Interchange – Let’s Unmake Something: On the Unconstructable Earth

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Our rising awareness that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. Today’s guest says “No!” in thunder.

In The Unconstructable Earth (Fordham) Frédéric Neyrat proposes an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against the capitalist, technocratic delusion of earth as a constructible object, but equally against an organicism marked by unacknowledged traces of racism and sexism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming. Underway for billions of years, withdrawing into the most distant past and the most inaccessible future, Earth escapes the hubris of all who would remake and master it.

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.

That’s from Melville’s Moby Dick, naturally.

All of our music for this episode comes from the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, released in 1979.

We’ll also share selections from Michael Palmer’s poem “Odd-Even” from 1985 – but excised out of published order.

Dear Lexicon, I died in you
as a dragonfly might
or a dragon in a bottle might

Dear Lexia, There is no mind

Dear Book, You were never a book
Panther, You are nothing but a page
torn from a book

Stupid Lake, You were the ruin of a book

GUEST:
Frédéric Neyrat is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is editor of Alienocene, an online journal that charts the environmental humanities and contemporary theory. His first book in English (following thirteen in French) is Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism.

RELATED
Viruses and Separation: Frédéric Neyrat on political virality and competing separatisms
On The Political Unconscious Of The Anthropocene: Frédéric Neyrat, interviewed by Elizabeth Johnson
Five Propositions | Critiques for the Anthropocene (2016)
The New Cosmology or Upbeat in the Anthropocene (Interchange)

MUSIC
Fear of Music Talking Heads (1979)
“Mind” (alternative take)
“Heaven”
“Air”
“Animals”
“Memories Can’t Wait”
ID underbed
“Dancing for Money” (Unfinished Outtake)

CREDITS
Impresario: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young