Necrontology

I propose a counter-ontology to that which is given by the corporation and its promotion of infinite growth: necrontology, the study of existing in terms of how seemingly discrete forms, when situated in relation to other forms and subjected to time, tend towards coming apart, disaggregation, decay, dying - disincorporation.

Given prevailing renderings of “the body” as a site for possession, I suggest that, from a necrontological perspective, human people do not have bodies so much as they become corpses. That is, human ways of being are not localizable to a static manifestation of self-possession but instead can be appreciated as dynamic, continuous wellsprings of mutation.

Human people are never so stable, bounded, or construable as the fixity of their taxonomy (Homo sapiens) suggests – rather they are a procession of reconfigurations that both precede and follow that moment we might call “death.”