• PDF / 152,452 Bytes
• 4 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
• 37 Downloads / 260 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT

---

Cities Gone Wild Tyson E. Lewis 1 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Keywords Rewilding . Henri Lefebvre . Dystopian films . Critical animal studies .

Exopedagogy . City . Critical ecological studies

In the popular dystopian imagination, post-apocalyptic cities are often depicted as empty of people. Think of the sci-fi classic The Omega Man (Sagal 1971), a lone white guy wandering around a major metropolitan city center encountering no one, only discarded objects and the unbearable silence of a world that has died, or, for a more updated version, there’s 28 Days Later (Boyle 2002) and the early, harrowing scene when Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakes from a surgery only to discover that everyone has disappeared. Such movies evoke fear of mass disappearance. The catastrophe feared is one of absence. Whereas many dystopian films evoke shock through spectacular destruction on a grand scale (earthquakes ripping buildings apart, tsunamis flooding whole neighborhoods, fires engulfing vast territories), mass disappearance is anti-spectacular. It is a quiet kind of terror that whispers equally to world collapse, but in this case, through the visual language of the void rather than through the thrills of surplus and excess. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, images of mass disappearance have now become a reality. On the Internet and on social media platforms, one finds thousands of pictures of deserted streets, empty buildings, and so forth. Instead of iconic buildings being blown up or destroyed, we see them silent and alone—monuments to a hidden civilization that is under threat of erasure. It would seem that real dystopian nightmares come silently. Yet the absence of human inhabitants is not an absolute absence. Indeed, such a reading reasserts the centrality of the human and its presence as the constitutive feature of worldhood and, in this sense, merely recapitulates old forms of anthropocentrism. The ideology of absence mistakes the lack of human actors for lack as such. For this reason, I find images such as the post-apocalyptic world encountered in the opening sequence in the film 12 Monkeys (Gilliam 1995) more interesting and compelling than

* Tyson E. Lewis [email protected]

1

University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

Postdigital Science and Education

the aforementioned films. The protagonist, James Cole (Bruce Willis), ventures to the surface of the devastated, burned out Earth. Certainly, there is an absence of human signs of life, but living in the rubble and the ruins of a crumbling city are a host of animals, including a massive grizzly bear. The world has been repopulated by a variety of living things, big and small, that now inhabit the spaces and places once built to accommodate human-oriented actions and purposes. Thus, mass disappearance of humans creates the condition for a mass migration of animals into otherwise restricted zones, producing zoomorphic heterotopias in a post-Anthropocene world. As of this writing, we are already seeing figurations of the occupation of cities by all sorts