Week+14

- E xtinction: since the ‘anthropocene’ can only be named from without or after, as if by another looking back — hence Hollywood’s routine evocations of aliens’ arriving after the fact (as in Spielberg’s A.I.). Some eye, or some thing, must witness and confirm this arc, this mark in geomorphic and biomorphic time. It, the term, implies a species consciousness marking its disappearance. It does so with rampant metaphors of inscribing and marking (scarification, stratigraphics, ‘human imprint,’ carbon footprints, and so on). The Derridean ‘archive’ defined most often as human script melts backward into vaster biosemiotic mutations in which it is also framed, and embedded. But the term anthropocene is a placeholder, non-semantic, a non-word and non-name that does not adhere to any binarised sense and cannot be deconstructed. It cannot not evoke all the metonymic depredations involved in irreversible global warming, resource wars, and even exponentially leveraged hyperfinance and megadebt, not to mention projections of ‘population culling’ to come. Even its ‘time’ is plastic, since it above all marks the time at which it emerges as a speech act (or marketable brainfart, gratis Crutzman). (241)  -

That these appear absent today reflects the anaesthetised state of academic culture in the //late anthropocene//—call it a sort of pre- //ptsd// — when the un timely has become unexceptional and numbingly rote. That culture’s perpetual relapse into pre-critical and crypto- humanist positions para llels that of geo-political and economic systems more broadly, to say nothing of the unwinding of university programs. Indeed, it mimes th e global financial elites’ consolidation of a cognitive crony-capitalist kick-the-can-down-the-road backloop (denial) in which, mathematically, virtual generations are despoiled or cut off (hyper-debt, resource depletion, mass extinctions). Intra- generational war seems deferred in much of the West only by laced foods, ipods, and a plenitude of pharmaceuticals.

Might a //mutant// or properly anarch(ival)ist deconstructive meme find its opportunities and relevance endless in this ‘environs’? It need only, for the moment, ‘sacrifice’ the proper name, the brand, the pretense that more exegesis on //Derrida// is, or was ever, ‘deconstruction’—since without the wager (no one takes ‘risks,’ says McQuillan again), without the //contretemps//, and without the engagement of contemporary mutations, it would hardly conform to Derrida’s //practice//. Is //survival// really //that// necessary to assert (I mean, //today//?)—and, once it is asserted, does that not guarantee 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 read, now, from the //cinanthropocene//. (253)

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Trance wars. Does it matter that the current non-present ‘present’ is not one of your run of the mill times out of joint, since it subsists beyond known tipping points in a posture of denial that alters life forms negatively going forward aeons? It accomplishes this unusual grammar — a future-past- unconditional—not by some deed but by altering nothing in the inertia of business as usual (no need to consider the nuclear and bio- weapons factors). It is the event. Does it matter that said ‘present’ speaks from within a curious parenthesis of peak food, peak oil, peak water, peak credit, or peak humans — in a posture allied to a cinematic trance? (252)

- It is also clear that if the ‘anthropocene’ implies ecocide, and the current global regimes accelerate or seal this process, and if these same do so through a totalisation of mediacratic trances, then there is—even for the most peace-seeking among us, like myself — an implicit war within the global disposition. Its stakes might be any ‘futures’ at all (a truly misused and misbegotten term) or ‘survival’ on a para-species level — but that, in itself, also should not be the metric. (254) - If you meet derrida on the road, kill him!