Catatonic Futures and Post-Apocalyptic Capital

Abstract

What does late capitalism’s mode of temporality reveal about the logic linked to its mode of production? This article establishes a dialogue between theoretical works concerned with this question and Jeff Noon’s speculative fiction novel Falling out of Cars. By drawing on Marxist criticism in the works of Fredric Jameson and Gilles Deleuzeand Felix Guattari, it argues that Falling out of Cars develops a catatonic mode of temporality that critically challenges these authors’ diagnosis of schizophrenia as the cultural logic of late capitalism. Noon’s novel offers a dystopian version of the future in which catatonic subjects function as the norm for the system’s optimal operation. The catatonic temporality of the novel emerges as the logic underlying this transformation, namely, as the passive assimilation of the individual to the system’s economic rationale, which no longer needs human agency in order to operate. Falling out of Cars does not only deploy these narrative techniques on a purely aesthetic basis, but explicitly links them to the objective conditions of the world they aim to represent. In this sense, Noon’s novel suggests catatonia as the dominant logic leading to capitalism’s terminal stage in which individuals no longer possess agency to take control of their lives.