ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin argued that the future of rational-technological society oscillates between the chance of radical transformation that is distributed to each new generation and the revitalization of reactionary ideologies of nation, blood, and soil. This tension is the root of Hollywood’s obsession with the destruction of the world: for it is in the human reaction to catastrophic malfunctions of technology that we are shown that individual strength and resilience are still essential to the survival of humanity. This aesthetic figuration of human life, however, is essentially unstable, for insofar as its representations of heroism and self-sacrifice tend to refer to conventional forms of masculinity, femininity, race, and religion, there is a sense in which it is complicit with a deeply conservative reaction to the atheistic transhumanism of the neoliberal imaginary. The new nationalisms that have emerged in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States can be understood as affirming precisely this reaction to the rational-technological organization of society: their ideals of righteous war, sovereignty, and racial hierarchy are concerned with reasserting the ‘natural order’ of things that has been ruined by abstract technological systems, the total capitalization of desire, and the monstrous acts of terror that haunt the global economy.
