Download Ecology without Nature

Timothy Morton
Ecology without Nature
Chapter 3
Chapter 2 could leave us in a state of
cynicism. ...Remaining in cynicism is a habit
of the beautiful soul.
Juxtaposition
Ecomimesis is above all a practice of juxtaposition.
.... But it all very much depends upon what is being
juxtaposed with what. If it is to be properly critical,
montage must juxtapose the contents with the
frame. Why? Simply to juxtapose contents without
bringing form and subject position into the mix would
leave things as they are. As we have seen, just
adding items to a list (such as adding polluting
factories to a list of things in "nature") will not entirely
do. The most extreme example of "contents " would
be the writing quality of writing. The most extreme
example of "frame " would be the ideological matrix
that makes things meaningful in the first place.
Radical Ecological Kitsch
Kitsch is immersive. It is a labor of love: you have to
"get into it." It poses the problem of how the subject
relates to the object in a striking manner.
The problem of human beingness, declared
Sartre and Lacan, is the problem of what to
do with one's slime (one's shit): "The slimy is
myself. "So Ultimately, is sliminess not the
sacred, the taboo substance of life itself?
One word for this is Kristeva's abject, the
qualities of the world we slough off in order to
maintain subjects and objects. Ecological
politics is bound up with what to do with
pollution, miasma, slime: things that glisten,
schlup, and decay.
Mind the Gap: Place in Question
A left ecology must "get" even further " into" place
than bioregionalism and other Romantic localisms.
Only then can progressive ecocriticism establish a
firm basis for exploring environmental j ustice issues
such as environmental racism, colonialism, and
imperialism. This basis is a strong theoretical
approach.
Dark Ecology
Even if "I" could be immersed in nature, and still
exist as an I there would remain the I who is telling
you this, as opposed to the I who is immersed. If we
are even able to achieve ecology without nature, it
will be difficult, if not impossible, and even
undesirable, to achieve ecology without a subject. If
reason, devoid of sadistic instrumentality, is
openness to nonidentity, that is still a kind of
subjectivity. We cannot come up with a "new and
improved " version of identity that will do without the
paradoxes and aporias associated with it.
Solidarity, strangely, has become a choice.
The ecological thought, the thinking of
interconnectedness, has a dark side em
bodied not in a hippie aesthetic of life over death,
or a sadisticsentimental Bambification of sentient
beings, but in a "goth" assertion of the contingent
and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay
with a dying world: dark ecology. Now is a time for
grief to persist, to ring throughout the world.
Modern culture has not yet known what to do with
grief.
So while we campaign to make our world "cleaner"
and less toxic, less harmful to sentient beings, our
philosophical adventure should in some ways be
quite the reverse. We should be finding ways to
stick around with the sticky mess that we're in and
that we are, making thinking dirtier, identifying with
ugliness, practicing "hauntology" (Derrida's
phrase) rather than ontology. So out with the black
clothes, eyeliner, and white makeup, on with the
spangly music: dark ecology.
The mechanical process that "is nature" is
monstrous. To see this properly would retain the
unknown-ness of the unknown, but not as an
aesthetlc mystery. It approaches the psychoanalytic
idea of drive, the repetitive, cycling processes that
operate sentient beings. The ultimate trajectory of
the "new and improved" school of revisionary
aesthetics would transfer art away from objects of
desire and toward objects of the drive. These
drives, these cycling processes have a certain right
to remain unconscious, unknown.
It gets over the dilemma of the beautiful soul, not
by turning the other into the self, but perversely,
by leaving things the way they are. In order to be
itself, forgiveness would not expect the frog to turn
into a prince as soon as we kissed it. To forgive,
then, would be a fundamentally ecological act, an
act that redefined ecology in excess of all its
established concepts, an act of radically being-with
the other. And being-here, being literally on this
earth (Da-sein), would entail a need for
forgiveness, an equally radical assumption that
whatever is there is our responsibility, and
ultimately, "our fault."
“genuine forgiveness must engage two
singularities: the guilty and the victim. As soon as a
third party intervenes, one can again speak of
amnesty, reconciliation, reparation, etc., but
certainly not of forgiveness in the strict sense” Jacques Derrida