Open Conference Systems, Nordic Geographers Meeting 2011

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The Living End: Excerpts from a Work in Progress
George Henderson

Last modified: 2011-04-18

Abstract


How do we respond to the idea that the future is 'dread-full' and its disastrous geographies have already begun? How are life and memory, pulled into the orbit of apocalyptic idioms? I offer samples of a creative work-in-progress that responds to a putative epochal shift scheduled for the possibly-near future, a time of extreme resource shortage, unstoppable climate and landscape change, perpetual geopolitical havoc, and the like. These tropes circulate widely in the cultural industries, and no less in the social and biophysical sciences:  how do they interpellate us as subjects? What structures of feeling do they elicit? My presentation moves in and out of three literary genres, creative nonfiction, memoir, and fiction, in order to explore how the tropes in question reshape memory, inflect the felt texture of present day social-spatial encounters, and prompt speculative geographic reverie. The work is not itself an end-time scenario but it does behave as if the continent mapped by the tropes of crisis has a certain purchase.

Theoretically, the work is interested in the interplay of Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation and Raymond Williams' structures of feeling. If for Althusser, we as subjects are haled into being by dominant social-cultural structures that 'ask' us to recognize ourselves in new ways, for Williams subjects always exceed determinate structures by acting as determined beings themselves. The present creative work acknowledges the productive friction between these ideas, i.e., contemporary interpellating processes are quite real, but the end of becoming is not near.