Navigating Apocalyptic Affects: Generating Posthuman Cartographies of Resistance to Capitalist Realism

Abstract

Humans find themselves inhabiting an uncanny milieu of accelerated cultural transition, uncertainty, and geopolitical crisis. The transformation of human and nonhuman worlds in the wake of technological progress narratives have raised troubling ontological spectres. ‘How’, for instance, ‘do we conceive of being when the distinction between organic and machinic dissolves, when reality is folded into virtuality, [when] the body is morphed by technology, and [when] computer networks digitise knowledge?’ (Davis 1994: 1). As material relational agents, technological media leave phenomenological traces in the bodies they penetrate. ‘How do they touch us … do they merely reflect off our skin [and] the surface of our internal organs?’ ( Dunne 2005 :107). Electromagnetic frequencies that infiltrate somatic realms are accompanied by other affective vibrations too. This article explores the apocalyptic affects that jump between bodies entangled with technological media and in digital networks. It explores the ontological, epistemological, phenomenological, and ethical residues of such dark affective entanglements while positing how they might be harnessed in pedagogical practices that aim to work toward more affirmative somatechnical relations. It constitutes a theoretical/experimental exploration of the pedagogical value of affect theory in the context of progress-driven apocalyptic unease and seeks ways in which the sensibilities of fear and alienation constructed around the speeds and atmospheres of spectacular media culture might be productively wielded in Higher Education pedagogy as weapons of transformation.