Peak Everything

Not politics, but “cognitive or epistemographic zone[s]”; not texts, but “biosemanti[c]” or “nanoinscriptive process[es].” These are the domains of the new idiom, the new directions in critical thought suggested by Tom Cohen in his introduction to this powerful and timely recent collection, Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change. The book is timely not only in its unwavering focus on the uniqueness of our present crisis but also in its hyper-consciousness of itself as a radical self-questioning of the position of the theorist/academic in the early part of the twenty-first century. In some ways a bleakly honest vision our era, Telemorphosis consists of a dozen essays (plus introduction) all (or nearly all) intent on recalibrating our whole philosophic and critical discourse in relation to climate change. It’s a bold project, but the authors, the list of whom reads like a who’s-who of modern theory, are more than up to the task, and the collection ultimately demonstrates an indispensable place for theoretical thought in a time of imminent “real world” catastrophes.

In his introduction, Cohen immediately sets the stakes high for the collection as a whole in defining the project of telemorphosis. Telemorphosis is the name he gives to a critical project that undertakes to interrogate the ways in which the tradition of Western philosophy and cultural criticism has in fact been complicit in, and even advanced, the language and worldview that brought us to a state of ecological/economic global crisis. From the outset, Cohen hones in on some foundational history-of-metaphysics concepts that are deconstructed in various essays throughout the whole collection, which works quite well to tie the whole book together. The most powerful of these lies at the etymological heart of the crisis, reflected in the very terms “economy” and “ecology,” which come from the common root word eco-, the Greek oikos or “home,” always already complicit in the western drive for lossless production, expansion, and yet ever-stable “homeland security.” Another thread that runs through the whole collection is the idea that our civilization has reached some “break” or “limit,” exceeding the framework of our traditional critical discourses and therefore demanding “new” discourses. With respect to this, however, the authors have a wide variety of reactions and responses, and while Cohen claims that “the aporia of an era of climate change are structurally different from those that developed on the torsions of Western metaphysics,” I’m not sure all the authors would agree. Yet there does seem to be a consensus that contemporary theory is caught in a self-destructive loop, “circl[ing] back to pre-critical premises” from which these essays think through various escape plans.

There is also more or less unanimous agreement that destructive anthropogenic climate change is already “irreversible.” Indeed, it is in part the way in which this hard-to-swallow conclusion is shifted from problem to presupposition that often makes this text so sobering: “The mystery is why we did nothing until it was too late?” ponders J. Hillis Miller with terrifying after-the-factness. In analyzing how we got to this point, the essayists overwhelmingly identify some pattern of paradoxical inversion of cultural life-drive into death-drive, most explicitly expressed by J. Hillis Miller as the “auto-co-immunity” in which “a community destroys itself by way of what is intended to make it safe, whole, indemnified from harm, just as autoimmunity in the human body’s immune system turns the body against itself.” Hillis Miller traces this auto-co-immunity to the structuring cultural metaphor of the “organic unity model” (concepts like truth, logos, and ratio leading him back to organicist metaphors of roots, home, and earth) whereas science is finding more and more evidence that

the earth is not a super-organism. It is not an organism at all. It is best understood as an extremely complex machine that is capable of going autodestructively berserk, at least from the limited perspective of human...