Critical Climate Change

Telemorphosis Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibil- ity of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re- alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the in- terface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomor- phic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo- political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. Telemorphosis Theory in the Era of Climate Change Volume 1 Edited by Tom Cohen OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor 2012 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2012 Freely available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.10539563.0001.001 Copyright © 2012 Ton Cohen and the respective authors This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 ISBN-10 1-60785-237-3 ISBN-13 978-1-60785-237-7 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at MPublishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which pro- vides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org Contents List of Figures 9 Acknowledgements 11 Introduction 13 Tom Cohen 1. Time 43 Robert Markley 2. Ecotechnics 65 J. Hillis Miller 3. Care 104 Bernard Stiegler 4. Unicity 121 Justin Read 5. Scale 148 Timothy Clark 6. Sexual Indifference 167 Claire Colebrook 7. Nonspecies Invasion 183 Jason Groves 8. Bioethics 203 Joanna Zylinska 9. Post-Trauma 226 Catherine Malabou 10. Ecologies of War 239 Mike Hill 11. Notes Toward a Post-Carbon Philosophy 270 Martin McQuillan 12. Health 293 Eduardo Cadava and Tom Cohen Notes on Contributors 309 List of Figures “Earth’s Shipping Lanes and Road Networks” Acknowledgements This volume was generated from a series of symposia sponsored by theIn - stitute on Critical Climate Change, at the University at Albany. Co-founded by myself and Henry Sussman, then of the University of Buffalo (initially IC3 was a cross-SUNY initiative), it was created to pose the question of how the 21st century horizons of accelerating “climate change” and eco- catastrophe alters critical languages inherited from 20th century agendas. It posed this question in what is increasingly apparent as the twighlight of the “humanities” in the public university, IC3 queried implicitly after the future of critical aims and pedagogy. Few of IC3’s events would have been possible without the energy and imaginative input of Mary Valentis. We are also especially grateful to Vice-President William Hedberg of the University at Albany for his interest and support, without which our ef- forts would not have been possible. I also thank Dean Elga Wulfert of the College of Arts and Sciences at Albany and Mike Hill, Chair of English, for their continued support during a period of institutional transitions. The broader project is indebted to the energetic collaboration of Profes- sor Wang Fengzhen, who helped to extend this conversation to our Chi- nese colleagues. Finally, I thank Jason Maxwell, whose superb editorial skills, care, and assistance in preparing the volume for press were key to its production. Introduction Murmurations—“Climate Change” and the Defacement of Theory Tom Cohen The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And we are trashing the natural world. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. The atmosphere can’t absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological. – Naomi Klein, “The fight against climate change is down to us—the 99%” [2011] Carbon pollution and over-use of Earth’s natural resources have become so critical that, on current trends, we will need a second planet to meet our needs by 2030, the WWF said on Wednesday. – Agence France-Presse, “Time to find a second Earth, WWF says” [2010] 1. Warnings regarding the planet earth’s imminent depletion of reserves or “life as we know it” arrive today more as routine tweets than events that might give us pause, particularly as the current wars over global “sover- eign debt” and economic “crises” swamp attention. The intensifying spec- 14 Tom Cohen ter of megadebt—at a time of “peak everything” (peak water, peak oil, peak humans)—dumped into a future despoiled of reserves and earning capacity has a specific relation to this white-out—the “economical” and “ecological” tandem shifts all attention to the first term (or first “eco”). In a post-global present consolidating what is routinely remarked as a neo-feudal order, the titanic shift of hyperwealth to the corporatist few (the so-called 1%) sets the stage for a shift to control societies anticipat- ing social disruption and the implications of “Occupy” style eruptions— concerning which the U.S. congress hastily passed new unconstitutional rules to apprehend citizens or take down websites. The Ponzi scheme logics of twenty-first century earthscapes portray an array of time-bub- bles, catastrophic deferrals, telecratic capture, and a voracious present that seems to practice a sort of tempophagy on itself corresponding with its structural premise of hyper-consumption and perpetual “growth. The supposed urgencies of threatened economic and monetary “collapse” oc- clude and defer any attention to the imperatives of the biosphere, but this apparent pause or deferral of attention covers over an irreversible mutation. A new phase of unsustainability appears in which a faux status quo ante appears to will to sustain itself as long as possible and at whatever cost; the event of the twenty-first century isthat there will be no event, that no crisis will disturb the expansion of consumption beyond all supposed lim- its or peaks. In such an environment other materialities emerge, reference systems default, and the legacies of anthropo-narcissm go into overdrive in mechanical ways. Supposedly advanced or post-theory theory is no ex- ception—claiming on the one hand ever more verdant comings together of redemptive communities, and discretely restoring many phenome- nological tropes that 20th century thought had displaced. This has been characterized as an unfolding eco-eco disaster—a complex at once economic and ecological.1 The logics of the doubleoikos appear, today, caught in a self-feeding default. The present volume, in diverse ways, reclaims a certain violence that has seemed occluded or anaesthetized (it is a “present,” after all, palpa- bly beyond “tipping points” yet shy of their fully arrived implications— hence the pop proliferation of “zombie” metaphors: zombie banks, zombie politics, zombie “theory”). It departs from a problem inherent in the “eco” as a metaphoric complex, that of the home (oikos), and the suicidal Introduction 15 fashion in which this supposed proper ground recuperates itself from a nonexistent position. The figure of an ecology that is ours and that must be saved precludes us from confronting the displacement and disposses- sion which conditions all production, including the production of home- lands. Memory regimes have insistently, silently and anonymously pro- longed and defended the construct of “homeland security” (both in its political sense, and in the epistemological sense of being secure in our modes of cognition), but these systems of security have in fact acceler- ated the vortices of ecocatastrophic imaginaries. If a double logic of eco-eco disaster overlaps with the epoch in deep time geologists now refer to as the “anthropocene,” what critical re-ori- entations, today, contest what has been characterized as a collective blind or psychotic

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