From now until the launch event on Sep 30th, I’m posting daily excerpts from Cold World…

The cold world imposes itself as final, terminal, because it is the termination of a world, its metaphorical freezing or blackening. Just as a given “life-world” is endowed with resources and qualities which make it possible to live well within it, so the experience of the cold world (or “unlife-world”) is the experience of the exhaustion of these resources and the extinction of these qualities. This experience places in question the value of “the world”, and with it the opposition between the mundane and the exceptional, the worldly and the unworldly. “The” world, thus disenchanted, is revealed as “a” world, a world among possible worlds; but it is also estranged from its conditions of possibility, to the extent that it seems scarcely credible that such a world could ever have existed at all.

For example, the narrative of “peak oil” identifies the cultural and technological co-ordinates of “advanced” societies as coterminous with the historically brief epoch, now drawing to a close, of copious and readily-accessible fossil fuel. The shock of the “peak oil” narrative is not only that it warns of a great and imminent crisis in these societies, but that it identifies their world, supported by a steadily unfolding narrative of social progress and technological advancement, as ephemeral and illusory, “unsustainable” and unsustained by any permanent reality. What the “peak oil” narrative declares (along with a brace of other ecological disaster-scenarios) is that “another world” is not only possible but inevitable, since this world cannot go on as it is (and, indeed, has in a sense already ended, inasmuch as its condition has already been diagnosed as terminal). To put it another way: not only is another world possible, but the present world is impossible: its very appearance is a kind of ontological mishap, a disorder in the real.