The+Twelfth+Week

Occupy Deconstruction

It seems the epitome of //anthropomorphism// itself – irradiating with a secret pride invoking comments on our god-like powers and ownership of ‘the planet.’

Some eye, or some thing, must witness and confirm this arc, this mark in geomorphic and biomorphic time.

Deconstruction in, or ‘and,’ the //anthropocene//?

The ‘untimely’ positions itself as routine, ineradicable, banal.

Instead of trying to play against the idea of the ‘linguistic’ by moving outward, the concepts that might be at war with the ‘ethical’ Derrida would be generalized, //intensified//, rerouted nanographically.
 * What does he mean by “nanographically”?

//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 referred as a ‘mutation’ to come?

It is interesting, then, that if one allows the //anthropocene// to read ‘deconstruction’ – that is, to shatter the mythos of a Derridean //persona// the exegisis of whom delivers a legacy intact – it would be possible to select what is relevant, rather, to //it//. It reads back.

The perspective of the //anthropocene// provides the violence necessary for a selective redefinition.

The ‘bad’ reading of those opposed to the ‘bad reading,’ presumably in his name.

Curling into imaginary bearers of the proper name, interested more in fetishising networks or re-iterations involved with academic capital and the pretense to channel a certain persona, banding into policing orthodoxies, retreating into the role of parochial conservators, and so on.

But if Derrida //occludes// ‘climate change’ from his writing – would not address or write to it – it might not be accidental. Addressing //it// would have stripped a rhetorical backdrop of his writings, which relied on a stated commitment to a Euro-centric //responsibility// (as if) to the future – an inhibiting Euro-centrism.

//Cinema// is not, as Derrida opines, the fantasy-technics of writing all along but involves a logic that is pre-letteral and pre-hieroglyphic, back to the cave paintings, in effect programming the sensorium.

It would be disavowed in a similar manner to how ‘climate change’ would, or a certain ineluctable and non-binarised ‘materiality’, or a machinal trace that implacably drives (and displaces) ‘psychism’.

The more it would endeavour to extend and anchor Derrida’s ‘legacy’, the more it has executed his prediction of //disappearance//.

What will deconstruction be prepared to sacrifice in order to survive?

Like Cortez’s men fleeing the //noche triste// of Montezuma, drowning because they would not abandon their gold, the only thing earnest //Derrideans// need give up is what they could not use or deploy in the current conditions in any case.

What is clear is that ‘deconstruction’ today deconstructs nothing, curls back on itself fetishistically, and relies on a certain misreading of the //persona// (‘Jacques’) for instructions that were missing.

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Nothing would have guaranteed J.D.’s survival and relevance to the 21st century more than – contrary to his expectations or strategy – having addressed the very zones that he occluded: //ecocide//, the mnemonic machine, cinema, an other materiality than humanists or phenomenology would recognize.

The following is inspired by a number of converging factors, rather than a direct response to the reading this week. It was inspired via thinking about the Third Wave of Science Studies by Collins and Evans and their depoliticization of scientific expertise (or perhaps more accurately separation of consideration of politics within the “core group” for any given science, and their privileging of certain politics over others in “science as culture” under the guise of no politics). However, this is more the key that started the engine. The real work comes from a way of thinking about speaking/writing that emerged from this course (and likely others in addition to other experiences with language I have had). My most explicit thinking came from readings, discussions, and my reactions and thoughts about my classmates’ portfolio entries. Like many other pieces from my portfolio, it is largely stream of consciousness. An additional comment on this note: I appreciate that this class gives me the chance to air this sort of writing. Writing for this class alleviates stress rather than causes it when the necessity to conform to a particular style is not there. It gives me a chance to hash out the sorts of thoughts in writing that I normally only get to do verbally or don’t get to do at all. Thanks. My statements are political. I have politics. This class has politics. Academia has politics. I, as an academic, have politics. Even the move to deny the politics in any of these and other arenas is a political move. Yet, despite this, rather than airing our partisanship (politics) in our writing and our speech, we attempt to de-politicize it. However, because this depoliticization itself is political, it only ever serves to further certain partisan goals but with the dishonesty of claiming that one’s politics are not political – in other words unbiased, objective, or “True.” Even more insidious, this politically depoliticized speech offers the speaker (or writer) a perceived political (or dare I say moral) high ground from which to simultaneously oppress the speech of others while making one’s self out to be victimized by barbaric acts of political (emotional, reactionary, etc.) speech. This is the mode of science, but also of those that speak in the scientific discourse. This includes those who appeal to science as a source of politically depoliticized truth, but also others. Those who take the journalistic approach of presenting “both sides” of an issue, as if there are ever only two sides or as if any or all sides are ever equal, perform the scientific discourse. Those who counter one set of politics with another and demand (through assumption) that both sets be taken as equally legitimate (but really equally illegitimate as this move is often meant to demonstrate the perceived fallaciousness of political transparency) are also performing the scientific discourse. The scientific discourse is a discourse of legitimacy through power. To speak through this discourse is to speak to power through knowledge (power/knowledge?). But it is also a discourse of oppression. The power of this discourse operates off of the constant policing of discursive boundaries. The power/knowledge of the scientific discourse **requires** the marginalization of other discourses that would speak through knowledge. This is why, when one speaks a performance of the scientific discourse, they can only ever be the oppressor, and never the oppressed (although perhaps they can be neither). Speaking a performance of the scientific discourse means that you do so at the expense of the agency of all other speakers of other discourses and so, as a result, even when (discursively) attacked by these other speakers, no matter how many there are and no matter how fervent their attacks, one within the scientific discourse can never be oppressed by other discourses, because the scientific discourse is dominant.