Warhammer 40,000 is by the admission of its creators, a satire of Britain in the 1980s. It is a representation of a squalid, sprawling failed empire, where human life has ceased to matter as anything other than oil for the machinery of a broken state. In this talk I will characterise this satire using the work of Mark Fisher, arguing that the Imperium of Man demonstrates a peculiar form of eeriness. This eeriness, I argue, offers a radical critique of British capitalism.
For Fisher, the eerie is about agency appearing in places that it should not or in places where there is a mystery as to its origin. Paradigm cases include ruins, disappearances, and eerie cries from across misty fields. We “find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human” (Fisher 2016). It might seem odd, then, to read the Imperium of Man as eerie; if anything characterises the Imperium it is precisely an excess of humans: “To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions” (Priestley et al 1998 3). Yet, as I will argue, despite this excess of humanity, the Imperium is characterised by an absence of agency on the part of those humans. Moreover, it is unclear how the Imperium can act at all: the Adeptus Administratum is regularly described as having collapsed under the weight of its own paperwork: “the vast size of the Imperium makes a mockery of any true form of governance” (Priestley et al 1998 104).
Nevertheless, the Imperium lumbers on, a fallen empire perpetually on the brink of collapse, characterised by an agency without any agents. The sheer weight of the structure of the Imperium acts, demanding the perpetual sacrifice of humanity. I will argue that this is the “metaphysical scandal of capital” (Fisher 2016) in allegorical form: a darkly humorous parody and critique of life in the UK.
Bibliography
- Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie Zer0 Books.
- Priestley, Rick et al (1998) Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook (3rd Edition) Nottingham, Black Library.
- Ralphs, Matt. (2007). The Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer Nottingham: Black Library.
Author bio
Dr Matthew J. Cull is Interdisciplinary Research Fellow in the Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and Society at the University of Edinburgh. Their work focuses on social and political philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of language.
