Chromophilic Annihilation: Posthuman Prisms and New Materialist Refractions of Reality
Chromophilic Annihilation: Posthuman Prisms and New Materialist Refractions of Reality

Summary/Abstract: While the film’s title might suggest otherwise, Annihilation (Garland, 2018) is not about the nullification of existence. Rather, it deals with a refractory re-creation of reality, in which colour plays a pivotal part. The manner in which this film creates a novel kind of being (not only) human presents rich avenues for exploring how colour is deployed in imagining ‘the posthuman.’ Annihilation’s iridescent ‘Shimmer’ envisions a life-altering alien force which seems to devour the world as we know it. This article analyses how Annihilation’s hallucinatory, weird colour-scapes conceptualise a posthuman state of existence which relentlessly refracts each and every aspect of life, calling into question what it means to be human or nonhuman, animate or inanimate, dead or alive. In investigating how Annihilation’s peculiar use of ‘prismatic’ colour functions within David Batchelor’s concepts of ‘chromophobia/-philia,’ while analysing the film’s chromatic alien refraction in light of the new materialist theories of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, this article fashions a protraction of the notion of chromophilia in which the ontology of colour itself gains a posthuman connotation. In Batchelor’s argument about chromophobia, colour is delineated as dangerously ‘other,’ and even as alien. This rationale is aligned with the ‘enlightened’ humanist discourse which values shape over colour, integrity over chaos. Yet, it is also intimately connected to its counterpart—chromophilia—a discourse that revels in colour’s refractory qualities and can be linked to the ‘digital.’ To illuminate the thus far unexplored topic of‘ posthuman colour,’ the article argues that Annihilation demonstrates how chromophilia can encompass an inherently posthuman and new materialist ‘essence.’

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