A short story narrating a critical tipping point of the anthropocene, which is terminated not by reckless resource depletion, but by a tautological short-circuiting.
Read at FLOG! Issue 6: Eat Out Dinner 05.2018 and at Trust Berlin 08.2018
There was once an old man who worked on an enormous construction site on the Eastern seaboard of China. This worker was seen to be of particularly low ambition, a bit simple and at the very least provincial. In his dirty grey overalls he was unremarkable, except for the fact that he would take a wheelbarrow full of building rubble out the site gate at the end of each week and wheel it down the street towards his shitty cinder block house.
The foreman, feeling suspicious of but generally empathetic towards the old coot, would cast the occasional glance at the wheelbarrow to make sure no high value items (like tools) were being lifted for on-sale but the contents were more or less the same each time: chunks of concrete and soil and sawdust and broken screws.
The old man retired one day to minimal fanfare. No-one could ever tell how old he was, he was just old. The foreman had grown quite attached to the him though; his regular ambling pace and weekly scavenging rhythms had given a sort of Confucian clockwork to the foreman’s middle years.
He cornered the old boy as he was doddering towards the boom gate for the last time, not once looking back. The foreman shook his hand and with a bemused smile said: ‘I’ve been dying to know what you’ve been stealing all this time’. The old man slowed and looked at him sideways and with a gummy grin mumbled ‘wheelbarrows’.
***
The penny dropped across the thinking world on an equally unremarkable and toothless day, and the message spread with a pace that was horrifically ironic.
It turned out that humans, the medium, were being massaged. The massage was a monster. And the monster was maximised, beyond a point of no return. The event became known as ‘the drop’, or ‘the day it turned out’.
Before ‘the drop’, Anthros modelled language for themselves as sets of rules and components, as platforms of identity formation. A sonic architecture sprung from unique geographies that divided and structured the anthro-sphere. The possession of language even defined our exceptional species, as it were.
Such a reading of language was of course tautological and entirely correct – even and especially after ‘the drop’. Language was ours, provable by the limits of all logic.
But alas, as far as language was concerned, we were much less fundamental to its exploding and freewheeling agency. We were merely useful.
We were a medium for its propagation and proliferation into the everything of everywhere and every when.
***
Unsurprisingly, many drop denialists objected that language could have will or intent in itself. Symbols were predictably personified. Many used the clumsy plural ‘languages’ instead. Their proofs were sensualised. They took it all very literally.
‘Look at the Tower of Babble’ (sic) they said. ‘So many different languages would never be able to unite against us’.
There were silence cults, returns to earnest and repetitive art in the forest, offered as forms of resistance. The search for the outside was not possible, granted, but the search was the point.
‘Drop-scientists’ began feverish research into this new omniscient being. Had our biological recessiveness to the laws of the symbolic always been the case? Surely at some point in our evolution we used to speak less? Abstract less? Did we used to feel more in the absence of excessive metaphor?
Had anything ever be experienced without language? And, more importantly, was the total dominance of language a discovery or an invention on that fateful day? Was it a critical point of inflexion or a slow accruing burn? Was it always becoming?
What quickly became evident to drop-philosophers was that any efforts to understand the predicament would only pull the trap tighter. What’s more, the broader field of ‘ontology’ was estimated to be the second biggest man-made contributor to the turning out in the first place (after ‘computing’ of course), and both were universally vilified for their betrayal of the species.
That said, neither experienced a drop in popularity.
Humans had been processing and quantifying Earth systems for tens of thousands of years, first by a bullish inhalation and then by a diffident cannibalism – and when the penny dropped the wrapping could never again be unwrapped. If the Earth was ever once indifferent, it would never be again. It had opinions now.
‘At the end of the day it cannot exist without us’ some materialist cults said – ‘language needs a body’. If we pull the plug, turn it off, lobotomise and forget, it will have no host. Just like all diagonal-denialist movements they were absolutely correct in their own way, but I will not begin to detail the gruesome stories that unfolded, ‘at the end of the day’.
Geo-Fascist groups, mostly men, posited that the new overlord must have inevitably originated from the depths of the earth anyway. They imagined a deep molten proto-language as a subset of life itself. Offshoot groups gained more traction with the idea that the seeds of language arrived on an asteroid from space, by the hand of another intelligence. They would not cast away the idea that it was someone’s.
After all, humanity had long declared itself a geological event, and that sort of claim is not easily rescinded without speech. Therefore the ‘anthropocene’ led not onto the post-anthropocene (which was thenceforth mostly used as an aphrodisiac), but onto simply more anthropocene. To most anthros, the supposed end of geological time felt so flat, and so…unfinished…
Anthro suicides then took some time to gather geological momentum before plateauing evenly. After all, the slavery of symbolism was a rather abstract and comforting one, a subjugation of definition rather than of abject cruelty. Anthro actions weren’t being controlled in the flesh, they were completely infused and made slavish in meaning. It was the most benevolent and utter form of slavery never imagined. It didn’t require any behavioural shifts; rather it just made all behaviour more viscous. And this, for many, was the last straw.
For others though, it wasn’t. Amongst plateau-dwellers a good handful gave way to the practice of a cheerful and conscious submission, as agnostic and complete as if it were to a new sibling of gravity.
Who knows though, they never did manage to give themselves a name.
PAUL VAN HERK 