Cover image credits: © Richard Droker
Criticizing principles is a philosophical and pragmatic necessity [shaking the foundations to reveal the multiplicity underneath]. This project makes no exception. We shall take its title, “Understanding the Sixth Extinction as a Hermeneutical Challenge”, and proceed in order.
UNDERSTANDING is supposed to be the philosopher’s job. But what is understanding? The current state of globalized academic knowledge suffers from an even deeper separation than that between theory and praxis once denounced by Marx (“the philosophers have only interpreted the world…”). It is fractured into a myriad of areas of specialization whose isolation is functional to grant personal authority and enforce the atomization of academic subjectivities, at the same time separating them from the rest of society and from the problems posed by reality.
But academic knowledge is also massively overcodified into areas of relevance by means of targeted funding: for example, ethics and logics have become two fundamental vectors of cognitive extraction and real abstraction [i.e., the commodification of knowledge]. These vectors have the effect of mobilizing university as an otherwise immobile system of social exclusion and existential precarity.
Understanding depends on transindividual invention and, as such, it is forced to seep in the grid of academic knowledge like an acid. From my own position of privilege, the main instruments that right now I choose to wield with contradiction are solidarity [making alliances to embody differential commonalities and mitigate suffering] and epistemic anarchy/obliquity [becoming elusory in the immanence of thinking].
SIXTH EXTINCTION is the name of the reduction of biodiversity that began with the appearance of humankind and is now dramatically accelerating towards collapse. The association of an ordinal number with something as abstract and radical as the word “extinction” is almost poetic. It emphasizes the fact that there have been other extinctions in the past and there will probably be others in the future, as the Earth is in itself catastrophic; it also suggests that the human presence on Earth has always been extinctive and is now so to an increasing extent.
But however good it may sound, the term “sixth extinction” runs the risk of concealing the instable heterogeneity of the present problem. In order to frame the interconnected fabric of stories and struggles flowing collectively into the extinctive drift, we need a materialism of the problem, a way to stay close to it; and if we choose to understand it as a constellation of apocalypses directed towards some kind of “end” [what Guattari called “the conjunction of all possible convulsions”], then we need a materialism of the end.
HERMENEUTICS is a respectable philosophical tradition that most people perceive as incapable of providing answers in front of the environmental crisis, essentially due to its logocentrism and ill-concealed spiritualism. For me, hermeneutics is an instrument of concretization. It is useful to claim that reality is not a text, language is not an abstract code and words are actions. Perhaps this materialization of the mediation goes back to Hermes the monistic magician rather than Hermes the Greek god.
Finally, the word CHALLENGE seems to echo the neo-liberal habit of encouraging people to make lemonades out of lemons. Extinction is not an opportunity for anyone, or maybe just for the very small group of interstellar owners that would survive in a lifeless future. And it’s not just a matter of adaptation. It is indeed a challenge, however, to what is and has been, in the name of habitable and liberated futures.
