Destruction II - World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
Summary
Abstract
Global destruction, and the media that imagines it are considered here from two opposing perspectives. First, the explosive potential of architectural destruction is examined in a comparison between disaster cinema, and the mediatization of September 11, 2001. This reveals the aesthetic distinction and tension between the destruction of a single monument, and the destruction of the reliability of spatial relations in general. The mode of global destruction is then reversed in an investigation of the ‘Last Man’ narrative phenomenon. Beginning with Mary Shelley's novel, and progressing through the cinematic fascination with empty streets, the ‘Last Man’ achieves unbearable immortality through extinction, defined here as the destruction of everyone else.
Keywords: Last Man, Disaster Cinema, Human Extinction, September 11 Media, Anthropocene, Architectural Destruction, Destruction Theory
There was thunder
There was lightning
Then the stars went out…
And the earth died screaming
While I lay dreaming of you.
Operations of destruction in media and culture echo the fantasies and fears of the audiences that consume them. In the chapter that follows, I discuss representative examples of world destruction, and the desire audiences have for these images, which, in turn, echo the appetite for disaster in contemporary news cycles. The repetition of endless iterations of world destruction in recent film history suggests an attracted paranoia for the end of a world that provides comfort and cushioning from the apocalyptic desperation that audiences imagine would follow it. The reason for this paranoia is because, as Claire Colebrook has observed, ‘these dystopian future scenarios are nothing worse than the conditions in which most humans live as their day-to-day reality’. In Part 1, the aesthetic and symbolic effects of disaster films are discussed in relation to the mediation, and mediatization of disaster events after September 11, 2001. I take the position that aesthetic representations of disaster incorporate both restricted and general economies of expenditure in the destruction of spatial relations (architectural structures) that societies rely upon in order to function.
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- Information
- The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and MediaA Philosophy of Expenditure after Georges Bataille, pp. 55 - 102Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022