Clotting the Archive: Geoaesthetic Remainders in the Age of Soft Catastrophe
Clotting the Archive: Geoaesthetic Remainders in the Age of Soft Catastrophe
Abstract:
This essay theorizes the current geopolitical escalation in the Middle East—centered on the coordinated military operations of Israel and the United States, and the resulting reverberations through Iraq, Iran, and global actors such as Russia, China, and Turkey—as a generative site for speculative geoaesthetic inquiry. It frames these developments not merely as geopolitical phenomena, but as sedimentations of imperial residue and performative sovereignties. Departing from a narrative of immediate crisis, the work offers a method of aesthetic intervention organized around the lexicon of “clotting,” wherein historical trauma, archival latency, and contemporary spectacle become coagulant matter within artistic praxis. Interweaving Marxian materialism, psychoanalytic temporality, and vernacular epistemologies, this essay proposes an ethics and aesthetics of listening to conflict as unresolved matter—a mode of attending to the world not through resolution, but through the density of the historical present.
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I. Inherited Conflicts and the Rhizomatic Event
The attacks by Israel and the subsequent U.S. bombings in Iraq and Iran do not mark new beginnings but emergent epiphenomena within a longue durée of imperial governance. They are not singular events; they are dispersed accumulations—rhizomatic in their structure and perpetually coextensive with global conditions of militarization, securitization, and political spectacle.
The “event,” to borrow from Badiou, no longer constitutes a rupture but a carefully modulated loop, wherein warfare is less declaration and more modulation—less climax than persistent hum. To interpret such developments requires a departure from historicist linearity. Instead, we must position these actions within a coiled temporality, a spectral recursion in which past occupations, diplomatic fissures, and unratified sovereignties layer upon the present like sedimentary scar tissue.
This layering invites an epistemological intervention. The contemporary artist—the speculative practitioner—does not represent the war; they rematerialize its excesses. What has been hidden by the logics of realpolitik and media choreography is not simply truth, but remainder—what is unintelligible yet unavoidable. This remainder is the site of aesthetic inquiry.
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II. Archival Remainder and the Politics of Refusal
Israel’s militarized futurism and the U.S.'s preemptive strikes emerge from an archive saturated with declarations of exceptionalism, contingency, and military paternalism. Yet the archive—following Derrida—is not a container of the past, but a mechanism for reproduction. What remains unarchived, misarchived, or disavowed thus becomes vital terrain for the speculative artist.
To engage this terrain requires a move toward clotting—not metaphor, but method. Clotting designates the refusal of linear explication. It is the aesthetics of the unresolved, of that which accrues rather than clears. In this sense, clotting is affective sediment: a blockage in the flow of historical time, an aesthetic state in which remainders coagulate to resist liberal logics of closure and visibility.
The clot, as used here, is conceptual infrastructure for a speculative praxis of geopolitical remaindering. It allows for the production of an art that neither commemorates nor documents, but haunts—that inhabits the archive’s negative space to make perceptible its absences. Such work performs not representation, but tension.
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III. Performing Sovereignty in Multipolar Spectacle
China, Russia, and Turkey each respond to the conflict not with military intervention, but with theatrical posturing calibrated through their own historical grammars of sovereignty. Their refusal to “enter” the battlefield is not a pacifist stance; it is a recoding of global order wherein sovereignty is no longer demonstrated through force, but through semiotic saturation.
Russia, invoking Cold War nostalgia, deploys the idiom of anti-imperialism to simulate stability while deepening global entanglements. China, preoccupied with infrastructural futurism and planetary development, performs as patient steward rather than reactionary antagonist. Turkey, oscillating between Ottoman yearning and NATO compliance, enacts sovereignty as performance: never stable, always contingent.
These performances contribute to what I term the multipolar mise-en-scène—a distributed dramaturgy wherein sovereign states posture through statements, abstentions, sanctions, and rhetorics of intervention. Such choreography does not resolve conflict; it displaces it into semiotic domains, leaving the material consequences (displacement, death, extraction) in what Glissant might call the “opacity of relation.”
Artists operating in this terrain must resist the lure of coherence. They must learn to navigate sovereign performance not as thematic content, but as structure: to render visible the feedback loops between performance and policy, between visibility and erasure.
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IV. The Filipino Aperture: Vernacular Mapping and Pedagogic Resistance
The Philippines provides a particularly potent aperture through which to refract the unfolding catastrophe—not as a peripheral observer, but as a geopolitical palimpsest saturated with its own histories of militarized modernity. U.S. imperialism, Cold War allegiances, and postcolonial authoritarianism constitute a dense infrastructural matrix wherein global conflict is not foreign, but intimate.
This intimacy authorizes a practice of vernacular cartography, in which the artist maps geopolitical violence through culturally embedded epistemologies. These mappings do not merely locate crisis; they relink crisis to everyday life—through haunting, inheritance, and embodied knowledge. To think from the Philippines is to think from within the archive of global militarism, while simultaneously enacting counter-archives through localized acts of aesthetic resistance.
This counter-archival practice may manifest through ritual annotation, speculative retellings, affective pedagogy, or situated installations where memory is animated as performance. The Filipino artist here becomes archivist, not of the state, but of that which eludes state-making: the hunch, the rumor, the wound.
In this frame, pedagogy functions not as dissemination, but as reactivation. It is a dialogic cartography through which the residue of the global catastrophe is made relational—felt through the body, rather than delivered as doctrine.
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V. Material Strategies for Geoaesthetic Interruption
A speculative aesthetic grounded in clotting is not constrained by medium but guided by modality. What matters is the refusal of transparency, the privileging of latency, and the rendering of aesthetic residue as political artifact. This calls for formal strategies attuned to archival friction and epistemic weight.
Topographic palimpsests—hybrid cartographies rendered through scans, overlays, and performative redaction—interrogate how land becomes weaponized text. Sculptural coagulations, made from disused media, military paraphernalia, and organic matter, materialize history’s refusal to dissipate. Archival fictions, staged as installations or participatory protocols, invite audiences to navigate not what is known, but what cannot be.
These strategies mark a transition from documentation to remaindering. They aim not for representation of the geopolitical crisis, but a performative enmeshment with its atmospheric excesses. In refusing clarity, they induce discomfort. In inducing discomfort, they activate ethics.
Through clotting, each work interrupts—temporal flows, state narratives, and viewer expectations. It impedes resolution. And in so doing, it holds open the political space necessary for becoming-with rupture.
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VI. A Soft Catastrophe and the Aesthetics of Density
The phrase soft catastrophe is offered here not as euphemism but as analytical descriptor. It names the global condition in which rupture is neither singular nor total, but prolonged and asymptotic. The catastrophes of war, displacement, and surveillance do not explode, but seep—into infrastructures, into dreams, into matter. They manifest not as headline, but as humidity.
In this condition, traditional narrative frameworks collapse. There is no climax, no denouement. There is only repetition with mutation. And in such a world, the artist’s charge is not to document tragedy, but to register its texture. This texture is sticky, ambient, and resistant to linguistic capture.
Clotting becomes the aesthetic mode most attuned to this texture. As both physiological function and conceptual residue, it marks the body’s (and the archive’s) resistance to dissolution. It is neither healing nor hemorrhage. It is the in-between—uncertain, viscous, alive.
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VII. Conclusion: Toward an Orgasmics of Refusal
We arrive not at a conclusion, but at a saturation point—where aesthetic residue thickens, archival latency pulses, and the spectacle of power begins to fray at its semiotic edges. It is here, in this dense coagulum of history and becoming, that a final conceptual exhale becomes possible.
Not a closure, but a climactic refusal—a conceptual climax without narrative resolution. This is not the orgasm of completion, but of interruption: a somatic surge that destabilizes what came before and dilates the space for what might come next. It is affective, it is epistemic, it is uncontainable.
The world, in its catastrophic recursion, does not beg to be saved—it demands to be attended to otherwise. This attention—this refusal to look away, to resolve, to simplify—is an act of aesthetic defiance. It is a practice of clotting.
Clotting is not our answer. It is our inheritance. And perhaps, if we allow it, our future.
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Amiel Gerald Roldan
June 23, 2025
amiel_roldan@outlook.com
amielgeraldroldan@gmail.com
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