C1. A Giga-Annum of Genealogy

Philosophical genealogy has lately been defined as the unveiling of ‘causes masquerading as reasons’.1 It works to reveal that those beliefs that we think depend upon edifying reasons in fact depend upon contingent causes, unveiling unaccountabilities in the structure of belief. Thus one may be seen to hold a particular belief not on account of deliberative ratiocination, but as a result of some accident of background or upbringing. (As Robert Brandom recounts, for Freud the latter would be something to do with the Oedipal drama, for Marx the effect of economic structures, and so forth).

At least, this characterises classical genealogy, as practised by what Brandom calls the ‘great unmaskers of the nineteenth century’. Classical genealogy works to reveal local unaccountabilities within the edifice of belief. In both Freud and Marx, suspicion bottoms out in a privileged register, and the genealogical endeavour is constrained to specific ‘vocabularies’ (i.e., psychology or economics). In both cases it thus remains, in many respects, a rational enterprise: the critique of supposedly rational beliefs doesn’t do away with rational belief as such. Despite critiquing reason, in classical genealogy the practice of suspicion remains beholden to the better reason and to the rational: it unmasks local arrogations in order to secure greater global accountability.

The strain of genealogy entreated here, however, is no mere question of ‘causes masquerading as reasons’, but very soon becomes a matter of tectonics parading as reasons. In this hypergenealogy, the liquidation of deliberations, reasons, and justifications is no longer constrained to specific vocabularies, but is generalized across the entire edifice. By definition, this does away with even the residual fealty to rational order retained by classical genealogy. Dragged across the thorny brakes and fenny-boggs of its own errant history, reason—that cozening ignis fatuus of the mind—is plunged headlong into doubt’s boundless sea. Hypergenealogy rejects all accountability, and thus all criteria of selectivity in our representations of an objective world—encouraging instead a libertine semantic irresponsibility. It is genealogy on steroids. For genealogically revealing everything that we think and do as utter arrogation is necessarily recursive. It cannot but also apply itself to itself. Hypergenealogizing therefore doesn’t generate claims that are ever more just (for, by its own lights, there can be no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ claims), it just enjoins the generation of ever more profligate, ever more exquisitely arrogated, claims. There can no longer be better or worse claims, only more. Here, boundlessness kicks into productivity: doubt becomes an orgiastic agnoseology, selectivity is duly suspended, and arrogation careens towards force rather than fallacy: a power to pullulate in muscular wrong-mindedness rather than an eradicable error or an avenue of tendentious deselection. Genealogy on steroids tends toward conceptual wantonness, semantic lasciviousness. What ensues is a voluptuousness of vocabularies: a mangling of target domains—from phonetics to rheology, from psychology to volcanology—that any right-minded thinker would consider distinct. ‘Suspicion’ is bent inward onto itself, spiralling into superlation.2

From the perspective of right-minded reason, this is gross impiety. Yet, for many of the thinkers explored below, pollent superlation—rather than prudent suspicion—offers the promise of reconciling human experience with the enormities (in both senses of the term) of natural history. Instead of being responsible to an object=X, and thus having a world in view, superlation recaptures the ontogenetic dimension of enormous historicity, and forges the world anew. Ontogenesis, after all, has never itself been ‘suspicious’ in its gigantism. This is the promise of recapitulation: to redefine ‘concept-mongering’ not as a representational practice held accountable by natural history as a set object domain, but as natural history in the making. To be libertine is, in a sense, to reiterate the forces that made you: to allow graphism to once again reassume its proper place amongst the productives, to allow thought of the world to become a worldmaker. What could be more historical than creation?

And so, philosophic assiduity be damned, ‘fill me from the crown to the toe topfull’ with impious enormity. Supererogation and suspicion pushed aside, this book explores where, and how far, certain (arguably wrong-minded) thinkers have been able to travel along the twisted path of a genealogy that isn’t suspicious of the winding relation between planet and person but, rather, revisits (and in some instances reignites) the superlative dimensions of this filiation. This twisted path, again and again, turns out to be precisely that line from ‘crown’ to ‘toe’: the vertical axis of the body and its bony ledger, the spinal column. This is because, for a nature with a history, an anatomy is just a memory: and we have had spines for as long as we’ve had brains. Can it be a coincidence that so many thinkers have been drawn to a certain heady admixture of these notions— a theoretical superlation that has only lately been christened ‘Spinal Catastrophism’?

The chief contemporary exponent of this hypergenealogical heresy is the notorious Professor Daniel Charles Barker. Yet, as we shall see, in incorporating Spinal Catastrophism into his ‘Geocosmic Theory of Trauma’, Barker drew upon a rich history. Before we explore its wealth of delirious superlations, however, it will pay to establish the philosophical stakes involved in the questions Barker and others drew upon. What exactly is involved in the relation between person and planet?

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