Planetary Dysphoria
Planetary Dysphoria
Planetary Dysphoria
Planetary Dysphoria
Emily Apter
To cite this article: Emily Apter (2013) Planetary Dysphoria, Third Text, 27:1, 131-140, DOI:
10.1080/09528822.2013.752197
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.752197
Planetary Dysphoria
Downloaded by [Columbia University Libraries] at 07:07 02 March 2016
Emily Apter
Cities phosphorescent
on the riverbank, industrys
glowing piles waiting
beneath the smoke trails
like ocean giants for the sirens
blare, the twitching lights
of rail- and motorways, the murmur
of the millionfold proliferating molluscs,
wood lice and leeches, the cold putrefaction,
the groans in the rocky ribs,
the mercury shine, the clouds that
chased through the towers of Frankfurt,
time stretched out and time speeded up,
all this raced through my mind
and was already so near the end
that every breath of air made my
face shudder.1
1. W G Sebald, Nach der
Natur (1988), from the
translation into English by
Michael Hamburger, After
Nature, Random House,
New York, 2002, p 113
2. On the concepts of
Romantic and aesthetic
absolutes, see Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc Nancy, The Literary
Absolute: The Theory of
Literature in German
Romanticism, Philip
Barnard and Cheryl Lester,
trans, SUNY, Albany,
New York, 1988. This text
is a considerably abridged
version of the French
original, LAbsolu
litteraire, Seuil, Paris,
1978.
This extract from W G Sebalds poem Nach der Natur (1988), published in
English in the wake of his untimely death in a car accident, makes full use
of the Romantic absolute (particularly Friedrich Schlegels conception of
art as the completion of philosophy), updated for modern-day ecological
disaster.2 A ghostly slick of chemical pollutants coats each urban form.
Light twitches, as if emanating off things that are themselves in the last
spasms of violent death. Piles of industrial effluvia glow radioactively.
In German the expression nach der Natur suggests a naturalist credo of
painting from nature (versus the aesthetic imitation of art), but it can
also be construed to mean post-nature, or running after nature, as if
trying to recoup Natures creative force or forestall its dissolution.
Sebalds terrestrial imagery is symbolically overcoded, culled from
historical events and their epic cultural scripts. The city of Frankfurt has
entered a phase of planetary eclipse that reaches referentially back in
time to the Renaissance, and specifically to Matthias Grunewalds painting
of the 1502 solar eclipse. There are allusions to primeval lagoons and bogs
that plunge the narrator into a quasi/sublunary state of deep/melancholia; biblical lands beset by plagues, desolate alpine peaks on which
# Third Text (2013)
132
The show included several works by under-recognized artists that exemplify a planetary aesthetic; one that has arguably been around since artists
began painting the zodiac, scenes from Genesis and extraterrestrial
mythology, but which took on new guises in the context of telescopic
imaging and post-atomic technologies. Eugene von Bruenchenheins
Atomic Age (1955), an oil painting set in an Edenic dystopia congested
with undulating vines and dragon tentacles; films by Nancy Graves,
known for early career displays of fossils and taxidermy, as well as delicate gouaches of celestial cartography (VI Maskeyne Da Region of the
Moon, 1972); and the photographs of August Strindberg, dubbed Celestographs, produced in 1894 by setting glass plates bathed in saline solution under the night sky. Douglas Feuk notes of Strindbergs art made
in absence of the artist:
3. Sebald, op cit, p 99
4. See After Nature in the
digital archive at http://
www.newmuseum.org/.
5. Douglas Feuk, The
Celestographs of August
Strindberg, Cabinet 3,
summer 2001, Birgitta
Danielsson, trans, online
at: http://www.
cabinetmagazine.org/
issues/3/celesographs.php
133
Gustav Metzger, Liquid Crystal Environment, 2005, slide projectors, liquid crystals, collection: Tate, London. From the
exhibition Gustav Metzger: decennies 19592009, Musee departemental dart contemporain de Rochechouart, 2010,
photo: David Bordes, courtesy the artist
134
135
136
137
Negarestani is quite possibly the pseudonym of a collective (which probably includes Mackay himself) that has created a roman a` tiroir centred
on the recovered manuscript of one Dr Hamid Parsani, author of a book
banned after the Iranian Revolution called Defacing the Ancient
Persia: 9500 Years Call for Destruction. In labelling this curious metafiction of planetary neurosis geotrauma, Mackay insists that trauma
theory itself was always a materialist cryptoscience; a cryptogeological hybrid predicated on the geologists view of the earths
surface as a living fossil record, a memory bank rigorously laid down
over unimaginable eons and sealed against introspection yet vulnerable
to a broken encryption that brings humiliation in its train.26 Trauma
involves an ecology radical enough to take in these solar
eschatologies; a terrestrial embrace of the perishability of the earth,
and its implication in the universe, beyond the local economics of the
relation between the sun and the surface.27 For Mackay, geotrauma
entails a perennial boring or a vermicular inhabiting of the organic
by the inorganic.28 This geophilosophy cum chemophilosophy,
telegraphed in Negarestanis geopoetics of oil and dust, engenders an
anticapitalist planetary politics because it indicts the global corporate
interests of Big Oil. The deadly fallout of energy extraction
is traced deep down below the earths surface where traumatic blows
to the core are rarely exposed to public scrutiny or made subject to
revolutionary insurgency:
The time of trauma is altered. Geophilosophy was always a chemophilosophy: just as it needed to explode the constricted space of the individual and
escape to the political surface of the earth, and just as it was then necessary
to understand the apparently stable surface as an arrested flow and to
penetrate to the depths, the cosmic theory of geotrauma now needed to
pass through the core of the earth only to escape its inhibited mode of traumatic stratification and to carry its interrogation further afield, or rather
according to a new mode of distribution.29
26. Robin Mackay, A Brief
History of Geotrauma, in
Ed Keller et al, eds, Leper
Creativity: Cyclonopedia
Symposium, Punctum,
Brooklyn, 2012, p 16
27. Ibid, p 31
28. Ibid, p 33
29. Ibid, p 34
30. Ibid, Glossary, online at:
http://www.ccru.net/
id(entity)/glossary.htm
31. Ray Brassier,
Accelerationism,
transcription from a
Backdoor Broadcasting
Company recording, online
at:
moskvax.wordpress.com/
2010/09/30/
accelerationism-raybrassier/
32. Brassier, Nihil Unbound,
op cit, p 204
138
. . . both life and mind will have to reckon with the disintegration of the
ultimate horizon, when, roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion (10 to the
1728th power) years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe
will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment. Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind
nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on
planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating
any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every
vestige of sentience irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state
cosmologists call asymptopia, the stellar corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm of elementary particles. Atoms
themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational expansion
will continue, driven by the currently inexplicable force called dark
energy, which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and
deeper into an eternal and unfathomable blackness.34
Like Brassier, Eugene Thacker writes with the chiaroscuro of Goth spiritualism. In After Life he positions dark pantheism against theological
pantheism (for which an anthropomorphic God still serves as sovereign
Creator and Source), imputing to it the challenge of thinking under the
sign of the negative and of ontologising life beyond its physico-biological reduction.35 Arguing in an implicitly Latourian vein (which is to say,
from the position of a political ecology that assumes a level playing field
between human and non-human forms of life), Thacker would seem to
revel in a possible world uncognized by humans and steeped in doomsday
naturism:
The world is increasingly unthinkable a world of planetary disasters,
emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. . . The aim of
this book is to explore the relationship between philosophy and horror,
through this motif of the unthinkable world. . . the means by which philosophy and horror are related to each other is the idea of the world. But
the world can mean many things, from a subjective experience of living
in the world, to the objective, scientific study of geological conditions.
The world is human and non-human, anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic, sometimes even misanthropic. Arguably, one of the greatest challenges that philosophy faces today lies in comprehending the world in
which we live as both a human and a non-human world and of comprehending this politically.36
33. Ibid, p 34
34. Ibid, p 228
35. Thacker, After Life, op cit,
pp 229 230
36. Thacker, In the Dust of
This Planet, op cit, p 1, p 2
It has often been alleged that the speculative materialists many claiming
a pronounced allegiance to Marxism and antiglobalist activism pay
only lip-service to politics, but there is arguably a political edge to their
hyperbolic evocations of a planet in the grip of revolutionary ressentiment: sullen, wounded and ready to retaliate against the hubris of
humans who forget that their own psychic fates are tethered to the
earths distressed crust and depleted mineral veins. In Nick Lands
vision of nihilism as nakedness before the cyclone, the:
139
. . . human animal is the one through which terrestrial excess is hemorrhaged to zero, the animal destined to obliterate itself in history, and
sacrifice its nature utterly to the solar storm.37
140
there is a decided mood-swing, with Justine starting her free fall into catalepsy and Claire opening up to the exquisite anticipation of extinction.
The thymotic tipping point comes when guests at the lavish party pass
from assurances of Justines happiness (Hows your wonderful night
going?), to scenes of rage, starting with Justines mother who remarks
at the toast, I dont believe in marriage, and climaxing with Justines
public denunciation of her boss (I hate you. . . you are a power-hungry
little man, Jack). By the time we reach Part II, all traces of Justines
animal high spirits have vanished and she is like someone shot, where
the path of the bullet has entered and exited her body, pulling her
psyche into the slingshot orbit of the planet Melancholia proceeding on
its course closer and closer to Earth. Taken into this cosmic force-field,
Justine becomes a planetary avatar. In one shot, the viscous water of
the stream in which she floats reclaims her body; she morphs into
Ophelia, with a baleful stare fixed on an unseen extraterrestrial
Hamlet. In another sequence, she moves arduously across the greensward
wearing a wedding dress from which skeins grow into moss-like tendrils
that act as restraints, restricting her movements and tethering her to the
ground as if in cthonic servitude. Yet another scene fixates on Justine
naked on the rocks at night, her body radioactively luminescent,
communing directly with her planet in a pantomime of Brunnhilde
(whose funeral pyre would come to destroy the world in Wagners
Gotterdammerung). There are also searing moments when her hands
become conductors of lightning, and the sky, sensing her moods, rains
down dead birds, freakish hail and rain, and clouds of insects. Throughout von Trier relies on ecological embodiments of the death-drive, conscripting the devices of pathetic fallacy with no apology. And while the
film may fall short of Brassiers full-on solar posthumanism there is
humanist redemption in Justines caring preparation for death, easing
the way for her sister and nephew it is arguably just as dysphoric in
its lunar clinamen, the way the film swivels into position as an allegory
of cosmic self-destitution.
Planetary dysphoria captures the geopsychoanalytic state of the world at
its most depressed and unruhig, awaiting the triumphant revenge of acid, oil
and dust. These elements demonstrate a certain agency: they are sentient
materials even if they are not fully licensed subjectivized subjects. Mackenzie Wark, with reference to the Cyclonopedia, underscores the abstract
look of the worlds chemical signature at the end of human time:
Our permanent legacy will not be architectural, but chemical. After the
last dam bursts, after the concrete monoliths crumble into the lone and
level sands, modernity will leave behind a chemical signature, in everything from radioactive waste to atmospheric carbon. This work will be
abstract, not figurative.43
43. Mackenzie Wark, An
Inhuman Fiction of Forces,
in Keller, ed, Leper
Creativity, op cit, p 40
44. Brassier, Nihil Unbound,
op cit, p x, quoting
Friedrich Nietzsche, The
Will to Power, Walter
Kaufman, trans, Vintage,
New York, 1967, p 1