After Cold War Studies

Abstract

“What is the wall?” Don DeLillo asks this question in a 2015 afterword to his novel Underworld (1997). Walls are a recurring form in DeLillo’s post-Cold War novel, but he goes for an answer outside the text: “[T]he upright structure of building material located just beyond the typewriter, the manuscript pages, the jutting pens and pencils in the marmalade jar” (829). This is the “blank space” that helped DeLillo come up with a narrative design—and crucial tense shift—that connects three other wall forms that appear in his nostalgic “counterhistory” of the Cold War: the outfield wall at the Polo Grounds that, in 1951, failed to contain Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World”; the Berlin Wall, which in 1974, was still a synecdoche of the entire divided Cold War system; and, finally, the sublimely graffitied wall of a South Bronx tenement, “part of the American gulag” (807), a zone of exclusion and a last refuge at the end of history.¹ “People in the Wall liked to say, When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets,” DeLillo writes in Underworld. “It was happening a little sooner than they thought” (245).

Underworld, a novel all about afterlives, comes up in two new books, by Penny Von Eschen and David L. Pike, that are both centrally concerned with the posthumous survival of Cold War forms into the period after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Taken together, they suggest how a critical method of “political formalism” might be applied to this unstable post-1989 period (Kornbluh 4).² But what does formalism look like when a world falls apart? A third book, on the Cold War-era writer Philip K. Dick, provides a useful reminder: all social and cultural forms have a half-life. Like DeLillo’s Underworld, all these books show how the post-Cold War period, which lasted roughly between 1989 and 2016, has been shaped by the simultaneous persistence and decay of forms associated with the Cold War past.³

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Nostalgia, Von Eschen argues, is the key concept for understanding the post-Cold War period. “God, I miss the Cold War.” Von Eschen records many such utterances, from George Clooney in The Peacemaker (1997) and Judy Dench, as M, in Casino Royale (2006) to a blog-era poet and a proverbial Washington, D.C. taxi driver. Paradoxes of Nostalgia ranges widely, tracking this popular sentiment across a profusion of cultural sites that memorialize the global Cold War, including both postcommunist monument parks and late-capitalist spy museums, with their gift shops filled with nostalgic kitsch. She cites Milan Kundera’s famous definition of kitsch as the “absence of shit,” relics in a ritual of purification and forgetting (qtd. 190). But she also embraces a more generous psychoanalytic view of Cold War artifacts as “transitional objects” that help us process the collective sense of mourning and loss that comes with rapid historical change (195).⁴ Von Eschen expands on the considerable scholarly literature devoted to communist-era nostalgia in the former Soviet world, seeking out examples of “nostalgia across former Cold War divides,” including in the US (5).⁵ As she shows, Western societies have experienced their own equivalent of ostalgie, that German-language neologism used to describe longing for the material culture, social forms, and state benefits that vanished along with the German Democratic Republic. A corresponding westalgie was hardly limited to former citizens of West Germany. Even in their supposed triumph, Americans, too, longed for a lost sense of geopolitical and cultural order.

Throughout, Von Eschen holds up the possibility that “critical nostalgia” might offer a corrective to Cold War triumphalism in the West (16, 20). What might this critical nostalgia look like? In a brief but suggestive discussion of Underworld, she argues that DeLillo offers a “postmortem on the Cold War” precisely by showing how we are still living amongst “the waste products of the era,” in “a world littered with nuclear sludge, unexploded bombs, and mountainous garbage dumps” (136). As the protagonist, a “waste broker” named Nick Shay, watches containers of nuclear material being buried underground, he thinks “of the living rocks down there, the subterrane process, the half-life, the atoms that decay to half the original number” (DeLillo 122). But this process of decay will take years. In the meantime, some, like the salvage artist Klara Sax, are busy “transforming and absorbing” Cold War-era military surplus into something new, creating a sprawling art installation out of decommissioned B-52 bombers in the Arizona desert (102). In contrast, Nick pursues the “deep eros of memory,” by tracking down lost baseball memorabilia (171). For DeLillo, these two activities are connected as formal responses to a world order that has become “undone, unstuck” (76). Von Eschen, too, takes popular longing for the Cold War past seriously. As DeLillo writes, “Longing on a large scale is what makes history” (11).

More typical of this era than Underworld, however, are the conservative techno-thrillers of Tom Clancy. Although Clancy’s big breakthrough came in 1984, when the US Naval Institute agreed to publish his novel The Hunt for Red October after the manuscript was rejected by traditional publishers, Von Eschen shows how Clancy’s popular Jack Ryan series would help subsequent presidential administrations project Reagan-era narrative frames onto the post-Cold War world. As Von Eschen points out, “Clancy’s role as a popularizer of US cold war triumphalism was solidified with nine novels reaching the number one slot on the New York Times fiction best-seller list between 1986 and 2003” (28). Screen adaptations of his novels have had an even wider reach. The 1990 movie version of Hunt for Red October, starring Sean Connery as the Lithuanian captain of a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine who is seeking to defect to the West, was screened at the White House by George H. W. Bush in early 1990 and would go on to make more than $200 million worldwide. “The romance of the Soviet dissident, as fundamental to the US cold war imaginary as any idea of an enemy,” Von Eschen writes, “could now be consummated in the film as fulfilled desire” (30).

The post-9/11 world required further adaptation. Just as the Navy had advised the production of the movie version of Hunt for Red October, a humiliated CIA would work with the filmmakers behind the adaptation of Clancy’s Sum of All Fears, starring Ben Affleck, in 2002.⁶ As Von Eschen also shows throughout Paradoxes of Nostalgia, “representations of the Cold War and the war on terror have been largely constructed in a digital world” (17). Indeed, since 9/11, Clancy’s fictional worlds have been translated into other popular digital forms, including streaming series and video games.

The tactical shooter video game Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, released in November of 2001, did not cause the “War on Terror.” But the projection of Cold War tropes onto the post-9/11 geopolitical imaginary has done plenty of damage. “[P]ositing Middle Eastern and Muslim threats to the United States and rebooting older Asian enemies,” Von Eschen claims, “Clancy was a major exponent of popular Islamophobia and racialized xenophobia” (159). That’s not all that these digital narratives have helped to “reboot” (17). In the first Ghost Recon game, an ultranationalist regime has come to power in contemporary Russia and reclaimed the territory of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in an attempt to reconstitute the former Soviet Union. The point is not that the Clancy-industrial complex predicted, let alone brought about, a so-called new cold war with Russia; rather, video games are one more cultural site where Cold War narrative forms are endlessly redeployed. Although Von Eschen doesn’t discuss Ghost Recon in her book, she did spend hours playing the Call of Duty series as part of her research process. To better understand how digital adaptation has shaped post-Cold War literary culture, more of us may need to pick up the controller.

Whether on the screen or on the page, all these residual forms of Cold War culture are like the “busted containers” (132) that proliferate in so many ’90s thrillers. As Von Eschen shows, “loose nukes” (133) and “rogue nations” (172) were everywhere during this period. But all these recycled narrative tropes have done little to contain the anxiety of disorder that followed the end of the Cold War. And they had even less to say about the collective sense of longing for a better world that was so quickly suppressed after 1989. To help us recover this buried hope, David Pike suggests we return to another broken Cold War form: the bunker.

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The “bunker fantasy” is at the heart of After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Imaginations in the Twenty-First Century. Throughout, Pike explores a broad range of subterranean spaces, whether symbolic or realized in concrete, once associated with what he calls the “nuclear condition” of the Cold War era (2). These bunkers come in many forms, from private fallout shelters in suburban backyards to vast public infrastructure built into remote mountains. According to Pike, bunkers represent an ambivalent fantasy of survival, expressing utopian desire as much as apocalyptic horror. “As form, as image, and as physical space,” he argues, “the bunker dominated Cold War culture” (4). But even as fear of nuclear cataclysm has faded from the public imagination since the end of the Cold War, the fantasy of the bunker has remained.

The post-Cold War bunker fantasy is therefore another “misplaced idea.” Pike imports this term from the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwartz to describe what happens “when functions and meanings of ideas, tropes, and spaces are adapted to new spatiohistorical imaginaries” (Pike, 9).⁷ This is a very useful way of thinking about the many uses of “Cold war culture since the Cold War,” the wider ambit of Pike’s book (xx). But he has an even more specific preoccupation in After the End: he wants to show how the Cold War-era bunker fantasy has been misplaced into twenty-first-century narratives that imagine the end of the world. And there are many potential endings to choose from: under “apocalypse,” the book’s index lists subentries for “atomic-biological-chemical warfare,” “alien invasion,” “digital,” “ecological,” “nuclear,” “oppression and genocide,” “pandemic,” “religious,” and “zombie.” Ecological collapse might be the most immediate example. According to Pike, “most of our public discourse somehow still has not found an imaginary better suited to the climate crisis than the one we inherited from the Cold War” (xxi). Take the example of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a Norwegian biorepository located in an arctic archipelago. With its reinforced-concrete tunnels, the seed vault was designed to withstand a nuclear war. However, within a decade of its construction, the vault’s structural integrity was threatened by melting permafrost. These misplaced bunkers demonstrate the challenge of adapting the speculative and future-oriented apocalyptic scenarios of the Cold War era to a climate crisis that is already here.

Still, Pike holds onto the idea that the bunker might serve as a utopian form. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), Pike argues that bunkers are utopian precisely because they are misplaced in time and space. In Jamesonian terms, the bunker is an “imaginary enclave,” a differentiated social space to wait out the apocalypse (Pike 9). Maybe we are all vulgar Jamesonians now. But Jameson’s theory of utopia is particularly appropriate to Pike’s project, in part because Archaeologies of the Future is itself an “aberrant by-product” of the post-Cold War moment (Jameson 15). Jameson introduces (one might even say, historicizes) his Marxist recuperation of utopian form by lamenting utopia’s association with the failure of authoritarian party-states across the Eastern bloc. But in Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson also argues dialectically, “The best Utopias are those that fail most comprehensively” (xiii).

Perhaps that is why Pike is also at his best when he describes what happens after a bunker fantasy has already failed. He complicates the popular image of the contemporary bunker as the habitat of paranoid preppers and far-right survivalists, pointing to “a counter-thread in the comic mode that imagines what happens to survivalists when the world does not in fact end as predicted” (Pike 65). Some of these twenty-first-century narratives, like the Netflix streaming series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, incorporate a satirical critique of the white masculinity of the late Cold War era. (Pike uses Kimmy Schmidt’s theme song as an epigraph: “That’s gonna be uhhh you know uhhh fascinating transition.”) Throughout the book, Pike turns to a dizzying assortment of “contradictory” yet illuminating examples, from Afrofuturism to Albanian civil defense architecture. His chapters on twenty-first-century adaptations of the Cold War built environment offer a particularly useful model for what a post-Cold War formalism might look like, applying key terms like “continuation,” “transference,” and “appropriation” to former nuclear sites from Nevada and Hiroshima to Chernobyl and the Taiwan Strait (139).

“Appropriation” emerges as the most hopeful of these three terms. Take the example of Albania, where the former Communist leader Enver Hoxha, an unreconstructed Stalinist, once pursued a decades-long campaign of “bunkerization” (bunkerizimi), pocking the country’s landscape with over 700,000 “concrete mushrooms.” Although never used during the Cold War, some of these bunkers did provide shelter for refugees during the Kosovo War of 1999. Through a process of “retrofitting, repurposing, and appropriation,” many of Albania’s bunkers have now been transformed from symbols of terror into sites of hospitality: homes, cafés, hotels, and tourist sites (175).

Pike finds a parallel process of appropriation taking place in postapocalyptic fiction. He argues, “Perhaps the most significant development in postapocalyptic writing since the 1980s has been the appropriation of its popular genres by Black writers, Indigenous writers, writers of color, and writers from the global South” (5). Pike’s reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable series helps to clarify his book’s argument that post-Cold War bunker narratives represent an alternative “epistemology,” offering imaginative distance and temporary shelter from the traumas of history. But this can only be a fleeting utopia: “Rather than emerging from that world,” Pike argues, “we remain within its parameters and must find ways of reworking rather than simply presuming we can step outside them whenever we wish” (15). Just as Von Eschen finds hope in critical nostalgia, Pike argues that “the epistemological bunker can at times function as a critical and speculative tool rather than solely offering an ironic or nostalgic gaze into a simpler past” (139).

But as Pike has shown in his previous work, the bunker fantasy had already been warmed over once during Reagan years. After the End is itself a continuation of Pike’s earlier project Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades (2022). One of Pike’s most useful interventions in The Bunkered Decades was an argument about periodization. What we refer to as the Cold War really contained several distinct phases of ideological fantasy. Many of the most resonant bunker narratives were created around the time of one of two near-apocalyptic events: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the nuclear war scare of 1983, when a Soviet early warning system gave a false alarm of a US nuclear attack. A simulation nearly killed us all. Reagan’s “new Cold War” in the eighties may have been a postmodern exercise in reactionary nostalgia, but the threat of nuclear cataclysm was, and still is, very real.⁸

In After the End, Pike quotes Butler who in 1990 suggested that a central lesson of Reaganism was that “people will pay any price for praise, reassurance, and an illusion of security” (qtd. 204). Isn’t it time to finally step outside the bunker?

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In Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel The Penultimate Truth, published in 1964 but set in the year 2025, the majority of the American population still lives in a system of underground shelters in fear of a US–Soviet conflict that has long ended. Their sole window into the world above is a giant screen. When one of the novel’s protagonists tunnels to the surface in search of life-saving medical equipment, he discovers that the devastating world war being fought between the “Wes-Dem” and “Pac-Peop” alliances is merely an extravagant televisual production. The folksy President who delivers regular updates on the unfolding apocalypse is revealed as a simulacrum. Penultimate Truth is one of several bunker fictions by Dick that figure prominently in The Bunkered Decades. Pike shows how Dick and other postwar writers used bunker narratives to adapt “the modernist crisis of white male isolation and alienation,” drawing on texts like Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) and Kafka’s “The Burrow,” for the new Cold War era (The Bunkered Decades 48-9). This cycle continues into the present. Now, Dick is one of the Cold War-era writers being replicated.

Even though Dick died in 1982, one might argue that he is also a paradigmatic author of the post-Cold War era. Two of Dick’s greatest novels from the late sixties—Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? (1968) and Ubik (1969)—are both set in the future of 1992. And we are still living in the period that so much of Dick’s science fiction imagines. One brief example will have to suffice: Penultimate Truth opens with a scene, now familiar on any university campus, in which a writer struggles to use AI to meet an assignment deadline.⁹ As another character reminds the blocked writer, “It got its precious jargony linguistic habits straight from you” (4). The point is not that Dick was like one of the “precogs” in his stories. The retrospective predictive quality of his fiction has instead fueled an appetite for regular screen adaptations. Ridley Scott’s late Cold War masterpiece, Bladerunner (1982), was just the beginning: from Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) up through the Amazon Prime streamer The Man in the High Castle (2015-), Dick’s speculative worlds are now ubiquitous. To observe that the posthumous transformation of his fictions into corporate IP (and more grist for a content mill of “multiversal storytelling”) is like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel is to feed the machine of his ongoing canonization.

Canonization is always a belated process. For years, Jameson was Dick’s most influential, and lonely, champion among academic critics. In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), it is a reading of Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959) that helps Jameson develop his famous theory of “nostalgia for the present” (279). In Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson dedicates several chapters to Dick, referring to him as the “Shakespeare of Science Fiction” (345). This boosterish quote is taken from an “In Memoriam” essay, published originally in 1982, in which Jameson points out that Dick was still entirely unknown in English Departments, even as the US sci-fi author had become a “cult figure among French intellectuals” (345). The pattern is by now overly familiar: an American pulp writer consecrated in Paris is finally recognized by arbiters of literary taste in the US. By the mid-2000s, twenty years after his death, Dick had finally made it into the middlebrow canon, a source of some anxiety for Jameson.¹⁰ In 2007, Library of America began collecting Dick’s best-known science-fiction novels in a three-volume set, edited by the novelist Jonathan Lethem.¹¹

The strange process of Dick’s posthumous reanimation continues into the present. Most recently, the French philosopher David Lapoujade, a Deleuzian pragmatist, has written a book about Dick’s perverse approach to world-building. In Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick, Lapoujade also makes an idiosyncratic argument for reading Dick as a political formalist. Lapoujade takes his title from a speech that Dick gave in 1978 titled “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” Here are the key lines:

It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos (Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick 262).

It's worth noting that Dick’s “love of chaos” is more than just anti-formalism, or to borrow Anna Kornbluh’s term, “anarcho-vitalism” (Kornbluh 4). Rather, as Lapoujade argues, “If Dick’s stories show us the collapsing of worlds,” it is because they simulate how decades of “privatization” have allowed new forms of political, economic, and military power to “impose” a unipolar worldview on everyone else (25). For Lapoujade, this is the ultimate meaning, and threat, of the neoliberal slogan “there is no alternative.” As he puts it, “anyone who only lives in one world wants the destruction of all worlds, including his own” (61). In Dick’s fiction, there is always another world waiting around the corner.

In the meantime, Dick can help us think about the half-life of forms from the Cold War past. His fictions are all about the instability and disintegration of the inherited cultural forms that mediate our sense of reality. As Jameson puts it, “Dick is notoriously the epic poet of entropy and of the transformation of the world into kipple, the layers of dust, the rotting of all that's solid, a destruction of form itself that is worse than death” (82). The word “kipple,” referring to the accumulating detritus of the past, is a Dickian invention from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). But it is Dick’s novel Ubik that takes as its doubled preoccupation the preservation and decay of all social forms, including human consciousness. Even in death, the minds of the ultra-wealthy and well-connected can be suspended in “half-life,” stored in “cold-pac” in a private moratorium in Switzerland. For good reason, Lapoujade considers Ubik to be science fiction’s “antinovel par excellence” (55). Rather than a novel of technological progress, the plot of Ubik revolves entirely around historical regression: just as the minds kept in half-life deteriorate over time, the everyday objects all around the protagonist, Joe Chip, decompose into older versions of themselves. Obsolete currency is a recurring motif: one coin, minted by the governing North American Confederation, reverts into a quarter-dollar from the previous US regime bearing the face of George Washington. Artifacts, antiques, and other memorabilia can be found all over Dick’s oeuvre, but Lapoujade disagrees with Jameson’s suggestion that these are tokens of nostalgia.¹²

Rather, according to Lapoujade, Dick is our great author of the “time after” (128). Lapoujade adapts this idea from the sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem, who translated Ubik into Polish in 1972. In Ubik, nearly all the central characters are killed in a surprise explosion early in the novel. As Lem writes, “If . . . we assume a technology which makes possible the ‘half-life’ of the dead, nothing prevents the author from remaining faithful to his characters and following them with his narrative—into the depths of their icy dream, which is henceforward the only form of life open to them” (53-4). Dick’s characters only realize that they are existing in half-life, with their bodies frozen inside a Swiss mountain, in the final pages of the novel. But as Dick writes in the cryptic final line, “This was just the beginning” (227).

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If we leave behind the Cold War-era fantasy of the bunker, what will replace the bunker as a form? The answer, according to Pike, is already beginning to surround us: the form of the border wall. Since the turn of the century, we have been living through a global mania for wall-building. As of 2023, walls, fences, and other permanent security barriers “occupied or were under construction along more than sixty borders covering a total of more than twenty-five thousand kilometers” around the world (After the End 229). Focusing on walls separating the US and Mexico as well as Israeli and Palestinian territories, Pike argues, “these borderlands and barriers manifest many of the same special fears and dreams of security as the Cold War bunker fantasy, misplaced into the very different geopolitics of the twenty-first century” (21). But unlike bunkers, walls foreclose any imagination of the future, utopian or otherwise. Walls are for people who only want to live in one world.

During the Cold War, the wall was a very different kind of symbol. In 1961, East German soldiers hastily constructed the Berlin Wall out of concrete blocks and fencing to help keep would-be emigrants in. Today’s walls are usually built to keep people out. After 1989, pieces of the Berlin Wall circulated far and wide, as relics of liberation, as kitschy souvenirs, and as repurposed art objects. In Paradoxes of Nostalgia, Von Eschen describes how on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mauerfall, countless think-pieces in the US “recontextualized the wall in relation to contemporary social justice projects” (211). Others clung to the wall as a symbol of libertarian triumph. On her own campus, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, a segment of the wall featuring the graffiti of a Berlin DJ, nicknamed KAOS, was put on display. Funded by the fossil fuel magnate and alumnus, Robert A. Hefner, the wall installation was presented as a birthday gift to Thomas Jefferson, “as an expression of the power of personal freedom” (qtd. Von Eschen 212). However, by 2019, students who were surveyed now associated the wall installation with “Trump, the Mexican border wall, and US detention facilities for immigrants and refugee children taken from their families” (217). Today, as Pike writes in After the End, “the wall’s dystopia looms in self-evidence” (226).

Against the dystopian form of the wall, Pike argues, we are left only with a system of underground tunnels. In Cold War narratives, tunnels under the Berlin Wall were typically imagined either as sites of espionage and subversion or routes of escape and freedom. But Pike argues that tunnels are no longer emancipatory. Unlike the Cold War bunker form, “what they afford is resistance rather than long-term potential for change or survival” (240). According to Pike, the wall and the tunnel, frozen in symbolic opposition, “split the dystopian and utopian extremes united in the bunker fantasy into distinct but dependent spaces” (231). To illustrate this split, Pike turns to a series of artworks that take as their subject, and sometimes also their object, the walls and tunnels of US-Mexico and Israel-Palestine border zones. Some of the writers and artists in this final chapter are well-known (Joe Sacco, China Miéville, Banksy, Josef Koudelka, Teju Cole, Leslie Marmon Silko, Valeria Luiselli, etc); others are anonymous citizens of borderlands. Placed in juxtaposition, they all help demonstrate how “the enduring symbolic power of the Berlin Wall stands in tension with the reversed dynamics of wall and tunnel pairings on the West Bank, the Mexico-US border, and elsewhere” (234).¹³ I take all these symbolic reversals as further evidence that the strange interregnum that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall is itself now over, a little sooner than we thought.

Now is therefore a good time to take stock of the literary culture of the post-Cold War period. My own approach might be different: less nostalgic about utopia, more interested in art and ideas that resist containment. I confess I am just as interested in what we can learn from the objects on a writer’s desk as I am in a synoptic reading of texts. (An empty jar of marmalade!) Still, adapting a “perversely formalist approach” to the study of this period makes sense (Jameson 85). After all, we are working in a world built to fall apart. Let’s hope it’s just the beginning.

Brian K. Goodman is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. He is the author of The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain (Harvard UP, 2023), which won the Pamela Jensen Book Award from the American Political Science Association.

Footnotes

Works Cited