The Interminable Catastrophe

A thick sheet of ice covers everything after a winter storm hits West Texas (Jonathan Cutrer/Flickr)

I have been thinking about the word ‘catastrophe’ for the greater part of the last eight years, and dedicated my 2019 dissertation to the question, which has now become my manuscript by the same title, “The Interminable Catastrophe.” I started this specific project on catastrophe several years ago after a workshop I attended in Johannesburg as a graduate student, during which I presented the early pieces of this project. Prior to this workshop I had been focused on the political demands made by Black people experiencing the weight of catastrophe. It was during that meeting that I realized the manner in which I had taken the word for granted. Afterwards, I re-dedicated the project to mapping a conceptual history of ‘catastrophe’, and have yet to look back. What I have offered in this piece is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Women’s and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto on January 20, 2021. In this brief introduction to my work is an opening, a thread that we can all pull at so that our planetary thinking might unravel completely: catastrophic thinking. 

The word ‘catastrophe’ is an aporia. Its use as an anchor for understanding our earth’s ecology has yet to account for what Kamau Brathwaite has given us as a prompt—the manner in which the catastrophic is ongoing, yet still tied to an ‘original’ detonation of sorts. And so, the enigma of catastrophe as a word, as a concept, lies in this tension—between a desire to evade the originary Event in favor of the repetition, while also recognizing the Event as it were. A puzzle. The question that anchors my manuscript, following Brathwaite’s insistence on both the ongoing presence of an original or inaugural moment and the repetition, constitutes the most pressing theory-problem 1 concerning catastrophe today. My book is both an attempt to frame our current conversations concerning our planetary life, while also refusing that very same conversation. This provocation also betrays a conceptual dilemma that underpins this contradiction: the fact that ‘catastrophe’ requires additional theorization before a response/a refusal of the terms of this conversation might be provided. All categories, no matter their intended use or purpose, contain conceptual histories that are internal to them, yet there remains a paucity of theoretical work on what this conceptual history of ‘catastrophe’ might be, and why it has remained relatively underproblematized as a concept or category? 

Indeed, part of the problem with our thinking concerning this theory-problem, is the manner in which liberal scientist formulations have remained relatively unchallenged. Cedric Robinson, in an essay titled “On the Liberal Theory of Knowledge and the Concept of Race,” wrote:

“The examples are legion in physical science and in social science. One does a little hand-jive, a little mechanical magic, produces an illusion and looks for uncritical acceptance and obedience from the audience. Scientific thought does not resolve mysteries so much as it defines them out of existence.”2

As such, my book project The Interminable Catastrophe writes against the claim that we need simply to believe science, or have better science, or better mechanics so that we might address the problem of our earth’s ecology and its assumed life-span. Without destabilizing our core assumptions about catastrophe, we run the risk of rendering theory inept for confronting this predicament, and equally run the risk of complicity with the overdetermination of empirical or social science interpretations and political offerings concerning what is essentially a problem for which we have yet to develop an adequate grammar. 

Even more recent, and, relatively creative theoretical attempts at this issue still do not address the theory-problem of catastrophe itself, leaving Anthropocene studies relatively unchallenged and bounded in its authoritative discursive and material sway over discussions of our planet’s life-span. The terms upon which we enter the fray of this predicament are very much the problem and the way towards an antidote (if one exists). We would need to unseat all manner of genre-thinking in order to move outside of this overdetermined frame, be it Man or the anthropogenic lens. Because of the durability of this ‘master script’ concerning our planetary presence, catastrophe is currently understood as one or a series of disastrous events, rather than as a symbolic/material/structural imposition or a foundational political concept in colonial modernity. Indeed, as Sylvia Wynter remarks, our refusal to de-link from our previous or pre-nuclear way of thinking, is causing us to drift towards unparalleled catastrophe. This would suggest that we might make our way out of this predicament by first enacting a break and subsequently, transformation, in our thinking, rather than simply emphasizing and over-determining both Man and periodization, which Anthropocene studies proscribes. 

In order to address the problems of our time, including that of our earth’s ecology and circulating discussions concerning ‘imminent disaster’, it is indispensable that we first develop a robust epistemological scaffolding for ‘catastrophe’ itself, not as Event, but as a political category or concept that offers an analytic for the manner in which people structure their political and social lives, akin to other foundational concepts in colonial modernity such as freedom, sovereignty, rights, etc. This requires us additionally to delink from our ‘prenuclear way of thinking’3 concerning our planet’s lifespan, i.e. delinking from the overdetermined biojudicial and econometric lenses that have been deployed to understand our quandary. Re-thinking catastrophe’s entire conceptual framework offers a way to puncture this epistemological barrier, which I argue, is the main obstacle to adequately addressing our relationship to our planet. In this project, I endeavor to respond to Brathwaite’s provocation by throwing into crisis the ‘catastrophic’ itself. 

In my forthcoming book, I argue that our current understanding of catastrophe is inadequate as a theoretical frame for considering how catastrophe operates in our contemporary moment(s). In particular, I consider how modern-day ecological emergencies in societies haunted by plantocratic social relations gesture towards a need to understand catastrophe as both a semiolinguistic imposition and a repeating structure tied to the inauguration of racial slavery and plantation modes of production. In this regard, I argue that catastrophe is a structural condition, and a way of life imposed as a form of political and social domination, beginning with the New World colonial encounter(s). 

To this end, I consider the present-day legacies of the early modern European theological and empiricist debates concerning ‘calamity’. I focus mainly on the writings/works of George Cuvier, Thomas Robert Malthus, and Charles Darwin, their bourgeois and theological preoccupation with ‘calamity’, and Black life post-Middle passage as the historical and epistemological hinge-point that transformed these discussions into ‘catastrophe’ proper. In my configuration of catastrophe, there are two main constitutive elements. The first is that of the ‘breathless numbers’ (per McKittrick) and ‘cruel mathematics’ of these debates concerning ‘calamity’. The second is that of fatal liberalisms and sovereign power, and the rise of governmentality as the antidote to ‘calamity’, particularly post-1492. Where these two paradigms meet is where the catastrophic stabilizes itself as a category and concept.4 

By ‘breathless numbers’ (McKittrick) and cruel mathematics (a term I borrowed from Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus5), I am referring to the quantification of human life (in particular Black life) as a matter of perfecting the numerical threshold between life and death, and the arithmetic logic applied to both the preservation and loss of life. This is further nuanced via the calculus that ratifies the massification of all aspects of human life—the allowance for margins of error in medical procedures, calculating the minimal caloric intake for the enslaved to labor another day, the exact number of meters below sea level before a place is considered unlivable or unsafe, or as Daina Berry writes in Price for Their Pound of Flesh6, the massification of all aspects of the enslaved African’s life/death cycle—these are all functions of what I call cruel mathematics imposed upon Black people. As opposed to biopolitics’ emphasis on control over prescribing forms of life, cruel mathematics works at the level of the bios-political7, or ways of life. Central to understanding cruel mathematics is what Sylvia Wynter calls a biocentric genre of the human8, which was inaugurated by the Darwinian rupture in planetary thinking, and the diffusion of the concept of natural selection and equally, that of dysselection. Early theological and empiricist debates concerning ‘calamity’ (in the tradition of George Cuvier, Charles Darwin, and Robert Malthus) as an intellectual formation relies intensely on this biocentric genre of the human and cruel mathematics, stemming from George Cuvier’s preoccupation with extinction as a predictive tool for the future of life on Earth9, to Darwin’s assertion that competition between life forms dictate a similar fate for life on earth, and of course,10 Malthus’ calculus regarding the importance of calamity for maintaining the earth’s delicate and ‘natural’ equilibrium.11 This tradition crystallized in the New World where Whiteness was codified as the future of the [human] species and Black/native/other became codified as that which gets ‘left behind’ in the earth’s ‘natural’ ecological thrust. Cruel mathematics, again, predicated on a logic of ‘natural scarcity’ (per Darwin and Malthus) and that of natural dysselection, means that it is simply a result of the earth’s ‘natural’ ecological formation that certain populations will have their needs met, while others will not, and, even further, these groups represent obstruction to the health and futurity of our planet.

The second constitutive element of my figuration of catastrophe, is that of fatal liberalisms and sovereign power. The logic(s) of sovereignty is fundamental to catastrophe, insofar as it is (in a similar manner as cruel mathematics) a mechanism which imposes, then normalizes, a violent foundation for our relationship to our planet, placing certain lives as a threat to the planet’s future (per anxieties concerning natural scarcity and calamity in Europe), and others as stewards or guardians of the planet. This occurs and is normalized via the extension of sovereign power (as either covenant per Hobbes, or exception per Schmitt and Agamben) into the colonial context, which occurred via domination in the form of land expropriation/dispossession, piecemeal and contradictory expressions of rights and arbitrary governmentality. Essentially, certain forms of human life are proscribed as harbingers of calamity and are therefore antagonistic to the future of the earth itself. The logics of ‘rule’ and governmentality are then offered as the antidote to the perpetual threat of calamity (as theorized by Cuvier, Darwin, and Malthus), and consists of a host of legal, normative, and discursive impositions on land and peoples, defined by both a ‘low hum’ and explosions of violence. In other words, these circulating discourses of calamity in the works of Cuvier (on extinction) and Malthus (on calamity and scarcity) in particular, instituted an underlying terrestrial relation in which Man is antagonistic to the earth and nature itself, and of course certain forms of life, seen as closer to nature’s ‘anteriority’ were part of this antagonism (and this anteriority of africans is expressed in cuvier’s writings on extinction as we know). The re-signification of the relation between Man and the earth as antagonistic, meant a need to impose a ‘corrected’ image of the earth upon both the landscape and social worlds; this correction was carried out in the colony. Nature (which, by cuvier’s logic concerning the elemental, the Indian and the African) was now Man’s enemy in the Schmittian sense, and violent territoriality and ‘rule’ was the antidote. Where these two paradigms meet (cruel mathematics and governmentality), in the colony, is where the catastrophic stabilizes itself as a category and concept.12 In the colonial situation, the logic of exception (per Schmitt and Agamben)13 is in fact the rule, throwing into crisis the assumption that at the heart of the sovereign tradition is a preservation of life—it is in fact the opposite that anchors the expression of sovereign power in general, and especially in the colonial context. As such, we cannot think of the nation-state outside of its inaugural function as a container for the catastrophic.

Let me offer now briefly a meditation on the first constitutive element of cruel mathematics. Writing in The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus wrote: “No code of ethics and no effort is justifiable in the face of the cruel mathematics which command our attention.”14 I have been enchanted by this quotation for many years now. Camus never goes on to define what these cruel mathematics might be, nor does he return to it. It is a footnote in his thinking yet it provides such an aperture for thinking about the question of the interminable, and the role that numbers play in our theory-problem and predicament. What are these cruel mathematics which command our attention? I want to offer my own extension of this verbiage, following the openings offered by Katherine McKittrick’s conception of ‘breathless numbers’ and Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi’s figuration of the ‘cruel arithmetic’ of BlackLife and the Black Test, and thread the needle backwards to the conversations which dictated early empiricist and theological debates concerning ‘calamity’, as well as the rise of capitalism, and the biocentric conception of the human (per Wynter), all of which might be aggregated into a meta-paradigm called cruel mathematics, one of two major pillars of my re-conception of catastrophe.

One such example is Cuvier’s writings and imprint on studies of extinction. Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe and Other Changes,15 is concerned with understanding the ecological ‘upheavals’ which have shaped the surface of the earth and its appearance, and more importantly, what the residuals of these upheavals tell us about civilizations of the past. Indeed, Cuvier forwards the argument that in order for ‘civilization’ to survive and establish itself, it must necessarily shed the ‘excess’ or unburden itself of the elements of its habitat that were opposed to this civilizational pull. Which laid the groundwork for the assumption that disastrous ecological events and their impacts on vulnerable populations,  is simply a function of the earth progressing along its natural ecological formation, or in other words, that the earth has embedded in its ecological life-span, a manner of ‘self-correction’—the Error being that of Black life itself. 

The biggest proponent of this claim was Thomas Robert Malthus, the founder of demography and the most important theorist of disaster in this early modern tradition. Malthus, by arguing for the link between scarcity, disaster, and the need to regulate ‘undesirables’, ushered in a paradigm that rendered mass loss of life a simple mathematical inevitability in the earth’s drive to preserve itself. Early theologians and empiricists held a deep obsession with the (inevitable) arrival of calamity due to the onset of ‘lax morals’, growing cities, and, as such, what they viewed as a ‘natural’ state of scarcity. The greatest proponent of the theory of natural scarcity was Thomas Robert Malthus, whose idea of scarcity hugely influenced Darwin’s theorizations of competition—that is, organisms compete over scarce resources and in so doing, the naturally fittest survive and continue to pass on their genetic information. Robert Malthus’ theory of scarcity argued that increases in the human population would outgrow increases in the means of subsistence (what he identified as the outpacing of human population’s geometric growth versus the ‘arithmetic’ growth of our means of subsistence).16 This means that in order for society to function, some people will receive or achieve their material and political needs and others will be denied. It is important to note that Malthus was both a cleric and economist (recall Wynter’s elucidation of the overrepresentation of Man1/Man2), and as such, there is a moral calculus that accompanies his economic determinations about resource scarcity. To begin, Malthus proposed that scarcity, though it leads to death and destruction, teaches virtuous behavior, and that the misery that accompanies scarcity is a benefit to the whole of society.

Malthus argued that with the progress of society re. medical care, food production, and shelter, led to increasing populations. For all of these positive advances in population growth, accompanied equally and opposing afflictions, which would ‘level out’ the world’s population. These afflictions included poverty, disease, war, and natural disasters. More importantly, these afflictions are limited to the lower classes of society—in other words, calamity (and I argue later in the text, catastrophe) is not a condition of life for the dominant classes of society because of their having achieved their status due to their assumed ‘virtuous’ and ‘un-wasteful behavior’

The earth is therefore made up of winners and losers—those who will have their needs met and those who will not. The manner in which human beings must avoid this type of calamity is through preventative measures which include abstaining from sex, sterilization of the lower classes (who lacked the virtue necessary to live within their means), and outlawing prostitution. The model for human restraint and ‘masterer of human scarcity’ (to quote Wynter) dovetailed with the rise of Man2 and helped render him cohesive as the highest expression of the Human Self. Wynter writes:

“This latter, as the new hero-figure who, by providing capital as the means of production of the then-new techno-Industrial system thereby serving to enable the mastering of the threat of the ostensibly empirical threat of “Natural Scarcity”, as put forward in the Malthusian-cum-Ricardo economic discourse, was now made to embody iconically the new bread-winning criterion of being that is indispensable to the class supremacy of the western, as well as the globally westernized, bourgeoisie. While if it were by their represented successful ‘mastering’ of such scarcity. . . “Mankind has always known want and the distress of being hard-pressed by nature, but the generalization of such experiences to the evaluation of reality as a whole” is linked to ‘a motif of modern intellectual history unknown in previous epochs[:]. . the [Malthusian] idea of overpopulation . . that the bourgeoisie legitimated the economic projection of capitalism, a logical corollary had also followed.”17

They key for Robert Malthus was the importance of moral restraint in easing the stresses of ongoing affliction due to resource scarcity.  \Malthus was in fact, disciplining the world into a paradigm that prescribed a ‘government of life’ (per Foucault), which laid the foundations for the obsessive fascination with population that informs ‘biopolitics’ in our modern epoch. For Malthus, the originary relationship between human beings and the earth is that of disequilibrium—the purpose of human activity in the sciences is to ultimately redress this disequilibrium. The irrevocable conjoinment of population as a paradigm to ‘ills’ such as poverty, promiscuity, and ‘scarcity’ is in no uncertain terms, were foundational for colonial expansion in the Americas as it was seen as a geometric increase in human biospheric living space, resources, and a solution to the ‘moral ills’ of those unvirtuous segments of society upon whom calamity would indefinitely fall. Colonial expansion managed, in the Malthusian frame, to remove the calamitous elements of society from plain view. In the ‘winners and losers’ paradigm of Malthus’ theorization, Black people are also hidden from plain view. The ‘losers’ in Malthus’ paradigm was a collection of the non-virtuous (poor, disabled, promiscuous, and ‘unproductive’/nonlaboring). The colony and Black people, (as Wynter remarks reminds us), are already inscribed within a deficit model, and are as a result, always already ‘losers’ and deserving of calamity. The outcome of this natural scarcity is on the one hand, series’ of laws (including Poor laws) and policies meant to condemn the poor and ‘undesireables’, yet natural scarcity also had an impact on the crystallization of the ‘archipelago of Human Otherness’ vis-à-vis Black people, who remained unthought by Malthus, despite making up the bedrock upon which such claims could be made. Sylvia Wynter writes:

“While it will be in the lineaments of the new criteria defining of Man2, in the terms of this new descriptive statement, that the lineaments of its negative Human Others are also already outlined. Seeing that if at one level Man2 is now defined as a jobholding Breadwinner, and even more optimally, as a successful “masterer of Natural Scarcity” (Investor, or capital accumulator), what might be called the archipelago of its modes of Human Otherness can no longer be defined in the terms of the interned Mad, the interned “Indian,” the enslaved “Negro” in which it had been earlier defined. Instead, the new descriptive statement of the human will call for its archipelago of Human Otherness to be peopled by a new category, one now comprised of the jobless, the homeless, the Poor, the systemically made jobless and criminalized—of the “underdeveloped”—all as the category of the economically damnés (Fanon 1963), rather than, as before, of the politically condemned. With the result that if inside Europe, it will be the Poor who will be made to reoccupy the earlier proscribed interned places of the Leper and the Mad, in the Euro-Americas, it is the freed Negro, together with the Indians interned in reservations, or as peons on haciendas, who will now be interned in the new institution of Poverty/Joblessness. 

That is, in an institution now made to actualize the idea of the human overcome by Natural Scarcity, and therefore in the process of being swept away by Malthus’s “iron laws of nature,” because unable, as the regular job- holding Breadwinners and Investors are so clearly able to do, to master the “ill” of this scarcity.”18

What this newly instituted archipelago of Human Otherness accomplished was the transmission of the logic of natural scarcity globally, engulfing and encamping the global Damnés in their narratively and materially condemned status. This Malthusian-Ricardian bind (per Wynter) is part of the theological-cum-empirical turn of homoeconomicus, yet the logic of natural scarcity is also coeval with Enlightenment writings against the empirical turn in philosophy, revealing the manner in which cruel mathematics is not bound by Enlightenment divides between transcendentalism and empiricism.

I would also like to use this frame to consider how this logic of natural scarcity was of course stabilized by the systems of valuation rendered possible by slavery. As Katherine McKittrick writes, “The slave’s status as object-commodity, or purely economic cargo, reveals that a black archival presence not only enumerates the dead and dying, but also acts as an origin story. This is where we begin, this is where historic blackness comes from: the list, the breathless numbers, the absolutely economic, the economics of the unliving.”19   

Walcott and Abdillahi, in their conceptualization of the ‘Black Test’, echo this sentiment in their critique of the ‘cruel arithmetics’ of BlackLife.20 They write:

“Indeed, we are suggesting that BlackLife seems to be summed up in a cruel arithmetics that position us as both a cost and a deficit simultaneously. These arithmetics are both material and otherwise. The arithmetics of BlackLife is a cruel calculation, hinted at above in the previous chapters, that has its corollary in both debasement of BlackLife and the commodification of it at the same time. . .Black people are required to count all kinds of things: the numbers of our deaths, the first to accomplish this or that, and so on. These forms of arithmetic that frame BlackLife are strange and marvelous simultaneously.”21

In Black Metamorphosis, Sylvia Wynter considers the methods of valuation that activated the transformation of the African into a ‘negro’ or commodity for plantation production, via the pieza system, which underpinned slavery as the nucleus of capitalism as a world-system. She writes:

“The slave was sold in the New World as a pieza—a piece. A pieza was the equivalent, for example, of a ‘count’ bunch of bananas—a count bunch of bananas is a stem of nine hands or more and this is the norm. A stem of six hands, for example, ‘would count as a quarter bunch…the Amount of stems of banana is therefore more than the amount of bunches.’ So with the African, the pieza was the norm. The norm was a man who represented the largest possible amount of labor power. He had to be above average height, without physical defect, with good teeth, and between thirty to thirty-five years, the years in which he had most labor to give. Others who did not attain these qualifications had to be added together to make up a pieza. Three boys or girls between eight and fifteen would make up two pieces. Between four and eight years old, two boys or girls made up one. Between thirty-five to forty, when physical powers were waning, two made up one. Over forty they were sold as ‘refuse’ at cut rate prices….”22

Slave merchants, according to Wynter, used this calculation in order to exchange manufactured goods for negros, or the commodity produced by ‘negrification’, the negro-pieza, in order to account for the asymmetry in exchange metric between wage labor and slave labor (via the sublation of slave labor with commodity valuation). As the trade in enslaved Africans developed over time, Wynter describes a transformation in the system of valuation, which developed to account for this increase, referred to as the ‘ounce trade’, a device which, “consisted in paying ‘in kind’ for the gold ounces that the Europeans owed for slaves, but counting the goods in ‘ounce trade’ i.e. with an average one hundred percent markup.”23  

Though this explanation may seem pedantic, Sylvia Wynter reminds us of the importance of understanding systems of exchange and valuation at the core of the Atlantic slave economy.

Consider this testimony from Charles Malenfant, a former plantation manager in St. Domingue, who remarked (on the rationale of the plantation overseer):

“His main aim is to send the owner in France the maximum revenue possible. The owner scarcely gives a thought to what is happening to the slaves on his estate. He puts himself in the hand of a man who sends him enormous sums . . . A new attorney wants to do better than his predecessor and, at the same time, get rich quickly himself. He therefore keeps expenditure to a minimum and works the slaves in a way that, in a few years, makes his fortune but destroys the work-force. Fifty new slaves are needed. The owner protests against such an expense but soon calms down . . . it’s on credit.”24 

McKittrick also notes that counting was fundamental to the manner in which violence and punishment were understood and practiced. She writes:

“Punishment during slavery was intimately linked to counting; lashings are the soundtrack to slavery, four, ten fifty, one hundred, two hundred. . . to be sure, the body, the lashings, the counting, culminates to affirm crass and familiar itemization, the corporeal consequences of rational reason: counting the cracks discloses measurable discipline.”25 

And this, in the end, is the heart of the logic of cruel mathematics—that it is hidden in plain sight, that it creates and maintains catastrophe as a way of life—a bios political rather than biopolitical, circulating in the web of plantocratic social relations and fundamental to the diffusion of the plantation’s modes of being into our present moment(s). The fact of cruel mathematics, and the subsequent assertion that it embeds catastrophe in the everyday lives of Black people, lays the groundwork for its heightened articulation during acute disaster scenarios (such as Hurricane Katrina, and the Earthquake in Haiti in 2010). It is a logic that operates on multiple registers, in the low hum of the brutal calculi of everyday life for the enslaved, and in the hyperbolic expressions of encampment/incarceration, scarcity driven disaster management, and racial paranoia (fear of racial ‘swamping’ etc.) during ecological disasters, as we saw after Hurricane Katrina. 

As McKittrick remarks, “the death toll becomes the source.”26 

Both cruel mathematics and violent/fatal liberalisms in the form of ‘rule’ and governmentality offer a grammar for considering the material expressions of the catastrophic. More importantly, both of these constitutive elements of catastrophe first and foremost introduce and stabilize a narrative condemnation, clearing a terrain in which the material violences can make themselves apparent and durable. In her open letter titled, “N.H.I.: No Humans Involved,” Sylvia Wynter remarked, “The Starving ‘fellah,’ (or the jobless inner city N.H.I., the global new poor, or les damnés) Fanon pointed out, does not have to inquire into the truth. They are the truth. It is we who institute this ‘truth.’” 

This narrative condemnation permits the material and structural violations which render Black people ecological ‘excess’ in the face of calamity and cruel mathematics, re-signified the category of the wolf/enemy to that of the native, which permits governmentality (which is always already violent), and multivalently violent expressions of sovereign power. We must undo our narratively condemned status if we are to break open the ‘bad infinity’27 of the catastrophic.

To conclude this preamble, I find it useful to restate the pressing need to meditate on the meaning of the catastrophic, as it stems from the question of who we are, and what possibility of a future there is for us.28 Early modern theologians and Darwinists would have us believe that we are headed on a collision course towards the end of the species. If we consider: 1) how the social life of the plantation and its attendant logics of cruel mathematics and fatal liberalisms. Catastrophe propels itself in its repetitions because of its inability to signal The End in a way that is complete or totalizing, as my correlation of the ‘bad infinity’ suggests. Instead, catastrophe, in its presence as the connective tissue of everyday plantocratic life, also propels Black people in these spaces to think differently, to do differently, which reveals an additional contradiction in the logic of catastrophe—in its failure to bring about the End, occasions for ‘speaking’29 and for intervening in our social and political conditions emerge. This is not to conflate catastrophe with freedom itself, or to suggest that one needs the catastrophic in order to think/do differently. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the catastrophe’s incomplete nature, and its incompleteness is what permits these possibilities to emerge and take hold. More importantly, under the thumb of the catastrophic, the key political consideration is, in fact, a social one, concerned with the predicament of how we all might live together on this planet, in the face of terrible loss.

I would be remiss if I were to ignore the recent consolidation of intellectual deliberations regarding the Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene, which offers as its root the Greek anthropos, refers to our current ecological epoch, which is characterized by its inauguration due to human intervention in the earth’s natural processes during the time of industrialization.30 What makes the Anthropocene distinct as an ecological epoch is the fact that one of its defining features is the constant presence of crisis (due to climate change). First, this manner of framing our ecological predicament simply re-inscribes Man as the core category of analysis and investigation.31 I find it more productive for my own intellectual and ethical commitments to simply offer a telling of the story of catastrophe itself, what it’s early and modern characteristics are, how it forced itself upon the New World, what it can tell us about plantation life/modes of being, and how these modes of being are remapped in our contemporary moment(s). What I am offering is a way out of our tendency to use the term as an ahistorical or transhistorical category (since as we know, there are no such categories) and a way of thinking about catastrophe contrapuntally with Black radical thought, as we endeavor to discern how to make life possible outside of anthropogenic frame and against circulating discussions of ‘imminent disaster’. 

Considerable and important work has been done to stretch the anthropogenic lens, including the capitalocene, plantationocene, or more recently, Kathryn Yussof’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, a text which has emerged as a decisive intervention in discussions concerning our planetary existence. Yussof argues that terming the Anthropocene a ‘geologic’ moment renders invisible the forces which made it possible—slavery, colonialism, and centuries-long dispossession of indigenous populations globally.32 Insisting that “no geology is neutral,” Yussof insists that the Anthropocene offers an opportunity to consider what constitutes ‘human activity’ in our geologic frame, and how anti-Blackness evacuates slavery and colonialism from that intervention.33 Indeed, Yussof provides a necessary corrective in addressing the manner in which black people have been central to the project of our earth’s ecological life from the very ‘beginning,’ in her adroit assertion that “the racial categorization of Blackness shares its natality with mining the new world.”34 

In the end, even a Black Anthropocene as Yussof suggests, recast as a site of refusal via these insurgent geologies, still concedes to the anthropogenic lens, which in the end stabilizes the authority of the anthropogenic frame. The Interminable Catastrophe poses a few questions to this figurative stretching of the anthropogenic frame—can we now, having seen the limit, having tugged at it and pressed up against it, cross the threshold to the outside of the anthropocenic reference point? Can we reach for an autonomous frame that is connected but still outside? Have we exhausted the anthropocenic lens? Can we move outside of the question of the anthropos while still maintaining an interrogation of Man’s overrepresentation? The Interminable Catastrophe reaches for an autonomous frame (catastrophe) outside of the theoretical grasp of the Anthropocene, in an attempt to capture the discursive and material fluvia which exceeds the constitutive limits of the anthropocenic lens. The space on the other side of the limit of the anthropogenic lens, even a Black one, is where the catastrophic resides, and I am reaching, tugging, straining for it.

The Interminable:

The question that haunts this entire manuscript, is, “how do we come to think of the notion of the ‘interminable’ as it relates to the catastrophic or calamitous?” It is here that I look to combine already available notions of sequencing and perpetuity in order to offer my own figuration of ‘interminability’, which, ultimately, is a paradigm linked to these already-existing expressions, but distinct insofar as it can and must be interrupted. Let us consider for a moment, Hegel’s notion of ‘infinity’, which undergirds much of Western episteme’s understanding of ‘continuity’ and perpetuity. Hegel’s notion of the infinite can be divided into the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (the ‘bad’ infinity will be the main preoccupation here). In his consideration of the Bad Infinity in his text Science of Logic, Hegel points first to a stanza in a poem which illustrates his logic:

I heap up monstrous numbers,

Pile millions upon millions,

I put aeon upon aeon and world upon world,

And when from that awful height

Reeling, again I seek thee,

All the might of number increased a thousandfold

Is still not a fragment of thee.

I remove them and thou liest wholly before me.35

This is our introduction into his concept of the Bad Infinity. What this poem demonstrates for Hegel, is the manner in which understanding the infinite as a ‘piling up of numbers’ reveals that the very attempt at the infinite is futile. He explains this expression of the infinite as a series, which each step appearing to take us closer towards infinity. This progression is fundamentally negated, because we are no closer to infinity at all, or to put it otherwise, we never arrive at a point in which infinity is more visible or nearer to us (as the poem reveals). In this way, the infinite is negated by the finite, and as a result, this particular conceptualization of the infinite, is comprised of a contradiction insofar as it always contains the finite within it. This understanding of the infinite, in which it sets itself over and against the finite, is referred to by Hegel as the ‘spurious’ or ‘bad’ infinite. Ultimately, for Hegel, the Bad Infinity is one that is simply open-ended. 

In his essay titled, “Terminality—the Ticking,” Abou Ferman theorizes the question of terminality within the framework of the Doomsday device, or, rather, Midnight on the Clock, which recalls Derrida’s argument concerning the invention of clock Time as an interruption of life itself.36 He writes: 

“The abstractions of the end—too slow, too vast to be experienced in the present—are transformed into legible futures through the repetition of probabilities, charts, statistics, and temporal frames in which experts produce ever more threatening scenarios with mounting stakes. What was supposed to happen in 2050 is already happening. Climate change effects are worse than expected. . .This is the logic of terminality: A threat is looming over all of humanity, and if humanity is to be saved, we can’t be caught up in parochial issues! We must do everything we can to save our unique species, the only conscious life form in an empty universe—even if saving “humans” means having to save a few rich Europeans or Americans, for after all they too are part of our species.”37

Abou Ferman is pointing to an issue in our thinking and time-sense, that in our anticipation of ‘midnight’ (or the terminal) we fail to understand that the terminal is already here, defining our relationship to terminality’s other—interminability or repetition. And so, my figuration of interminability is marked by this contradiction in the same manner that the Bad Infinity is—the interminable sets itself over and against the terminal, embedding the End Point inside each point in this series while also leading to the ‘piling up’ of time—over and over. In the introduction to this book, I noted that catastrophe is defined by a stubborn contradiction—of its assumption as a harbinger of the End while also failing to ever bring about the End. This contradiction, in which the End is embedded in and defines the interminable catastrophe, is what I am signaling via this Bad Infinity analogy. Where Hegel’s understanding of the Bad Infinity—and its manner of informing my understanding of interminability—must be exceeded, is in the inevitability of these repetitions. What I mean to suggest is the Bad Infinity does not adequately theorize the other constitutive element against which a chain or series is defined—that of the interruption. And so, my conception of the interminable is also defined by its propensity for interruption, for being thrown off course, its vulnerability via attempts to break the meter, to re-invoke Kamau Brathwaite. 

To put it otherwise, what if we forego this ‘anticipatory language’ (to borrow from McKittrick)38, of ‘midnight on the clock’, of time running out, of the end on a near horizon, an instead recognize that the we inhabit the end in every repetition, that the end is all around us, would the panic be replaced by another kind of action or thinking? If we were to understand that we don’t have to wait for the end, but that it’s the very presence of the end which propels the repetition? 

The other key feature for the interminable is that of the interruption. Nothing, not capitalism, not climate change—nothing is an historical inevitability, things are always vulnerable to interruption. And so, my conception of the interminable is also defined by its propensity for interruption, for being thrown off course, its vulnerability via attempts to break the meter, to re-invoke Kamau Brathwaite. Against the breathless numbers, the cruel mathematics, the piling up of numbers, and the assumed unbreakability of the interminable, the meter breaks. 

The Pentameter Breaks: A Word for Les Damnés 

If it is the case that the catastrophic is at the very first moment, a narrative condemnation via circulating considerations of calamity and governmentality/rule, then the question remains as to what it means to break with the pentameter, or rather, to break with the rhythm and expression of the catastrophic? Kamau Brathwaite has offered the opening for considering the catastrophic differently, and has given us a way out as well. In his essay, a “History of the Voice,” Brathwaite writes: 

“Over in the New World, the Americans . . . tried to bridge or to break the pentameter through a cosmic movement, a large movement of sound. . . the hurricane does not roar in pentameters. And that’s the problem: how do you get a rhythm which approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience?”39 

This is the refrain which we must repeat, as a call and a response to our current predicament: how do you get a rhythm which approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience? 

As McKittrick asks us, “What if we trust the lies . . . and begin to count it all out differently. . .”40 Indeed, what if we trusted the lies, as McKittrick asserts? What if we, taking our queue from Saidiya Hartman, leave ourselves no other choice but to refuse the categories given to us?41 This is the main ethical impulse of the interminable catastrophe, which throws assumed categories into crisis so that we might refuse them. 

Breaking with the world and the Word so that we may begin again (and again) necessarily means narrating them anew, against the narrative condemnation of the catastrophic. Since catastrophe itself, rather than being natural, is a phenomenon written onto Black life due to the enduring social life of the plantation, the second half of my book engages in those persistent efforts of Black people to break with the meter, the governing text, or the assumed terrain of the catastrophic. I can discuss in the q and a, I consider how the aesthetic mediations of Black people in Louisiana and Haiti give us these persistent breaks with the meter of the catastrophic. But for now, I have outlined the meaning of catastrophe. And so I end by repeating the question, “What if we count it out differently?” Indeed, another story awaits us. 

  1. David Scott, The Black Jacobins Reader, “Theory of Haiti”.
  2. Cedric Robinson, “On the Liberal Theory of Knowledge and the Concept of Race” (unpublished).
  3. Katherine McKittrick and Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 2-73.
  4. It is important that I clarify what catastrophe is not (in my estimation). It is not the arrival/fallout of a particular ecological Event, such as an earthquake or hurricane. For these events, I use the term ‘disaster,’ which is one of the ways in which catastrophe makes itself apparent/visible.
  5. Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays, by Albert Camus (New York, NY: Everyman’s Library, 2004), 505.
  6. Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (United States: Random House, 2018).
  7. Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom (Hanover, New Hamp.: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 18.
  8. Katherine McKittrick and Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?”, 16.
  9. Georges Cuvier and Ian Johnston, Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe and on the Changes Which They Have Produced in the Animal Kingdom (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources, 2009).
  10. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006).
  11. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5.
  12. It is important that I clarify what catastrophe is not (in my estimation). It is not the arrival/fallout of a particular ecological Event, such as an earthquake or hurricane. For these events, I use the term ‘disaster,’ which is one of the ways in which catastrophe makes itself apparent/visible.
  13. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 12;  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 13.
  14. Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays, by Albert Camus (New York, NY: Everyman’s Library, 2004), 505.
  15. Georges Cuvier and Ian Johnston, Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe and on the Changes Which They Have Produced in the Animal Kingdom (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources, 2009).
  16. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 1992).
  17. Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being of Desetre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in A Companion to African-American Studies, ed. Lewis Gordon (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), 128.
  18. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 321.
  19. Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” 17.
  20. Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdullahi, Black Life: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom (Toronto: Arbiter Ring Publishing, 2019), 95.
  21. Ibid.
  22. Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 29.
  23. Ibid, 32.
  24.  David Patrick Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 6.
  25. Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” 23.
  26. Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” 17.
  27. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic (New York: Routledge, 2012).
  28. There would first need to be an adequate theorization of the referent-we, per Wynter.
  29. George Lamming, “The Occasion for Speaking,” in The Pleasures of Exile (London: M. Joseph, 1960).
  30. Jeremy Davies, Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
  31. Hortense Spillers, “The Anthropocene” (lecture, Roundtable on African Critical Theory, University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, August 2017).
  32.  Kathryn Yussof, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
  33. Ibid.
  34. Ibid, 2.
  35. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 230.
  36. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume One (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 214.
  37.  Abou Farman, “The Ticking” a-line journal (Online) https://alinejournal.com/convergence/terminality-the-ticking/
  38.  Katherine McKittrick, “Wait Canada, Anticipate Black”, The CLR James Journal, 20:1-2, Fall 2014, 244.
  39. Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice, (London: New Beacon Books, 1984), 10.
  40. Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life”, 22.
  41. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2019).