Mark Featherstone
I recently watched the cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Akin to the book, the film presents the viewer with a post-apocalyptic scene, an imaginary depiction of the end of civilization, the end of culture, and the end of community. In short, the film perfectly captures the idea of the end of humanity. But perhaps more than anything what The Road talks to is the idea of the end of the city, the urban form that enables civilization, culture, and community, and allows us to be human. As Lewis Mumford saw, without the city there is no family, there is no tolerance, and there is no time for sentiment.
McCarthy’s work captures the impact of the end of the city, through its central premise, the road that must be walked, and the idea that in the wake of the collapse of the urban form humans have reverted back to being a nomadic species, permanently on the move, searching for food, struggling to survive. Mumford makes a similar point, but from the opposite direction. In Mumford’s view the city emerged once humans located a stable source of food and settled down. Once survival was secure everything else followed – civilization, culture, community, and humanity. Unfortunately, what else followed was what Mumford calls ‘purposeless materialism’ or desire, which as any psychoanalyst will explain, cannot be satisfied and is fickle in its choice of desirable objects. In many ways McCarthy’s The Road represents the end point of Mumford’s story, the point where ‘purposeless materialism’ has nowhere else to go, and collapses under its own weight.
In terms of the individual experience of the satisfaction of desire the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan captured this idea in the notion of jouissance. Lacan uses this term to describe the point where the self gives way to ecstasy and disappears. Similarly the philosopher Georges Bataille wrote about the limit experience and le petit mort or the small death which everybody experiences in ecstatic moments. But what does this have to do with the city, civilization, and the apocalypse?
Raised to the level of a social condition the Lacanian-Bataillean theory of the ecstatic explosion, or moment of orgasm, can be seen to refer to the terminal state of modern civilization, which we currently seem to be confronting in the form of over-population, excessive technologisation, de-humanisation, and environmental destruction, with the result that we may soon have to face up to the exhaustion of our society of progress, improvement, desire, and satisfaction in an ecstatic moment, an apocalyptic moment of revelation, where it becomes clear to us that there is nowhere else to go and that our current model of urban society is finished.
If this idea of exhaustion, the exhaustion of modernity, is exactly what post-modern thought is all about, then the idea of post-modernism has a very long history that we would have to date back to ancient Athens. We know that the very first philosopher of the city, Plato, understood the problematic of desire and urban society. In his Critias he wrote about the mythic city of Atlantis, a city of desire, luxury, and over-expenditure, which eventually sunk to the bottom of the sea under the weight of its own hubris.
What is McCarthy’s The Road about if it is not about surveying the catastrophic scene following the sinking of Atlantis, the catastrophic scene confronting the survivors of the apocalyptic burn out of modernity, and trying to imagine how it would be possible to survive under these conditions?
If this is in fact the case then what makes The Road so powerful is that in many respects it appears that we are approaching this situation today. For so many people in the world, who live on the edge of survival, the urban environment is already a catastrophic environment. For these people the city is about as far away from Plato’s shining utopia, the Republic, as it is possible to get. In fact it seems to strain the conceptual boundaries of the idea of the city to the very limit to continue to use it to describe the Platonic utopia and a place like Kinshasa, which is why we now talk of city-regions.
But of course the problem of calling a place like Kinshasa a city is not simply about size, as may be the case with Tokyo or Los Angeles, because what makes the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo strain the limits of the term city is the very lack of security, civilization, and humanity afforded so many of its inhabitants, such as the witch children abandoned to the streets to starve. Beyond this point, the point where the city as a centre of civilization starts to collapse, there is really only one way to go and that is the road, the place of nomadic life and the struggle to survive which characterises the lives of so many people in the world today, and approximately 2 million people in the DRC alone.
This is what The Road is about, the collapse of the city, culture, civilization, and society, the moment when the catastrophic condition that currently characterises the situation of so many people in the world, comes back and transforms the West into a wasteland. This apocalyptic vision of the collapsing city is, of course, embedded in so many of McCarthy’s works, such as No Country for Old Men, and in many respects characterises his Americanism, an Americanism perfectly suited to the post-9 / 11 landscape of our global asociety.
Under conditions of globalisation characterised by the war on terror, fear, and insecurity, we live in a state of existential anxiety that means that the city is endlessly teetering on the brink of collapsing back into the wilderness from whence it came. This is, of course, the classic story of the birth of American city in reverse, the classic story of the origins of America replayed in a new tale of the West and the collapse and reformation of the city, culture, and society from the ruins of what had passed into history. McCarthy finds his expression of redemption that refounds the city in the love of the father for his son, a love which endures even after the family has collapsed and the mother has departed, a love which survives the harsh conditions of the wilderness, where social relations dissipate before the law of self-preservation at all costs.
The final message of The Road, represented by the moment when the father dies and in doing so founds a new family, the basic unit of a new city and a new society, is that the end of the road, and the emergence of the city, and the civilization, culture, and society it sustains, are ultimately premised on the existence on something far more basic than a social contract, the kind of legal document thinkers such as Hobbes thought could give birth to a city. This thing, the thing that enables the city to endure, that makes it work in the worst possible conditions, is not something that can be legalised, written down, or made policy in fantastic documents that pretend to be realistic.
It is this truth that is perfectly captured by McCarthy in The Road in its most fundamental form, the truth that when everything else collapses, there is nothing left but the love of a parent for their child, and it is this that has to sustain the city, civilization, culture, and society.
