Shakespeare's Global Weirding: Macbeth's Posting of "Anthropos," Cinematization, and the Era of Extinction

From Middle English werde, wierde, wirde, wyrede, wurde, from Old English wyrd, wurd ("that which happens, fate, chance, fortune, destiny, Fate, the Fates, Providence, event, phenomenon, transaction, fact, deed"), from Proto-Germanic *wurdiz ("fate, destiny"), from Proto-Indo-European *wert- ("to turn, wind") […] Weird was extinct by the 16th century in English. It survived in Scots, whence Shakespeare borrowed it in naming the Weird Sisters, reintroducing it to English. The senses "abnormal," "strange" etc. arose via reinterpretation of Weird Sisters and date from after this reintroduction.

—Wiktionary

One benefit of formulating thoughts for a Chinese audience on Shakespeare—as this paper had originally been¹—is not just imagining how Chinese characters transcribe the alphabeticist wordplay and ear-play of "the Bard." Rather, it is the critical reverie it spawns of imagining if Shakespeare were Chinese, if English were a second tongue learned and translating back from a writing outside of letteral or alphabetic script, impacted initially by pictographic assemblages, graphic strokes, lines, punctum, and allogrammatic complexes. I am all for such a "Chinese" Shakespeare, which can never quite be translated back—not into Chinese (which was not there, of course), not into the English one assumes one knows for happening to dwell in it—more or less poetically, as Hölderlin offers, but perhaps, today, just less.² Such an approach, in any case, might license approaching the fate, destiny, or uncanniness of some "complex words" with a sense that, perhaps, they are not "words" at all in the assumed sense. The term matter recurs and ricochets through Hamlet, say, circulating finally outside of any semantic frame. One cannot quite bring it back to occupy a designation, as if it were immaterial or ghost-like itself. One can call this weird reading, and certainly reject my appeal to Chinese as a script outside of the alphabeticist-monotheist-narrative Western enclave, that belonging to the West and its version of man or "anthropos," for whom the term Anthropocene has been recently coined—as if to universalize his claim to defining "man," even if that claim to proprietorship coincides with what appears to be the latter's connotations of extinction. We do not call this supposed era the Sinocene, and the Chinese are too smart to want original ownership of the resulting debacle.

Still, one of the words I have in mind, and would give what I will call a Chinese reading of, is the word weird itself. I am particularly interested in why this para-word or non-word, rescued from extinction by Shakespeare, we are told, yet retaining the latter's stamp (who or what returns from "extinction"?), went on to virally take over the world, appearing on T-shirts today (one that I recently saw said, "Stay Weird!"). Moreover, it today becomes fused with the experience of climate chaos, the disclosure that what had been called "nature" appears pre-inhabited by technics, and the insurgencies of matter that threaten twenty-first-century tapestries of Holocene life forms, the disruption of natural weather or climate cycles, and so on. That is, this word, once all but extinct, would boomerang, through Shakespeare, to virally infect the world or globe itself, as what has become known as global weirding.

Now, I have already tried your patience with my Chinese references, which are speculative and opportunistic at best. So, I will not push my luck with some silly prediction, that Shakespeare in a sense caused global warming or predestined global weirding by inserting into his text the word "weird." I think the argument can be made, but that is a matter for another time. I will, however, risk the obvious by noting that, in the algorithm he names Macbeth, Shakespeare was tracking "Anthropos" already after the fact. I will do so by following a detour through digital cinema, through Derrida's spectrology, and by asking why the era of climate chaos calls for an (im)materialist reading of the term weird.

Figure 1.

Scotland as cinemascape.

Justin Kurzel, Macbeth (2005), with Michael Fassbinder, Marion Cotillard...