Genealogy:

As Timothy Morton reveals, ‘deconstruction [to be] the secret best friend of ecocriticism’ (296), and as deconstruction both co-exists with and co-originates from Jacques Derrida, then the Derridan concept of ‘pharmakon,’ inevitably lends itself to be re-configured into an e-concept, as the ‘pharmeikṓn.’ In order to derive this neologism, we must subject Derrida’s term ‘pharmakon’ to a phonic treatment which evidences itself in his seminal term, ‘différance.’ In misspelling the word ‘différence,’ and replacing the ‘e’ with an ‘a’ — a silent distinction only visible through inscription on the page and not in speech, Derrida’s term plays with the ideas ‘to differ,’ which is defined as ‘discernibility, distinction, separation, diastema, spacing,’ and ‘to defer,’ which means to ‘detour, relay, reserve, temporization.’ (Différance, 71) By doing so, Derrida demonstrates a method of reading in which the governing metaphysical principles of a text are subverted, undermining the authority of the text by displacing its origin.

[Différance is] the practice of a language or of a code supposing in the practice of this play a retention and protention of differences, a spacing and a temporization, a play of traces — all this must be a kind of writing before the letter, an archi-writing without a present origin, without archi-. (Différance, 67)

As a result, meaning is no longer found in binary oppositions but rather is ‘disseminated’ throughout the entirety of a text. ‘Différance,’ thus lingers on the margins, on the periphery, in fragments of the text, threatening to dismantle the entire logic it grounds itself upon. For Derrida, the ‘pharmakon’ is just one of the ‘nonsynonymous substitutions’ to his term ‘différance’ — which he specifies are used ‘according to the necessity of the context,’ (Différance, 65). Therefore, we are able to claim that the context of contemporary eco-critical thought demands the re-writing of ‘pharmakon’ as ‘pharmeikṓn.’

Boes and Marshall in ‘Writing the Anthropocene,’ delineate the aporia at the heart of the eco-critical project — how does one write about the anthropocene, without privileging the anthropocentric gaze?  In response, they propose a shift from Morton’s ‘eco-mimesis’ which is ‘premised on the notion that “nature” requires the intervention of a poet in order to be heard’ towards ‘a new realm of “ecodiegesis” that gives a voice to the planet itself.’ (64) Boes and Marshall explain:

Tracing the consequences for any form of writing in our present — a present being constantly reconstructed by the image of its ecological future and an increasing awareness of how the large-scale actions of a species’ past initiated processes only now becoming legible — is the ultimate aim of this project to describe, narrate, and imagine this moment in geological time.  (67)

Yet the plausibility of ‘ecodiegesis’ in writing remains unclear. As Act 1, Scene 3 has demonstrated, ‘eco-diegesis’ and its premise which conditions the removal of the perceiving anthropocentric agent upon the conception of the work, has immense potentiality within art, a tangible form that can exist in autopoiesis. However, in writing, this proves to be an immensely difficult project. But what is writing? For Derrida it is simply a play of differences, of ‘différance.’

Hence like ‘différance,’ the ‘pharmeikṓn’ comes into play upon a substitution, ‘akon’ is replaced with ‘eikṓn.’  Both endings phonetically sound the same, in classical Greek ‘ei’ makes an ‘a’ sound. Consequently, their difference is only visible in writing — their distinction appears in the inscription of the letter. Furthermore, upon realising the difference between the terms, the letter ‘e’ stands out — signifying ecology for the eco-critical reader.

Derrida elucidates Plato’s use of word ‘pharmakon’ to mean both remedy and poison:

The pharmakon would be a substance — with all that the word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths, refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy- if we didn’t have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity [literally, “othersidedness”] of what constitutes it and the infinite absence of what dissolve it. (Plato’s Pharmacy, 429)

Writing as pharmakon translates to writing as a play of differences. The word ‘eikṓn’ defines as image. Images are central to both our understanding of and the construction of the anthropocene. Eco-critic Irmgard Emmelheinz claims:

[...] the Anthropocene has not meant a new image of the world; instead, it has meant, first, a radical change in the conditions of visuality; and second, the transformation of the world into images. These developments have phenomenological as well as epistemological consequences: while images now participate in the forming of worlds, they have also become forms of thought constituting a new kind knowledge. This form of knowledge is grounded in visual communication and thus depends on perception, thereby demanding the attendant development of an optical mind. (131-132)

The manner in which it can be grasped what it means to live in the anthropocene and its rapidly changing nature is through an image. The notion that Antarctica is 1 degree celsius warmer means very little until one sees images of dead animals wound up onto fragmented sheets of ice. It is in the absence of glaciers  that we begin to see what statistical information means. ‘Seeing’ is essential to our understanding of grasping. But seeing should not be limited to visual communication as the infinite proliferation of images within our current geological era, as Emmelheinz notes, has began to indicate ‘automatization, tautological vision […] which also implies the cancellation of vision.’ (132)

Any semiotic theory of literary criticism, particularly that of Roland Barthes or Baudrillard would reveal such imagery to be illusive. Whereas Baudrillard would speak of the hyperreal, Barthes would speak about ‘myth’ — the manner in which our ‘anchoraged’ exposure to images of the anthropocene function to ‘transform history into nature’ (116). We are precisely desensitised to the complexity of what the post-industrial world has instigated by perceiving it as merely a fact of ‘nature’. And for Morton, 'the ghost of "Nature"' halts ecological thought by representing 'an ideal image, a self-contained form suspended afar, shimmering and naked behind glass like an expensive painting.' (Introduction, 5) 

Furthermore, images maintain the Romantic distance between the individual and the landscape. From a vantage point as the individual looks down upon the untouched slopes or mountains, they are safely removed at a distance. Even the images of melting glaciers or burning forests have an aesthetic beauty about them. The frames claiming to capture destruction reveal but a mere trace of the human footprint. These images only tenuously give ‘a voice to the planet.’

Therefore, the proposed term ‘pharmeikṓn’ attempts to reconcile writing with non-anthropocentric ways of seeing. It is defined as:

An act of writing (as différance) whose objective is to convey an image in which the anthropocentric body recedes to the background and ecology emerges to the fore. It deconstructs the binary between pharma and nature, the human and more-than-human worlds.

Within the literary tradition, there is a precedent for such a writing. What M.H Abrams refers to as a mere ‘poetic vogue’ (173) of the Modernist era, Imagist poetry demonstrates writing as ‘pharmeikṓn’ — and holds the potential to act as a (de)constructive tool to eco-critically grapple with the ever-changing present of the anthropocene.

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An Aside: 

For neo-Foucultian contemporary philosopher, Paul Preciado, there has been a regime change from 'biopolitics' towards the 'pharmacopornographic' in the era of late capitalism. This shift is marked by the regulation of bodies, sexuality, and desire by two distinct industries - the pharmaceutical and the pornographic. As a result, identity is no longer constructed by external means of control such as discipline but rather internal means such as chemical and psychological processes - processes that are owned by capitalism. Preciado observes:

There is nothing to discover in nature; there is no hidden secret. We live in a punk hypermodernity; it is no longer about discovering the hidden truth in nature; it is about the necessity to specify the cultural, political, and technological processes through which the body as artifact acquires natural status. […] There is nothing to discover in sex or in sexual identity; there is no inside. The truth about sex is not a disclosure; it is sexdesign. The pharmacopornographic biocapitalism does not produce things. It produces mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and conditions of the soul. In biotechnology and in pornocommunication there is no object to be produced. The pharmacopornographic business is the invention of a subject and then its global reproduction. (35-36)

The logic of this chiastic production, 'there's no porn without the Pill or without Viagra. Inversely, there is no Viagra or Pill without porn,' (51) reveals the laybrinthe complexity of the contemporary world in which we have moved past the natural/unnatural divide towards a continuum of production and then reproduction. 

Hence in context of Preciado's theory, the e-concept of ‘pharmeikṓn,’ holds the potential to extend itself beyond being a mere tool for literary deconstruction (which functions to subvert the anthropocentric gaze and create eco-critical pathways into reading a text), and instead become a theoretical mode for political critique of the 'capitalocene' - undermining the very structures of the pharma(coporno) by bringing to the foreground an image (eikṓn) of ecology. 



~ Vedika Rampal

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Cited Texts:
 

Abrams, M.H. and Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Cengage learning, Stamford: 2015.

Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today,” in A Barthes Reader. Hill and Wang, New York, 1982.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994. https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

Boes, Tobias, and Marshall, Kate. “Writing the Anthropocene: An Introduction.” The Minnesota Review 2014 (83): 60–72.  https://doi-org.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/10.1215/00265667-2782243

Emmelhainz, Irmgard. “Images Do Not Show: The Desire to See in the Anthropocene.” In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 131-141. Open Humanities Press, 2015.  http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/art-in-the-anthropocene/

Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” In A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf, 59-79. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Post-Modernism, 429–450. http://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/derrida_platos_pharmacy.pdf

Moore, Jason W. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press/Kairos, 2016.

Morton, Timothy. “Deconstruction And/as Ecology”. In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, 1st ed. Oxford University Press, (2014): 291-302.  https://www-oxfordhandbooks-com.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199742929.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199742929-e-005

Morton, Timothy. "Introduction." In The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, (2010): 1-10. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=3300977.

Preciado, Paul. “The Pharacopornographic Era” in Testo Junkie : Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013, 23-54.