Jack Halberstam’s keynote ‘Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse’ really was the absolute highlight of the Utopian Studies Society of Europe conference. But wait! You didn’t have to be there! A version of the lecture is available on YouTube so I wanted to share the details. It contains some real IDEAS about UTOPIA and I highly recommend checking it out.
If you want to get to utopia, you can’t start from here
Halberstam opened with a huge challenge to the genre of utopia. We are limited in what we can imagine, he argued, bounded by what we know. Going forwards only carries over the problems of the present into the future. The necessary project, he suggested, is not worlding but unworlding.
The use value of utopia is often thought to be in prefiguring changes we would like to see in the real world. For Halberstam, this function is moot. There is no hope in bridging from here to the future. You must instead go back to dismantle the present.
Nothing matters
Halberstam used the art of Gordon Matta-Clark, shown above, to illustrate the creative potential of deconstruction. In carving a spiral through a building due to be demolished in Paris, Matta-Clark employed his architectural knowledge to create an absence of building. In this artwork, the artist’s material is nothing. It is art because of what has been taken away.
This work subverts the logic of capitalism, which demands things are made, possessed, consumed. As such, it also deconstructs the system we are caught in. Halberstam’s suggestion was this is a surer first step towards a new world than imagining a utopia.
Advocating for entropy
Moving ever further away from glossy utopian futures, Halberstam then set out his argument for embracing entropy. We will have to follow the logic of other lifeforms, he argued. Lifeforms that know what to do around ruination. Mushrooms, microbes, beetles all require decaying material as sustenance, and through processing what is rotten create the conditions for new life.
In discussing ruins and the marginalised lives that exist amongst, and may emerge from, them, he referenced the photography of Alvin Baltrop. Baltrop’s pictures captured the New York’s collapsing West Side Piers in the 1970s and 80s, and the gay men who cruised there.
Source of image: https://bronxmuseum.org/news/the-life-and-times-of-alvin-baltrop/
Broken Earth
Drawing his final example from literature rather than art, Halberstam went on to discuss N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. His analysis centred the faction within the novel who want to see the end of the world, not save it. These characters are some of those who have been marginalised and exploited by the prevailing society. Halberstam drew parallels with Afro-pessimism, asserting the only way out of white supremacy is to destroy the world it has built. By implication, a utopianism that aims to repair the existing system would be a neo-colonial project.
After attending the lecture, I re-read the last two novels of the Broken Earth trilogy. I was left wondering whether the ending of the trilogy sustains the Afro-pessimist reading.
— SPOILER ALERT — Skip this section if you haven’t read The Stone Sky in its entirety!
Nassun, who had wanted to all-out destroy the world, in the end executes her mother’s plan to fix it. In the aftermath it is acknowledged that, despite the fix, the current Season will continue for some time. While it is hoped node maintainers will no longer be required, just exactly how things will work out remains uncertain.
The result is certainly an undoing, yet it isn’t total destruction. Is this a large repair job or are things are sufficiently unwound to start again?
Watch online
You can find a version of Jack Halberstam’s lecture Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse online, see below.
[…] emphasis on the terrible point we start from, Miéville’s words carry a similar sentiment to Halberstam’s ‘unworlding’ (which I’ve written about previously). Building on the foundation of what currently exists is […]