Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols

Twilight of theTwilight of Anthropocene Idols Following on from Theory and the Disappearing Future, Cohen, Colebrook and Miller turn their attention to the eco-critical and environmental humanities’ newest and most fashionable of concepts, the Anthropocene. The question that has escaped focus, as ‘tipping points’ are acknowledged as passed, is how language, mnemo-tech- Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols nologies and the epistemology of tropes appear to guide the accelerating ecocide, and how that implies a mutation within reading itself—from the era of extinction events. Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook amd J. Hillis Miller There’s something uncanny about the very word Anthropocene. Perhaps it is in the way it seems to arrive too early and too late. It describes something that is still happening as if it had happened. Perhaps it is that it seems to implicate something about the ‘human’ but from a vantage point where the human would be over and done with, or never really existed in the first place. And so besides the crush of data there’s a problem of language to attend to in thinking where and when and who we are or could ever be or have been. Cohen, Colebrook and Miller do us the courtesy of taking the Anthropocene to be a name that marks both the state of the world and the state of language. They bring their consider- able collective resources to bear on this state of language, that we might better weave words that attend to the state of the world. McKenzie Wark, author of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene With breathtaking fearlessness, the authors expose the full extent of the Enlight- enment shell game: not only have ‘we’ never been modern, we’ve never even been human. This isthe bedtime story for the advancing night in which all tropes are black, and the tropological grid in permanent black-out. Sigi Jöttkandt, author ofFirst Love: A Phenomenology of the One Cohen, Colebrook, Miller Imagine this book as the masterpiece of a new Pascalian wager: the irreversible wave of extinction events may turn out to be nothing, a false signal overtaken by a surprise holding capacity of the earth; but if not, if it is not, at least this book will have been one of the most important that appeared towards the end. Jonty Tiplady, 2009 Crasaw Prize winner and author of Zam Bonk Dip Cover Image: Courtesy of SOHO (ESA & NASA) Series: Critical Climate Change Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook The era of climate change involves the mutation of sys- tems 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. Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis Miller OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2016 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2016 Copyright © 2016 Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis Miller Freely available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/twilight-of-the-anthropocene-idols This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, no permission is required from the authors or the publisher for anyone to down- load, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same license. 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/4.0 Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restric- tions. Please see the Permissions section at the back of this book for more information. PRINT ISBN 978-1-78542-015-3 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-016-0 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mis- sion is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Contents Preface 7 Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook 1. Trolling “Anthropos”—Or, Requiem for a Failed Prosopopeia 20 Tom Cohen 1. Daybreak in the Ideovomitorium 20 2. Miss Lonelyhearts and the Deadpan—or, a Plague of Face 32 3. Mourning becomes electric—or, Greek words bearing gifts… 45 4. Brunch in the Ideovomitorium—or, WTF: Was “Anthropos” ever in fact, er… Greek? 63 2. What is the Anthropo-Political? 81 Claire Colebrook 1. Things “We” Have Been Told About the Anthropocene 81 2. Theory Refuge 89 3. What is the Political? 99 4. The Geological Sublime 117 3. Reading Paul de Man While Falling into Cyberspace 126 J. Hillis Miller 1. The Linguistics of Literariness and Ideology 126 2. If You Want to Lie, Digitize 138 3. What is Ideology for de Man? 139 4. Why Study Literary Theory? 142 5. What Does “The Resistance to Theory” Really Say? 145 6. Two-Handedness as Sleight of Hand 150 7. Reading Pictures in the Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols 158 8. Is the Digital Revolution the Radix Malorum? 159 9. Verbal as Against Visual? 163 10. Two Contemporary Examples of Pictures That Invite Reading 165 11. Mixed Media Forever 169 12. Just How Has the Internet Transformed Literary Studies? 172 13. Imagine Paul de Man Online in the Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols 176 14. Anachronistic Reading 178 Notes 195 Works Cited 212 Permissions 221 Preface Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook When we originally conceived this volume the original title was Twilight of the Anthropocene. We liked the Nietzschean resonance, and the notion that by the time the Anthropocene arrived as a marked event, yet still to be consecrated by geologists, it was already far too late. By this we do not mean “far too late to save the planet.” Theplanet does not need to be saved; it existed before organic life, and will go on to exist for some time (probably) well after humans and well after organisms. The “lateness”— or twilight—is not even a lateness for us. Indeed, one of the features of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene is that very few want to own up to being the guilty party: as soon as the Anthropocene was declared as a way of uniting humans once again, objections started pour- ing in. Why would “we” want to sully the entirety of humanity by plac- ing it as the author or agent of this late-modern event? So many declare, against the Anthropocene: “Not in my name!”: the Anthropocene is really the Capitalocene, the Corporatocene, or is better figured as a critical zone rather than one grand evil mess that includes all of humanity. And so the first way we would like to intertwine the concept of the Anthropocene with the notion of twilight is to argue that the idea was at once highly illuminating, suddenly sweeping away all concepts of the post-human, erasing the fiction of Cartesian “man,” and allowing humanity to appear clearly and distinctly, and yet the blinding nature of this light obscured so much. Only now, as the dazzling brilliance of the Anthropocene idea begins to wane, and we hear all the claims for different scales and narratives, do we perhaps think to question both the logic of “anthropos” as the single agent of geological change and the cry from the other humans who accept the narrative of geological destruction but want to exempt themselves. It’s capitalism and corporations, not me, not my humanity. If 8 Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook the Anthropocene seemed to drown out other scales and figures with its blinding light, its dimming seems to have opened other narratives, and yet perhaps what is not questioned is the light of narrative as such. Everything appears both with conditions of visibility, but also of obscurity, and one might only become aware of constitutive blindness by way of another dimming of lights. (The “light” of reason progressed only by co-opting fire, coal, nuclear energy and the labor of many beings not blessed with the spoils of enlightenment; but reason can be made aware of that debt only when the source of light is waning, in an age of depletion.) Insofar as there is a “we” or an “us,” we cannot say, in good conscience, that we only found out that we were destructive once it was too late. The formation of a “we” is generated from destruction and from the recognition of destruction: humanity as global anthropos comes into being with the Anthropocene, with the declaration that there is a unity to the species, and that this unity lies in its power to mark the planet.

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