Misprision

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Misprision:  treasonous failure to report a crime

Silver maple, western New Jersey, November 1, 2014

This morning, courtesy of the unfailing source of the fascinating and obscure -synthetic_zero blog, I watched a lecture by Claire Colebrook.  A professor at Penn State, she is the author of Death of the Post-Human: Essays on Extinction, Volume I.  I haven’t read it yet, but considering the description, I certainly will, especially because it is available for free online:

“Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as ‘theory,’ and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath. There can be no redemptive post-human future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human – despite its normative intensity – can provide neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. Death of the PostHuman argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and seemingly post-human futures.”

Since she is also co-editor of the “Critical Climate Change” series, I seriously doubt she is a climate change denier, as the endeavor is presented as “…at the frontier of new developments in theoretical and practical thinking. The world is changing so rapidly and in so many interconnected ways that theory has only begun to make the innovative responses demanded. The two distinguished editors of this series are seeking manuscripts that will respond creatively to climate meltdowns, global political and economic meltdowns, and new teletechnologies, in their complex interrelations. The series is a bold and timely enterprise.”

And after all, the publisher’s webpage is illustrated with this Goya painting of Saturn devouring his son:

Therefor I interpret her remarks as setting climate change – and the geologic era of the Anthropocene – into the context of humanity’s ongoing barbarity and exploitation both of each other, and the natural world, as opposed to a singularly remarkable outcome – a perspective I completely endorse.  If you listen to the entire lecture (embedded at the end of this post) you will find that she places the deforestation and violence of Australian aborigines firmly in this global pattern of destruction.  Below I have transcribed some of the points she emphasized in her talk (removing some superfluities).

27 minutes in, she refers to “…Walter Benjamin’s claim that every document of civilization is a document of barbarism.  This is not just to say that string quartets are written and appreciated in the same world as mass slaughter – it’s not just they contingently happen to be together – rather that some violent subjection of humans, for the sake of generating surplus production and energy is required to release the time and space of the history of Enlightenment.  Philosophy, rights, the constitution of a private self with a definitive personhood, sexuality and fulfilling life trajectory are not merely contingently placed alongside planetary and human/human violence…so in our planet, with our material conditions, those two things have not just been contingently related but because of the material composition of our planet are ESSENTIALLY related.  We live on a  planet with limited resources….

39 minutes in:

“Here’s the conclusion.  The idea of a life, life that could develop to its utmost potentiality, or purity – that you could have something like pure life, pure thinking – without incurring debt or debts to itself is what drives technological industrial investment.  The more we develop clean technology – oh you know, we can have “clean” technologies, or you could have pure thinking…I hate to say it because I really like Naomi Klein [but] that climate change is going to end up, we’re going to end up with this utopia in which you have social justice and climate justice, ultimately it’s a win-win…this notion generates the delusional idea of a life without expense, loss or misprision.  It’s the notion of generating more in the final instance than one initially takes.  It’s the dream of a pure ecology.

45 minutes in:

We are thinking of the Anthropocene as exceptional, as a volatility or destabilization of nature that has been caused accidentally by us…a sort of “oops, we went too far”…But what we know about the state of exception…is that IF the normal can be suspended – oh my goodness, we’ve destroyed the planet – then this is because what was there as the exception was always there as a potential.  There was nothing proper about humans and their relation to ecology.  This is not exceptional.  This loss of nature, this exceptional volatility – oh my goodness, nature has become volatile – it’s uncontrollable!  That’s the way most humans have always lived…Humans have always been disturbed except for a very brief moment in their history where they felt that they weren’t.

Nature appears now to be changing on us, it’s refusing to be stable.  That is not a result of anthropogenic climate change, that’s what Nature is.  It’s the condition from which what we know is the Anthropocene manufactured as a stable Nature.  The Anthropocene manufactured a stable Nature.  Volatility is the way of the world, not something caused by humans.  What we now call climate change is the re-emergence of what made climate possible.  Climate – what we think of as climate – was manufactured from climate change.  Climate change was there in the beginning, climate stability is what was manufactured.  What we are seeing is the return of the repressed.

So the event of the Anthropocene is exceptional, but not by being extrinsic to what we have come to refer to as Nature or Humanity.  If now we are responding to planetary destruction with surprise and wondering how we might engineer a future that would not cost the Earth, then we’re just repeating the whole Anthropocene era, it’s hardly an event…almost a non-event…nothing happening here, move on.  It’s the continuation of man, as the being who believes that he can finally be different, and transform himself to the point where he makes no difference.  It’s the very dream of a certain pure ecology that has always defined man in his essence, which is to say man in his trajectory, that is ecologically bound up with violence and depletion.