Hyperstitions of the Future: Terminal Culture and Contemporary Fictions

Possibly the most compelling argument for a literary study integrating fiction and the critique of crisis resides in the belief that through writing, we come to terms with ‘the end’. Across literature, philosophy, and culture, the reflexive thinking of language and disaster has long invoked the apocalyptic and its aftermath as the locus of a confrontation with the unspeakable and unimaginable. Opening with an analysis of post-war culture’s apocalyptic discourses, via J. G. Ballard, Theodor Adorno, and Thomas Pynchon, this thesis investigates how the period’s crisis of representation is comorbid with, and prefigurative of, what I characterise as the ‘terminal culture’ of the contemporary. Terminal culture, I argue referencing the manifold social and political antagonisms of capitalist modernity, names a cultural imaginary intensely attuned to, and perpetually caught up, in crisis. As an overriding impulse of the postmodern’s engineering of crisis as both a material and conceptual condition of the everyday, the valence of crisis in terminal culture likewise appears as a symptom of irremediable political, social, and economic complexity. Still, another far more inchoate tendency has been the formulation of the predicates for existence within, against, and beyond crisis. Staking its study of a nascent aesthetics of the possible-future to the critique of crisis, this thesis explores fiction, speculative fabulation, storytelling, as world-forming activities critical to the patterning of alternative political imaginaries and possible worlds to come. In particular, this thesis invokes the concept of ‘hyperstition’, a name for the process of fictions becoming real, as a structuring motif mediating between terminal culture and the formal, critical and conceptual languages of contingency. Through readings of post-war literature, culture, and theory, including the speculative fiction of David Foster Wallace, Ursula K. Le Guin, Colson Whitehead, and Italo Calvino, this thesis establishes a critical account of fiction as a cultural technology for the production of futures.