Years after Postmodern Geology and Petrology for Poets extended the genre of Sokalist Realism, along comes another PoMo journal, Society and Space , that "seeks to push the boundaries of theoretical debate and maintains a commitment to considering the political and social justice imperatives of research and theory", presenting the musings of soi-disant 'Geontologist' Elizabeth Povinelli, & a teaching aid whose coming philosophers of language have long dreaded--
EP: ... I coined the term “geontology” to indicate a disruption of a previous formation of power ...
Geontology asks, How do we understand the current formation of power when the figures that emerge from its mechanisms are something like the animist, desert, and the terrorist rather than the masturbating child, the hysterical woman, the perverse adult and the Malthusian couple?
KY: If we consider the Anthropocene as a monstrous geography (a kind of suicidal exhausting of earth materials), what kind of political reconsideration of geographical obligations might make an otherwise that is not-Anthropocene? ...
EP: I reserve the idea of the monster for that which decisively disrupts the current organization of the actual—...
Thus truth is not a proposition that has more or less referential coherence but an event that has more or less disruptive power...
The Geontological Column:
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Geontology asks, How do we understand the current formation of power when the figures that emerge from its mechanisms are something like the animist, desert, and the terrorist rather than the masturbating child, the hysterical woman, the perverse adult and the Malthusian couple?
KY: If we consider the Anthropocene as a monstrous geography (a kind of suicidal exhausting of earth materials), what kind of political reconsideration of geographical obligations might make an otherwise that is not-Anthropocene? ...
EP: I reserve the idea of the monster for that which decisively disrupts the current organization of the actual—...
Thus truth is not a proposition that has more or less referential coherence but an event that has more or less disruptive power...
Foucault, Deleuze, Braidotti, and others have noted that these threshold events are experienced at the time as monstrosities, as incomprehensible, as mad. The more event-full and more true it is, the more monstrous the event appears."
