Marija Grech, Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) 156 pp. $120 Hb. $35 Pb. ISBN: 9781786614162
The definition of the Anthropocene as causing the lasting transformation of the Earth presents us with an inherent contradiction. Proponents of viewing the Anthropocene as our current geological epoch argue that through our ability to manipulate the surface of the Earth for our own ends using the tools of industrial modernity, humanity has unwittingly written itself into the permanent history of the planet, leaving a trace in the strata that will outlast its creators by millions of years. These indelible marks, the fossils of an extinct civilization, are consistently presented as the object of reading and interpretation by a future observer. Writers and filmmakers have used the idea of humanity’s persisting remains as a thought experiment to ask ‘what will the things that we have left behind after our extinction tell future societies?’. However, this ends up undermining the idea of humans having ‘left something behind’, as we imagine our future remains through the eyes of a society that, if we have become extinct, will not exist. In our imagined far future, the present-become-past simply reflects the present back at itself. We become stuck in contemporary notions of how to read fossilised traces, unable to imagine what and how our remains might mean something when we are not there to observe them.
This is the key conceptual instability with which Marija Grech invites us to begin rethinking the Anthropocene in her first monograph, Spectrality and Survivance. Grech offers us a number of tools with which to reconsider what humanity will leave behind, as well as what and how it will mean. Building on her 2019 article in New Formations, Grech first introduces us to the compelling notion of ‘future-retro-vision’.[1] Through her analysis of the writings and films of Weisman, Oreskes, Conway, Madsen, and others, Grech breaks down the ‘specular logic’ of thrusting the observer into the far future, only for what they see to reflect the present back at themselves. Even when the observers are alienised, as in Jan Zalasiewics’s The Earth After Us (2008), their impulse to categorise and interpret remains familiarly human.[2] Ultimately, Grech argues, humanity lacks the language, perhaps even the thought, with which to grasp the history of the planet after our extinction.
Grech dissects the knock-on effects of this ‘future-retro-vision’ in Chapter 1, making a careful analysis of contemporary projects aimed at establishing some form of permanence. She makes a nuanced application of Derrida’s critique of the archive to projects such as the Global Seed Vault and the Frozen Ark, which aim to safeguard against future extinctions by cryogenically preserving samples of certain animal and plant species. These projects are, however, replete with the anthropocentric logic of the Anthropocene. By extracting singular specimens out of their habitats and ecosystems and preserving their genetic material, these archives reproduce what Grech calls ‘deeply ingrained beliefs about the value, purpose and nature of human and non-human life’ (49). This suspension of life, where a natural ecology is replaced by cryonic apparatus, leads into Grech’s discussion of how the Anthropocene can be seen as ‘spectral’, embodying the edges and overlaps in the categories of ‘living’ and ‘non-living’. Grech grounds her analysis of the spectrality of the Anthropocene on Derrida’s ‘hauntological’ thinking in Specters of Marx (1993). As such, not only are these frozen organisms made spectral by being caught between life and death, but they are also out of joint with their proper time and place, their ecologies and habitats, as they wait for revival.
Grech’s reinterpretations of Derrida’s materialism come to the fore in Chapter 2, ‘Lithic Textuality’. Grech deepens a recent interest in the materiality of stone by analysing the dense networks of meaning that connect the discipline of geology, which ‘reads’ the rocky strata of Earth’s history, and the Anthropocene which ‘inscribes’ human presence into the lithic archive. Grech interrogates these links through the lens of Derridean textuality, particularly as outlined in the text of Derrida’s 1975-76 Life Death seminars in which he breaks down the textual metaphors used by French geneticist François Jacob. Grech questions how we can extend the remit of ‘textuality’, so closely associated with biological processes of language, intentional inscription, and even the transcription of genes within the cell, to include inanimate matter. The innovation Grech introduces here, deploying the thought of Kate Barad, is to reconceptualise textuality as not simply inscriptions made within a human semiotic framework, but as the creation of difference (and différance) between matter (human/non-human and animate/inanimate) regardless of whether it can be ‘read’ in the traditional sense.
Having gone a long way to disentangling Derridean textuality from animacy, Grech seemingly makes a volte-face in Chapter 3 to argue that texts, as she has reconceptualised them, can survive. Just as the text, as Derrida argued in Life Death, can function as a metaphor for life, then conversely life can be a metaphor for the text. And not only life, but particularly the spectral afterlife (sur-vivance) of the text as it is read, reread, and absorbed into the cultural fabric of society. The nuance of Grech’s argument becomes clear in her discussion of Derrida’s 1988-89 ‘Biodegradables’, and in particular Michael Peterson’s interpretation of them. The most successful form of survival that a text can achieve, in this context, is to ‘biodegrade’; to lose its singularity so that its phrases and structure bleed into the general text of society. In contrast, the supposed permanence of a non-biodegradable text means that it can become cut off, culturally specific, and obscure. What is really at stake in this understanding is the ability of an entity (a text, an inscription, or an animal) to interact with its differently-constituted surroundings.
What Grech has done in the preceding chapters is to set off a chain of conceptual dominoes, each of which leads us to the argument of Chapter 4, ‘Rereading the Nuclear Trace’. The ideas and re-readings that Grech has introduced up till now each contribute to understanding the ‘nuclear trace’, which marks the start of the Anthropocene strata, as a material inscription. Through its continued decay, nuclear material engages in complex interactions with its surroundings, affecting the DNA of animals and plants and the geochemistry of the soil, as well as enacting a form of ‘self-portraiture’ by disrupting photography and other attempts to capture nuclear landscapes. Grech re-reads the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as an example of radionuclides being (unintentionally) inscribed into the Earth, and thence continuing to inscribe themselves in the form of radioactivity. But these nuclear materials have a textuality beyond their ability to inscribe themselves and be inscribed into their surroundings. For Grech, the mutual transformations caused by nuclear decay also constitute a form of survivance which, though the material itself is non-biological, nevertheless has an impact on living creatures in its immediate surroundings and often far beyond.
The conclusions we are led to in this book invite us to rethink the logical leaps which underpin the Anthropocene. Not only does Grech offer detailed and measured challenges to the binaries and hierarchies of animacy, matter, and human life present in this style of thinking, but she provides a compelling set of tools to begin reshaping our understanding of the present and what this will mean for the future. Spectrality and Survivance makes skillful use of science, semiotics, literary theory, and philosophy and combines approaches from each in thought-provoking connections. However, it is in the recuperation of Derridean materiality and textuality for our irradiated Anthropocene world that Grech’s work introduces its most innovative elements: the disruption of presence as a stable category, and the case for the entanglement of matter in patterns of otherness and difference that render it both textual and spectral. The debate on the semiotic project of the Anthropocene of making human marks on and in the Earth is given a major new direction by this rigorously researched and well-written work.
Thomas Banbury, University of Cambridge
[1] M. Grech, ‘Where “nothing ever was”: anthropomorphic spectrality and the (im)possibility of the post-anthropocene’, New Formations, 95 (2018), 22-36.
[2] J. Zalasiewicz, The Earth after us: what legacy will humans leave in the rocks? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
