If MCM's work truly depicts a disaster, the question that comes to mind isn't one of suspensive suspense: the disaster is so severe that it appears terminal. (We'll return later to the denial of this appearance offered by the work's title and, against all expectations, by the work itself.) The first question that comes to mind concerns the before: what happened to get to this point? This question prompts less the search for explicit causes than the perception of a global devastation so vast, so disparate, so insidious, that it surpasses words to describe it, yet it is present, there, now. In The Raft of the Medusa, the outside-temporality follows a narrative, diachronic logic. In MCM's work, the outside-temporality of the work is synchronous with the temporality of the world, so much so that the question is no longer: what happened to get to this point, but: what is happening…