of the FEV to Project Purity endows the wielder with the "power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death" (Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol 1, 138).  

Enclave propaganda

Though biopower is not expressively located in the State, but finds its expression in a variety of institutions and techniques, for our purposes, I would argue that the game stages the Enclave's power to control populations for the purposes of crafting a specific embodied citizen-subject, through which a new United States will be constructed. Additionally, I would argue that Fallout identifies the Enclave as "bad," and structures the game so that the "right" thing to do is to subvert this power of the State and realize the democratic potential of science.   

Fallout 3's identification of the Enclave as the "bad guys" is part of a wider critique of State power and suspicion of centralized governments. The assurances of ensuing prosperity and tranquility made by a militarized political entity become ironic in the face of ubiquitous devastation caused by the confrontation of previous entities armed with nuclear weapons. The game seems to present a critique that is both old and familiar: the State is inevitably constructed in order for the few to profit off the injustices committed against the many. 

The Republic of Dave presents a more tongue-in-cheek critique of State power and democratic government. Surrounded by a high chain-link fence on the boundaries of the Wasteland, the player is informed that "the Republic of Dave is the only true sovereign nation in the Wasteland." The player arrives to the Republic of Dave in the midst of an election. But surprise! Dave is the only candidate. He extols the virtuousness of overthrowing the Kingdom of Tom, Dave's father, and giving the citizen, who are all children, the right to vote. In this tiny plot of land, the game plays out its pessimistic vision of democracy: voting is making a fraudulent choice between candidates you did not choose and there is little difference between a tyrant and a president.

I hope to have sufficiently demonstrated the extent of Fallout's critique of State power and cynicism toward the ability of centralized governments to do little other than commit a series of injustices, to the point of death, against innocent civilians. In the next post, I will argue that despite this critique, the game is actually incapable of realizing an image of communal life that does not inevitably rely on the State form.

Introduction/Statement of Purpose

I have long been a fan of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I recall first watching my best friend wander the D.C. Wasteland and the gory mess of a mole rat's head being shot off. I was captivated by the expansive desolation and his sense of familiarity, as a former D.C. resident, with various dilapidated monuments.  

When New Vegas came out, I was excited to begin my own journey through the post-apocalyptic setting, which turned into a solid eight hours of conversation and roaming a rodent and insect infested desert landscape. Tracing the damaged roads through semi-inhabited townships, I relished the unknown around each corner, temporarily buffered from the game's ability to become a mundane practice in killing. 

Many times have I returned to wander the wastes of Fallout. As a black man (Cecil), as a white woman (Mary), as an avatar of myself. I have awoken from nightmares where I relived the never-ending hell of gunfire and the green-brown skin of Super Mutants lit up by the neon light of the Pip Boy in the dark labyrinthine hallways of Our Lady of Hope Hospital. I return to flee from enemies and scrounge through devastation for spare caps, stimpacks, or ammo. I roam, bleary eyed, for hours on end through the Wasteland.

But recently, I've wondered about Fallout and the vision it presents of life after nuclear war. Interrogating the political imagination of the game has lead me to ask about the forms of communal life it valorizes and what it relegates to the boundaries of human-ness. In order to better understand this text, I turned to the work of others, not only essays on Fallout but on visions of the post-apocalypse. Inevitably, this research encouraged me to reconsider my initial questions.

What was I interested in? Fallout? Nuclear war? Visions of the end of humanity? A latent impulse toward visions of complete destruction as a testament to the how deeply entrenched the reification of capital is and how difficult it is to imagine a functional world after capital? I did not anticipate that the initial thread I had tried to follow would be connected to a sweater still in the process of being made. 

The title of blog suggests a temporary answer to the question: I am interested in visions of life after the "end." How video games, novels, short stories, etc. have depicted human life after catastrophe; what political, social and cultural structures texts have envisioned as being created or sustained after large scale destruction. I hope to use the space of this blog as a repository for musings, whether those be summaries of articles or stories or simply pontifications.  

My hope is that this blog will be capable of demonstrating what "visions after the end" tell us about the conditions of our pre-apocalyptic lives.