Dark Geology : The Arcades Project as Earth Archive Jason Groves University of Washington Abstract: -Dark ecology, as elaborated by Timothy Morton, appropriates the complicit position of the protagonist typical of-film noir-in order to articulate an ecological thought that does not permit metapositions and neutral points of view. This article will propose a dark geology in order to account for the increasing implication of human elements in the complex geologic flows that compose cities, and it will also begin to conceptualize the dark geological archive. This thought experiment will take shape around a work of an important forerunner of a dark geology who perhaps better than any other of his time understood how the tropes of nineteenth-century geology and natural history could evoke the poetics of urban life, namely Walter Benjamin’s-Das Passagenwerk.-Benjamin understands the Paris arcades, and more broadly the city, as a collection of trace fossils and in a way that is not only metaphorical but also material� Not only do these technofossils invite inclusion into earth archives in an epoch tentatively known as the Anthropocene; moreover, Benjamin’s materialist historiography also-offers an opportunity to reconceptualize the earth archive by proposing new possibilities for geohistorical understanding that were not available through the stratigraphic logic of conventional historicism� Key words : Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk, earth archive, fossils Some of New York City’s more compelling archives might be located outside rather than inside the Public Library. In Geologic City: A Field Guide to the Geo- Architecture of New York, Jaime Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth of smudge studio ask us to consider Patience and Fortitude, the lion statues flanking the library entrances, as a kind of repository� Composed of a limestone that formed from the remains of bryozoa and other marine life forms starting in the Ordovician period some 460 million years ago, they write that the geological substances and fossilized life archived in the lions’ regal forms carry intimate knowledge of microbial ‘crud,’ shallow continental seas, tropical warmth, the tickle of trilobites, ice ages — and the second largest extinction in planetary history. The mineral intelligence of these New York icons rivals the preeminent repository of human thought and experience they have come to symbolize. (Kruse and Ellsworth n. pag.) Presenting the iconic statues as an archive comparable to the special collections of the New York Public Library might seem somewhat immoderate, but this proposal can be situated within a tradition in geological discourse of regarding the earth as archive. One finds this approach already in the writings of Torbern Oof Bergman, the Swedish chemist and mineralogist who argued in his 1766 Physisk beskrifning öfvert jordklotet (Physical Description of the Earth) that fossils are “laid down on the originating earth surface, whose layers are archives older than all annals [deras lågen åro archiver, åldre ån alla annaler]” (266). These terrestrial archives have been supplemented by the institutional archives of earth stored within the built environment -institutional collections of geologic specimens, ice and sediment — but in Patience and Fortitude, urban geologic objects that are neither, strictly speaking, naturally occurring nor institutional, the built environment offers an informal earth archive of cultural and geological significance. While so-called “naturally occurring” archives remain crucial for the study of both the deep history of the planet and its volatile futures, artifacts from the built environment promise, paraphrasing Kruse and Ellsworth, to facilitate human capacities to design, imagine, and live in relation to deep time� Just as these latter earth archives are distinguished from the former, so too is their study: let’s call it dark geology, adapting Timothy Morton’s notion of a dark ecology. Morton’s term has been extensively adapted already, as in Heather Sullivan’s elaboration of a “dark pastoral,” and Morton himself adapts this term from the genre of film noir, as he writes in The Ecological Thought: “The form of dark ecology is that of noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situation, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it” (17). 1 Thus, for dark ecology, which introduces hesitation, uncertainty, and irony into ecological thinking, “there is no metaposition from which we can make ecological pronouncements” (Morton 16). A dark geology, in turn, would take note of Jennifer Fay’s recent elaboration of postwar American film noir as an ecological genre in Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, but rather than Fay’s insistence on the noir world as one that negates any human imprint, a dark geology could take as its motto Ilana Halperin’s sculptural series We form geology, especially given the impersonal exhibition title in which these artwork featured, Steine� 2 The premise 234 Jason Groves of a dark geology might be further summed up in an observation from Geologic City: “There is no ‘outside of’ the complex geologic flows that compose our city. Humans live within and contribute to this mix” (Kruse and Ellsworth n. pag.). A dark geology would explore the implication of humans in the geological and the geological in the human in all of its monstrous, montage forms: technofossils, petrofiction, geoarchitecture, geosocialities, geotrauma, anthroturbation, anthropogeomorphology, the Anthropocene, the Humusities� The archives of a dark geology would differ from those of geology and paleontology proper: urban snow dumps rather than Arctic ice sheets, warehoused salt mounds rather than glacial moraines, maps of metropolitan street grids rather than prehistoric footprints, body stones rather than meteorites. Moreover, drawing on the paradigm put forth by historian of science David Sepkoski in “The Earth as Archive: Contingency, Narrative, and the History of Life,” the illustrated Field Guide in which Patience and Fortitude feature could itself constitute an earth archive: if the lions are construed as an “original” or “natural” archive of the earth then the field guide would be archive2 or “pictorial atlases of fossils” (71). One interesting aspect of Sepkoski’s model is that it accounts for the mediated reconfigurations of fossil collections (e.g., illustrated atlases, taxonomic compendia, digital databases) within the paradigm of the archive, and so an illustrated field guide to the urban geology of New York, if its illustrated objects are recognized as (dark) geological specimens, would also constitute an archive. This account of the archive that encompasses both terrestrial and textual materials is not particular to Sepkoski but is also elaborated by literary scholars. Drawing on Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Tove Holmes argues that literature, like Adalbert Stifter’s literary engagement with geology and the history of the earth, participates in “the recursive writing and reading that make up the archive and its understanding” (Holmes 282). While it is the case that most of the twenty specimens and sites collected in the Field Guide are not fossils, they are all, according to the authors’ elaboration, geologic objects that constitute a contemporary rock record (namely, the anthrostratum), and as such may be as instructive for a future paleontologist as prehistoric fossils are today� Sepkoski, writing about the emergence of paleontology as a historical and moreover historiographic discipline, does not speculate on how the geological records of the earth’s deep history might deviate from those of its recent and future history, particularly where those histories become entangled with human histories. Though, as Sepkoski notes, the eighteenth-century “geohistorians” of France and Germany proceeded to reconstruct the history of the earth using geological relics “just as human history is pieced together from texts, coins, monuments, and other artifacts,” he does not consider the possibility of such artifacts themselves one day being used to piece together geologic history, let Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 235 236 Jason Groves alone whatever archive might abstract those artifacts (181). If the methods of the human sciences informed the earth sciences, their materials did not� However, it does not take the speculative fiction of extraterrestrial geologists visiting the earth in the distant future and observing the built environment reduced to a “remarkable stratum” -encompassing “layers of angular pebbles with hard organic coatings,” the “remains of a long tubular structure, now oxidized, that had once been metallic,” and “shards of a white glassy substance” (Zalasiewicz, The Earth After Us xiv)—to envision cities and other cultural artifacts as comprising the earth archive, not in the distant future but in a geologic now that arguably extends back to the emergence of the modern earth sciences if not much further. Already prior to Sepkoski’s article a number of scientists from geology and related fields have proposed considering “human artefacts as technofossils” within a larger subfield of technostratigraphy (Zalasiewicz, “Technofossil Record” 36). Such a use of “fossil” seems to retrieve an earlier sense, which Martin Rudwick traces back to Aristotle’s Meterologica, of “any distinctive objects or materials dug up from the earth or found lying on the surface” (Rudwick 1). But in fact, there is a growing push by geologists to classify human artifacts along the lines of ichnofossils, or “trace fossils” in distinction to the more frequently encountered “body fossils.” They argue that the industrial materials that make up cities (anthropogenic lithologies like concrete and bricks; mineraloids like artificial glass and plastics) and the sites of excavation and extraction that underlie and underwrite them “may be considered in general as ichnofossils (trace fossils)” but have “distinctive characteristics, which serve to separate them from trace fossils as normally understood” (Zalasiewicz, “Technofossil Record” 35—36) and as such would constitute what Sepkoski calls an earth archive. Or as geographer Kathryn Yusoff pithily puts it, “in unearthing one fossil layer we create another contemporary fossil stratum that has our name on it” (784). One important forerunner of a dark geology is the writer who perhaps better than any other of his time understood how the tropes of nineteenth-century geology and natural history could evoke the poetics of urban life� In the Arcades Project Walter Benjamin writes of Paris as a counterpart to Vesuvius: “Ein drohendes, gefährliches Massiv, ein immer tätiger Herd der Revolution” (5.1: 134), outmoded hair styles, such as the permanent wave, become “versteinerte Haartouren” (5.1: 270), and he observes the bourgeois collector “seine Spur so betreuend wie im Granit die Natur eine tote Fauna” (1.2: 549). As Adorno remarks, Benjamin’s fondness for regarding cultural objects as natural ones is hardly surpassed: “Ihn sprachen die versteinerten, erfrorenen oder obsoleten Bestandstücke der Kultur, alles an ihr, was der anheimelnden Lebendigkeit sich entäußerte, so an, wie den Sammler das Petrefakt oder die Pflanze im Her- Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 237 barium” (242). Cities and their inhabitants are not only like (“wie”) fossils, as Benjamin occasionally writes; today they might be regarded as literal fossils (unearthed fragments) in “völlig unmetaphorischer Sachlichkeit,” as he writes in another context (4.1: 11). While in the translation essay from 1923 it is the continued “life” of the literary work in translation that Benjamin regards both as a metaphor and as a “fully unmetaphorical reality,” in the Arcades Project there seems to be a similar ambivalence around the fossilization of the city. Though the figurative fossils in the Arcades Project might be accounted for by Benjamin’s reception and redeployment of Hegel’s concept of second nature and the Marxian category of commodity fetishism, they can also be accounted for by a dark geology in which cultural fragments and manufactured artifacts are understood as forming an emergent earth archive of a unique stratigraphic interval that would correspond to a new geological epoch tentatively and contentiously known as Anthropocene� In this way they would not be metaphorical but literal fossils. With Benjamin’s familiarity with the importance of both fossils for nineteenth-century geology and nineteenth-century history for geology more or less given, in this essay I propose to reassemble and reassess some of the urban geological figures in the Arcades Project, as part of a putative dark geological archive, in order to speculate on an expanded earth archive in the Anthropocene, if not also the Capitalocene� 3 If the “natural archive” can be expanded to include the postnatural archive of manufactured materials and other technofossils, a wager that many in the geological community have already made, it would follow that the reconfiguration of the latter in the documents collected in the Arcades Project could also constitute an earth archive, if only marginally and tentatively, both metaphorically and in its fully unmetaphorical objectivity� What follows is a thought experiment exploring this scenario� Walter Benjamin is not generally regarded as an important figure in the history of environmental thought� While his work has been anything but neglected in recent decades, its disregard by ecologically engaged literary studies could stand to be corrected. This is the opinion of Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming� Of ecocriticism he writes, Benjamin might well serve as a lead interpreter in its general pursuit, defined by Lousie [sic] Westling as the reevaluation of “traditions in light of present environmental concerns” (Malm 128). Malm’s article makes a case for developing Benjaminian dialectical images from fossil fuel fiction, his term for literature that makes sustained and explicit reference to oil and coal economies. Together with the reader’s presence of mind (Geistesgegenwart), dialectical images possess the capacity to cast light on the present, and thus to acquire meaning that they did not originally possess. Im- 238 Jason Groves ages from the past might be recovered so as “to bring the present-into a critical state,” (5.1: 588) writes Benjamin in the Arcades Project, and thus to contribute, as Malm adds, “to a critical understanding of our current epoch, fracturing the narrative of the human species as a united entity ascending to biospheric dominance in the Anthropocene” (121). Accordingly, dialectical images can give insight into how the “miseries of global warming have been in preparation for a long time,” certainly before the advent of the term “global warming,” and also into how some more than others “have felt the heat from the start” (Malm 121). Malm’s article discusses dialectical images drawn from a veritable fossil fuel fiction archive of Chinese, Indian, Chilean, and European literature, but he does not look to Benjamin for these images. The one exception is a line from “Feuermelder,” a thought-image in Einbahnstraße about twentieth-century class struggle and the urgent overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat before the latter’s self-destruction: “Bevor der Funke an das Dynamit kommt, muß die brennende Zündschnur durchschnitten werden” (4.1: 122). How could this be read today, Malm asks, “if not with the approaching tipping points of global warming- suffusing the text? ” (128). Malm’s attempt to rescue this image of twentieth-century revolt in the context of twenty-first century ecocide, also shows how Benjamin has anticipated the methods of ecocritics who have largely neglected him. If Malm’s reading of this antiquated image retraces Timothy Clark’s recent argument in Ecocriticism on the Edge that literature today is subjected to an “emergent sense” in that it “exceeds that of the situation in which it occurred” and moreover where “that situation is being reconceptualized as a context that must now also include the present and an uncertain future,” Clark himself is sketching out a critical practice that highly resembles Benjamin’s dialectical image, a predecessor to whom he makes no reference (65). This “emergent unreadability” (and emergent readability) of literary texts is something that Benjamin already diagnoses in his 1939 commentary on the poems of Bertolt Brecht (Clark 62). Here it must be observed that if Benjamin’s writings do not offer many glimpses of fossil fuels, they nevertheless elaborate the practice of reading in which those texts that make no explicit reference to fossil fuels might nevertheless be read with reference to them. The audacity of such readings, Benjamin writes, and the audacity of writing a classical commentary on a contemporary, anti-authoritarian poet such as Brecht, is derived from the knowledge (Erkennntnis), “dass nämlich schon der kommende Tag Vernichtungen von so riesigem Ausmaß bringen kann, daß wir von gestrigen Texten und Produktionen wie durch Jahrhunderte uns geschieden sehen” (2.2: 540). Thus, as Benjamin adds in a parenthetical statement, “Der Kommentar, der heute noch zu prall ansitzt, kann morgen schon klassische Falten werfen. Wo seine Präzision fast indezent wirken könnte, kann morgen das Geheimnis sich Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 239 retabliert haben” (2.2: 540). Here Benjamin poses the challenge of reading during a terminal phase of the world that turns out to have been the terminal phase of the Holocene. For Benjamin, reading “today,” a time marked by an extraordinary scale of destruction, entails becoming attuned to the capacity of literary texts to dramatically deviate from the interpretive frames that readings place on them� The significance of this position increases not despite but because of his commentary’s inability to address the planetary crisis that was emerging alongside the political and historical crisis to which it most directly responds. The archive of texts held to constitute a record of our contemporary ecological crisis must be continually subjected to revision� Malm’s discovery of the potential of Benjamin’s dialectical images for ecocriticism, however, itself neglects the work of Catriona Sandilands, who already in a 2010 article explored “the role of the dialectical image in the cultivation of a critical ecology” (“Thinking Ecology” 219). While there are several significant differences to their projects, they can be glossed over relatively easy. Whereas Malm takes up the figure of the dialectical image in order to address and contend with a present defined by anthropogenic climate change, Sandilands takes up Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing in the less historically specific “age of the nature-commodity” (212) but with a no less urgent mission to “[wrest] nature from the bourgeois historical narrative that finds its congratulatory victory in the park, the nature-store, the eco-tour, the IMAX wildlife documentary, the hybrid SUV” (217). If for Sandilands we only now recognize the dream-image of a “universally consumable nature ‘beyond’ history” as such (namely, as a dream-image), then the peculiar kind of “dream interpretation” offered by the Arcades Project might facilitate our awakening from the “eco-phantasmagoria” of “public nature spectacles” offered by zoos, North American national parks, and other “arcades of our ecologically consumer age” (223). The sites and artifacts discussed by Sandilands, such as North American zoos and nature parks, certainly could inform a novel ecological archive of an outmoded nature-ideal that is complicit in the current ecological crisis. (A study of zoo director Carl Hagenbeck’s “empire” would surely figure into such an archive, not only in a German but also in a global context; Eric Ames’ monograph Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments would offer a solid starting point.) In other words, the methodologies that inform the Arcades Project could be mobilized to unearth the anti-ecological archives of our present ecological crisis� But rather than again taking up Benjamin’s theoretical insights only to apply them to contemporary North America, in the following I will consider the Arcades Project as itself a dark geological archive, if a rudimentary one and removed from the archives currently under consideration by geologists� 240 Jason Groves As a work consisting of “rags and refuse” that were rescued from oblivion by a practice of recycling (“Methode dieser Arbeit: literarische Montage. Ich habe nichts zu sagen. Nur zu zeigen.”), the Arcades Project might be a model ecological archive (5.1: 574). Indeed, in a follow-up article, “Green Things in the Garbage: Ecocritical Gleaning in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades,” Sandilands reads the historical work of the Arcades Project as a project of “waste diversion” that could “animate a practice of ecocriticism” (36). And while Sandilands makes a compelling case for the role that Benjamin could play in cultivating an environmental literary criticism, first of all in his identification and critique of phantasmagoria, it might also be said that the identification of ecology with “green” environmentalism and practices of salvage might be the contemporary phantasmagoria� Perhaps what is ecological about the Arcades Project today is not how green its practices of gleaning are but rather how grey its material is, and not only in terms of the unmetaphorical chromatic appearance of the Parisian arcades — the grey of men’s clothing, the grey of working class women’s uniforms, the socalled grisettes, the streets’ gradations of grey and the palette of grey that its painters used to paint them, the grey of boredom, and “das unansehnliche abgebleichte Grau der Häuser, die alle aus dem mürben Flözkalkstein gebaut sind, welcher bei Paris gebrochen wird” (5.1: 164)—but also in the metaphorical sense of an ecology that refuses any clear distinction between nature and culture, an ecology that occupies the liminal spaces of twilight, of thresholds, and other hybrid spaces. “Landschaft,” writes Benjamin in one of the most well-known passages of the convolute on the figure of the flaneur, “das wird sie in der Tat dem Flanierenden. Oder genauer: ihm tritt die Stadt in ihre dialektischen Pole auseinander. Sie eröffnet sich ihm als Landschaft, sie umschließt ihn als Stube” (5.1: 125). The grey ecology of the Arcades Project is announced by the flaneur (and also the sex worker and collector), for whom the dialectical image of the urban landscape first becomes a possibility and whose subject position, marked by an implication in the commodification and fossilization they observe, makes them a key protagonist in a dark ecology in which, as Susan Buck-Morss writes in an excellent overview of fossils in The Arcades Project, there is no longer any “absolute, categorical distinction between technology and nature” (68). If the flaneur undertakes dark ecology in the world-ecology of the Capitalocene, it is less as an outsider figure characterized by gleaning and salvage, practices which can be mobilized to sustain vulture capitalism equally if not more than resist it, and more as a complicit figure endowed with a critical reflexivity. An ecology folded around grey, marking both the color of liminal zones and the process of decomposition, refuses green ecology’s anthropocentric separation of culture and nature, the human and the inhuman. Grey, as Jeffrey Cohen writes in his contribution to Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, “reveals Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 241 the inhuman as a thriving of life in other forms, a vitality even in decay that demonstrates how the nonhuman is already inside, cohabitating and continuing” (274). Cohen’s vital materialist rescue of grey things from their moribund connotations parallels Benjamin’s historical materialist project. Seeing vitality in decay (“Das Pathos dieser Arbeit: es gibt keine Verfallszeiten.”) and decay in vitality (“die Monumente der Bourgeoisie als Ruinen zu erkennen noch ehe sie zerfallen sind”) belongs to the dialectics of seeing that inform and underwrite The Arcades Project (5.1: 571; 5.1: 59). Just as things are not inert for Cohen, the past is not inert for Benjamin� A grey ecology is nevertheless a moribund ecology, if only partially, and the Arcades Project is likewise characterized by a focus on “Erstorbene Natur” and the “Unabsehbarkeit der ausgestorbenen Passagen” (5.1: 271—2). What makes the Arcades particularly unfathomable is not their terminality, however, but rather the extension of their existence into a kind of deep time, or in Benjamin’s terms, prehistory (Urgeschichte). As Benjamin writes in Convolute R: Wie Gesteine des Miozän oder Eozän stellenweise den Abdruck von Ungeheuern aus diesen Erdperioden tragen, so liegen die Passagen heute in den großen Städten wie Höhlen mit den Fossilien eines verschollenen Untiers: der Konsumenten aus der vorimperialen Epoche des Kapitalismus, des letzten Dinosaurus Europas. (5.2: 670) In a related passage from a 1929 draft of the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes of the colored illustrations of petrified landscapes and the “Seen und Gletscher zur ersten Eiszeit” in children’s history books: “Solch ideales Panorama einer kaum verflossenen Urzeit tut mit dem Blick durch die in alle Städte verteilten Passagen sich auf. Hier haust der letzte Dinosaurus Europas, der Konsument” (5.2: 1045). Here a key difference between the geoarchitectures of smudge studio’s New York and Walter Benjamin’s Paris might be observed: whereas the former uses fossils and other geologic figures to resituate the history of the city within the history of the earth (and vice versa), the latter uses the figure of the fossil — and more specifically the fossilization of the recent past — to make apparent the radical difference and distance between two adjacent epochs of human history. It is a human-on-human story, but one that can only be conveyed in an inhuman, geological context. The experience of an unprecedented derangement of temporality and timescale where “Zum erstenmal […] hier das Jüngstvergangene ferne Vergangenheit [wird],” and where the new nature is even more transient than the old is, shares less with the Modernist chronophilia of Proust, Woolf, or smudge studio, and more the chronophagy of an alternative, moribund petromodernity (5.2: 1250). To reconstruct historical transformation through body fossils is only part of that story; in fact, most of the fossils that crop up in The Arcades Project are what 242 Jason Groves paleontologists would call ichnofossils, the study of which, ichnology, became intensely popular in the mid-nineteenth century, which is to say, in the period most extensively documented by The Arcades Project� Ichnology begins with a radically Benjaminian premise: that the ichnos — the track, footstep, or other imprint — constitutes a legible logos. The ichnologist reads what was never written. Continental ichnology studies those organisms whose presence on the earth, due to the transience of those organisms as well as radical changes in their environment, was not preserved directly in the form of a body, but indirectly in preserved traces (e.g., footprints, burrows) of behaviors such as walking (Cruziana) and resting (Rusophycus). Thus, when Benjamin writes of “places in the stones of the Miocene or Eocene Age that bear the impression of huge monsters out of these geological epochs” he might be referring to Rusophycus species of fossils; likewise, his impulse is a neoichnological one when he writes of his resolution: Was ich vorhabe ist, Baudelaire zu zeigen, wie er ins neunzehnte Jahrhundert eingebettet liegt. Der Abdruck, den er darin hinterlassen hat, muß so klar und so unberührt hervortreten wie der eines Steines, den man, nachdem er jahrzehntelang an seinem Platz geruht hat, eines Tages von seiner Stelle wälzt. (5.1: 405) With its focus on traces and interiors (such as Convolute I), the Arcades Project offers an incipient urban ichnology and not only of the nineteenth century but potentially also of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. Part of the work of The Arcades Project, then, involves developing an attunement to fossils: “seeing ourselves in the present as the material expenditure of the remains of late capitalism,” as geographer Kathryn Yusoff writes (784). As a textual documentation of those body fossils and trace fossils, which is to say, as a reconfiguration of the postnatural archive of the “capital of the nineteenth century,” the Arcades Project deserves to be considered as something of a speculative earth archive, which, as Benjamin recognized, is made up less of intact bodies and more of impressions and traces, where it is not so much a question of encountering a fossilized other as it is of engaging “the presence of an absence: the mark of the here-no-longer that remains” as Dana Luciano eloquently writes of such traces (100). The Arcades Project is a record of a radical transience characteristic of modernism — the “Hinfälligkeit und Gebrechlichkeit” (5.1: 419) of Paris in Baudelaire’s verse; a historical period defined by Baudelaire’s axiom “le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent” (5.1: 312)—and certain characterizations of the Anthropocene. The vulnerability of the Parisian arcades, and the related vulnerability of the textual materials collected in the Arcades Project to all kinds of historical contingencies, obtain a distinct legibility in a geologic now understood as a moment of destratification: as Bronislaw Szerszynski writes, “what is in the ascendant [in the Anthropocene] is […] not the durable world of things made by Homo faber, Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 243 but impermanence and change” as in “the fluxes and flows of substances such as CO 2 , SO 2 and NO; the migrations of species; the transformation of ecological communities; accelerated erosion and denudation” (174—5). The demolition of the arcades that inspired The Arcades Project, in order to make way for the broad thoroughfares of automobile traffic, figures into this history. Further, the limits of a stratigraphic logic correspond to the practice of materialist historiography that underlies The Arcades Project, and which is registered, as Benjamin writes in a crucial passage, “in der Aufsprengung der historischen Kontinuität […], mit der der historische Gegenstand sich allererst konstituiert” (5.1: 594). Citing from the same section of The Arcades Project, Jennifer Wenzel has recently identified a distinctly Benjaminian critique of stratigraphic logic based on an analogy between stratigraphy and “the kind of thinking Benjamin derided as historicism, where the past is safely past, neatly buried under the present in smooth and legible layers” (180). With Wenzel, but also drawing on historians of science like Sepkoski and Rudwick, it might be said that this similarity is not only an analogy but an historical and historicizable appropriation — by earth scientists “of ideas, concepts, and methods from human historiography” (Rudwick 181)—that was constitutive for stratigraphy and modern geology. This was highly expedient for the earth sciences, and it facilitated the historicization of nature and the mobilization of an earth archive for the production of stratigraphic knowledge. But in a moment where it is recognized that human activity operates as a “destratifying force” that manifests itself as igneous “extrusive and intrusive formations” which break the stratigraphic “logic of superposition” (Szerszynski 179), a historical materialist historiography suddenly offers new possibilities for geohistorical understanding that were not available through a conventional historicism, and it also offers expanded criteria for what constitutes an earth archive, in order to more adequately represent that “record of the contingent history of life on the earth” that is its supposed function (Sepkoski 56). Part of the record of that contingent history must be the historical contingency of historiographic practices� This, too, is a matter of and for reading. As Wenzel shows, from Freud to Coetzee the logic of superposition that underlies stratigraphy is “more fundamental to literary interpretation than we might expect” (174—5). Increasingly, however, Benjamin’s acts of interpretation and commentary bear witness to the untenability of inherited practices of reading, and they do so in a way that recognizes the increasing untenability of the Holocene, the logic of superposition, and the historiographic practices that underlie modern geology� When Benjamin writes “dass nämlich schon der kommende Tag Vernichtungen von so riesigem Ausmaß bringen kann, dass wir von gestrigen Texten und Produktionen wie durch Jahrhunderte uns geschieden sehen” (and one might add, Jahrtausende), 244 Jason Groves he is charting a deranged temporality which breaks with the prevailing geohistorical model of reading, while also arguing that acts of reading (and moreover misreading) might offer a metric for the dark geohistorical event currently unfolding: “Der Kommentar, der heute noch zu prall ansitzt, kann morgen schon klassische Falten werfen. Wo seine Präzision fast indezent wirken könnte, kann morgen das Geheimnis sich retabliert haben” (2.2: 540). If only a minor footnote in the great book of nature, this expression of the contingent history of reading nevertheless also constitutes part of the record of the contingent history of life that is known as the earth archive� And it is also a matter of reading stories in deviant stone. As Kruse and Ellsworth remind the bibliophiles, the lion statues outside of the New York Public Library are another kind of repository or earth archive, as worthy of attention as any geological object catalogued inside� Beyond their intended symbolic significance, as allochthonous blocks the statues also commemorate an epochal destratification whose monument may not be the accumulation of a novel anthrostratum but rather the gap in the existing rock record left by drilling, mining, and quarrying, as well as the unconformities produced by the deposition of those materials elsewhere (Zalasiewicz et al. 3—9). The daily encounter with such dark geological specimens and phenomena — voids and resulting unconformities in the built environment — offer glimpses into a pedestrian Anthropocene: pedestrian in the sense of an “everyday Anthropocene” that offers “a more granular and personal account of near catastrophic change” than that of specialized experts and pedestrian in the sense of one that is acutely informed by walking or otherwise moving slowly through the city (LeMenager 225). Inspired by contemporary pedestrian-oriented field guides such as smudge studio’s Geologic City, the pedestrian Anthropocene exists outside of, or at least on the margins of, scientific and academic institutions. But like Benjamin’s commentary that becomes antiquated as soon as it is written, the rapid alteration of the built environment today means that dark geological inquiry might also take shape in the disjunction between the guide and the environment� In closing I can offer one account of stumbling over such an unconformity. One day in 2016 I met up with Ilana Halperin in downtown San Francisco to take the “Petrographic Nature Walk Through the Financial District” that I had found in A Walker’s Guide to the Geology of San Francisco, a special supplement to the USGS’s Mineral Information Service (Volume 19, Number 11, 1966). The guide was compiled by none other than Clyde Wahrhaftig, author of the legendary Streetcar to Subduction and Other Plate Tectonic Trips by Public Transport in San Francisco, and both were held by the Observatory Library that Rick and Megan Prelinger developed for the Exploratorium Museum, where, coincidentally, Dark Geology: The Arcades Project as Earth Archive 245 Ilana was developing the exhibit that would become A Library of Earth Anatomy. Though the directions of Wahrhaftig’s “guide to geological street walking” were faultless and though the building descriptions both exact and lavish—“The next building down California St., Pacific Mutual Life, has genuine laurvikite as a decorative stone. The feldspar with schiller here is not labradorite, but a peculiar orthoclase. This rock is from Norway. On the Kearny St. side of this same building, basaltic volcanic bombs are used as decorative effect with small evergreens in a window garden” (Wahrhaftig 14)—Ilana and I struggled greatly to follow the guide. The reason for this had less to do with my lack of geological expertise and much more with the absence of the described buildings and building facades: like so many in the walk, the building mentioned above had been demolished decades ago� Where the buildings discussed in the guide happened to still stand, in some cases the stone cladding at street level had been replaced by massive glass panels or other manufactured materials. After completing the walk, we had determined that no more than five of the original twenty buildings and related petrographic features remained� Not despite but because the city no longer conformed to the guide, the guide turned out to be surprisingly useful to understand the city as a (dark) geological process. Yet the absence of the geological objects and features catalogued by Wahrhaftig, in some cases only decades after their formation, suggests that the urban geological archive may be marked by its transience, and here The Arcades Project will be profoundly instructive� Notes 1 Dark ecology, of course, holds other resonances than those for which Morton listens� An alternative dark ecological archive could begin not with film noir but instead Afrofuturism, Black feminist fugitivity, and the “dark feminine” as elaborated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in M Archive: After the End of the World. I plan to pursue this (mis)reading of dark ecology elsewhere, but here mark the for the most part unmarked whiteness of Dark Ecology� 2 The title Steine is, upon closer inspection, not neutral at all� As Halperin once related to me, the title for this prominently advertised Berlin show can be parsed as both a common noun and a German-Jewish surname; read as the latter the show overtly if implicitly commemorates the liquidation of German Jews, and as such the curated body stones, mineralized sculptures, and geologic specimens of this exhibition might also be understood with reference to, if not also participating in, the Jewish tradition of leaving pebbles on gravestones, a tradition tremendously complicated in a city with so many who were deported and otherwise disappeared� 246 Jason Groves 3 By most accounts the Capitalocene is not understood to be coterminous with the Anthropocene, though accounts of the former generally delegitimize the latter, and vice versa. 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