Arche-Cinema and the Politics of Extinction Available to Purchase

This essay places Bernard Stiegler's conception of arche-cinema in contact with the era of climate change and the impasse that it presents to the American Left today. It views Stiegler's thought as a post-anthropocene writing project yet asks whether the “proletarianization of the senses” it battles has not been irreversibly accomplished in last man culture and the disaffected society of hyperindustrial ecocide. Stiegler's foremost tool for engaging this endgame—his brilliant deployment of Gilbert Simondon (supplemented by an effaced Jacques Derrida)—might, in this case, be suspended: for the latter keeps open the promise of a “transindividuated,” adoptive community or we, which can reset care, attention, the long term, and advance new technologies of the spirit. One must turn instead to the darker side of Stiegler's thought, literally in the cave before the artifice and projection of “light,” which are the hypomnemata, or inscriptions, themselves. The progressivist and utopist styles, and weak messianism, which defined twentieth-century critical projects, themselves fueled the ecocidal trajectory. Any future war over inscriptions, the last perimeters of which bots now probe, is forecast in the two types of “climate change” cinema one finds today. At the point where “cinema” completes a trajectory that started, for Stiegler, in the cave paintings, we not only find ourselves delivered to a disarticulated biosphere and ecocidal acceleration, but return to arche-cinema to disperse how the “senses” themselves have been engineered in what can be called the cin-anthropocene era. Using Stiegler's opposition between a cinema of stereotypes and one of traumatypes, I trace how this might be applied to what I call a cinematic politics of extinction in today's “consciousness industry.”