LP+Week+11

When I first read this article, I thought of cryonics (mostly because I had seen an interesting talk on cryonics at AAA), but I decided that I was finding that symbol a bit too morbid to pursue - arguably so - I know - but I just wasn't in the mood. Instead I started thinking about time capsules - what I understood to be collections of artifacts [often] buried beneath the Earth to be dug up and opened sometime in the future. Wikipedia defines them as follows:

A time capsule is a historic [|cache] of goods or information, usually intended as a method of [|communication] with future people and to help future [|archaeologists], [|anthropologists] or [|historians]. Time capsules are sometimes created and buried during celebrations such as a [|World's Fair], a [|cornerstone] laying for a building or at other events. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_capsule)



Intentional time capsules assume the existence of a distinct future date; they also assume the existence of individuals (or maybe robots?) capable of interpreting the contents at this distinct future date. They attempt to transcend time by removing their objects from presence between the burial date and the Un-Earthing date, saving them for a moment when they may become significant. They have the power of both signifying to individuals in the future what individuals in the past considered to be important, and providing a space for reinterpretation of the things considered to be significant in the past.

William Jarvis, author of //Time Capsules: A Cultural History,// has critiqued these capacities, positing that much of what people decide to put in time capsules is useless junk to the people that Un-Earth them, failing to capture answers to the questions that historians/anthropologists are asking. My position is that it is a truly violent thought to discount the capacity to learn from what individuals in the past considered to be important enough to save for the future.

There's some sort of fun thought process in linking up the 'Un-Earthing' or physical digging of artifacts to the anthropocene, but I haven't fully disentangled that one yet.


 * Quotes from the Text **

The term ‘anthropocene’ is curious, at once leaden and foppish. It carries a trace of the obscene. Arriving from an ejaculation at a geologist’s forum by Paul Crutzman, it seems the epitome of anthropomorphism itself—irradiating with a secret pride invoking comments on our god-like powers and ownership of ‘the planet.’ (240)

Extinction: 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). (241)

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. (241)

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? (243)

Having artefacted the auto-immune vessel and the ‘persona ’for circulation — adhered to and literalised by Derrideans — he withdrew, announced that he may have no heirs and certainly no contemporary readers, and then spoke against the ‘proper name’ he had crafted. Since the reading of Derrida has not yet ‘begun,’ he notes ‘sincerely,’ it awaits a reader still — again, perhaps generations hence (‘later on,’ he says). One can imagine such a reader mystified by how the après-Derrida, instead of opening ‘deconstruction’ to 21st century logics, curled back to endless exegeses, reading Derrida according to ‘Derrida.’ This betrayal by ‘fidelity’ would be programmatic. The perspective of the anthropocene provides the violence necessary for a selective redefinition. (244)

It is to note that the anthropocene, a post-binarised horizon that dislocates by fiat the ‘anthropo-narcisst’ parenthesis (say, 5000 years of writing), overleaps these strategies, sifts them from within this ‘war’ with himself (and itself)—which it apparently seems to many taboo to inspect. One cannot but be struck that being ‘close’ to Derrida the individual seems today less a mark of initiation, of genealogical pedigree or translatorial identification, than a guarantee of a submissive limit which J.D. discounted in advance (really, ‘Derrideans’?). (244)

Can the DNA of a ‘deconstruction’ early on claiming the most radical of auto-critiques — which one recalls with a certain melancholy — recur if it emerges at the price of various literalisations, memorialisations, pieties, and imaginaries of ‘Jacques,’ or need one wait, as he suggests, for another generation, assuming it has its chance? (245)

In each case, there is something too close perhaps, impinging on (or interfering with) the ‘deconstruction’ he chose to craft in order to keep a ‘future’ open, or survive. Rather, what Derrida names ‘archive’ leads him to turn back from crossing this rim repeatedly, and does so as if out of pedagogic imperatives — the perceived rhetorical limits of a readership. (245)

It wasn’t that Derrida was too ‘untimely’ but that he constrained his address to the too contemporary in a certain way—performing ‘Derrida’ on request or when urged to respond to academic trends or politics. And he could not stop going back, one sees it again and again, to correct his interlocutors, his ‘Derrideans’ and his breakaways (Nancy) — all along, or in part, battling against a ‘bad reading’ of him. (246)

Rather than represent some blindspot or a repression — or some lack as if to be supplemented today — one might see here the riddle of a translation-effect held at bay and to be later released, that of being read by and from the anthropocene. That would be the ‘later on’ toward which J.D. points in saying ‘one has not yet begun to read me.’ This other reading to come is at war with the first, the auto- immune capsule of ‘late Derrida,’ presented as warm milk to the kids, withdrawing the tequila shots of the (not yet) ‘early’ Derrida—not trusting that it was ‘time’ for that, or whether that path would not lead to a pre-emption of the brand (the example of ‘de Man’). (247)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px;">These aporia pile up exponentially: cinema will be all about trace, yet he retains no memory trace of it; it will have included all techniques of deconstructive writing, and subsumed psychoanalysis, yet it is an ‘art of distraction’; it is the purest instance of spectrality, yet is not to be written on. In effect: ‘Cinema is the absolute simulacrum of absolute survival.’ (247-248)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px;">On the one hand, there would be a ‘deconstruction’ busy tending to the proper name, obsessively, dutifully, yielding a soft Derrideanism without deconstruction. DeconstructionTM. And on the other hand, there is what might be called a deconstruction without ‘deconstruction’ in so far as the anthropocene alleviates and rereads the former—selectively and aggressively. (250)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px;">Enter, the ‘anthropocene’. This term or non-name arrives in a tangle of forces without any appeal to sovereignty. It has turned the current geo- political and geo-economic climate into a paralysed network of zombie systems (in denial) angling for momentary advantage before the next reset hit: Euro-collapse? Methane bubbles from the tundra? Oceanic acidification? — the menu is suddenly endless. (251)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px;">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. (252)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px;">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. (254)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px;">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)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px;">Of course, there is an irony here: 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 recognise. Instead, Derrida gave us specters. (255)