The World Keeps Ending
further thoughts on Kingsnorth's Machine series
In this series, I’ve offered a critical reading of Paul Kingsnorth’s Tale of the Machine series. In the first post, I discussed the complexity of what he set out to do. It’s even in the blurb of Kingsnorth’s forthcoming book: “how a force that’s hard to name, but which we all feel, is reshaping what it means to be human.” I wouldn’t presume to know what everyone feels, but I agree wholeheartedly that the force(s) that shape our lives withstand easy definition. This is why I prefer to follow Thomas Merton in naming this system The Unspeakable. Calling it The Machine does give it a sort of eerie, calculating, and impersonal quality, despite the ways we tend to give an animus, a personal character, to the Unspeakable. I noted how his attempt to define this thing causes a bit of mental whiplash as Kingsnorth gropes for clarity on what precisely this is. He’s trying to lasso an amoeba, or put a fence around a jellyfish. It doesn’t quite work, in my opinion.
In the second post, I noted that many of the concrete aspects of the Machine that he lists are not really any different than how most people describe civilization or empire. I discuss critiques of empire from sociologists and anarchists like James C Scott, and I discuss how, if empire produces its own cosmology or myth, we might look to indigenous cosmologies as alternatives to the cosmology of empire.
………………………………
By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already
ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending
world spun in its place.
-Franny Choi
Apocalypse. Now there is a word worth thinking with more. The many writers and thinkers about apocalypse remind us that while popular usage connotes disasters that upend the world, the Greek word simply meant “unveiling,” like one might do in the days and places where brides wore a veil. The genre came from Jewish and Christian writers who used rich imagery to pull back the thin gauze of history to show their readers that despite how bad world events seemed, God did indeed have a plan. Crucially, apocalypse originated as a tool of the oppressed. This was a way for people in the “below” of empire, people who had little agency over the events unfolding in their lives at the whim of powerful men with imperial ambitions. Apocalypse began when the Seleucids ruled Judea and the Jewish people grappled with how to respond to foreign oppression, and was taken up by John of Patmos to speak to assemblies of Christians likewise pressed down by empire’s rule. Apocalypse is the dream of the below that one day justice comes.
Nowadays, apocalypse as a genre has less God and lamb, but more zombies, epidemics, and the occasional lake of fire or many-headed beast. Apocalypse in movies and books often serves as a backdrop, a vehicle by which the storyteller shows us (unveils for us?) the true character of the people involved. In zombie movies and shows, the real terror is not the zombies, but what the people do in a societal cataclysm.
The genre has a few features that interest me.
In apocalypse, evil is clear. No moral gray areas exist. There is only sinner and saint, beast and lamb, unquenchable fire and everlasting city. This is quite compelling.
Time, in apocalyptic thinking, is a moving car hurtling at a brick wall. It only goes forward, until a sudden, inevitable crash. There is only the world, with all its moral wreckage, and then there is the end. There can be no after the end, because that would introduce the complexity of everyday life back into the real. The myth of empire creates its own time, and so if the empire falls, and its cosmology with it, the trajectory of time likewise ceases to be.
Apocalypse, historically, is a hopeful enterprise. No matter how bad the bad is, there is a good which is stronger. This is a real comfort if one is subjected to the bad.
Because apocalypse offers an assessment of a painful present, as well as future possibilities through options of present action (via heightened imagery), apocalypse presents the reader/hearer with articulation of resistance to empire.
Apocalypse often articulates and invokes history as a means of discursive revolt. If dominant powers utilize history to justify their position (think of the Roman histories meant to undergird imperial power by claiming its inevitability), then apocalyptic thought uses history to capture its historical contingency. Empire may be winning, currently, but the beast will eventually be slain. History, viewed through the lens of apocalypse, does not move in a predictable trajectory. Empires rise, and empires fall.
Domination often proceeds by creating its own cosmology. For instance, in the 19th century United States, the idea of Manifest Destiny became cosmological, invoking both biblical metaphors as well as standard tropes of civilization vs savages, in order to justify the continued expansion of the US to the west coast long before that was an actual possibility. So a key facet of apocalypse is unveiling the mythic dimension of hegemony/domination/empire, and answering “myth with myth,” to use the framing of scholar of Jewish apocalyptic literature, Anathea Portier-Young.
…………………..
Why all this on apocalypse, when writing about the Machine? Paul Kingsnorth’s Tale of the Machine series feels apocalyptic in tenor. Take your pick of any of the essays, and it barks warnings of a history constantly teetering on the precipice. Paul’s Machine is paranoia par excellence. It is everywhere. It is numinous, escaping the bounds of the material into the domain of the spiritual. It threatens the very fabric of human existence.
It is a very paranoid kind of writing. I don’t mean that Kingsnorth peers out his window between the blinds, or that he constantly checks the rearview mirror while driving. I use paranoid in the sense that Eve Sedgwick uses in her critical essay “You are so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you.” In it, Sedgwick borrows from the work of psychologist Eve Klein who proposes paranoid versus depressive frameworks as positions within which the psyche works to understand their world. The paranoid framework arises from trauma and is the ego’s way of fortifying itself against a threatening world. Because there is danger, the paranoid position says one must constantly be alert against even the hint of threat. In contrast, what Klein calls the depressive position is one that is anxiety mitigating by attempting to reassemble a world fractured by trauma or harm. This is a reparative position precisely because it attempts to “repair” a broken psyche by piecing together the world into a cohesive whole–even when that world does indeed contain threats–and then looks for ways to identify nourishment even within an often dangerous world.
Sedgwick offers the following characteristics of paranoia, which she relates to strategies of reading (both texts and life).
The first, and perhaps most important, is that paranoia is anticipatory. She writes, “The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.” This kind of anticipatory paranoia is seen in the somewhat confusing trajectory of the machine in Kingsnorth’s thinking. AI is perhaps the worst manifestation of the Machine (which Kingsnorth actually names as a demon with a name, Ahriman), but simultaneously, the Machine has been dominant since the pyramids were built. The paranoia, as Sedgwick notes, burrows backward in time. So paranoid writing and writers must assume that all is bad and getting worse, because to assume otherwise would leave open the possibility of being wrong, and being wrong is a terrible thing to be. The only thing more painful than a world of pain, is believing that there can be good, and finding out, through painful means, that one was wrong about hope.
Another key trait is that paranoia is a strong theory, that is, it attempts to fold everything into its all-knowing lens. This becomes very clear with even superficial readings of the Machine series. Science is the machine. So is consumerism. So, too, wokeness. As I said previously, pretty much anything Kingsnorth seems not to like is the Machine, which makes it everywhere, and also, somewhat meaningless as a concept. But it certainly seems paranoid. (Of course, Kingsnorth is by no means the only person who talks like this. In many a leftist space, one can see capitalism blamed for every physical and mental illness, or even one’s emotions…”you don’t hate mondays, you hate capitalism,” etc). Strong theories tend not to have nuance. Paranoia can not tolerate multiple interpretations or perspectives. This is why, actually, strong theories are so compelling. Logic that has no gray areas, no questions, tends to be much more compelling as a system than a worldview that allows for mystery and situational ethics.
I might go even further than Sedgwick here, and say that the strong theory can lead to schizoid behavior. So for instance, one might write about how terrible computers are, paradoxically on a computer. One might decry the social ills of social media on social media itself. This occurs because the strong theory cannot tolerate multiple perspectives, or nuances of principle.
Another important characteristic of paranoia is that it places faith in exposure. According to this process, demystification, that is exposure of the truth, is assumed to be the answer to the problem. Sedgwick puts it this way:
paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known. That a fully initiated listener could still remain indifferent or inimical, or might have no help to offer, are hardly treated as possibilities.(17)
Part of the problem with modern society in general is this over-emphasis on knowledge over practice. This is clearly the case with self-help literature which fills the shelves of our bookstores: 7 habits of highly-alpha-enlightened-integrated-brave-people.
Finally, paranoia is a theory of negative affect, that is, it is entirely motivated by pain avoidance. Paranoia looks at the world as a harsh place, and in response, believes it can only mitigate pain rather than find true joy. And so the other characteristics of paranoia outlined above can be seen as strategies of harm mitigation. Anticipating pain makes the pain less of a surprise, and thus, a bit less painful. Likewise, making the danger visible through exposure likewise prevents the possibility of being stunned by some unpredicted hurt.
………………………
It’s a fine time to be paranoid. In fact, I would question the reader’s sanity if they didn’t feel that there is danger lurking everywhere.
As I write this, masked agents drive around in my county, abducting people, and often in the process taking by-standers who attempt to intervene. The military has been deployed on US soil against its own citizens. People have been shipped to a foreign gulag in El Salvador without due process. Israel continues its onslaught against Gaza, now, not only bombing indiscriminately, but also cruelly shooting people trying to access food and basic supplies. The United States, my government, has been supporting this genocide since it began. And this is not enough. The bloodlust of empire is still thirsty. The administration in partnership with mainstream media is whipping up support to actively attack Iran.
It feels like the apocalypse is at hand.
When I feel paranoia, or downright fear, about the apocalyptic times, there is something soothing about Franny Choi’s take on apocalypse, happening again and again. She ends the poem with this:
It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled,
the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted
slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we stopped hearing it.
The fact is, apocalypse does happen, has happened. The apocalypse has already happened for so many indigenous nations in North America who have had their native tongue erased, their populations decimated, and their homelands stolen. The apocalypse has already happened for so many Gazan children, who have lost house, siblings, parents, limbs. The apocalypse has happened, and I am lucky to only, currently, worry about apocalypse happening in the future, to sit in a state of anticipatory paranoia, unready for apocalypse to happen to my house, my family, my life. Because the apocalypse has happened, and my world has kept going on.
At my most hopeful–or reparative, as Sedgwick would say–I can remember that apocalypse is not an external thing, a history happening to me or my community. The apocalypse is a myth–specifically, apocalypse is myth answering myth. The bad thing, the beast, the empire, is not the apocalypse, rather, the apocalypse is the unflagging, even reparative position, that we can answer the supposed inevitability of empire’s history with a counter story, and alternative community of practice.
It is here that I have another disagreement with Kingsnorth’s framing of the Machine. He follows Lewis Mumford, rightly so, in my opinion, as understanding the Machine as firstly a myth. But the antidote given by Mumford and Kingnorth is to walk away. Kingsnorth writes:
To liberate ourselves, steadily, one human soul at a time, we simply have to walk away from the Machine in our hearts and minds, as the Israelites of the Exodus walked away from its original master, Pharaoh.
But this is not the way to create change, and likewise is a poor reading of the Exodus. The Hebrews were only able to walk away after an extended mythic confrontation between the power of YHWH and the power of the Egyptian empire. Only because Moses had countered myth with myth were the Israelites able to walk away from Pharaoh.
Similarly, if the Machine–or the empire–is everywhere, there is no “away” to which one might walk in order to escape. No, the myth must be countered with an equally powerful myth.
In the same way, I believe the task at hand in our current apocalyptic times is to remember that apocalypse itself is a tool of the subjugated by empire. It reveals that the way things are is not inevitable. In so doing, apocalypse refuses to stay in the paranoid reading of history. Because with apocalypse, good surprises can also happen. As Eve Sedgwick puts it, the reparative position is “no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic.” If bad things can happen, so can good things. And the more we can render our current moment into the unveiling of what Tolkien called the eucatastrophe, joyful turn, the more equipped we might be to survive. So properly understood, apocalypse is the bane of beasts and kings, not of mere mortals with the animal hunger and fragile bodies of you and I.
The world keeps ending. And the world keeps going on.