Prologue — What Is Past Is Prologue¶
Summary: The dissertation's prologue, written as a personal-reflective foreword in the autotheoretical register. Frames the dissertation itself as an archive — "an assorted collection ... of complex emotions, scattered thoughts, appropriated discourses, ambivalent readings, and serendipitous encounters." Anchors the project temporally (started 2013, "stops" 2026) and methodologically (a peripatetic walk through Abney Park cemetery, an homage to Derrida's Archive Fever).
Sources: prologue-2026-06.txt.
Last updated: 2026-06-10.
Polycrisis vs the singular crisis¶
The prologue's opening move is to push back against the now-dominant term polycrisis (or multicrisis) — the notion "that there once existed a singular universe of rupture that today feels fragmented." Mademli rejects this temporal narrative. Her central reasoning, she writes, is that "neither crisis nor the archive has been first singular and intact and later multiple and brought into pieces." The shift from one crisis to the plenty is therefore not a historical fact about the world but "a thought process that opts for surprising relations and free associations over essentialist claims."
Civilian, then spectator, then viewser¶
The autobiographical arc the prologue traces: civilian (an "oftentimes unwilling partaker in the making of collective history") → spectator → "viewer turned viewser, after consuming media content as commodity." This positions the prologue as the dissertation's anchor for its own theoretical figure of the viewser — the writer was one before naming one.
Abney Park as Freudian-Derridean impression¶
The prologue is presented as "a processed transcription of some audio notes I recorded walking in Abney Park, Hackney" — one of London's "Magnificent Seven" cemeteries, an arboretum / botanical archive with 2,500 categorized species growing on a non-denominational burial ground. The setting is treated as a working diagram of the dissertation's argument: "Whereas the natural ecosystem surrenders to the scrutiny of categorization, the spectral refuses to succumb to dogmas."
This is also explicit homage. Derrida's Archive Fever — the dissertation's central theoretical reference — was first delivered in 1994 as a lecture in Freud's London home, by then a museum. Mademli's audio-walk in a London cemetery near that house is "a partial recognition of what is rendered invisible."
Two endpoints, one origin¶
The prologue dates the project's beginning to 2013, "in the heyday of what is remembered today as the Greek national-debt crisis." That crisis was the original prompt: "one that afflicted my home, my country, my people, and mobilized me also in the literal sense, urging me to relocate and find a different environment away from Greece."
It also names a buried first research question — "nominal attributes and annotation processes in databases, the textual nature of every attempt to archive an image, and the ostentatious exclusion of information performed by language" — that the author had to acknowledge was a way of disavowing her own cultural and intellectual specificity. This is an important note on the dissertation's autotheoretical method: the form was reached only when the disavowal broke.
The endpoint is dated to "a critical point in time for human history, in a landscape of generalized violence ... amid an unacknowledged genocide in progress and devastating wars flattening different areas of the planet." The political register is explicit; the failure of academic discourse to register collective agency in this landscape is noted directly.
The cover image: Future at the US National Archives¶
The prologue closes with a description of the dissertation's cover image — the Future statue at the National Archives Building in Washington, one of four corner monuments (the others titled Past, Heritage, and Guardianship). Future is a woman holding a book whose pages are blank. The limestone pedestal carries Shakespeare's The Tempest, "What is past is prologue."
In The Tempest, the line is spoken by the villain Antonio to persuade Sebastian to murder his sleeping father. The prologue reads this both ways at once: "is it our past or our present a prescribed mediated experience?" The blank pages of the book held by Future and the elliptical method of the dissertation are joined: "the pages of the book the young woman holds are left intentionally blank, and so are our archives of our past and present."
This is the dissertation's most direct statement on its own form: "My research endorses the elliptical as the only way to exist, while it imagines, in hope and in fear, its future landscape."
What the prologue does for the rest of the wiki¶
The prologue is not part of the four analytical chapters — it stands outside them. But it provides the autotheoretical anchor for several pages elsewhere in the wiki:
- It motivates the viewser figure as an autobiographical position the author once occupied.
- It glosses hauntology / spectrality through the cemetery-and-arboretum image.
- It introduces the polycrisis-vs-crisis problem that chapter-4-crisis-ecosystems later argues at length.
- It anchors the dissertation's relation to crisis not as one event but as a long, layered condition.
- It explains the peripatetic methodology — walking, both physical and conceptual — that recurs in every chapter.