Creative facticity and ‘hyper-archaeology’: The spatial and performative textualities of psychogeography

Abstract

In today’s age of ‘post-truth’, Oxford Dictionaries’ word of 2016, scepticism and denial have become the new normal. Traditional battlegrounds such as climate change have broadened to embrace a far wider, more visceral, declamation of scientifi c opinion and ‘fact’. In this maelstrom no certainties are left unscathed. Th e very assertion of ‘truth’ has become a political act, the aim not to embrace clear and unequivocal ‘fact’ but rather to commit to a wider ideology in which the primary purpose is the disruption of the neo-liberal consensus. In our ‘post-truth’ world, truth has been replaced by belief (D’Ancona 2017 ; Sim 2019 ). Th e focus of this new paradigm is not simply present or future time; it is also very much engaged with the past (McIntyre 2018 ). Denial of climate change and the wider implications of what has been termed the ‘Anthropocene’, for example, involves not only a careful rebuking of scientifi c projections but also a systematic denial of the historical and archaeological record. In announcing the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2019, for example, President Trump not only dismissed belief in an environmental crisis; he also rejected both the data and the academic communities on which an understanding of the crisis stands. If you believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, it is also very possible to deny the vast array of scientifi c data that underlines mankind’s negative impact on the Earth’s climate, including the landscape degradation and species extinction associated with the more extreme defi nitions of the Anthropocene (Hamilton, Bonneuil and Gemenne 2015 : 1–3).