schaffer_anthropocene



"In its way, the planetary collision mimes the cinematic arrival of the term //anthropocene//--or what I will call one of its two antipodal poles of non-sense." (240)

"Think of the profits and power to be leveraged from the //geo-engineering to come//: 'climate change' is, it may turn out, profitable for what can no longer quite be called capital or the non-human corporate entity." (240)

"But the term //anthropocene// is a placeholder, non-semantic, a non-word and non-name that does not adhere to any binarized sense and cannot be deconstructed. It cannot evoke all the metonymic depredations involved in irreversible global warming, resource wars, and even exponentially leveraged hyperfinance and megadeby, not to mention projections of 'population culling' to come." (241)

"As in his ‘last’ interview, when he ￼￼￼￼projects not only the disappearance of his work after his death (despite a well-oiled network of archivists) but that no one in the present is, as of yet, his reader (‘one has not yet begun to read me’). That would be for ‘later on’—perhaps generations, after the current phase of remembered contact and consignation efforts are gone. Does this 'later on' not point inevitably to the anthropocene, sometimes referenced as a 'mutation' to come [anthropocene seems to be more properly an era in Derridean time rather than geological]." (242-3)

"If what can be called //cinematisation// drives the mnemonic and perceptual orders, and does so by way of backloops precessionary to any phenomenological trope, Derrida's refusal to write on it is not due to his self-exemption from a 'culture of cinema,' and it is not that it is 'diversionary' (no more, say, than the detour of writing a deconstructive 'ethics "of the other"'). [transcriber's note--this may be one of the longest conceivable punctuation cluster in the english language] Its relentless backloop precedes and swamps residual tropes of invention, 'open' futures, and 'trace' in a fore-closing fashion: it compromises a certain rhetoric of the //to come// as an inappropriate short cut. Which is not quite to say that cinema is to //khora//, it seems, as writing is to //archive//." (248)

"//Cinema// is not, as Derrida opines, the fantasy-technics of writing all along but involves a logic that is pre-letteral and pre-heiroglyphic, back to the cave paintings, in effect programming the sensorium. It is, in this sense, //khora//-like and at the same time a 'popular' cultural power. The space without 'prohibition' registers what Joana Maso has termed a memory outside of memory, a sheer, machinal trace exponentially accelerated. As Bernard Steigler observes in this context, cinema 'is' //life//--which is to say, cinnamon. One can read this today, perhaps, because the 'era' of cinema [pardon?] is technically dead, over and accomplished, like a species getting to have a geological era named after it [and whence the author's preoccupation with epochs and their naming?]." (248-9)

"Given the hyper-accelerations of 20th century techno-media and the coincidence of any era of 'cinema' [here, i think, the scare quotes are a misreading of a muscle spasm on the part of some belabored amanuensis] with that of //exponential// growth, techno-genocide, hyper-consumption and global financialization--that is to say, the totalising mediacratic trances of today--we could instead trope this as the //cinemanthropocene// or //cinanthropocene// era, the epoch without 'epochality'." (249)

HERE I REMEMBER THE WORD I'VE BEEN SEARCHING FOR


 * CHRYSOSTOMIC**

not in the sense of mellifluousness, though there's an undeniable tonality to his writing...in the literal greek roots sense of a golden mouth, a heavy, expensive word-hole. his words weighed down with a garish opulence, a sort of painful filigree that gets caught in the reader's corneas, like an awful baroque armchair that costs a fortune and simply can't be sat on.

as i read Cohen, i know, i know, i know there is something else to be gleaned in here, some sort of useful tidbit of knowledge among these ten dollar words, awkward neologisms (//cinanothropocene,// or //cinemanthropocene!//), single quotes inside double quotes inside single quotes again, italics...

italics...

but the texture of his prose keeps trapping it somewhere on that trip from cornea to thalamus to left temporal lobe and through the variety of forebrain, motor cortical, tongue, tooth, lip, and yes--//visceral//--activations that are involved in intaking a text. choking somewhere between eyelash and fingertip, the mouthfeel of Cohen's writing emerged as an object of analysis.

i'm reminded of a facebook conversation i had this summer.

 =====  [|Guy Schaffer]   ===== [|a while ago]

oh for heaven's sake, judith, there's no need to use theory to explain why you're a bad writer.   [|Like] · · [|Promote]   · [|Share]


 * [|Gianna D'Emilio], [|Allie O'Hora] , [|Jordan O'Jordan] and [|others] like this.
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[|Guy Schaffer] btw this is the afternoon where i livetweet gender trouble. [|recently] · [|Like] ·
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[|Jessica Hall] Give her a break, it's hard undoing yourself [|recently] · [|Unlike] ·

while i prefer either a straightforward, open style that offers treasures on the re-read (à la hooks) or a bubbly, wide-eyed style that whisks you along (à la haraway) butler bugged the crap out of me with her ill-formed sentences and lack of flow. i've got high standards, what can i say? but jessica hall, in her infinite wisdom, reminded me that sometimes you need to write badly in order to think good-ly.

so is this what cohen is doing? what sort of horrible mind-game is he playing with this prose? unless he generally writes with an open thesaurus stapled to each hand and a macro set to italicize randomly, what on earth is it that makes him need to write so ** thickly **?

"that is, as Derrida notes, [cinema] implies in advance all deconstructive techniques." (249)

"Would one need instead to risk calculi and algorithms that are more properly //khoratic// in order to reconfigure a piece of deconstructive //DNA//--without much genetic engineering--toward the non-relations of carbon, of 'oil' [augh] (the circuit of auto-cannibalization of life in decomposition, black, toxic to touch, stored 'sunlight,' suffused into suicidal restoratinos of this underworld into the biosphere, as runaway global heating)?" (252-3)

"Might an italicized mutant or properly anarch parenthesis ival end paranthesis ist deconstructive meme find its opportunities and relevance endless in this scarequotes environs? It need only, for the moment, scarequote sacrifice the proper name, the brand, the pretense that more exegesis on italicized Derrida is, or was ever 'deconstruction'--since without the wager (no one takes 'risks,' says McQuillan again), without the contretems, and without the engagement of contemporary mutations, it would hardly conform to Derrida's practice. Is italics survival really italics that necessary to assert (I mean, //today?//)--and, once it is asserted, does that not guaranteed ethical contaminations, calculation, simulation, that is, failure? One need only begin with an affirmation of extinction--and proceed to unriddle the aporia of a Western parenthesis [his parenthesis] read, now, from the //cinanthropocene//." (253)

"What is clear is that 'deconstruction' today deconstructs nothing, curls back on itself fetishistically, and relies on a certain misreading to the //persona// ('Jacques') for instructions that are missing. Its execution is even more suspect--hagiographic ameliorations, naturalizations." (254)