Into the depths of distopia: remarks confronting an atlas of wastelands.
This research springs from a fountain, from a fire burning within the body of its author, and we might name it: a strong will towards lucidity about the world and why it’s so messy, sorrowfull, and probably doomed to ever-incresing degrees of becoming-distopia. My aim here is perhaps one of elucidation, and it certainly demands the labours of critique. Being a somewhat self-taught cultural critic that has been practising the written critique, published in the Web, hypertextualized and illustrated with colourfulness, for more than 20 years, led me to perceive the re-occurence of a theme amongst my main preoccupations – the bad place, the scorched Earth, the topos of distopia.
My intelectual life and my situation in life pushed the boat of my existence to such a place of questioning the variety of bad places there are all around us in “This Mess We’re In” (this song by PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke, for instance, game immense aesthetic resonance, through music, in the realm of music). To understood, to elucidate about its whys, to debate about its descriptions and depictions, its constructions inside science or fictions, the fact – the bad places that are – and the possibility – the bad places that might be. Films of sci-fi, for instance, will be such important ouèvres under our scrutiny because in their chaotic pulsating “menstruating heart” they are the equivalente a thousand Atlases of Wastelands.
Another way to frame the question is: after so many utopias unfulfilled, so many flunked promises of better places, so many dreams of perfect justice shattered by the bloodsheds of oppression, so many baloons of illusion exploded by the sharp knives of disillusionment, seem to have led me to a place where I perceive me as part of us, a bit of society’s tissue, a part and parcel of the collective, and so I open my eyes, as wide as I can, and exert my mind’s power to my utmost, trying to go into the depths of distopia, and learn its better lessons. They’re also bitter lessons. For Academia to be able do deal well with bitter lessons and awful truths, it should keep its doors and windows open to poetry and to the philosophers of the Garden.
Strangely enough, one of main thesis I am trying to construe, with my statues of words, as some sort of sculpture-made-of-concepts, states this: wisdom can be gained through out attentive e continuous intercourse with distopia-in-sci-fi and other genres of especulative fiction. One of our main goals will be always, throught this writings, to reach for that wisdom that can be gained and aknowledged through our aesthetic experiences. They also can bring about political awakening, and any revolution would be doomed to fail if it mistook deep profound thoughtfulness for a waste-of-time to be sacrificed to the urgencies of action.
We are trying to engage in thoughtfulness, but without forgetfulness of the urgencies of action. This thesis was written during very turbulent times, but I should ask you all if there ever was a time of peaceful tranquility in History, or if it was always this ocean of chaotic movement and unceasing flux? Alarms are resounding all around us about the impending calamity of the climate catastrophe, but the ears heeding the calls of these alarms are still too few, and the working class citizen who’s outside the institutions of Academia sometimes can’t be “all ears” about the climate of cientists when he’s dealing with a very concrete climate – tornados that make him fall off his bike while trying to deliver food in Uberized labour market, for example. The climate of History is shifting with increased acceleration, and of course art sort of mirrors it. Sci-fi gives birth to a child, cli-fi; Music, instead of preaching love and peace in Woodstocks, declares emergency; European’s plazas and streets are increasingly filling up movements of wavelike upsurge of rebbeliouness, the most famous being Fridays For Future and Extinction Rebbelion, and distopias proliferate in cultural space, along and fighting with, for supremacy in the zeitgeist, with several sorts of neo-utopianism, new age Aquarius-like dream-weaving machinery – which is certainly one of the main motors of success for James Cameron’s Avatar, the most profitable enterprise in the history of ticket selling for movie theathers.
A TRANSLATION CHALLENGE
To get into the depths of distopia it seems we can’t avoid, on our way, to get confronted with The Waste Land. I don’t mean here only T. S. Eliot’s poem, published in 1922, and of tremendous resonance throughout one hundred years, I mean to question the notion of wasteland, how can a society produce a territory that can thus be called, and why are distopias so closely correlated to such bad places, such lands of waste. When Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski ventured into translating into portuguese, his suggestion was to call it “devastolândias do porvir”. I’ll struggle for just one paragraph to re-translate it back into English.
“Porvir” means what is bound to come, the realm of futurity, and is similar those similar occurences in French – avenir or Spanish – a venir. Distopias, these artfacts that are carriers of wastelands, mean something about our relationship to the possible, to the future in its openness. “Devastolândia” is harder to translate – but my best shot is to refer to the verb to devastate, in English, meaning to cause ruin, disaster, havoc or damage. When Leminski wants to call Eliot’s The Waste Land by Devastolândias do Porvir, he’s saying that futurity holds within its realm of possibilities the advent of devastation.
Sci-fi in the Anthropocene is brimming with an aesthetics of devastation – remember Alex and his droogs in Clockwork Orange, remember also how authorities deal with normalization of the déviant throught devasting tortureful techniques of brainwash and herenomous mind-control. The aesthtetics of devastion dive into the depths of distopia’s power of expression in masterpieces such as The Road, Snowpiercer, Parasite, Children of Men, The Handmaid’s Tale.
Sci-fi is devastated already by the world to come. Sci-fi tells us to wise up because it shows, by its extrapolations and especulations, that Things to Come might be terrible, horrific, unless we’re quick to remove the catacctes blinding our eyes and breaking the chains that constrains our actions, sometimes reducing us to sociopolitical imobility and pathological conservatism. The aesthetics of devastation which expresses itself in corelation with society’s shifting “climate of History” is ever-more about chaotic atmosphere.
The winds are devastating in the screens of cinema’s most powerful contemporary filmmakers – in Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, in Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, the howling winds of devastation blow. It could be said these films throw distopia into our faces in a manner so rude, so unwelcoming, so depressing, that most viewers might turn away from the films in disgust. Toxic positivity culture when call back its recruits to the comforting lap of mother ideology, “good vibes only”. Self-imposed blindness will complete the cataract: subjects made into half-blinded zombies, slaves to their cellphones and touchscreen, zombiewalking into the gas chamber of the future set up for us for the masterminds of apocalyptic capitalism.
When we talk about wastelands, it stands out also as a concept needing further clarification the notion of waste, which is at the center of a heated controvery among Brazilian translators. Paulo Mendes Campos, translator of Eliot’s The Waste Land, has felt disatisfaction with his choice for A Terra Inútil:
“o adjetivo ‘waste’ tem uma grande franja de significado: deserto, ermo, desabitado, despovoado, bravio, desolado, árido, inculto etc.”, Paulo Mendes Campos disse. Ivo Barroso, Gualter Cunha e Júlia Cortês Rodrigues escolheram A Terra Devastada. Paulo Vizioli e Idelma Ribeiro de Faria escolheram A Terra Gasta. Maria Amélia Neto preferiu A Terra Sem Vida. Gilmar Leal dos Santos, traduziu como A Terra Árida. Ivan Junqueira e Caetano Galindo optaram por A Terra Desolada. Paulo Leminski disse que se fosse traduzir o poema, sua escolha seria Devastolândia.” (BERÇA: https://unamuno.com.br/cem-anos-desolacao/)
DISTOPIA MADE CONCRETE
This thesis also aims to elucidate how distopias can become reality, how the process of concretization might happen, in a period of History where perhaps is no longer very strange to affirm, like I do, that distopias are ever-increasingly happening in the material world instead of staying confined within the confines of fiction. Of course this quickly can become a controversy between optmism and pessimism, and in such an imaginary battle I would certainly ally with the pessimists; our adversaries might try to wound us by saying our monomania about distopias becoming real is just a symptom of the diseased minds of sick people that suffers from manic depression. They might recommend us the un-hook from too much documentaries and Al Jazeera, choose a good dose of self-blindness, currently on sale on so many markets, and forget about wastelands – for those with money, por those who possess the capitals, this is the best of possible worlds. Those dudes, the Candides of apologetic capitalism, of course only for the happy few, can’t help gain any wisdom in the realm of distopias.
It’s, of course, because capitalism has become a mega-machine of mass-devastation, it’s turning into La Machine Du Apocalypse, and of course film would reflect it. The madness of mutual assured destruction in nuclear war becomes a trending topic in Cold War sci-fi and gets new fuel from Christopher Nolan’s fiery Oppenheimer in 2023. There’s no way to avoid: our method will have to be one that deals with the fact, in art history, in the realm of speculative futuristic fiction, of the increased presence of war with means of mass destruction. No map of distopia would be worth consulting if it didn’t include pitstops in masterpieces such as Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Number Five, Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, Peter Watkins The War Game and Brian Aldiss’ Greybeard.
A land goest to waste when it becomes sterile. Its decay is made of infertility. One of the main currents in our age’s sci-fi is the one dealing with the death of birth. Both Greybeard and Children of Men dive into the depths of how birth could become rarefied, extinct – this is how homo sapiens dies, not with a huge explosion, but with the whimpers of the last generation to grow old. No human will ever be born again.
The death of birth is not utterly pessimistic because there’s a countweight, there’s the utopia of wild. Non-human lives can flourish in our absence.
Publicado em: 21/08/25
De autoria: Eduardo Carli de Moraes educarlidemoraes
