Return Competencies: On Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume”

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In a sleepy park near the Hauptbahnhof in Bremen, there is a statue of an  elephant, made of brick and mortar, standing ten meters tall. Erected nearly a century ago as a Reich Colonial Memorial of Honor, the elephant is a cenotaph for the German colonial enterprise.

First proposed in 1925, the memorial was initially supposed to be built in Berlin. But Bremen had a particularly strong connection to the colonies: Bremen was the origin point for many of Germany’s colonial expeditions. The very first state-sanctioned settlement in South West Africa, now Namibia, was bankrolled by Adolf Lüderitz, a Bremen tobacco merchant. The Bremen Colonial Society insisted that the loss of the colonies had been particularly ruinous for them, so the Weimar government agreed, after several years, to allow the monument to be erected in Bremen.

With National Socialism sweeping the country, the elephant was designed by the Nazi sculptor and “star of the colonialist movement” Fritz Behn in 1931. It served both to commemorate the “fallen heroes” of German colonialism and to invigorate efforts to recapture the colonies. It stands upon a crypt that once held a ledger containing the names of approximately 1500 soldiers. Carved into the tomb are inscriptions lamenting the loss of “Our Colonies,” and honoring Lüderitz alongside General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the so-called “Lion of Africa” who commanded the Schutztruppe in Namibia responsible for the genocide of the Nama and Herero peoples. After the statue was erected, the Nazis held a convention in Bremen for Germany’s colonial organization and designated Bremen the “Capital of the Colonies.”

It was only in 1989 that, at the height of the international struggle against apartheid, this memorial to colonialism was rededicated as an Antikolonial-Denkmal, an Anticolonial Monument. The park it stands in—renamed Nelson Mandela Park in 2014, soon after his death—has become a kind of clearinghouse for memorials to German colonial guilt and postcolonial apologia. Today, a placard in the park invites visitors to behold the elephant through a hole in the shape of the African continent.

Despite these attempted rhetorical revisions of Bremen’s colonial past, it remains a crucial commercial entrepôt for Germany’s economy, indeed for all of Europe. Last year Bremen was Europe’s leading freight transport center. More than 65 million tons of cargo moved through the port of a city containing less than 600,000 people. It stands now as a crucial node in the global shipping and logistics sector, a cog in the machine of capitalism’s accelerating annihilation of space and time. And, for a Europe increasingly superfluous to the global economy, Bremen is a last bastion of European economic power.

All to say, Bremen makes a suitable setting for the fourth installment of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. Set almost entirely between the four brick-and-mortar walls of a sprawling mansion in the city, Book IV finds its protagonist and chronicler Tara Salter in the company of a growing cohort of “loopers,” a seemingly random assortment of people stuck in an endlessly recurring November 18. The mansion becomes a port of call for the growing number of loopers that, we come to learn, are scattered across the continent. And, like Bremen itself, the mansion was built “with questionable funds…that flow to local banks through various channels via tax havens and money laundering operations.” Such continuities between high colonialism and contemporary capitalism haunt the narrative, the elephant in the room of a story about the intractability of the time we live in.

But Tara had not always been in the company of others stuck in time like her. She begins Book I alone in Paris, before returning to Clairon-sous-Bois, to the home she shares with her husband and business partner Thomas. She awakens every morning and explains anew that she is stuck in November 18; together they search for clues that might shed light on Tara’s dilemma. The book ends with Tara returning to Paris in the hope that rounding out the year where the time-loop began might offer her a way out of it. In Book II, Tara casts a wider berth, traveling up and down Europe in search of seasons—winter and spring in Sweden and Norway, summer in Spain—with brief visits to her husband and her family in search of companionship and solace. It is at the end of Book II that she discovers she is not alone. In Book III, she finds relief in a new companion: the sociologist Henry Dale. The two are “astonished” and “giddy” in one another’s company. They spend more than six months together before making visits to family, reconvening approximately three hundred days later. By then, another looper named Olga joins in their transience, seeking help from Tara and Henry to locate a fourth looper named Ralf. The book ends with them squatting in a house in Bremen when five more loopers arrive at their doorstep, a growing class of people all made superfluous by time.

Much has been made of Solvej Balle’s as-yet-incomplete septology: A study of intimacy and alienation; a meditation on loss and the healing power of community; an injunction to notice the small details that constitute the rich welter of human experience. Commentators and critics have likewise reflected on theness of the world that Balle has built, the recondite rules that govern Tara’s time-loop, rules that Balle has said are “dissolved in the work as sugar dissolves in a glass of water.” Yet for all the wonder at this worldbuilding, there is curiously little critical attention paid to the world itself.

In fact, to read On the Calculation of Volume merely attuned to its more sentimental qualities is to entirely overlook the books’ real engine. The loneliness and alienation, the dread and wonder; these are mere symptoms of a more fundamental structure of feeling at the heart of the work. They may constitute Tara’s preoccupations, but they hardly help to make sense of the book’s world or Tara’s place within it. What might we see by fixing our attention on the world itself? What if we looked at the book, like the elephant in Bremen, through a hole in the shape of the colonized world? What if we read Balle’s time-stuck world less as a portrait of the human condition than as a parable of Europe, stuck in the time of postcolonial melancholia?

This world is one that only ever hovers at the edges of the narrative: a world in crisis, a system in decline. In Book IV, as Tara begins to learn how to drive, she quips that the car seems less important as a means of transportation than as a carapace to hold together the institution of the family precisely at a moment when it is “in the process of crumbling.” Henry admonishes her for making a claim without empirical evidence:

Why the car, of all things? Why not start with the chariot? What about the prairie wagon, full of household utensils and tools and a cradle for the little one? Did it spell the end of the pioneers’ era? And the ships — what about them? Gigantic container ships, did they mark the end of global trade? Was I suggesting that this urge to collect the world’s goods in gigantic vessels signaled the era’s imminent demise? The last breath of world trade? Did I mean more generally that by looking into the transport sector’s protective boxes, one could determine what was in the process of dying?

Prairie wagons that settled colonial frontiers; container ships that carry more than 90% of the world’s goods today: each is a vehicle for the capitalist annihilation of space-time, aiding in the acceleration of production, commerce, accumulation, and, ultimately, its own obsoletion. And yet, no sooner does the world impinge upon the loopers’ idyllic life in Bremen than Henry tells her that her assertions “lacked empirical evidence.” Tara is obliged to perish the thought.

The fact is, the residues of postcolonial Europe are as inextricable from the slow-leavening action of On the Calculation of Volume, as dissolved into the water of the novel,  as the rules of the time-loop itself. This real drama is happening “off-stage,” as Edward Said might put it. It is the hidden engine of the novel, but it expresses most fully the contradictions that govern the world of the book. Read in these terms, the book is a fugue for the twilight of Europe, a jeremiad for an empire that has outlived its relevance to the world system it built.

The book’s preoccupation with the fall of Rome is an obvious way into the book’s concern with the twilight of empire. The first new object that enters Tara’s possession, for example—the very first time the eighteenth of November repeats for her—is an old Roman coin, a sestertius. The relic is a catalyst for her growing obsession with the Roman Empire, and though absent for much of Book I, the coin has remained a mathom for Tara through a decade’s worth of November 18s. She comes to identify herself with it. Once “just metal…molten, fluid, formless,” the coin became frozen in perpetuity the moment it was minted. Contemplating the coin’s condition, Tara says, “we were two of a kind.”

But while her fixation on Rome may have begun with the coin, in time it takes a much wider tack to include all that “had fallen out of history along the way.” In Book II, for instance, she travels across northern and central Europe, mapping the limits of Roman imperium, coming to understand the empire, and everything in it, as a kind of container. It is not just amphorae and glass vessels, Tara tells us. It is not just tenements and granaries and temples; it is also the walls and forts pushed farther and farther afield, stretching across central Europe, reaching as far as Britain and Scotland, containing new subjects of empire whose taxes and toil kept the growing empire afloat. “The entire empire is now a container,” Tara writes, “the Roman container, and the walls define the empire.” The ruins of the walls, of the Roman container, prompt her to consider divergent theories of Rome’s collapse: internal strife, the growing power of the barbarian hordes to the north, even the “rye-wheat boundary”—the latitudes where the climate becomes too cold for wheat cultivation. Empire, she reflects, needs its outside. It cannot function without surplus, without something superfluous, something beyond the frontiers of its dominion, something still to be either captured or wasted by its machinery of capture.

In the opening of Book III, Tara’s reading of twenty-first century Europe through the parable of Rome’s downfall grows more explicit. Having met Henry Dale at a lecture on Roman supply chains, Tara wonders what it was that led them both to Rome. “We had both landed,” Tara writes, “on the banks of the Rhine, at the border of the Roman Empire. We had both lost the futures which once stretched out before us.” Was this not what Europe must have looked like from Rome when the empire fell? And is this not what the world looks like from Europe now? From within this rupture in time, she can see that “the meltdown is already well under way.” Perhaps, she says, “our world was just one in a long line of worlds that dissolve and disappear,” and there’s simply nothing one can do about it. “It’s no wonder one feels compelled to follow in the Romans’ footsteps,” she reflects. “One wants to know what led them to their downfall.” Rome seems to illuminate something of their condition, insofar as its remnants and ruins had withstood the ravages of time, had borne witness to the rise and fall of subsequent polities that also thought themselves immortal. “We have come to a standstill in a time that is starting to crumble. Europe in free fall. The final days of the West.” Tara diagnoses, almost in passing, the condition of Europe, only to return immediately to her fascination with relics and discarded objects, the “wreckage from the maelstrom of history.” Her preoccupation with Rome misdirects us from the more urgent question at hand. It is a red herring, diverting attention away from the real crisis of the world of the book.

Rome’s capacity to illuminate and obfuscate the forces of European history is not new. Indeed, this was very much Karl Marx’s preoccupation when he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in 1852. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx describes how the French revolution of 1789 and Napoleon’s coup d’etat a decade later sought in the European past a repertoire of Roman “names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” Rome came to serve, first as republic and then as empire, as tropological obfuscations of the contemporary political landscape. Reenactments of both the revolution and the coup were staged “in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases,” as a means of imputing heroism and valor into a bourgeois society that was now sorely lacking in such qualities. The tropological function of Rome, then, for both the bourgeois revolution and the Napoleonic empire, was to metonymize the glory of the past in service of occluding the historically-contingent and materially-specific class formations of the present.

Following in Rome’s footsteps is European tradition. Napoleon’s France; Mussolini’s Italy; Hitler’s Germany; the European Union technocrats who want to Make Europe Great Again—each and all spirit up the ghosts of Rome for their own ends. It is the recurrent fetish-object of European imperium, primordializing the European will to dominate. The banal contemporary finds new valor in the idea of Rome, using it to mask and thereby contain the present.

Though The Eighteenth Brumaire and On the Calculation of Volume both understand Rome to be a cipher for the present, there are more reasons to look to Marx here. It is not just that both are accounts of the eighteenth day of a month on the verge of winter. It is not just because Tara’s story, like Napoleon’s, begins in Paris and swells to fill much of the European continent. And it is not just because Tara and her companions seek “units of measurement, distinct time frames, precise terminology” for reckoning time, only to devise a provisional calendar built around ten-day weeks, precisely as the French Republican calendar did. The Eighteenth Brumaire is useful because it is where Marx attempts to theorize why it is that the forward march of history might seem to stand still, even to move backward. Why is it, as he famously wrote, that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce?” With this guiding concern, Marx tries to understand how the revolution of 1848 in France brought about the tyranny of Louis-Napoleon in 1851, and how this series of events mirrored the pendulum swing between the French revolution of 1789 and Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1799. What are the political-economic structures that make the dynamic forces of history appear to stand still at their most volatile tipping points? It is Marx’s attempt at a theory for historical inertia and historical action, and it is through The Eighteenth Brumaire that we can better understand the stasis that propels On the Calculation of Volume.

Like The Eighteenth Brumaire, On the Calculation of Volume takes as its object the practices and contradictions of a protean class formation: the loopers. Where Marx attends to the way that certain classes—in particular, the lumpenproletariat—are conscripted against their own class interests, Balle gives us a group of loopers with no choice but to “devour the world” that sustains them. Her characters expend finite resources like food, consuming what is available to all those for whom time has not been interrupted. This refrain of resource exhaustion is a common one across the books; a gesture towards an incipient class antagonism whose drama, as yet, remains off-stage.

Class, as Marx argued, is the locomotive of history. It specifies a relation to a mode of production—capitalism—and imputes normative social and cultural logics to the unequal distribution of wealth that results. “Insofar as millions of families,” Marx writes in the Eighteenth Brumaire, “live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class.” Although Tara and the loopers do not (yet) number in the millions, their mode of life, their interests, and increasingly their culture, diverge from those who remain in the flow of time.

But what are the constitutive characteristics of loopers as a class? The question itself, raised as a sidebar in one of the loopers’ extensive debates in the Bremen house, is never quite settled. Tara speculates that everyone in the world experienced the same rupture in time, but it was only them, this “class of fools” who got stuck. Those who lacked what another character calls the “return competencies” that would have brought them back into the fold of progressive time—“the chumps who stopped in our tracks.” The others, therefore, must have managed to make their way back through that rupture.

But Henry Dale sees things differently. “Almost all of us belong to the Western middle class,” he observes, “of fairly ordinary European stock.” If there is a foolishness to the loopers it is less a question of aptitude than it is of structure: a socially produced and economically feasible directionlessness. Those who become loopers seem to be people who have “taken detours and side streets through life… people with loose-fitting identities and unsettled lives,” people without clear vocation or profession, people whose conscription into the labor market is relatively inconsistent, and people able to depend upon the wages of social democracy to make do. Reflecting on the professional and class backgrounds they had, one character named Lenk notes:

We have no chimney sweeps or stockbrokers… No homeless people, retired housewives, or refugees arriving by boat. We have no countesses, no old men playing pétanque beneath plane trees. No industrial fishermen or pet shop owners or animal feed producers. Where are the athletes: soccer players and elite gymnasts? We have neither captains nor train conductors, we’re missing trash collectors, and seamstresses.

The loopers seem to constitute a vanishing middle class, neither rich nor poor, neither young nor old. They are a class of people whose labor is viable and available and who are nonetheless underemployed—or at least underproductive in the capitalist market. It is the specific character of postwar European social democracy that allows for this: These are people whose labor was already, even before they became trapped in the eighteenth of November, largely superfluous to the labor market. Tara dealt antique books; Henry was a sociologist. The contributions of these loopers to the reproduction of capital are, as the case increasingly is for Europe, ultimately marginal. It was thus a short path to the time-loop of the eighteenth of November. Out of a labor market insulated by social democracy and into a sequestered form of what the Marxist historian Michael Denning calls “wageless life.”

Historically speaking, wageless life has characterized the lumpenproletariat, the colonized, and the dispossessed: classes of people who live in the peripheries of formal labor markets or on the frontiers of capitalist subsumption. Wageless life is, Denning argues, not a problem in need of a fix through the capitalist mode of production, but a clear byproduct of its productive forces. There is no capitalism, in other words, without the reserve army of labor from which capital can conscript at any time, but which it is always structurally able to expend as waste. “It is capitalist accumulation itself,” Marx writes in Capital Volume I, “that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.”

Surplus populations are dangerous, often destructive, precisely because of their idleness. For Marx, they are “social scum,” a class of idle people who are inherently and preternaturally reactionary. In Eighteenth Brumaire, the lumpenproletariat were easily conscripted, in Marx’s reading, as irregular armies for the Bonapartist coup. Later revolutionary thought attempts to redeem the lumpenproletariat—Fanon refers to them as the “urban spearhead” of anticolonial struggle—but in both cases, the lumpenproletariat is a sociopolitically volatile class formation, dangerous precisely because of its superfluity to the given order.

The solution to this problem of surplus labor and superfluous populations has varied across time. In Europe, the pioneers of social democracy in the twentieth century attempted to resolve the problem of wageless life through forms of social insurance: unemployment benefits, welfare programs, and social security, in an attempt to prevent surplus labor from falling into the informal market. In the twenty-first century, universal basic income has likewise emerged as a liberal stopgap intended to ameliorate the deepening inequalities of capitalism without addressing the class antagonism that is their root cause.

The crisis of superfluity also reached a peak in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, precisely at the same time that Marx was diagnosing the contradictions of capital. As industry swept the continent, Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Europe reached a crisis of capital overaccumulation, in which “superfluous money… could no longer find productive investment within the national borders.” The explosion of the industrial economy likewise produced an entire underclass of “human debris,” rendered “as superfluous to the community as the owners of superfluous wealth.” It was not just that the labor of these increasingly-redundant populations was wasted; it was also that they posed a growing danger to the social order of Europe. Idle capital endangers the necessary velocity of production that sustains capital’s inexorable pursuit of endless growth.

These twinned crises, of superfluous money and superfluous labor, found their resolution in the then-novel project of imperialism. “A permanent remedy,” Arendt writes, “for a permanent evil.” The superfluous wealth that sat idle in Europe could be exported abroad to drastically expand capital’s productive capacities. But the particular ingenuity of European imperialism was what it did with its growing problem of “superfluous men” whose idleness made them a “menace to society.” It bribed them with “crumbs from the imperialist table,” a speculative share in the riches of the diamond fields and the gold mines. But this share also afforded them an unprecedented mode of upward class mobility. By virtue of their whiteness, they would effectively rule over the racialized underclasses whose labor would extract wealth from the earth. In so doing, Europe’s “human debris” were not just excised from the imperial core; they were also made newly productive in the globalizing scheme of capital accumulation.

This alliance between “the much-too-rich and the much-too-poor” was the linchpin between imperialism and capitalism. For the superfluous men that Europe sent to the colonies were no longer merely the “inevitable residue” of the capitalist system; they became its very emissaries. In the colonies, these superfluous men conscripted natives as slave labor to toil in their stead, developing a “contempt for work” entirely contingent upon the drudgery of the racialized underclasses. Through this form of “lazy domination,” these superfluous people came to imagine themselves—like the Boers of South Africa did—as master races, as “chosen people.” The colonies thus afforded them “a world of infinite possibilities… for the full realization of their own phantom-like existence.” But these possibilities came at the cost of a total expulsion from European society. For life in the lawless colonies made them even more dangerous than before; too dangerous, in fact, to ever allow them “to return to their homelands.” In a remarkable passage from Origins of Totalitarianism we find the following description of this almost complete alienation, this collective social death:

They had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it… they were not enterprising beyond the permitted limits of civilization but simply victims without use or function…. [The] best of the superfluous men or of those who were threatened with superfluity established a kind of countersociety through which men could find their way back into a human world of fellowship and purpose. They were nothing of their own making, they were like living symbols of what had happened to them, living abstractions and witnesses of the absurdity of human institutions.

Book IV of On the Calculation of Volume is nothing if not the chronicle of just such an incipient countersociety coming to life—where else—in the ground zero of German colonialism. Having been “spat out” by society, the loopers find themselves living a “phantom-like existence.” They are nearly ghosts, haunting those who remain in progressive time. But this temporal death has thrust them into a “world of infinite possibilities” enabled by the complete abolition of waged life. Though stranded in the eighteenth of November, Tara and the others have built a “countersociety” that lives freely on the accumulated labor of every day that came before. This countersociety, like the one Arendt describes in colonial Africa, is a “paradise of parasites.” And it is certainly a paradise: The loopers, in being expelled from time, have been liberated from the labor-time of capital. “Welcome to the leisure class,” Henry quips.

Arendt warns that the profligacy and decadence of colonial life turns the exiles into “the coming type of murderer.” In the case of high imperialism, the colonists’ emergent sense of supremacy foreshadowed the return of these same colonial logics to Europe, bringing about the rise of Nazism and totalitarianism. And we know that the loopers can kill without consequence, since one of them in Book IV accidentally runs over a cyclist whose life is not restored the following day. “We are fragile creatures,” Tara writes of this revelation, “who bring death and destruction.”

Complete and infinite dominion over the world’s resources, the ability to kill with impunity, “ejecting people from time entirely”: the loopers embody the very excesses of European imperial power. What, then, would it mean for them to re-enter the flow of linear time, to forego their freedom from waged labor and to relinquish their “lazy domination” of the world? So far, the loopers’ “fellowship and purpose” has been focused principally towards “find[ing] their way back into a human world.” To return, as it were, to the forward march of time. But in Book IV, which spans the five to ten years after the beginning of the time-loop, the possibility of return has grown more improbable, while the comforts of wageless life have only grown more irresistible. Some of the loopers have consigned themselves to not only living and dying in the eighteenth of November, but to reproducing the distinct “mode of life” of their class position. Some begin to experiment with growing fruits and vegetables; others with sewing clothes or repairing furniture, preparing themselves for the indefinite future in the eighteenth. Two of them, Sonia and Peter, even hope to have a baby, although the fetus mysteriously vanishes from Sonia’s body in the closing chapters of Book IV. Gradually, it seems, the loopers have embraced their position as the leisure class, seeking new means and possibilities for sustaining their paradisiacal life in this newfound periphery.

As it was in earlier moments of capitalist crisis, the expulsion of superfluous people from productive life does not resolve the contradiction, but merely holds it in abeyance. By virtue of their exhaustion of the world’s resources, the loopers are fundamentally in hostile opposition to all those who exist in linear time, and their infinite wealth affords them total control over the finite foodstuffs of the world. Very early on in her saga, Tara realizes with horror that what she consumes over the course of a day is not replenished when the day resets itself. “I have become a ravening monster, a monster in a finite world. A swarm of locusts,” Tara writes in Book I, before less than a year has passed in the time-loop. “How long can my little world endure me?”

The greater the number of loopers, the greater this contradiction grows. Tara and the others find themselves dumpster-diving, even traveling to different cities, to be able to feed themselves as foodstuffs dwindle. They try to leave as little of a mark on the resources of the world by “eat[ing] misunderstandings and wrong orders… overproduction and small blunders.” But by the end of Book IV, they are traveling farther and farther afield to acquire greater and greater amounts of food. They find themselves tapping into their strategic reserves or eating smaller meals in order to sustain themselves. “We are depleting our surroundings,” she says in Book IV, more than nine years since the time-loop began, “and many are talking about leaving.” Those who remain in the flow of progressive time, meanwhile, wake up every morning to a world with fewer and fewer resources: grocery stores with emptier shelves, restaurants who don’t have the supplies to make the food on their menus, bars where they can no longer “enjoy their favorite drinks,” a world quietly being pillaged by a phantom class of timestuck people. As their numbers grow, how long can the world endure them?

And as it is in the eighteenth of November, the crisis in Europe is growing. It is by now a truism to note that social democracy in contemporary Europe—or what remains of it, at least—was built with the plunder Europe accumulated from the world it colonized. But this social democracy was always destined for crisis. It emerged as a means, Marx writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire, “not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony.” In this way, social democracy carries within itself the forces of capital that are now unmaking it.

This crisis of social democracy has been in the offing since at least the end of the second World War, and certainly since the end of the Cold War. As its contradictions deepen, the crisis of social democracy has become an engine for the consolidation of walls and border technologies, new modes of nationalist isolationism, mechanisms of containment, and the resurgence of fascism across the continent. Death rattles resounding from the body of a dying empire. As all have before, Europe reached its spatial limits, overproofed its container, and now finds itself without the plunder it needs to keep growing—without its long historical supremacy in the capitalist world system. The requisite commerce that kept Europe’s economy afloat for most of what we call capitalist modernity has found other, more productive avenues for capital accumulation. The European Union has issued gray papers lamenting the decline of European productive capacities and Europe’s role in a globalized market. The growing evidence of Europe’s superfluity speaks to a problem that has no solution. Europe now sustains itself on the dwindling reserves of that colonial plunder, stuck in the time of its former glory while time, everywhere else, seems to march ceaselessly onward.

This is a crisis that lingers at the edges of On the Calculation of Volume. It appears in flickers, as when Lenk notes the absence of “refugees arriving by boat” among the loopers. It appears, too, in the growing class antagonism of the loopers to the rest of the world. Tara and the others could not be stuck in time if Europe writ large did not also now find itself stuck in time, unable to attain the former glory of its colonial prowess, unable to keep itself at the center of the global capitalist market it originated, a market that has since moved onto greener pastures, emerging frontiers of capital growth in places that once constituted the dependent, colonial periphery of the global economy. In this state of permanent postcolonial emergency, Europe longs for all the affordances of an empire that will never return.

If this impasse is the condition of possibility for On the Calculation of Volume, what, then, might it indicate for the fate of the loopers? At the end of Book IV, Tara receives an unexpected phone call from her husband: a shocking turn of events, given that nothing unexpected is supposed to happen in this endlessly repeating day. “He knew something was wrong,” Tara writes, “with time.” The call leaves Tara “shaking” and “dazed” as she tries to explain to herself how this could have happened, how her husband could have fallen, like her and the other loopers, out of the regular course of time. The novel ends with Tara leaving Bremen, uncertain if she will ever return, and taking the train back to Clairon-sous-Bois to speak to Thomas. She wonders whether she will be able to abandon her friends in the eighteenth, even as she is “uneasy” about reuniting with Thomas after so long apart. We do not yet know if Thomas’ “stumble” has entered him into the looper class, nor if it might instead signal an opening for her to escape the eighteenth of November. What awaits her either way, for the first time in a long time, is an uncertain future. And with it, the question of whether such a future is even salvageable.

But such a question is beside the point. The loopers are constituted as a class precisely by their lack of—or perhaps freedom from—a future. Why would they leave their comfortable dominion in the “leisure class” and return to the drudgery of capitalist labor-time? With three more installments of the novel still to come, it is probably safe to say that the loopers will remain, with or without Tara, a stubborn and “parasitic” class formation. Their end will come when they will it, after they necessarily continue to “devour the world” with all the gusto of empire until, finally, they are forced to devour themselves.

“Who are we?” Tara wonders in the penultimate paragraph of Book IV. She sits on a train leaving Bremen, surrounded by passengers bound in many directions, bound indeed for the nineteenth of November, for the future. “Do we have something in common?” Tara surveys the train car, watches the conductor checking tickets, watches all the people aboard the train get counted, like cargo, as “units in the same set.” It gives her solace, being one among them, even if it is only temporary. “I do not know,” she finally concludes, staring through the window at the darkening world outside, “but we’re moving on.” She does not know, or perhaps cannot name, what all of them have in common: there will be no way back, only an ending. In the meantime, the world is moving on.