Imagining the End: Crisis Culture and the Pleasure Economy

Abstract

Homo sapiens sapiens¹ might have been created in a crucible of fear and desire. These primal dispositions are not simply the ‘fight or flight’ instincts of other higher species; rather, they represent a precarious detente that connects our essential animality to a more complex rendering of culture, economy and social organization. Through nearly 200,000 years of genetic, ecological and cultural history, this remarkably vulnerable and adaptive species has conjured from its immanent conditions a consciousness that has transformed the planetary life systems into an image of itself.

… no man can ever identify himself aright unless his eyes be closed: as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essence, though light be more congenial to our clayerer part.

Ishmael, Moby Dick (p. 57)

What are you, figure of the die I turn over in your encounter with my fortune? Nothing, if not that presence of death which makes of human life a reprieve obtained from morning to morning in the name of meanings whose sign is your crook.

Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on The Purloined Letter’, 1956

The world will eat more food over the next fifty years than has been consumed over the whole of human history.

Dr Megan Clark, CEO, CSIRO, 2009