Master’s Major Research Project Proposal (2011)

Neoliberal Apocalypse: Ends, Spectres and L’Avenir in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Andrew Reszitnyk

McMaster University

Frederic Jameson argues that our present age is “marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that.”[1] Jameson’s remark does not entail that this period, in contrast to the epochs preceding it, lacks an apocalyptic imagination. On the contrary, contemporary society is saturated with diverse “end of days” fantasies, from narratives of environmental disaster to the spectre of what Chris Harman calls “zombie capitalism”.[2] What is distinctive about the present is that the apocalypse is no longer envisioned as a revelatory “unveiling” of hidden truths or as a cyclical rejuvenation of a cultural model. It is instead, as Teresa Heffernan argues, “associated...with disaster and a sense of exhaustion with the model itself”.[3] If there is a truth unveiled by recent apocalyptic narratives, it seems to be “après moi, les deluge”. What does this bleak apocalyptic imagination—this “inverted millenarianism” that Jameson describes—say about our culture? Why is cataclysm easier to imagine than a better future? What, if any, resistance or emancipatory potential exists in such apocalyptic fantasies? In order to puzzle out the answers to these questions, I will employ the critical framework and language of Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida’s contribution to post-Marxist debates. I contend that contemporary apocalyptic narratives reflect and magnify the tenets of the dominant ideology and cultural pedagogy: neoliberalism.

Ahistoricity, cynicism and hyper-individualism are three distinguishing feature of “post-ideological” neoliberal culture. The futurelessness, hopelessness, and narratives of individual survival that characterize contemporary imaginings of “the end times” are symptomatic of such cultural attitudes. For my Major Research Project, I will treat Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as an exemplar of the “exhausted” apocalyptic narrative of neoliberal society. The Road tells of a father and son making a doomed journey towards the coast across a devastated America. Taking place after some unspecified catastrophe has eradicated almost all life, McCarthy presents a futureless world where isolated survivors wander aimlessly and meaninglessly until death. Not only has human civilization disintegrated, but all plant and animal life has disappeared and the air grows colder with each passing day. Human relations are reduced to a Hobbesian war of all against all. Each individual is responsible for his or her own survival and cannibalism is a constant threat. All things—commodities, cultural symbols and narratives—are transient, to be consumed and discarded. Losing the ability to tell days apart, survivors experience time as a perpetual present. McCarthy’s language is sparse and utilitarian: there is little dialogue or punctuation and characters speak more through actions than words. Motifs, such as a dead baby roasted on a spit and books used as tinder, attest to the disposability of life and text, indicating that this world is without a future to prepare for, without the capacity or desire to recall the past.

Collapsing past and future into the present, reducing social concerns to individual affairs, and replacing morality with instrumental rationality, neoliberalism is the hegemonic ideology of a time referred to as “the end of history,”[4] and of a culture Alain Badiou calls “worldless.”[5] Henry Giroux argues that our neoliberal present lacks “any notion of historical consciousness and any vestige of social and moral responsibility owed as much to future generations as to the dead.”[6] Drawing upon this definition, The Road seems to be the ultimate fantasy of our times, corroborating Zygmunt Bauman’s contention that “[i]n contemporary dreams…the image of ‘progress’ seems to have moved from the discourse of shared improvement to that of individual survival.”[7] Neoliberal values appear to be naturalized, persisting even without culture. In spite of this appearance, I suggest that The Road’s apocalypticism can be read as a radical critique of neoliberalism.

My project will be divided five different sections, which analyze the different sorts of apocalypse explored in The Road: the end of culture, the end of social bonds, the end of life (including plant, animal and human), the end of time, and the end of text. The first three sections will make up the first movement of my project, which treats The Road as a depiction of what Frank Kermode calls the “transition phase” before the apocalypse. The latter two sections will make up the second movement, which alternatively views The Road as a post-humanist attempt to illustrate a post-apocalyptic time. Identifying the representation of these ends in the content and form of McCarthy’s text, I will show how they superficially mirror neoliberal ideals. Despite analyzing the various manifestations of these endings in the text, I will argue that none are fully realized: the apocalypse is a haunting not a presence.

Using Derrida’s notion of hauntology, I will show how concepts put to death by neoliberalism—such as “the commons”, universality, social justice, and utopia—reappear as specters in The Road.[8] Proceeding from both the future and a time always-already past, spectres are “revenants”, neither present nor absent in space or time. Revealing an ideology’s exclusions and internal contradictions, specters are injunctions to the present, which, by virtue of their unclassifiability, “resist and discompose domination that aspires to be total”.[9] The resistance and persistence of these spectres challenges the worldlessness, futurelessness and amorality of neoliberalism. While McCarthy presents an incredibly bleak scenario in which the future of life and the archive seem certain to cease, he is unable to rule out the absolute, unknowable futurity that Derrida calls l’avenir, from whence spectres come. The narrative continues forward into an uncertain future, having as Joseph Kronick remarks, “the structure of a divisible missive or envoi”[10]. That McCarthy does not actually represent oblivion, ending the narrative on a bizarrely positive note, supports this theory. By representing hope and ethics in spite of disaster—something like the “radical hope”[11] John Lear describes—I suggest that The Road functions as a repudiation of neoliberal norms and ethics.

While most criticism about The Road interprets the text through the conventions of Southern gothic literature, Chris Walsh’s “The Post-Southern Sense of Place in The Road” as one example, my project will read it as a cultural critique. Although I will at times compare McCarthy’s representation of the apocalypse to such classic works of apocalyptic literature as the book of Revelation and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, my primary concern will be to examine The Road as an artifact of the present culture of neoliberalism. Sincemy project is deeply informed by the arguments and theintellectual example of JacquesDerrida, DavidL. Clark iswell suited to supervise my project.I also intend to work with Henry Giroux,whose critique of neoliberal ethics and culture powerfully inflects my own.

Bibliography

Badiou, Alain. “The Caesura of Nihilism,” lecture delivered at University of Essex

September 10, 2003.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times. London: Polity Press, 2006.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx, Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge 1994.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press,

1992.

Giroux, Henry. “The Twilight of the Social State,” Truthout Tuesday Jan 4 2011.

http://www.truth-out.org/in-twilight-social-state-rethinking-walter- benjamins-angel-history66544.

Harman, Chris. Zombie Capitalism. Chicago: Bookmarks Publications, 2009.

Heffernan, Teresa. Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism and the

Twentieth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New

York: Duke UP, 1991.

Kronick, Joseph. Derrida and the Future of Literature. New York: State University of

New York Press, 1999.

Lear, John. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Radical Destruction. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2006.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006.

1

[1] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Duke UP, 1991), 1.

[2] Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism (Chicago: Bookmarks Publications, 2009), 1.

[3] Teresa Heffernan, Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 7.

[4] Francis Fukuyama The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 23.

[5] Alain Badiou, “The Caesura of Nihilism,” lecture delivered at University of Essex September 10, 2003.

[6] Henry Giroux “The Twilight of the Social State,” Truthout Tuesday Jan 4 2011. http://www.truth-out.org/in-twilight-social-state-rethinking-walter-benjamins-angel-history66544.

[7] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times (London: Polity Press, 2006), 103.

[8] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, Trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge 1994), 9.

[9] Ibid. 100.

[10] Joseph Kronick, Derrida and the Future of Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 144.

[11] John Lear Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Radical Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1.