Don't They Know It's the End of the World?
Skeeter Davis’ 1962 song has been haunting me. The line “Don't they know it's the end of the world?” plays on a loop in my mind. The song, titled The End of the World, was a popular hit in a time when the world was on the brink of nuclear war and self-destruction, the first American went to Space and Marilyn Monroe was found dead. In recent years, the feeling of the end of the world has increased with an awareness of global warming and its correlation with our economic and political systems (which are broadly right-leaning: Tory governments, Trump, Bolsonaro, etc) that continue to expand neoliberalism and global-capitalism, despite the climate crisis. Stories of Earth’s rising temperatures, of forest fires and melting icebergs, which lead to floods across the globe, are recurrent in the news. In 2019 both the Cyclone Idai in Mozambique and the Australian bushfires displaced whole communities, sweeping away entire species and ecosystems. Now Covid-19 has brought the end of the world closer to home, as we find ourselves facing a global pandemic from the strange comfort of our sofas. “Don't they know it's the end of the world?” should be asked with a raised eyebrow.
I recently revisited the feelings of Skeeter Davis’ song in Soundings (2019), a 35 min-long film by London-based artist Bronte Dow. Made for a dark cinema room with surround sound, the work starts with an a cappella cover of Davis’ song and an aerial image of the sea. In the beginning, the image changes in colour from blues to pinks and then reds, until the waves turn into thick blood-like materiality. The lyrics, “Why does the sun go on shining?/ Why does the sea rush to shore?/ Don't they know it's the end of the world?/ Cause you don't love me anymore” are softly pronounced by singer Florence Warner (a collaborator of the artist), inducing an instant shiver down my spine, goosebumps on my arms, and watering eyes. Soundings is a speculative docu-fiction about deep-sea mining in the ocean commons. Yet even before the narrative unfolded, the song acted as a kind of emotional catalyst, unleashing a wave of repressed end-of-the-world-feelings into my 2021 reality.
Since the pandemic hit our capitalist existence, I have been seeking comfort in wondering about what professor Mark Fisher would have to say now. The beloved Visual Cultures’ theorist from Goldsmiths University killed himself in 2017 after years of research and writing on the production of culture under the oppressive states of capitalism. It is impossible for me to separate his death from the fatalism of capitalism itself. I wonder if in the face of total collapse (if that is the definition of the present?) he would have found escapism or just rendered this crisis as more of the same? In 2009 (following the financial crash) Fisher published the book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? that would forever define his career beyond the subculture of his blog, k-punk. Here, he exposed a dilemma in cultural production that was rooted in world-making, or the lack of it. He explained that a type of fatalism had replaced the future.[i] Drawing from the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, Fisher sustained that it is easier to foresee the end of the world than the end of capitalism, he defined capitalist realism as the inability to imagine new futures or even alternative political or economic models.
World-ending has long been a popular scenario for the future even before capitalism, with the apocalypse for example. However, the hopelessness that things will never change is what this is about—as we fall dependent on crisis capitalism, our awareness could make way for an apathetic witnessing of the end of the world. Just like Skeeter Davis' song, which says “How life goes on the way it does” despite the tragic events ongoing. Fisher’s words gave voice to the sentiment of my generation coming of age in 2009. We were expected to make a living in the bipolar context of expanding neoliberalism and crashing job opportunities. We were demanded to work more and spend more than ever before (the word prosumer comes to mind), regardless of the decreasing quality of life. Fast forward ten years at a time when the end of the world feels so present—has anything changed in the collective imagination?
Let's consider Soundings, a compilation of several non-linear narratives that inform each other. One is set in the year 2060 in a laboratory where technology for mapping the bottom of the sea is being developed. Bronte Dow, the artist and producer of the film, interviews a scientist-engineer responsible for the AI equipment. Speaking straight to the camera, he says that 50,000 robots are being sent to the ocean by drones. There, without light, the robots use sound to outline the floor, producing high frequencies that echo back and forth generating imaging (a type of recreated image). Ocean depth recording involves a piano wire called sounding, which gives the film its name. The scientist explains proudly that they are close to finishing the mapping of all deep-sea flooring; previously (referring to our present time), human knowledge covered only 5% of the sea.
The scanning of the seabed is invasive to the ecosystems and beings living there, and its purpose is to extract natural resources—to mine minerals that are essential for electric batteries for cars, computers, and phones. Soundings portraits the type of dystopian future that Fisher has identified as bonded with capitalism—the inevitable end of the world caused by a human culture of endless exploitation and extraction. The scientist turns to the camera and asks rhetorically: “What parts of the Earth are unique and what parts of the Earth will fuel this next industrial revolution?” He implies that sacrifice is necessary for the evolution of human life. Curiously enough, he looks at the camera and says: “The future's looking good!” But what does he mean by future—isn’t this the end of the world?
Depicted as a nerdy and chubby middle-aged man wearing a ghostbusters t-shirt, the scientist-engineer is the antagonist. He symbolises a growing community of geoengineers and technoscientists who believe and promote the idea that “technology will save the world” (Elon Musk being the most famous member). This type of future-technology is believed to solve many of the problems that will precipitate the end of the world, yet it relies on the extraction of new sources of energy, often called green or sustainable, but nevertheless not infinite—like the materials mined in Soundings. This technological advancement spills into various fields including bioscience, which, for instance, aims at enhancing the human body beyond our vulnerabilities, endorsing not only the idea that AI is intertwined with humanity (generally accepted as part of the posthuman condition) but also the development of such technologies with the purpose of genetically modifying the human-species, into a kind of super-human.[ii]
On the other side of the story, Soundings explores a feminist critique of the posthuman that suggests a different way of evolving humanity beyond the exploitative nature of capitalism. Feminist posthumanism is an embodied vision of the future that seeks to create sustainable new worlds that are inclusive of all life forms. Such ideas are gaining popularity amongst the emerging art scene in London and the Humanities in general, particularly due to the endeavours of Donna Haraway—whose work decentres humanity’s role in the world, in pursuit of more-than-human subjectivities. Most importantly, Haraway develops strategies to live in the Anthropocene (which she calls the Chthulucene, to remove anthropo that means human, from the term), encouraging entangled ways of living, complex environment networks, interdependence amongst species, and interspecies care, love, and intimacy.[iii] This shift in thinking brings together intersectional feminism with the posthuman, and extends the critic of binary thinking of subject from object in gender, sex, race, and class, into questioning the binaries of nature/culture, human/animal, animate/inanimate, self/environment, living/non-living, among others.
Bronte Dow, Soundings, 2019. Still image from the film depicting the artist’s sister dressed up as a fish on her iPhone in bed.
Soundings puts feminist elements and strategies into practice, in particular the mobilisation of affect and practice of kinship. The main characters are a type of fish called anglerfish, which live at the bottom of the sea in total darkness. Aside from the parallel storyline of the technology that would invade this part of the ocean, there are two other main narratives in the film. One features archived specimens of anglerfish and another stages the artist’s sister as one of these fish.
In the latter narrative, Dow’s sister plays with her iPhone in bed, laughing and walking around domestic corridors, fantastically characterised as a fish. Although she is the only fish moving (alive) during the film, she seems to be a figment of imagination or a memory, as the footage is shown intermittently, as if to haunt the other narratives. Later, there is a scene where the sister-fish seems fainted or dead, Dow holds her in her arms, resembling the renaissance’s sculpture, Pietá; she holds her face with both hands, turns one cheek, and then the other—the sister is absent. We feel deep empathy, as if the future of our own sisters is being cut short.
The physical resemblance between the two sisters evinces the first account of kinship: their sisterly bond is recognised in the frame by their physical appearance, and, in turn, the sister that is dressed as a fish extends their family lineage toward the other deep-sea fish of the story. This re-enacts a feminist exercise that aims to address racism from within the movement by truly considering the other (woman) as sister, and through this practice, build kinship despite (and because of) difference. [iv] It also bears Haraway’s slogan to “make kin, not babies” to save the world—this means, to relate to other species as family, like a chosen queer family, to see beyond the idea of the nuclear family towards a rooted interspecies familial ecosystem. [v]
Bronte Dow, Soundings, 2019. Still image from the film depicting the artist’s finger caressing an anglerfish specimen in a jar.
Occasionally, a shot of anglerfish preserved in glass jars hovers above the main storyline; like the footage of the sister, this feels conjured from memory. We can see the fingers of the artist caressing the jars tenderly—the camera zooms in dramatically, and a piano plays Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. To watch Soundings is to experience a visceral sensation of emotions, where ideas take form through the layering of sounds and scenes, building a sense of mourning and care for the sisters, their future, our future and the world at large. What the film anticipates beyond the expected fatalism is a strategy to create action through affect: to change our relationship with the more-than-human world. As opposed to imagining an end of the world always and forever bound to capitalism, Soundings enables the possibility to foresee a world despite capitalism, through radically decentring the human and suggesting new forms of relations. Although these ideas are not new in themselves, the belief in them has shifted with the advance of the posthuman turn and this is increasingly more evident in mainstream culture.
For example, Guillermo Del Toro’s film The Shape of Water from 2017, depicts an interspecies romance. A mute cleaning-lady Elisa Esposito falls in love with a sea creature, a kind of god-like mermaid that has been captured at the aerospace research centre where she works. The sea-person cannot survive outside of water for long and his bathtub-life is making him unwell. In antithesis, we expect Elisa not to be able to breathe and live underwater, which makes this an impossible love affair. Like Dow’s care for her sisters in Soundings, these expressions of love are compromised by biology—or so we assume. Thus the film revolves around the stubbornness (and love) of one woman to change the social construct and break through the human/nonhuman divide.
Guillermo Del Toro, The Shape of Water, 2017. Still image from the film depicting the main character Elisa Esposito and the magical aquatic creature that she is in love with.
Much else happens in the film, but at the very end both characters are shot to death. However, magically, the sea-creature is resurrected and escapes to water, taking Elisa’s body with it. Once in deep waters, she also wakes up from the dead—Elisa grows gills, where previously she had the scars responsible for her muteness. I take this final scene as a suggestion that perhaps she has not been all that human all along, or better, this poses the consideration of who is considered human within the capitalist world. Elisa is characterised as a mute, orphan, low paid worker, whose desire is repeatedly denied. What at first dehumanised her—her disability, her muteness—at the end made her more-than-human.
Similarly to Soundings, the practice of relating human with nonhumans, or as Haraway calls it, making kin, becomes the alternative to the end. As the posthuman imaginarium leeks into cultural production – both at the niche end of London’s art scene and at the level of Hollywood productions – I think it proves that we have moved beyond Fisher’s capitalist realism and are ready to restore our faith in alternative politics. From the Mercurius perspective, to create a new world, first it is necessary to imagine what the new world could look like. In the land of overspecialisation, that means listening to diverse voices and bringing together and reconciling various micronarratives, a kind of pragmatic idealism.
To return to Skeeter Davis’ song, the question of the end of the world is posed to the birds, the sea, and the sun, querying their oblivious behaviour. I suggest turning the question around and letting the birds, the sea, and the sun ask “Don't they know?”—“they” the humans—that “it’s the end of the world?”.
[i] Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism Is There No Alternative?, 2009, p. 2.
Capitalist Realism is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”
[ii] Braidotti, Rosi, The Posthuman, 2013, pp.7-8.
[iii] Haraway, Donna Jeanne, Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, 2016.
[iv] hooks, bell, Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women, Feminist Review, no. 23, 1986, pp.125-38.
[v] Haraway, 2016.
Bronte Dow (b. 1991, Sydney) lives and works in London. Her practice involves working with text, sound, performance, photography and film. Visit her website here.