Third Text, Vol.

27, Issue 1, January, 2013, 131– 140

Planetary Dysphoria
Emily Apter

Cities phosphorescent
on the riverbank, industry’s
glowing piles waiting
beneath the smoke trails
like ocean giants for the siren’s
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

This extract from W G Sebald’s poem Nach der Natur (1988), published in
1. W G Sebald, Nach der English in the wake of his untimely death in a car accident, makes full use
Natur (1988), from the of the Romantic absolute (particularly Friedrich Schlegel’s conception of
translation into English by
Michael Hamburger, After art as the completion of philosophy), updated for modern-day ecological
Nature, Random House, disaster.2 A ghostly slick of chemical pollutants coats each urban form.
New York, 2002, p 113
‘Light twitches’, as if emanating off things that are themselves in the last
2. On the concepts of spasms of violent death. Piles of industrial effluvia ‘glow’ radioactively.
Romantic and aesthetic
absolutes, see Philippe
In German the expression nach der Natur suggests a naturalist credo of
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean- ‘painting from nature’ (versus the aesthetic imitation of art), but it can
Luc Nancy, The Literary also be construed to mean ‘post-nature’, or ‘running after nature’, as if
Absolute: The Theory of
Literature in German
trying to recoup Nature’s creative force or forestall its dissolution.
Romanticism, Philip Sebald’s terrestrial imagery is symbolically overcoded, culled from
Barnard and Cheryl Lester, historical events and their epic cultural scripts. The city of Frankfurt has
trans, SUNY, Albany,
New York, 1988. This text entered a phase of planetary eclipse that reaches referentially back in
is a considerably abridged time to the Renaissance, and specifically to Matthias Grünewald’s painting
version of the French of the 1502 solar eclipse. There are allusions to primeval lagoons and bogs
original, L’Absolu
littéraire, Seuil, Paris, that plunge the narrator ‘into a quasi/sublunary state of deep/melancho-
1978. lia’; biblical lands beset by plagues, desolate alpine peaks on which

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online # Third Text (2013)
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.752197
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Arctic explorers perished, battlefields laid waste by conquering armies

(Alexander the Great’s), ravaged vestiges of Frankfurt’s medieval peasant
revolts, pogroms and the death-camp at Sachsenhausen; wastelands of
environmental bio-hazard.3 Given this pageant, little wonder that
Sebald’s poem served as the titular pretext for a show at the New
Museum curated by Massimiliano Gioni in 2008. Gioni, we learn:
. . . is as confident of Sebald’s Pied Piper appeal, as he is of Werner Herzog’s
– the director’s gorgeous and dire film on the aftermath of the Gulf War,
‘Lessons of Darkness’ (1992), excerpts of which are loop-projected on the
first of the show’s three floors, is another touchstone. Gioni also cites
Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, ‘The Road’ (2006), writing
of a rising sensibility haunted by ‘the destabilizing sensation of having
come upon the remains of our own civilization after its extinction’, trans-
fixed by ‘offended sceneries and scorched earth’, and hankering for qual-
ities of the ‘pure, distant, and extreme’ in ‘a sphere that is, if not
religious, at least sacred or obscure, like a mystery cult’.

The publicity circular continues in this idiom of the religious blockbuster:

The exhibition:
. . . surveys a landscape of wilderness and ruins, darkened by uncertain cat-
astrophe. It is a story of abandonment, regression, and rapture – an epic of
humanity and nature coming apart under the pressure of obscure forces
and not-so-distant environmental disasters.
The artists are said to:
. . . share an interest in archaic traditions and a fascination for personal
cosmologies and visionary languages. A requiem for a vanishing planet.
‘After Nature’ is a feverish examination of an extinct world that strangely
resembles our own.4

The show included several works by under-recognized artists that exem-

plify 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 Bruenchenhein’s
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 deli-
cate gouaches of celestial cartography (VI Maskeyne Da Region of the
Moon, 1972); and the photographs of August Strindberg, dubbed ‘Celes-
tographs’, produced in 1894 by setting glass plates bathed in saline sol-
ution under the night sky. Douglas Feuk notes of Strindberg’s art made
in absence of the artist:
3. Sebald, op cit, p 99
The surfaces not only look weathered with an atmospherically-created
4. See ‘After Nature’ in the
digital archive at http:// patina, but even seem to have been made in physical collaboration with
www.newmuseum.org/. the weather. . . the photographs often look like nocturnal celestial scenes.
5. Douglas Feuk, ‘The
But you could just as easily see gravel or dust, a close-up of worn
Celestographs of August asphalt, or a patch of dark soil. Actually, the pictures are not totally
Strindberg’, Cabinet 3, unlike the topographical earth studies that much later, in the 1950s,
summer 2001, Birgitta engaged Jean Dubuffet, which he named texturologies. The greatness of
Danielsson, trans, online
Strindberg’s photographs lies precisely in that they offer this double
at: http://www.
cabinetmagazine.org/ view, where starry sky and earthly matter seem to move within and
issues/3/celesographs.php through one another.5
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The motifs vary – swirls of dust and atmosphere, combustive, atomic

infernos, blistered ground and an unsettling indistinction between earth
and cosmos – but they set the terms, albeit from radically different pol-
itical and artistic positions, for a range of works exceeding the show
that explore a cosmic end-of-times consciousness. These might include:
Roberto Matta’s M’onde (1989), a painterly study in chaosmosis;
David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Cosmos and Disaster (1936); a 1955 concetto
spatiale by Lucio Fontana (which resembles earth rent asunder by an
asteroid, its torn edge allowing the oceans to spill out into space);
Michael Heizer’s Nine Nevada Depressions, a painting from Anselm
Kiefer’s series Himmel auf Erden (1998 – 2004); Gustav Metzger’s auto-
destructive acid pieces on nylon (1959) (generated politically by the
Nuclear Disarmament Movement) and psychedelic light projection,
Liquid Crystal Environment (1965– 1966); or a Metzger-inspired work

Gustav Metzger, Liquid Crystal Environment, 2005, slide projectors, liquid crystals, collection: Tate, London. From the
exhibition ‘Gustav Metzger: décennies 1959–2009’, Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart, 2010,
photo: David Bordes, courtesy the artist
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like Radiation Burn (2010) by the American collective Critical Art

6. Heizer is an obvious choice
for this medium, but I could Ensemble.6
have mentioned any Gabrielle Decamous remarks that Metzger’s auto-destructive happen-
number of earthworks ings show that ‘galaxies constantly engage in creative and destructive pro-
featured in ‘Ends of the
Earth: Land Art to 1974’, a cesses but [that] we have now internalized these processes’.7 As such,
recent show at the Museum planetary aesthetics – especially Metzger’s process-based actions and
of Contemporary Art, Los installations – could be seen to embrace a ‘systems’ concept of environ-
Angeles curated by Philipp
Kaiser and Miwon Kwon. ment emphasizing dynamical interactivity among orders of material,
7. Gabrielle Decamous,
economic, technological and social forms. Timothy Morton’s notion of
‘Nuclear Activities and ‘mesh’ (in The Ecological Thought) aptly describes much of what falls
Modern Catastrophes: Art under the rubric of ‘systems’ environmentalism. Mesh is characterized
Faces the Radioactive
Waves’, in Leonardo, vol
by interconnectedness, concatenation, weaving and computing, ‘infinite
44, no 2, April 2011, p 127 connections and infinitesimal differences’, lichen, fungus, bacteria, endo-
8. Timothy Morton, The
symbiosis or symbiosis within organisms, envelopes and filters.8 It comp-
Ecological Thought, lements ‘process’ which recurs to thermodynamical systems (emergence,
Harvard University, conservation, entropy, percolation). For Isabelle Stengers, process takes
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
2010, p 29, p 30, p 36
into account:
9. Isabelle Stengers, . . . the consequences, for a given milieu, of the appearance of a new tech-
Cosmopolitics, vol 1, nical practice just as it does for the consequences of climate change or the
Robert Bononno, trans,
University of Minnesota,
appearance of a new species.9
Minneapolis, Minnesota,
2010, p 33 She underscores an adaptive notion of system centring on the technical
milieu, theoretically indebted to Georges Friedmann, Gilbert Simondon,
10. ‘We are no longer mostly
dealing with information Bernard Stiegler and Tiziana Terranova (who coins the expression ‘infor-
that is transmitted from a mational milieu’ to refer explicitly to digital telecommunication
source to a receiver, but systems).10 Biomedial environments – a medium of choice for much
increasingly also with
informational dynamics – internet-based art – fix on patterns of emergence, individuation, hylo-
that is with the relation morphism, transduction, metastability, assemblage, dissipation, dis-
between noise and signal,
including fluctuations and
persion etc. ‘Environment’ in architecture increasingly refers less to
microvariations, entropic protocols of sustainability and more to the computational dynamics of
emergences and distributed systems and informational swarms.11
negentropic emergences,
positive feedback and
While an aesthetics of planetarity might well draw on the technics of
chaotic processes. If there is this ‘systems’ environmentalism, drafted from the material sciences,
an informational quality to cybernetics, network theory and distributive computation, its specificity
contemporary culture, then
it might be not so much
and impetus also come, at times, from a different place, namely the con-
because we exchange more vergence of Naturphilosophie, nihilism, the psychoanalytic soma, specu-
information than before, or lative materialism and recent ecological science that claims that we are
even because we buy, sell
or copy informational living in the midst of a mass extinction event during catastrophic
commodities, but because climate change. From Kant’s ‘physical geography’ lectures (which fol-
cultural processes are lowed his Master’s thesis of 1755, On Fire, and foreshadowed his meteor-
taking on the attributes of
information – they are ological treatises of the 1790s), to Félix Guattari’s concept of the Universe
increasingly grasped and as an autistic, subjectively destituted territoriality and to Eugene Thack-
conceived in terms of their er’s cthonic divinations of bio-horror, the planet is conceived of as an
informational dynamics.’
Tiziana Terranova, environmental death-trap afflicted by radiation, pandemics, dust and
Network Culture: Politics stellar burnout.12 In the Sphären (Spheres) trilogy Peter Sloterdijk pro-
for the Information Age,
Pluto, New York, 2004, p 7
ceeds ‘psycho-cosmologically’, attributing to the post-Enlightenment
‘shattering of celestial domes’ (induced by Copernican heliocentrism,
11. See, for example, Philippe
Morel’s discussion of the
the loss of faith in God, the relinquishment of immunological protection
‘distributed paradigm’, from the bubble of the universe), the condition of humanity’s subjection
which relies on ‘grid to ‘cosmic frost’, ‘stellar coldness’, and the sensation of ‘shellessness in
computing’, as a protocol
aimed at rendering ‘the
space’.13 Quentin Meillassoux cedes the human cognition of a world to
classical concept of an ancestral time of rocks and arche-fossils and a cosmic order of
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singular and autonomous après-finitude.14 Jane Bennett’s recourse to ‘a materialism in the tradition
intelligence obsolete’ and of Democritus-Epicurus-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze’ that privileges vital-
which takes as points of
departure: ‘ideas of
ism and ‘vibrant matter’ supports her conviction that ‘the image of
industrial production, post- dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and
human networks or our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’.15
disappearing cities in
reference to bionetworks
Thacker meditates on the mystical call of ungroundedness (Ungrund) to
and the multitude’. ponder the question:
‘Computational
Intelligence: The Grid as a . . . can there exist today a mysticism of the unhuman, one that has as its
Post-Human Network’, focus the climatological, meteorological, and geological world-in-itself,
Architectural Design, and, moreover, one that does not resort to either religion or science?16
September/October, 2006,
p 100, p 101. See, in the
same issue of AD, the
And in his Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Ray Brassier,
extension of feedback to faulting vitalist eschatology for evading ‘the leveling force of extinction’
‘responsive design invokes ‘the cosmological re-inscription of Freud’s account of the
networks’ in work by the
design collaborative
death-drive’, Nietzschean nihilism, and Lyotard’s ‘solar catastrophism’
‘servo’, ‘Parallel to underscore extinction’s inexorable ‘truth’.17 Brassier is interested in
Processing: Design nihilism that decouples thinking from the life of the planet, prompting
Practice’, p 81, as well as
Benjamin Bratton and questions like: ‘How does thought think a world without thought?
Hernan Diaz-Alonso’s How does thought think the death of thinking?’18 Such queries arise
description of a foray into from Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of ‘solar catastrophe’, which
fashioning an environment
grafted from the plural occasions the destruction of thought’s ‘terrestrial shelter’.19 ‘With the dis-
‘post-Oedipal’ family, appearance of earth’, Lyotard wrote, ‘thought will have stopped –
through a prosthetic leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of’. 20 The fixation on
projection designed ‘to
exacerbate, accommodate the extinction of extinction as thought – which is to say as the ultimate
and confound intimate fulfilment of philosophical nihilism’s remit – sets this strain of cata-
social economies’,
‘Treatment 1: Notes from
strophism apart from past traditions of Christian eschatology (end-of-
an Informal Discussion on the-worldism, end of days); as well as from the old Cold War fear of
Interinstitutional Design mutual annihilation or the particular terrors associated with geological
Research and Image
Production’, p 110.
mass extinction events and nuclear energy accidents on a scale far sur-
passing Chernobyl and Fukushima.
In these speculative materialist analyses there is a consistent oscillation
between geophilosophy and psychoanalysis that recalls Derrida’s essay
12. I refer here to Peter Fenves’s
chapter ‘Revolution in the ‘“Geopsychoanalysis. . .” And the Rest of the World’ (1991). In addition
Air; or the End of the to attacking the depoliticized, culturally restricted world map of the Inter-
Human Regime on Earth’,
in his Late Kant: Towards
national Psychoanalytical Association (whose 1977 Constitution pre-
Another Law of the Earth, sumed a parochially divided world distributed between North and
Routledge, London, 2003, South America and ‘the rest of the world’), Derrida makes the intriguing
pp 136 –161; to Félix
Guattari’s Chaosmose,
if abstruse claim that ‘psychoanalysis has an earth’:
Galilée, Paris, 1992; to
I am sure it will come as no surprise to you that my speaking of ‘geopsychoa-
Eugene Thacker’s After
Life, University of Chicago, nalysis’ – just as one speaks of geography or geopolitics – does not mean
Chicago, Illinois, 2010; and that I am going to propose a psychoanalysis of the earth of the sort that
his In the Dust of this was put forward a few decades ago, when Bachelard evoked ‘The Earth
Planet, vol 1 of Horror of and the Reveries of the Rest’ and ‘The Earth and the Reveries of the
Philosophy, Zero,
Alresford, Hampshire, Will’. But as inclined as I may be today to distance myself from such a psy-
2010; and Reza choanalysis of the earth, as likewise from the more recent and more urgent
Negarestani’s theme of an anti-psychoanalysis of territorialization, it is nevertheless upon
Cyclonopedia: Complicity the earth that I wish to advance – upon what the psychoanalysis of
with Anonymous
Materials, re: press,
today considers to be the earth. . . For psychoanalysis has an earth,
Melbourne, 2008, p 238. sole and singular. An earth that is to be distinguished from the world of
psychoanalysis.21
13. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles:
Spheres I, Wieland Hoban,
trans, Semiotext(e), Los
Psychoanalysis ‘has an earth’ in the sense of having a geography bounded
Angeles, 2011, p 22, p 24 by the institutional milieux of its practice, and in so far as it maintains a
136

mission to propagate its theories abroad. Derrida cites correspondence

14. Quentin Meillassoux, After between Freud and Ernest Jones that shows Jones playing the image-
Finitude: An Essay on the
Necessity of Contingency, doctor; counselling Freud to keep the sketchier areas of his thought –
Ray Brassier, trans, the writings on telepathy and thought-transference – under wraps for
Continuum, London, 2008
reasons of sound ‘foreign policy’. All this is to say that when, in this
15. Jane Bennett, Vibrant essay, Derrida asserts that ‘psychoanalysis has an earth sole and singular’,
Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things, Duke University,
he is not putting forth a theory of something on the order of ‘geotrauma’
Raleigh, North Carolina, that would marry ecology and psychosis. Yet his very coinage of the term
2010, p xiii and p ix ‘geopsychoanalysis’ moves tantalisingly in this direction.
respectively
Referring to a ‘geocosmic theory of trauma’ attributed to the myster-
16. Thacker, In the Dust of this iously vanished cyberpunk theorist Nick Land – author of The Thirst for
Planet, op cit, p 133,
emphasis in the original
Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992) and a co-
founder (with Sadie Plant) of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
17. Ray Brassier, Nihil
Unbound: Enlightenment (CCRU) at the University of Warwick in the 1990s – Aidan Tynan
and Extinction, Palgrave defines geotrauma as an ‘attempt to give the psychoanalytic concept of
Macmillan, London, 2007, the unconscious its full materialist extension’. The encryption of
p 227 and p 204
respectively trauma within phylogeny and ontogeny results from what Tynan calls a
‘calamitous maladaption’:
18. Ibid, p 223

19. Ibid, p 225 Geotrauma repositions the unconscious relative both to the individual,
20. Ibid, p 10, citing Lyotard, interpersonal and social sphere and the bio-organic one. It is only in
The Inhuman terms of the earth itself, its geological and cosmic genesis, that we can
21. Jacques Derrida, account for the radical decentring of consciousness suggested in Freud’s
‘“Geopsychoanalysis. . .” discoveries. . . It is thus precisely not the adaptation of the organism to
And the Rest of the World’, its environment that gives us the immanence of the inorganic and the
Donald Nicholson-Smith, organic, but its calamitous maladaptation, which necessitates a takeover
trans, in Christopher Lane,
ed, The Psychoanalysis of
of other already adapted structures that are then re-engineered via dra-
Race, Columbia matic and obsolescing changes in conditions. This is why catastrophes
University, New York, are important for the geotraumatic account of evolution.22
1998, p 66
Robin Mackay’s ‘A Brief History of Geotrauma’ thickens this definition
as it riffs off a Landian/Deleuzian pseudo-science of earth-think that
coaxes readers to speculate on the mysteries of authorship surrounding
the book Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008),
Reza Negarestani’s occult treatise on oil ‘polytics’ and ‘Tellurian insur-
gencies’.23 With its glossary of arcana and genre-mixing narration of eco-
logical nihilation as told from the vantage point of the earth, this text
realizes a new naming opportunity for the encyclopaedic form as a
‘pedia’ hit by a ‘cyclone’. (‘Cyclones,’ Nick Land writes in The Thirst
for Annihilation, ‘are atmospheric machines that transform latent
energy into angular momentum in a feed-back process of potentially cat-
22. Aidan Tynan, ‘Geotrauma, astrophic consequence’).24 In Cyclonopedia there is a curious confluence
towards a concise of geological combustion and Oedipal revolt apparent, for example, in
definition’, online at: http://
violentsigns.wordpress.
this definition of the word Naft:
com/2012/03/30/
geotrauma-towards-a- Naft (Arabic and Farsi word for oil). According to the classic theory of
concise-definition/ fossil fuels (ie excluding Thomas Gold’s theory of the Deep Hot Bio-
23. Negarestani, op cit, p 4 sphere), petroleum was formed as a Tellurian entity under unimaginable
pressure and heat in the absence of oxygen and between the strata in absol-
24. Nick Land, The Thirst for
Annihilation: Georges ute isolation – a typical Freudian Oedipal case, then. . . Petroleum is able to
Bataille and Virulent gather the necessary geo-political undercurrents. . . required for the process
Nihilism, Routledge, of Erathication or the moving of the Earth’s body toward the Tellurian
London, 1992, p 106 Omega – the utter degradation of the Earth as a Whole. . . Xerodrom is
25. Cyclonopedia, op cit, p 17 the Earth of becoming-Gas or cremation to Dust.25
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Negarestani is quite possibly the pseudonym of a collective (which prob-

ably includes Mackay himself) that has created a roman à 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 meta-
fiction of planetary neurosis ‘geotrauma’, Mackay insists that trauma
theory itself was always ‘a materialist cryptoscience’; a ‘crypto-
geological hybrid’ predicated on the geologists’ view of the earth’s
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 Negarestani’s 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 earth’s 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 chemophiloso-
phy: 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 trau-
matic stratification and to carry its interrogation further afield, or rather
according to a new mode of distribution.29
26. Robin Mackay, ‘A Brief Mackay channels the planet-talk of the Cyclonopedia, as well as the
History of Geotrauma’, in
Ed Keller et al, eds, Leper pseudo-serious CCRU glossary definition of geotrauma as:
Creativity: Cyclonopedia
Symposium, Punctum,
. . . a polymathic hypertheory of the terrestrial machinic unconscious,
Brooklyn, 2012, p 16 which refuses the distinction between biology, geology, linguistics and
numeracy. Geotraumatics processes the becomings of the earth as inten-
27. Ibid, p 31
sive products of anorganic tensions, especially those compacted from
28. Ibid, p 33 archaic xenocatastrophes.30
29. Ibid, p 34
Catastrophism, always a staple of sci-fi, emerges now as a wildly
30. Ibid, ‘Glossary’, online at: neologistic demotic of choice, demonstrating a tendency to move
http://www.ccru.net/
id(entity)/glossary.htm beyond the assumption of earthly sentience, and the contingency of
humans within a continuum of co-creating materialities, into registers
31. Ray Brassier,
‘Accelerationism’, of cthonic psychopolitics.
transcription from a A co-editor of Nick Land’s selected writings (Fanged Noumena,
Backdoor Broadcasting
Company recording, online
2010), Ray Brassier picks up on Land’s shift from geophilosophy to
at: geopsychoanalysis which credits him with swapping a ‘Bergsonian vitalist
moskvax.wordpress.com/ phenomenology’ for ‘an unconscious thanatropism’.31 In Nihil Unbound,
2010/09/30/
accelerationism-ray-
he resizes Freud’s theory of the death-drive from germ plasm, individual
brassier/ psyche and civilization, to the scale of a cosmically proportioned ontic
32. Brassier, Nihil Unbound,
subject.32 Roger Caillois’s psychasthenic reworking of the repetition
op cit, p 204 compulsion, where adaptive mimicry is taken to the extreme of an