In 2013, a philosopher and ecologist named Timothy Morton proposed that humanity had entered a new phase. What had changed was our relationship to the nonhuman. For the first time, Morton wrote, we had become aware that “nonhuman beings” were “responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking.” The nonhuman beings Morton had in mind weren’t computers or space aliens but a particular group of objects that were “massively distributed in time and space.” Morton called them “hyperobjects”: all the nuclear material on earth, for example, or all the plastic in the sea. “Everyone must reckon with the power of rising waves and ultraviolet light,” Morton wrote, in “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World.” Those rising waves were being created by a hyperobject: all the carbon in the atmosphere.
As soft tissue feeds on blood
Someday I’ll find you, the urge is here.
Like a mushroom on a tree trunk
As the protein transmutates
I knock on your skin, and I am in.
We
parked the car in a lot surrounded by twisted metal, piles of scrap, and anemic
plants. Bobbing in the water not far away was a medium-sized passenger boat
with dozens of plastic chairs arrayed on its upper deck. After standing in line
for a half hour in the sun, we walked on board, moving to the bow as the boat
headed out into the water. We passed extensive ruins of concrete warehouses at
docks no longer in use. Morton pointed toward the long, flat, horizontal line
of bunker-like structures. “It’s like a skyscraper lying on its side,” they
said.
The port seemed to fold civilizational thriving and collapse together into one spooky continuum. Giant tankers drifted by in an endless procession. Several were docked at huge plants composed mostly of pipes of various sizes. Massive tubes shot flames into the sky. In the spaces between the plants, oil silos dotted the landscape.
“Look,” Claire said, pointing to a little stretch of green along the shore. A few guys sat in the grass with fishing poles. Just behind them, another plant loomed. A screaming sound seemed to be part of its production process.
Since around 2010, Morton has become associated with a philosophical movement known as object-oriented ontology, or O.O.O. The point of O.O.O. is that there is a vast cosmos out there in which weird and interesting shit is happening to all sorts of objects, all the time. In a 1999 lecture, “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Graham Harman, the movement’s central figure, explained the core idea:
“The arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of “access” to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines.”
We are not, as many of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers would have it, trapped within language or mind or culture or anything else. Reality is real, and right there to experience—but it also escapes complete knowability. One must confront reality with the full realization that you’ll always be missing something in the confrontation. Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. The ethics implied by such a strangely strange world hold that every single object everywhere is real in its own way. This realness cannot be avoided or backed away from. There is no “outside”—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.
The next morning, I was eating a leisurely breakfast at my B. and B. when a young woman sat down at the same large wooden table. I assumed that she was in Houston to do something artsy in this part of the city. “Are you visiting the Menil Collection?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. She was a scientist in Houston for business; she worked for one of the largest petrochemical companies in the world.
“Are you here for the Menil Collection?” she asked, in return.
“No,” I said. “I’m here to meet Timothy Morton.”
I told her about Morton and hyperobjects. She nodded along indulgently, then told me more about her work, which revolved around the difficult task of improving plastic. She pointed to the corner of the breakfast room. “It’s a completely different matter to get plastic to be brittle and hard like that trash can over there, versus making it get supple and strong and stretchy like the bag inside the can,” she said. I asked her if she felt bad about working for a giant petrochemical company. Her brow furrowed. “I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I just think maybe it’s worth something to make plastic better, more efficient, less wasteful.” She seemed to be gauging my reaction, staring at me intently over the lip of her coffee cup.
I was suddenly curious about what a conversation between a plastics scientist and an eco-philosopher might sound like. “Will you come to Galveston with me and Simon and Tim?” I blurted.
“Absolutely,” she said, jumping up from the table. “Just give me a couple of minutes to get ready.”
In Morton’s Mazda, we zipped along the massive highway linking Houston and Galveston, which is in the area that the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca called “the Isle of Bad Fate.” There, we saw a giant yellow phosphorescent pile of sulfur; a building complex containing three massive glass pyramids; Halliburton, or at least a sign pointing to Halliburton; and a Second World War submarine credited with having sunk one of the Japanese aircraft carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor.
We stopped for lunch at the Black Pearl Oyster Bar, a seafood restaurant that evoked a hypothetical diner inside the film “Pirates of the Caribbean.” The place was full of customers, their plates piled high with critters pulled from the Gulf of Mexico and tossed immediately into a deep fryer. Morton ordered oysters. “I love the objectivity of science,” they said, turning to the plastics scientist. “I love the rigorous way that you can ask questions and then get answers.”
She nodded. “But polymers are tricky,” she said. “Polyurethanes behave in downright magical ways.” She picked at a salad layered with tentacles.
“But there’s a method,” Morton insisted, beginning to progress through a dozen oysters.
“Sometimes it seems more art than science,” she cautioned. “I have deep emotional commitments to plastic.”
Listening to their discussion—about art and science, logic and emotion—I understood an argument to which Morton often returns. We are not getting rid of the hyperobject Plastic anytime soon, or of any of the other hyperobjects that are the result of our industrial practices. We are deeply involved with all of them now. We might as well admit our commitment, physically, practically, and emotionally.
In “Dark Ecology,” Morton writes that we must cultivate a “spirituality of care” toward the objects of the world—not just the likable parts but the frightening ones. Morton suggests that, instead of burying nuclear waste, we might store it aboveground, in a visible place, where we can learn to take more responsibility for it—perhaps even building an aesthetically interesting enclosure. The kind of care Morton envisions is as interested in piles of sulfur as in trees; it is concerned with both polar bears and circuit boards. Morton wants us to care for plutonium. At a minimum, Morton thinks that this kind of caring could cure us of the idea that we are in control; it might show us that we are part of a vast network of interpenetrating entities that come to know one another without dispelling their mystery. At a maximum, Morton seems to feel that this omnidirectional, uncanny form of care could help save the world.
The port seemed to fold civilizational thriving and collapse together into one spooky continuum. Giant tankers drifted by in an endless procession. Several were docked at huge plants composed mostly of pipes of various sizes. Massive tubes shot flames into the sky. In the spaces between the plants, oil silos dotted the landscape.
“Look,” Claire said, pointing to a little stretch of green along the shore. A few guys sat in the grass with fishing poles. Just behind them, another plant loomed. A screaming sound seemed to be part of its production process.
Since around 2010, Morton has become associated with a philosophical movement known as object-oriented ontology, or O.O.O. The point of O.O.O. is that there is a vast cosmos out there in which weird and interesting shit is happening to all sorts of objects, all the time. In a 1999 lecture, “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Graham Harman, the movement’s central figure, explained the core idea:
“The arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of “access” to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines.”
We are not, as many of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers would have it, trapped within language or mind or culture or anything else. Reality is real, and right there to experience—but it also escapes complete knowability. One must confront reality with the full realization that you’ll always be missing something in the confrontation. Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. The ethics implied by such a strangely strange world hold that every single object everywhere is real in its own way. This realness cannot be avoided or backed away from. There is no “outside”—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.
The next morning, I was eating a leisurely breakfast at my B. and B. when a young woman sat down at the same large wooden table. I assumed that she was in Houston to do something artsy in this part of the city. “Are you visiting the Menil Collection?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. She was a scientist in Houston for business; she worked for one of the largest petrochemical companies in the world.
“Are you here for the Menil Collection?” she asked, in return.
“No,” I said. “I’m here to meet Timothy Morton.”
I told her about Morton and hyperobjects. She nodded along indulgently, then told me more about her work, which revolved around the difficult task of improving plastic. She pointed to the corner of the breakfast room. “It’s a completely different matter to get plastic to be brittle and hard like that trash can over there, versus making it get supple and strong and stretchy like the bag inside the can,” she said. I asked her if she felt bad about working for a giant petrochemical company. Her brow furrowed. “I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I just think maybe it’s worth something to make plastic better, more efficient, less wasteful.” She seemed to be gauging my reaction, staring at me intently over the lip of her coffee cup.
I was suddenly curious about what a conversation between a plastics scientist and an eco-philosopher might sound like. “Will you come to Galveston with me and Simon and Tim?” I blurted.
“Absolutely,” she said, jumping up from the table. “Just give me a couple of minutes to get ready.”
In Morton’s Mazda, we zipped along the massive highway linking Houston and Galveston, which is in the area that the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca called “the Isle of Bad Fate.” There, we saw a giant yellow phosphorescent pile of sulfur; a building complex containing three massive glass pyramids; Halliburton, or at least a sign pointing to Halliburton; and a Second World War submarine credited with having sunk one of the Japanese aircraft carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor.
We stopped for lunch at the Black Pearl Oyster Bar, a seafood restaurant that evoked a hypothetical diner inside the film “Pirates of the Caribbean.” The place was full of customers, their plates piled high with critters pulled from the Gulf of Mexico and tossed immediately into a deep fryer. Morton ordered oysters. “I love the objectivity of science,” they said, turning to the plastics scientist. “I love the rigorous way that you can ask questions and then get answers.”
She nodded. “But polymers are tricky,” she said. “Polyurethanes behave in downright magical ways.” She picked at a salad layered with tentacles.
“But there’s a method,” Morton insisted, beginning to progress through a dozen oysters.
“Sometimes it seems more art than science,” she cautioned. “I have deep emotional commitments to plastic.”
Listening to their discussion—about art and science, logic and emotion—I understood an argument to which Morton often returns. We are not getting rid of the hyperobject Plastic anytime soon, or of any of the other hyperobjects that are the result of our industrial practices. We are deeply involved with all of them now. We might as well admit our commitment, physically, practically, and emotionally.
In “Dark Ecology,” Morton writes that we must cultivate a “spirituality of care” toward the objects of the world—not just the likable parts but the frightening ones. Morton suggests that, instead of burying nuclear waste, we might store it aboveground, in a visible place, where we can learn to take more responsibility for it—perhaps even building an aesthetically interesting enclosure. The kind of care Morton envisions is as interested in piles of sulfur as in trees; it is concerned with both polar bears and circuit boards. Morton wants us to care for plutonium. At a minimum, Morton thinks that this kind of caring could cure us of the idea that we are in control; it might show us that we are part of a vast network of interpenetrating entities that come to know one another without dispelling their mystery. At a maximum, Morton seems to feel that this omnidirectional, uncanny form of care could help save the world.
Later
that afternoon, we dropped the scientist back at the B. and B. I prepared to
head off to the airport. Morton insisted that I have their friend Ron Texada
drive me there. “Nobody knows the city as well as Ron does,” Morton told me.
Morton kept talking about Ron. “Ron can drive through a parking lot in the
middle of Houston and then emerge, magically, closer to the airport than the
laws of physics would otherwise allow,” they said. “Ron listens to the most
amazing gospel music.” Morton drew out the word “amazing” for several beats.
“Ron’s car”—now Morton was almost whispering—“is filled with gold.”
“Houston is a great city,” Ron told me, once I was in the car. “People don’t realize it, but it’s a people city.” As I was listening to Ron, I noticed something glinting in the car. I looked more closely at the indentations of the puffy handle on the inside of the passenger door. They were filled with Werther’s candies, in their shiny golden wrappers.
Nearly a year after my trip to Houston, I called Morton on the phone. It was April, 2020. COVID-19 was tearing through the U.S.
“Is COVID-19 a hyperobject?” I asked them.
“It’s the ultimate hyperobject,” Morton said. “The hyperobject of our age. It’s literally inside us.” We talked for a bit about fear of the virus—Morton has asthma, and suffers from sleep apnea. “I feel bad for subtitling the hyperobjects book ‘Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World,’ ” Morton said. “That idea scares people. I don’t mean ‘end of the world’ the way they think I mean it. But why do that to people? Why scare them?”
What Morton means by “the end of the world” is that a world view is passing away. The passing of this world view means that there is no “world” anymore. There’s just an infinite expanse of objects, which have as much power to determine us as we have to determine them. Part of the work of confronting strange strangeness is therefore grappling with fear, sadness, powerlessness, grief, despair. “Somewhere, a bird is singing and clouds pass overhead,” Morton writes, in “Being Ecological,” from 2018. “You stop reading this book and look around you. You don’t have to be ecological. Because you are ecological.” It’s a winsome and terrifying idea. Learning to see oneself as an object among objects is destabilizing—like learning “to navigate through a bad dream.” In many ways, Morton’s project is not philosophical but therapeutic. They have been trying to prepare themselves for the seismic shifts that are coming as the world we thought we knew transforms.
I’ve thought about Morton and their ideas often since we met. In 2017, my spouse and I purchased an old house not far from downtown Detroit. In the empty lots behind our house, we’re creating a community garden. Across the street from the lots stands the giant, crumbling ruin of what was once a factory. Kestrels sometimes fly out from gaps in the concrete blocks that seal its windows. In the spring, a two-foot-tall ring-necked pheasant likes to stand on a pile of discarded tires and squawk. Late at night, I’ve seen a single coyote moseying down the middle of the street, on which there’s never much traffic. Digging a hole to plant a tree, I once unearthed fragments of old bottles, plastic children’s toys, and hard-to-identify mechanical parts that I think might be pieces of a car still buried down there.
Our neighborhood was once dense with homes and businesses. Most of them have now been reduced to foundations, and are grown over with grass and weeds interspersed with layers of garbage. So many lives and stories are buried beneath the ruins. The landscape is uncanny, strange, trashy, and wild—Mortonian. I return to that line that Morton wrote in one of their e-mails to Björk, describing the “fusion between tenderness and sadness, joy, yearning, longing, horror (tricky one), laughter, melancholy, and weirdness.” Sifting through the rubble at the back of our house, as the sun sets pink and fierce behind the smokestack of the moldering factory, I often find myself struck by the world’s all-pervading, surprising, and mysterious beauty.
Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic. By Morgan Meis. The New Yorker, June 8, 2021.
“Houston is a great city,” Ron told me, once I was in the car. “People don’t realize it, but it’s a people city.” As I was listening to Ron, I noticed something glinting in the car. I looked more closely at the indentations of the puffy handle on the inside of the passenger door. They were filled with Werther’s candies, in their shiny golden wrappers.
Nearly a year after my trip to Houston, I called Morton on the phone. It was April, 2020. COVID-19 was tearing through the U.S.
“Is COVID-19 a hyperobject?” I asked them.
“It’s the ultimate hyperobject,” Morton said. “The hyperobject of our age. It’s literally inside us.” We talked for a bit about fear of the virus—Morton has asthma, and suffers from sleep apnea. “I feel bad for subtitling the hyperobjects book ‘Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World,’ ” Morton said. “That idea scares people. I don’t mean ‘end of the world’ the way they think I mean it. But why do that to people? Why scare them?”
What Morton means by “the end of the world” is that a world view is passing away. The passing of this world view means that there is no “world” anymore. There’s just an infinite expanse of objects, which have as much power to determine us as we have to determine them. Part of the work of confronting strange strangeness is therefore grappling with fear, sadness, powerlessness, grief, despair. “Somewhere, a bird is singing and clouds pass overhead,” Morton writes, in “Being Ecological,” from 2018. “You stop reading this book and look around you. You don’t have to be ecological. Because you are ecological.” It’s a winsome and terrifying idea. Learning to see oneself as an object among objects is destabilizing—like learning “to navigate through a bad dream.” In many ways, Morton’s project is not philosophical but therapeutic. They have been trying to prepare themselves for the seismic shifts that are coming as the world we thought we knew transforms.
I’ve thought about Morton and their ideas often since we met. In 2017, my spouse and I purchased an old house not far from downtown Detroit. In the empty lots behind our house, we’re creating a community garden. Across the street from the lots stands the giant, crumbling ruin of what was once a factory. Kestrels sometimes fly out from gaps in the concrete blocks that seal its windows. In the spring, a two-foot-tall ring-necked pheasant likes to stand on a pile of discarded tires and squawk. Late at night, I’ve seen a single coyote moseying down the middle of the street, on which there’s never much traffic. Digging a hole to plant a tree, I once unearthed fragments of old bottles, plastic children’s toys, and hard-to-identify mechanical parts that I think might be pieces of a car still buried down there.
Our neighborhood was once dense with homes and businesses. Most of them have now been reduced to foundations, and are grown over with grass and weeds interspersed with layers of garbage. So many lives and stories are buried beneath the ruins. The landscape is uncanny, strange, trashy, and wild—Mortonian. I return to that line that Morton wrote in one of their e-mails to Björk, describing the “fusion between tenderness and sadness, joy, yearning, longing, horror (tricky one), laughter, melancholy, and weirdness.” Sifting through the rubble at the back of our house, as the sun sets pink and fierce behind the smokestack of the moldering factory, I often find myself struck by the world’s all-pervading, surprising, and mysterious beauty.
Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic. By Morgan Meis. The New Yorker, June 8, 2021.
Should young people read Aristotle? That is a question. ‘No, they shouldn’t’ would be a perfectly good answer. ‘Why shouldn’t they?’ is the sort of follow-up question many people might ask and the answer is: because Aristotle puts humans front and centre in his theory of poetics. For our purposes, however, this response is less to do with writing nice tragedies that don’t have too many wacky and improbable plot twists, and more about attuning oneself to human beings accurately enough to engage them in ways that will profoundly influence their behaviour.
Two
minutes thirty seconds.
Consider
a single-celled organism, blobbing through the ocean. Glop! ‘Oh my god,’ goes
the organism, ‘did I just swallow poison?’ This is what we call the
phenomenology of symbiosis. The association between beings always has this
uneasy quality to it, and you delete it at your and others’ peril. Say, for
example, you want to be totally sure who comes through your border… Need I go
on? The thing about porous walls, and they’re all porous to some extent, is
that you can never be totally sure. Nor should you be. That is what basic
hospitality means. It contains the threat of hostility nestled within it. Knock
knock – who’s there? It might be Godzilla.
Tens of
millions of years on, the single-celled organism’s descendants are going: ‘No,
you didn’t swallow poison! That was an anaerobic bacterium, and now it’s an
energy cell, and now I’m an animal! Yay evolution!’ There’s no way to make any
sense of evolution if you look forwards – it isn’t going forwards because it
doesn’t have a telos. It is non-teleological, with no ultimate object or aim.
It only makes sense in retrospect.
Think of
those nature documentaries where the voice-over talks about ‘the webbed feet of
the duck, perfectly adapted to swimming in ponds’. Well, have you ever seen a
coot? They also swim in ponds but they don’t have webbed feet. Which leads us
to the conclusion that evolution doesn’t give a toss about webbed feet or
adaptation. ‘Survival of the fittest’ means only that you had kids before you
died. Pressure from social Darwinists, especially Alfred Russel Wallace and a
Christian socialist named Herbert Spencer, persuaded Darwin to include the
phrase, well after On the Origin of Species was first published. They couldn’t
handle the randomness, the contingency. Much in the way some people can’t stand
the Rothko Chapel for more than two minutes thirty seconds.
Or
consider sexual display. I was in a film where someone said it was to attract
members of the opposite sex. I tried and tried to get that line deleted because
it’s so homophobic and biologically inaccurate. Can you see gay people? Good.
Sexual display isn’t about attracting members of the so-called opposite sex.
Think about the first beetle who had an iridescent wing case. The other beetles
may have turned really beetlist and excluded it from their company as a mutant.
Now ponder the first beetle who found that beetle attractive. The other ones
are going wow, gross, there’s no accounting for taste! And that’s just it.
There is no accounting for taste. It’s contingency, randomness. It’s what’s for
dinner. It’s why things can be different. It’s why there is a future, no matter
how far we try to automate the past and build it out, like that cartoon
character, Wyle E Coyote, nailing a platform over the void, until he realizes
he’s standing on nothing while doing the hammering.
So all
that happens in the evolution space, the art space, the political space, has a
contingent, open quality about it until someone interprets what is happening.
The fascism doesn’t lie in turning politics into a work of art. It’s about
assuming that it needs to be there in the first place. Make the politics great
again. Make it feel great. Great is a feeling, isn’t it? It’s not just about
might and power. It’s about pain relief. It’s an analgesic, like Vicodin.
Relax, take another Vicodin, this is gonna be great, I’ll make you feel terrific
by getting rid of those people over there.
Fascism
believes that any other politics out there is a drab, featureless lump that
needs to be blinged up. But as I’ve just argued, it’s bling all the way down.
That’s also Benjamin’s problem. He thinks aesthetics is a thing that happens to
stuff. But what I’m saying here (along with Darwinism, actually) is that
aesthetics actually is the stuff, all the way down. So, all you progressive
film and TV people, let’s act like this is true! Enough of only criticizing and
critiquing and being cynical and bemoaning hypocrisy. You have to make some
amazing, compelling, magnetic dream weapons that will get the Vicodin people to
put down their turkey drumsticks and gaze slack-jawed in amazement as Fox gets
aesthetically owned.
My
daughter Claire recently got into Pre-Raphaelite art, because it’s basically
saying, the trouble with capitalism and consumerism isn’t that it promises too
much pleasure. It’s that it promises nowhere near enough. This fits in well
with leftwing theories of labour, the Marxist one, for example, because for
Marx production doesn’t mean being a robot in a Kraftwerk video, it means the
pleasure of biting into a peach. I can point to the exact passage.
Producing
and consuming, active and passive, are not as different as medieval Neoplatonic
tweets would have you imagine. Maybe incremental change and sudden revolution
aren’t opposites at all, or not entirely. Maybe that’s what they want you to
think. Maybe action is made out of little dots of appreciation. Think of being
in a band. You’re listening to the music, you’re listening to the other
musicians, you’re attending to your musical lineage, to your instrument, to the
audience, to the vibe in the room…
Surely
increased pleasure could mean enjoying other beings’ pleasures, at least a bit.
We shouldn’t be about just tolerating the other’s enjoyment, but about
appreciating it. So the increase in pleasure must lead to an increase in
ecological niceness. You can’t really enjoy something once you know how much
fossil fuel it has burned. Being alive must be nice for polar bears, and we can
make it be nice for us. Surely we can enjoy that so-called ‘crass’ pleasure
that Dickens and others found so disturbing about Pre-Raphaelite art: putting a
dot of amazing indigo paint right there on Ophelia’s dress, and some viridian
green on a leaf in a one million dpi JPEG kind of a painting that doesn’t make
a distinction between foreground and background, human subject or non-human
surroundings. It’s the kind of pleasure that makes something awesome, so you
can taste it.
Even
logic is kind of PR bling, I’d say. Even maths is. Mathematicians would be the
first to agree with me – beautiful equations are a thing. That whole answer was
in the question stuff is ‘truthfeel’. Beauty is truthfeel, as John Keats said,
or more exactly: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all/ Ye know on
earth…’.
Meanwhile,
there’s data harvesting. Wipings are harvested, aggregated and weaponized to
make black people not vote in Jamaica. There’s that William Blake style
painting called The Ghost of Trump walking through his own combover, gazing
into a bowlful of blood and going ‘so drenched, so drenched in blood’. Come on
guys we can do better than this! We can improve on all this recycling – which
is the trouble with automation.
It’s not
AI that’s the problem, it’s the fact that automation causes the past to eat the
future. Are we completely enlightened Buddhas living in a pure land of total
bliss? No. So if the past sucked, let’s try for the future instead.
Let’s go
back to thinking about tragedy being a kind of alienation, similar to watching
a priest go through ritual motions so you don’t have to. All that religion and
tragedy and mansplaining philosophy is a function of a hierarchical social
structures that generated patriarchy, racism and class division. Yet still, the
Mickey Mouse brooms of the agricultural society algorithm keep on sweeping
away, for twelve and a half thousand years, and we’re still rubbernecking the
show. It’s an alienation process.
Alienation
from what? From our powers as a gigantic collective being that hasn’t had a
chance to realize that it is a gigantic collective being yet. Alienation from
the superpowers of a hyperobject called all the human beings on this planet,
doing it right for the biosphere. Consider the Marshall Islands and nuclear
testing. You don’t need to do this, American people! We even imagine humankind
as an alienated thing, a single vast metallic being that is the same all the
way through. Scratch anyone, and a white or transparent (same thing) man is
revealed underneath. We have to get out of this gaping mode in which we look
for the spectacular and see human beings as a unified tragic Godzilla. Godzilla
wants us to do something. But look, it’s out there, it’s being Godzilla so we
don’t have to. That’s the point of Godzilla.
Godzilla
says, no massive geoengineering, no terrifying deus ex machina spectacles fixed
by technocratic billionaires. Godzilla says, make democracy feel as lovely as
it could. Foment it. We are part of a loose, vague, inconsistent and diverse,
yet real, hyperobject called humankind. Let us think about collective action at
Earth magnitude. My son Simon has imagined a sitcom where Godzilla is a
regular, ordinary person. The character comes in and sits down on the sofa with
the other Earth defenders and they watch TV – in much the same position as the
television audiences on their sofas. But they’re watching shows about humans
destroying Earth.
It’s
significant that, as global warming awareness has increased, so has the size of
Godzilla, who is the sum total of everything wrong done to Japan and the
Pacific by America, the bits of ourselves we don’t want to see. The
environmental bits. Please note though, that pleasure in eco mode is inevitably
going to have a gross fringe to it, because, remember, ‘yuck, was that poison I
just swallowed?’ is the basic format of symbiosis.
Toys ‘R’
Us and so is Godzilla. Sitting in your living room, Godzilla is that
hyperobject, rather than an objectified spectacle you’re watching, or just
another way to retweet the grief, shock and panic we’re feeling. On its
birthday, all Godzilla’s friends wish it a happy 66th and it goes ‘thank you
for reminding me of my mortality once a year’. Please, how do we get out of
tragedy space and into comedy space?
It’s a
political question.
This
essay is based on the lecture the author gave at De Dépendance for the
International Film Festival Rotterdam, 31 January 2020.
Benjamin
made a bit of a mistake in that essay. Sorry, dude, but you did. He says at the
end that fascism is the aestheticization of politics. But if you think about
it, aesthetics and politics (as opposed to ethics and morality) are kind of the
same, based on amoral sorts of decision like ‘let’s put a blob of yellow next
to this blob of red’ or ‘let’s connect these two groups together’. Indeed, if
you’re going to get deep about it, aesthetics and politics are basically the
way the whole biosphere works, in a symbiotic way. It’s not particularly good
or especially bad.
D.R.E.A.M.W.E.A.P.O.N.S.
ByTimothy Morton. Eurozine, March 26,
2020
Among
his circle of academic rock stars in the Object-Oriented Ontology movement, the
philosopher Timothy Morton describes himself as the George Harrison of the
group, a freewheeling wanderer with an appetite for hallucinogens. In his books
such as Ecology without Nature (2007) and Humankind (2017), the 50-year-old
British expat has set out to change the way we consider ecological catastrophes
by helping us shed our civilization-centered world view. Morton instead
encourages us to think of crises such as global warming as “hyperobjects,”
entities that stretch so far into time and space that they cannot be discussed on
a human scale. The term was inspired by a 1996 song called “Hyperballad” by
Morton’s friend Björk, with whom the philosopher has a longstanding e-mail
correspondence that verges into telepathy. What follows are his gut reactions
to nine semi-random topics.
———
VERSACE
Ecological
Philosopher Timothy Morton on Saving the World, Sour Patch Kids, and Versace
Shirts. Interview Magazine, March 14,
2019
We know
that global warming is happening but we don’t know how to feel about it: this
precise, very relevant, nexus is the subject of eco-philosopher Timothy
Morton’s work. “What is happening on Earth right now is trauma, in every sense
of the word, for all lifeforms… [But] we talk about this stuff in ways that are
as traumatizing as the events themselves. That is a problem.” Online global
warming explainer pieces traffic in “information dumping, guilt-inducing, or
preaching to the choir,” to quote the blurb to Morton’s book Being Ecological
(2018). How might we discuss things differently? Could we defer the frantic,
knowing tone with which global warming is typically discussed in favor of
wonder, acceptance, and comedy?
These
are inherently aesthetic questions, and so it makes sense that, in addition to
writing, Morton curates and works with artists as well. He has collaborated
with Olafur Elíasson, the Danish-Icelandic artist perhaps best known for Ice
Watch (2015), in which he installed blocks of ice outside the Place du Panthéon
during the 2015 Climate Change Conference. Excerpts from Morton’s
correspondence with Björk were published as part of her 2015 MoMA
retrospective, while the group exhibition "Hyperobjects: An Exhibition on
Today’s Ecological Crisis," co-curated with Laura Copelin, ran at Ballroom
Marfa this year.
If
academics also have non-academic appeal, their peers treat them as pop
stars––shallow but powerful. You're supposed to "queer" or
"transgress" the public, not care about them. Morton’s academic and
artistic work show the elitism of such an approach. An edited version of our
conversation, conducted via Google Docs, is below.
How did
you get into ecology?
I’ve been
into ecology since I was four years old, when my mum gave me a book that UNESCO
had published called SOS Save the Earth. I still have it. What it tells you
about is scarily up to date: it totally talks about global warming, for
example. Later on, I fell in love with the mixture of poetry and philosophy in
Romantic art, that twisty goth feeling that is weirdly the same as the feel of
being a scientist. It leaves one fascinated and disgusted and melancholic at
the same time, suspending one’s beliefs, being open…
I talk
about ecological awareness. It’s not what we know, but how we know it, that
gets us into trouble, and out of it. I’ve been mostly trying to get people to
realize that ecological issues are part of the intimate, deep texture of their
human lives, and that these issues are deeply intertwined with issues of race,
gender and class, and with how we treat entities that we consider to be very
different from us, things that we call “objects.”
The term
“hyperobject” is thrown around a lot in the art world. Could you talk about
what the word means and what makes global warming a “hyperobject”?
I
invented this word "hyperobject" in 2008 while I was writing the
conclusion to a book called The Ecological Thought (2010). At the time I was
trying to find a way to describe pollution, which implies a future, all kinds
of futures in fact—futures that humans might not intend deliberately,
accidental futures that involve all kinds of stuff and that go on far far
beyond a human lifetime.
We use
Styrofoam for coffee cups, but for most of its existence, Styrofoam will be all
kinds of other things: receptacles for all kinds of toxic liquids, pellets in
the stomachs of birds…So what do you call all the Styrofoam ever, throughout
all of its states and all the ways different entities interact with it? Well,
it’s a thing, so let’s call it an object. But what kind of object? This kind of
object is so massively distributed in time and space that it goes beyond your
ideas of what an object is. When I say “object,” I bet you visualize something
you can fit into your immediate field of vision, like your phone. “Beyond” in
Greek is “hyper”… so this must be a hyperobject. That’s it.
Global
warming inspires a lot of heavy feelings––ennui, anger, denial, grief. How can
we begin to work through them?
What is
happening on Earth right now is trauma, in every sense of the word, for all
lifeforms. In our case, there is trauma in realizing that you are living on a
planet, because that happens when your world starts to malfunction, like
suddenly there’s a hurricane and all the Mediterranean stuff around Earth
bursts into flame. Your world wasn’t solid. It was a kind of stage set, and you
were treating it in all kinds of ways that led to this.
We talk
about this stuff in ways that are as traumatizing as the events themselves.
That is a problem. You don’t shake someone whose parent just died and yell
“Don’t you realize, you idiot, your mom just died!” But that’s exactly how we
talk to one another about ecology.
If we’re
ever going to do something about it, like really really do something about it,
we are going to need to be out of shock-mode. We are picturing these horrible
things, and they are horrible, but how can we actually do something about them,
please, because dolphins don’t have fingers to operate the keyboards that turn
off the oil pipes.
Could
you talk about "Hyperobjects: An Exhibition on Today’s Ecological
Crisis," the show you co-curated at Ballroom Marfa? In the press text, you
said that the exhibition sought “to create encounters with artworks and non-art
objects that de-center and expand the scale of human perception." I’d love
to hear more about that.
Laura
Copelin and I curated that lovely show. I did all kinds of things for a
hyperobjects show in Barcelona (After the End of the World at the Centra de
Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona), too, that ran almost simultaneously with
ours. We combined local biological and geological artifacts with human works of
art that sought in various ways to capture the feel of hyperobjects.
One work
that I really liked was Paul Johnson’s Wallet (Five Years) (2010-2015). Paul
told me that he had gone around with this pair of pants in which there was
buried a wallet, and when he retrieved it, it was as if he had found a
sculpture made by all kinds of things that were related to him, but that
weren’t strictly him: his legs, his clothes, the items in the wallet… it had
become this strange sandwich that he then put on the wall.
It
beautifully shows how when you think of humans over time, other selves and
future selves, the whole multitude of what we nervously call “us,” you notice
that this thing you’re seeing, the human—it’s a hyperobject, it’s a fuzzy heap
of all kinds of things that are also parts of other heaps: computers, cows, clutches...
No, that’s not at all what it’s about! How come it’s a zero-sum game? If you let turtles do stuff in the way we do stuff (like have a history or whatever), why does that mean we have less of it? That says something about the mind of the hearer—the ways in which anthropocentrism, thinking that humans are special and different and that the only way to value them is to regard them as special and different, is deeply wired into our ways of thinking.
Another critique that people have is that your conceptions of “human” and “object” don’t factor in the ways those terms have been defined by anti-Blackness and transatlantic slavery. Could you maybe speak to that a bit?
Racism deeply structures what we think about the so-called objects. To demolish racism is key to any kind of ecological project that values other beings along with humans. In fact, my whole argument is that speciesism—treating other lifeforms as really different (worse in some way, pretty much) than us—is structured deeply by racism. My own research is in conversation with African-American scholars such as Fred Moten at NYU and my French editor Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, an African PhD student who shares what he takes to be my animism.
Since the beginning, my mission has been to show how ecological issues are structured by ones involving race, gender and class. It’s just that how I’ve been showing that has gradually spoken to more and more people, and is not always explicit about it, because I’ve learned that sometimes truth needs to emerge out of what you say, that people resist it less when you don’t point at it.
An Interview with Eco-Philosopher Timothy Morton on Art and the Hyper-Object. By Charlie Markbreiter. Artspace, December 14, 2018.
When you
first hear some of philosopher Timothy Morton’s ideas, they may sound bizarre.
He argues that everything in the universe - from algae and rocks to knives and
forks - has a kind of consciousness. That we need to scrap the concept of
“nature” as being distinct to civilisation. And, he says, we’re ruled by a kind
of primitive artificial intelligence: industrial capitalism.
These
ideas may sound strange, but sit down with Timothy for five minutes and they
start to make sense. His latest book, Being Ecological, explores the
relationship between humanity and the environment and why the world’s current
approach to climate change isn’t working. We don’t need endless “factoids” or
“guilt-inducing sermons”, he says, we need to radically change how we think
about nature – and stop distinguishing between humans and non-human beings.
Timothy
sat down with Sian Cain in the studio
and talked about what a human can do on an individual level to tackle global
warming, his work with Björk and how pop culture can help in philosophical
conversation.
Why we
need to rethink climate change, with Timothy Morton – books podcast. The Guardian, February 13, 2018.
In 2015,
Cecil the lion was shot with an arrow by a big-game hunting American called
Walter Palmer. Facebook and Twitter erupted in outrage against the insouciant
dentist, UN resolutions were passed, Palmer was stalked and his extradition to
face charges in Zimbabwe demanded.
Timothy Morton takes Palmer’s flash-mob shaming as a hopeful sign. We may be living in dark times – the epoch he and other radical thinkers call the Anthropocene, in which our species has committed ecological devastation, presided over the sixth mass extinction event (animal populations across the planet have decreased by as much as 80% since 1900) and got our degraded kicks by offing lovely lions. But, in a dialectical twist, humans are becoming so aware of what we’ve done that we are now capable of bringing about change.
Morton sets out a political programme of liberating humans from the “patriarchal, hierarchical, heteronormative possibility space” that has constrained our species ever since our ancestors started farming in Mesopotamia 400 generations ago. It was then, he asserts, that humans started hubristically carving up the biosphere. Ever since, he contends, our very thinking has become rapaciously binary. Consider the Platonic distinction between body and soul. Consider Descartes’ implicit suggestion that other animals are furry robots. Consider what Dostoevsky saw when he visited Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace: he found in it a metaphor for western civilisation, an immune system that brought the world’s most diverting flora, fauna and industrial products under one roof, while whatever remained outside (war, genocide, slavery, unpleasant tropical diseases, human waste, expendable life forms) dwindled into irrelevance.
We have airbrushed out the historical disaster Morton calls “the Severing”, a name that gives his argument a voguish Game of Thrones-like vibe. “The Severing,” he explains, “is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place ‘at’ a certain ‘point’ in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, and in whose wake we are caught.” The severing resembles the central trauma of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels. In that imagined world, children each have their daemons – until, that is, organised religion (evil Nicole Kidman in the film adaptation The Golden Compass) brutally severs the symbiotic pair in order to subjugate humanity. For Morton, our task is to become haunted beings again, possessed by a spectral sense of our connectedness to everything on this planet.
How might we do that? Morton here attempts to retool Marxism to accommodate oppressed non-humans. Tough gig: Marx’s thought is, you’d think, hopelessly anthropocentric, a philosophical artefact of the Severing. Morton demurs. His book is about adding “modes of anarchist thought back into Marxism, like the new medical therapy that consists of injecting fecal matter into another’s ailing guts”.
His fecal shock therapy sometimes seems like a quack cure, but one disarming aspect of Morton is his hopefulness. He loathes the smug leftist defeatism of his academic colleagues – their sense that capitalism won, that Earth is done, and all that remains is for self-serving professors to ringfence their critiques of neoliberalism and ecological ruination inside intellectual cordons sanitaires. In the Anthropocene, he realises, everyone is implicated. Even theory professors don’t have clean hands.
Against defeatism, he pits hope. The size and scope of the outrage over Cecil’s killing was, he argues, very different from, say, the Save the Whale protests of the 1970s. “The year 2015 was when a very large number of humans figured out they had more in common with a lion than a dentist,” he claims.
Without wishing to sound pre-fecally defeatist, though, I’m doubtful. I don’t think the reaction to Cecil’s killing suggests we have anything significant in common with lions. Rather, the flash-mob shaming might well be thought of as projected self-loathing premised on realising that Palmer is the barbarous flipside to what we call human civilisation.
In his earlier book Dark Ecology Morton was on to something like this. He reflected that in Ridley Scott’s dystopian thriller Blade Runner, the protagonist Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) comes to suspect he might be the enemy he has been ordered to hunt down. Humanity in the Anthropocene is like Deckard: we realise with – ideally, revolution-catalysing – horror that we are the problem.
There’s another possibility Morton too quickly dismisses. Zambia’s tourism minister Jean Kapata had a point when she suggested the reaction to Cecil’s slaying showed westerners care more about African animals than African humans. No matter. We should, Morton argues in this exasperating, beguiling, intellectually reckless and restless book, have solidarity with non-humans – not just with charismatic megafauna such as Cecil, but algae, cutlery, rocks. This follows from his adherence to object-oriented ontology, the argument that nothing has privileged status and philosophers exist equally with Xboxes and excrement.
That’s right – excrement. Even the stuff we throw away demands our solidarity. “The waste products in Earth’s crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense,” Morton writes. “One’s garbage doesn’t go ‘away’ – it just goes somewhere else.” Good point, though I’d like him to argue that point in front of those living through the second month of Birmingham’s refuse collectors’ strike this summer.
Morton’s
garbage is like Freud’s return of the repressed, in that it comes back to bite
us in the philosophical ass: what we excrete remains part of us, as do the
plastic bottles on landfill sites we thought we’d got rid of. Even more
chasteningly, he insists that humans are not just composed of stardust (as Joni
Mitchell once suggested), but of viruses, rubbish and bacteria. One-third of
baby milk, for instance, is not digestible by the baby; rather it feeds the
bacteria that coats the intestines with “immunity-bestowing film”.
Here too he suggests we scrap the concept of “nature” and reclaim the upper scales of ecological coexistence, rather than – as the blurb deliriously has it – let agrochemical company “Monsanto and cryogenically suspended billionaires define them and own them”. You don’t have to holiday at Center Parcs to realise that “nature” is a hyperreal simulation devised to blind us to the “agrilogistic” rape of the Earth, but it might help you get inside Morton’s mindset.
Stuart Jeffries. The Guardian, August 23, 2017.
A few
years ago, Björk began corresponding with a philosopher whose books she
admired. “hi timothy,” her first message to him began. “i wanted to write this
letter for a long time.” She was trying to give a name to her own singular
genre, to label her work for posterity before the critics did. She asked him to
help define the nature of her art – “not only to define it for me, but also for
all my friends, and a generation actually.”
It turned out the philosopher, Timothy Morton, was a fan of Björk. Her music, he told her, had been “a very deep influence on my way of thinking and life in general”. The sense of eerie intimacy with other species, the fusion of moods in her songs and videos – tenderness and horror, weirdness and joy – “is the feeling of ecological awareness”, he said. Morton’s own work is about the implications of this strange awareness – the knowledge of our interdependence with other beings – which he believes undermines long-held assumptions about the separation between humanity and nature. For him, this is the defining characteristic of our times, and it is compelling us to change our “core ideas of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is”.
Over the past decade, Morton’s ideas have been spilling into the mainstream. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London’s Serpentine gallery, and perhaps the most powerful figure in the contemporary art world, is one of his loudest cheerleaders. Obrist told readers of Vogue that Morton’s books are among the pre-eminent cultural works of our time, and recommends them to many of his own collaborators. The acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson has been flying Morton around the world to speak at his major exhibition openings. Excerpts from Morton’s correspondence with Björk were published as part of her 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Morton’s terminology is “slowly infecting all the humanities”, says his friend and fellow thinker Graham Harman. Though many academics have a reputation for writing exclusively for their colleagues down the hall, Morton’s peculiar conceptual vocabulary – “dark ecology”, “the strange stranger”, “the mesh” – has been picked up by writers in a cornucopia of fields, from literature and epistemology to legal theory and religion. Last year, he was included in a much-discussed list of the 50 most influential living philosophers. His ideas have also percolated into traditional media outlets such as Newsweek, the New Yorker and the New York Times.
Part of what makes Morton popular are his attacks on settled ways of thinking. His most frequently cited book, Ecology Without Nature, says we need to scrap the whole concept of “nature”. He argues that a distinctive feature of our world is the presence of ginormous things he calls “hyperobjects” – such as global warming or the internet – that we tend to think of as abstract ideas because we can’t get our heads around them, but that are nevertheless as real as hammers. He believes all beings are interdependent, and speculates that everything in the universe has a kind of consciousness, from algae and boulders to knives and forks. He asserts that human beings are cyborgs of a kind, since we are made up of all sorts of non-human components; he likes to point out that the very stuff that supposedly makes us us – our DNA – contains a significant amount of genetic material from viruses. He says that we’re already ruled by a primitive artificial intelligence: industrial capitalism. At the same time, he believes that there are some “weird experiential chemicals” in consumerism that will help humanity prevent a full-blown ecological crisis.
Morton’s theories might sound bizarre, but they are in tune with the most earth-shaking idea to emerge in the 21st century: that we are entering a new phase in the history of the planet – a phase that Morton and many others now call the “Anthropocene”.
For the past 12,000 years, human beings lived in a geological epoch called the Holocene, known for its relatively stable, temperate climes. It was, you might say, the California of planetary history. But it is coming to an end. Recently, we have begun to alter the Earth so drastically that, according to many scientists, a new epoch is dawning. After the briefest of geological vacations, we seem to be entering a more volatile period.
The term Anthropocene, from the Ancient Greek word anthropos, meaning “human”, acknowledges that humans are the major cause of the earth’s current transformation. Extreme weather, submerged cities, acute resource shortages, vanished species, lakes turned to deserts, nuclear fallout: if there is still human life on earth tens of thousands of years from now, societies that we can’t imagine will have to grapple with the changes we are wreaking today. Morton has noted that 75% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at this very moment will still be there in half a millennium. That’s 15 generations away. It will take another 750 generations, or 25,000 years, for most of the those gases to be absorbed into the oceans.
It turned out the philosopher, Timothy Morton, was a fan of Björk. Her music, he told her, had been “a very deep influence on my way of thinking and life in general”. The sense of eerie intimacy with other species, the fusion of moods in her songs and videos – tenderness and horror, weirdness and joy – “is the feeling of ecological awareness”, he said. Morton’s own work is about the implications of this strange awareness – the knowledge of our interdependence with other beings – which he believes undermines long-held assumptions about the separation between humanity and nature. For him, this is the defining characteristic of our times, and it is compelling us to change our “core ideas of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is”.
Over the past decade, Morton’s ideas have been spilling into the mainstream. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London’s Serpentine gallery, and perhaps the most powerful figure in the contemporary art world, is one of his loudest cheerleaders. Obrist told readers of Vogue that Morton’s books are among the pre-eminent cultural works of our time, and recommends them to many of his own collaborators. The acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson has been flying Morton around the world to speak at his major exhibition openings. Excerpts from Morton’s correspondence with Björk were published as part of her 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Morton’s terminology is “slowly infecting all the humanities”, says his friend and fellow thinker Graham Harman. Though many academics have a reputation for writing exclusively for their colleagues down the hall, Morton’s peculiar conceptual vocabulary – “dark ecology”, “the strange stranger”, “the mesh” – has been picked up by writers in a cornucopia of fields, from literature and epistemology to legal theory and religion. Last year, he was included in a much-discussed list of the 50 most influential living philosophers. His ideas have also percolated into traditional media outlets such as Newsweek, the New Yorker and the New York Times.
Part of what makes Morton popular are his attacks on settled ways of thinking. His most frequently cited book, Ecology Without Nature, says we need to scrap the whole concept of “nature”. He argues that a distinctive feature of our world is the presence of ginormous things he calls “hyperobjects” – such as global warming or the internet – that we tend to think of as abstract ideas because we can’t get our heads around them, but that are nevertheless as real as hammers. He believes all beings are interdependent, and speculates that everything in the universe has a kind of consciousness, from algae and boulders to knives and forks. He asserts that human beings are cyborgs of a kind, since we are made up of all sorts of non-human components; he likes to point out that the very stuff that supposedly makes us us – our DNA – contains a significant amount of genetic material from viruses. He says that we’re already ruled by a primitive artificial intelligence: industrial capitalism. At the same time, he believes that there are some “weird experiential chemicals” in consumerism that will help humanity prevent a full-blown ecological crisis.
Morton’s theories might sound bizarre, but they are in tune with the most earth-shaking idea to emerge in the 21st century: that we are entering a new phase in the history of the planet – a phase that Morton and many others now call the “Anthropocene”.
For the past 12,000 years, human beings lived in a geological epoch called the Holocene, known for its relatively stable, temperate climes. It was, you might say, the California of planetary history. But it is coming to an end. Recently, we have begun to alter the Earth so drastically that, according to many scientists, a new epoch is dawning. After the briefest of geological vacations, we seem to be entering a more volatile period.
The term Anthropocene, from the Ancient Greek word anthropos, meaning “human”, acknowledges that humans are the major cause of the earth’s current transformation. Extreme weather, submerged cities, acute resource shortages, vanished species, lakes turned to deserts, nuclear fallout: if there is still human life on earth tens of thousands of years from now, societies that we can’t imagine will have to grapple with the changes we are wreaking today. Morton has noted that 75% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at this very moment will still be there in half a millennium. That’s 15 generations away. It will take another 750 generations, or 25,000 years, for most of the those gases to be absorbed into the oceans.
The Anthropocene is not only a period of manmade disruption. It is also a moment of blinking self-awareness, in which the human species is becoming conscious of itself as a planetary force. We’re not only driving global warming and ecological destruction; we know that we are.
One of Morton’s most powerful insights is that we are condemned to live with this awareness at all times. It’s there not only when politicians gather to discuss international environmental agreements, but when we do something as mundane as chat about the weather, pick up a plastic bag at the supermarket or water the lawn. We live in a world with a moral calculus that didn’t exist before. Now, doing just about anything is an environmental question. That wasn’t true 60 years ago – or at least people weren’t aware that it was true. Tragically, it is only by despoiling the planet that we have realised just how much a part of it we are.
Morton believes that this constitutes a revolution in our understanding of our place in the universe on a par with those fomented by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. He is just one of thousands of geologists, climate scientists, historians, novelists and journalists writing about this upheaval, but, perhaps better than anyone else, he captures in words the uncanny feeling of being present at the birth of this extreme age.
“There you are, turning the ignition of your car,” he writes. “And it creeps up on you.” Every time you fire up your engine you don’t mean to harm the Earth, “let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet”. But “harm to Earth is precisely what is happening”. Part of what’s so uncomfortable about this is that our individual acts may be statistically and morally insignificant, but when you multiply them millions and billions of times – as they are performed by an entire species – they are a collective act of ecological destruction. Coral bleaching isn’t just occurring over yonder, on the Great Barrier Reef; it’s happening wherever you switch on the air conditioning. In short, Morton says, “everything is interconnected”.
As Morton’s work spreads beyond cultural hierophants such as Björk to the pages of major news outlets, he is arguably becoming our most popular guide to the new epoch. Yes, he has some seemingly crazy ideas about what it’s like to be alive right now – but what it’s like to be alive right now, in the Anthropocene, is pretty crazy.
In the course of its young life, the Anthropocene has grown into a concept as grand in its scope as any other world-historical paradigm worth its salt (which, if it’s sea salt, now includes a good dose of synthetic waste in tiny particles called microplastics). What began as a technical debate within the earth sciences has led, in Morton’s view, to a confrontation with some of our most basic ways of understanding the world. In the Anthropocene, he writes, we are undergoing “a traumatic loss of coordinates”.
The Anthropocene idea is generally attributed to the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer, who started popularising the term in 2000. From the outset, many took Crutzen and Stoermer’s concept seriously, even if they disagreed with it. Since the late 20th century, scientists have viewed geological time as a drama punctuated by great cataclysms, not merely a gradual accretion of incremental changes, and it made sense to see humanity itself as the latest cataclysm.
Imagine geologists from a future civilisation examining the layers of rock that are in the slow process of forming today, the way we examine the rock strata that formed as the dinosaurs died off. That civilisation will see evidence of our sudden (in geological terms) impact on the planet – including fossilised plastics and layers both of carbon, from burning carbon fuels, and of radioactive particles, from nuclear testing and explosions – just as clearly as we see evidence of the dinosaurs’ rapid demise. We can already observe these layers forming today.
For a couple of years, a lively debate over the usefulness of the concept unfolded. Detractors argued that humanity’s “geological signal” was not yet loud enough to justify the coronation of a new epoch, or that the term had no scientific use. Supporters wondered when they should date the Anthropocene’s start. To the advent of agriculture, many millennia ago? To the invention of the steam engine in the 18th century and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? To 5.29am on 16 July 1945, the moment when the first-ever nuclear test exploded over the New Mexico desert? (Morton, in his all-embracing way, treats each of these moments as pivotal.) Then, in 2002, Crutzen set out his arguments in the scientific journal Nature. The idea of a moment in planetary history in which human influence was predominant seemed to tie together so many disparate developments – from retreating glaciers to fresh thinking about the limits of capitalism – that the term quickly spread to other earth sciences, and then beyond.
Since then, at least three academic journals devoted to the Anthropocene have been founded, several universities have established formal research groups to ponder its implications, Stanford students have started a popular podcast titled Generation Anthropocene, and thousands of articles and books have been written on the subject, in fields ranging from economics to poetry.
Some thinkers object to the term, arguing that it reinforces the human-centric view of the world that has led us to the verge of ecological catastrophe. Others say the blame for the despoliation of the Earth should be laid at the feet not of humanity in general, but of (predominantly white, western and male) capitalism. Several alternative designations have been minted, including “Capitalocene”, but none has caught on. They don’t have the disquieting existential ring of Anthropocene, which stresses both our culpability and our fragility as humans.
Around
2011, the Anthropocene “began to crop up regularly in newspapers for the first
time”, according to the scholar Jeremy Davies’s recent history of the concept.
The BBC, the Economist, National Geographic, Science and others covered the
idea. Planetary changes had increasingly led journalists to set their
environmental reporting in the context of geohistory – atmospheric carbon
dioxide levels of 400 parts per million? Not seen since the Pliocene, three
million years ago – and the Anthropocene became a useful shorthand for placing
human activity in the perspective of geological deep time. For Morton, who had
recently begun writing about it, it captured his concern with the way beings of
different kinds, including humans, depend on each other for their existence – a
fact the various calamities of the Anthropocene drove home.
In 2014, the Anthropocene was inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary, and last year, the epoch was formally endorsed by a working group within the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the official keeper of geological time. As a tentative start date, they chose the year 1950, when one of the clearest markers of human activity shows up globally in the earth’s crust: plutonium isotopes from widespread nuclear testing. The working group’s announcement was considered so significant that it made the front page of the Guardian. (Across the media, the Anthropocene is now used to frame everything from fiction reviews to discussions of the Donald Trump presidency.) As Jan Zalasiewicz, the chair of the group and one of the leading scientists studying the Anthropocene, said at the time, the new epoch “sets a different trajectory for the Earth system” and we are only now “realising the scale and permanence of the change”.
There have been periods of intense climate fluctuation coupled with mass extinction before. The most recent was 66m years ago, when a meteorite six miles in diameter struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. The impact released an estimated 2m times the energy of the most powerful atomic bomb ever detonated, altering the planet’s atmosphere and wiping out three-quarters of its species. But that was a comparatively simple event, which the physical sciences are well-equipped to understand.
To make sense of an epochal change that is being driven by human activity, we need more than geology, meteorology and chemistry. If this is a reckoning for our species, we need an intellectual guide – someone to tell us just how panicked we should be, and how our recognition that we are transforming the planet will change us in turn.
The awareness we’ve gained in the Anthropocene is not generally a happy one. Many environmentalists now warn of impending global catastrophe and urge industrial societies to change course. Morton stakes out a more iconoclastic position. Instead of raising the ecological alarm like some Paul Revere of the apocalypse, he advocates what he calls “dark ecology,” which holds that the much-feared catastrophe has, in fact, already occurred.
Morton means not only that irreversible global warming is under way, but also something more wide-reaching. “We Mesopotamians” – as he calls the past 400 or so generations of humans living in agricultural and industrial societies – thought that we were simply manipulating other entities (by farming and engineering, and so on) in a vacuum, as if we were lab technicians and they were in some kind of giant petri dish called “nature” or “the environment”. In the Anthropocene, Morton says, we must wake up to the fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can’t even burn, throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment – that they are separate from us, and relatively stable – have been destroyed.
Morton likens this realisation to detective stories in which the hunter realises he is hunting himself (his favourite examples are Blade Runner and Oedipus Rex). “Not all of us are prepared to feel sufficiently creeped out” by this epiphany, he says. But there’s another twist: even though humans have caused the Anthropocene, we cannot control it. “Oh, my God!” Morton exclaimed to me in mock horror at one point. “My attempt to escape the web of fate was the web of fate.”
The chief reason that we are waking up to our entanglement with the world we have been destroying, Morton says, is our encounter with the reality of hyperobjects – the term he coined to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are “massively distributed in time and space” compared to individual humans. Hyperobjects might not seem to be objects in the way that, say, billiard balls are, but they are equally real, and we are now bumping up against them consciously for the first time. Global warming might have first appeared to us as a bit of funny local weather, then as a series of independent manifestations (an unusually torrential flood here, a deadly heatwave there), but now we see it as a unified phenomenon, of which extreme weather events and the disruption of the old seasons are only elements.
In 2014, the Anthropocene was inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary, and last year, the epoch was formally endorsed by a working group within the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the official keeper of geological time. As a tentative start date, they chose the year 1950, when one of the clearest markers of human activity shows up globally in the earth’s crust: plutonium isotopes from widespread nuclear testing. The working group’s announcement was considered so significant that it made the front page of the Guardian. (Across the media, the Anthropocene is now used to frame everything from fiction reviews to discussions of the Donald Trump presidency.) As Jan Zalasiewicz, the chair of the group and one of the leading scientists studying the Anthropocene, said at the time, the new epoch “sets a different trajectory for the Earth system” and we are only now “realising the scale and permanence of the change”.
There have been periods of intense climate fluctuation coupled with mass extinction before. The most recent was 66m years ago, when a meteorite six miles in diameter struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. The impact released an estimated 2m times the energy of the most powerful atomic bomb ever detonated, altering the planet’s atmosphere and wiping out three-quarters of its species. But that was a comparatively simple event, which the physical sciences are well-equipped to understand.
To make sense of an epochal change that is being driven by human activity, we need more than geology, meteorology and chemistry. If this is a reckoning for our species, we need an intellectual guide – someone to tell us just how panicked we should be, and how our recognition that we are transforming the planet will change us in turn.
The awareness we’ve gained in the Anthropocene is not generally a happy one. Many environmentalists now warn of impending global catastrophe and urge industrial societies to change course. Morton stakes out a more iconoclastic position. Instead of raising the ecological alarm like some Paul Revere of the apocalypse, he advocates what he calls “dark ecology,” which holds that the much-feared catastrophe has, in fact, already occurred.
Morton means not only that irreversible global warming is under way, but also something more wide-reaching. “We Mesopotamians” – as he calls the past 400 or so generations of humans living in agricultural and industrial societies – thought that we were simply manipulating other entities (by farming and engineering, and so on) in a vacuum, as if we were lab technicians and they were in some kind of giant petri dish called “nature” or “the environment”. In the Anthropocene, Morton says, we must wake up to the fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can’t even burn, throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment – that they are separate from us, and relatively stable – have been destroyed.
Morton likens this realisation to detective stories in which the hunter realises he is hunting himself (his favourite examples are Blade Runner and Oedipus Rex). “Not all of us are prepared to feel sufficiently creeped out” by this epiphany, he says. But there’s another twist: even though humans have caused the Anthropocene, we cannot control it. “Oh, my God!” Morton exclaimed to me in mock horror at one point. “My attempt to escape the web of fate was the web of fate.”
The chief reason that we are waking up to our entanglement with the world we have been destroying, Morton says, is our encounter with the reality of hyperobjects – the term he coined to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are “massively distributed in time and space” compared to individual humans. Hyperobjects might not seem to be objects in the way that, say, billiard balls are, but they are equally real, and we are now bumping up against them consciously for the first time. Global warming might have first appeared to us as a bit of funny local weather, then as a series of independent manifestations (an unusually torrential flood here, a deadly heatwave there), but now we see it as a unified phenomenon, of which extreme weather events and the disruption of the old seasons are only elements.
It is through hyperobjects that we initially confront the Anthropocene, Morton argues. One of his most influential books, itself titled Hyperobjects, examines the experience of being caught up in – indeed, being an intimate part of – these entities, which are too big to wrap our heads around, and far too big to control. We can experience hyperobjects such as climate in their local manifestations, or through data produced by scientific measurements, but their scale and the fact that we are trapped inside them means that we can never fully know them. Because of such phenomena, we are living in a time of quite literally unthinkable change.
This leads Morton to one of his most sweeping claims: that the Anthropocene is forcing a revolution in human thought. Advances in science are now underscoring how “enmeshed” we are with other beings – from the microbes that account for roughly half the cells in our bodies, to our reliance for survival on the Earth’s electromagnetic heat shield. At the same time, hyperobjects, in their unwieldy enormity, alert us to the absolute boundaries of science, and therefore the limits of human mastery. Science can only take us so far. This means changing our relationship with the other entities in the universe – whether animal, vegetable or mineral – from one of exploitation through science to one of solidarity in ignorance. If we fail to do this, we will continue to wreak havoc on the planet, threatening the ways of life we hold dear, and even our very existence. In contrast to utopian fantasies that we will be saved by the rise of artificial intelligence or some other new technology, the Anthropocene teaches us that we can’t transcend our limitations or our reliance on other beings. We can only live with them.
That
might sound gloomy, but Morton glimpses in it a liberation. If we give up the
delusion of controlling everything around us, we might refocus ourselves on the
pleasure we take in other beings and life itself. Enjoyment, Morton believes,
might be the thing that turns us on to a new kind of politics. “You think
ecologically tuned life means being all efficient and pure,” the tweet pinned
to the top of his Twitter timeline reads. “Wrong. It means you can have a disco
in every room of your house.”
I
wondered how potent Morton’s animistic politics would seem under the new
dispensation. The day after his talk at the Serpentine in the autumn, I had
eaten lunch with him, the performance artist Kathelin Gray and John Polk Allen,
AKA Johnny Dolphin, the prime mover behind Biosphere 2, a planetary microcosm
built inside what is essentially a gigantic test tube in the Arizona desert.
The conversation, in the course of meandering from places on the globe with
special energy (the Himalayas, Chaco Canyon) to the “lunatic asylum for clever
people” that is Oxford, turned toward solidarity with other species.
“I’ve always called other things ‘people’,” Gray said. “My Native American friends are very happy about that.”
“How could you not call them people?” Morton responded.
Gray told a story of snakes she had known. Morton, evidently moved, put his hand on his chest. “You had two friends called Snakey?” he said. “That’s wonderful.”
This had all sounded a bit ludicrous, even before Trump got elected. But somewhere in these schmaltzy attempts to express their affinity with other creatures was a genuine desire to move towards the sort of radically pluralist politics that Morton advocates. “Don’t hide under a rock, for heaven’s sake,” Morton had said to me at one point. “Go out in the street and start making any and as many kinds of political affiliations with as many kinds of beings, human or otherwise, that you possibly can, with a view to creating a more non-violent and just, for everybody, ecological world.” It was hard to argue with those aims. We can’t debate with other species, but the Anthropocene makes it clear that we need to include their wellbeing among our goals.
Morton’s own political emphasis seemed to change after the election. Wind-powered house parties and interspecies reading groups were out. Now, the whole point, he said, was “to freakin’ crush these fascists over and over and over again”.
Still, the Anthropocene isn’t going away just because a venal troll in a baggy suit is sitting in the White House. The build-up of carbon in the air and nitrogen in the soil; the acidification of the oceans and the desertification of once-fertile lands; the counterpane of radioactive isotopes (from nuclear testing) and plastic (from consumer packaging) that blankets the globe; the species after species extinguished – the list of dramatic changes to the planet goes on. The politics of today may be more urgent than ever, but the need for a politics of tomorrow hasn’t gone away.
A few days after the election, Morton regained his sense of humour and began to laugh about the president-elect, “this little orange guy with a huge, yellow pile of Cheetos on his head”. Yes, Morton was going to spend the next months, or however long it took, fighting fascists on campus and wherever else he could be heard, but he was also continuing to proclaim his unusual view of ecology.
“Let’s put some house music on,” Morton said at the end of one of our longest conversations. “Even if it’s true that we really are screwed, let’s not spend the rest of our lives on this planet telling ourselves how screwed we are.”
What should we do instead?
“Shake hands with a hedgehog and disco.”
A reckoning for our species': the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene. By Alex Blasdel,The Guardian, June 15, 2017.
The
seeds of this conversation were planted when I saw an online announcement for
Timothy Morton’s new book, Dark Ecology. Immediately I felt the cover design
resonated with the amazing covers of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.
When I mentioned this to Tim at an academic conference, he said it was a sort
of lovely and weird coincidence because he and Jeff had recently started
communicating with each other — appreciating each other’s work, ideas, and aesthetics.
Soon
after, Gerry Canavan and I started collaborating on “Global Weirding,” a
special issue of the academic journal Paradoxa, and we agreed that Jeff and Tim
would make an engaging and provocative pair to feature in conversation with
each other. In many ways, they both have a magical ability to produce extremely
edgy and sophisticated work capable of reaching wide audiences well beyond
academic and/or genre fiction coteries. Fortunately, they agreed to meet via
Skype one morning in the summer of 2016. I opened the conversation by asking
them to start with a statement on what they found engaging and illuminating in
the other’s work and how they envision their work intersecting, and then I
quietly recorded and observed as their friendly, loopy conversation veered
around through Beatrix Potter, Surrealism, childhood experiences with tidal
pools, fur-shedding cats, and uncanny orange juice.
TIM
MORTON: There’s a very, very strong overall feeling about the work that you do,
Jeff. There's a very dreamlike quality to it, and I like this quality very
much. If I was going to use a word to describe it, I’d probably use Freud’s
word “displacement.” There’s something around the corner all the time. You
can’t quite put your finger on it, and maybe you’ll never be able to put your
finger on it. It’s sort of disturbing, tantalizing, dreamlike, and there’s this
overall feeling of losing a sense of obvious reference point, whereby the way
that you’re dreaming and what you’re dreaming about are sort of weirdly melded
together so you can’t tell which is which a little bit.
JEFF
VANDERMEER: The interesting thing is I’m very much a writer who is both organic
and mechanical. I believe in getting down a draft, which is very influenced by
the subconscious, and then peering through it. After I wrote Annihilation, I
started seeing reviews that mentioned your work in connection with it; that’s
why I picked up Hyperobjects, and the thing that was fascinating to me is that
it appealed to both the organic and the mechanical sides. The mechanical side
made me understand what I had written better because the very term
“hyperobject” kind of encapsulated what was going on organically in
Annihilation.
Then,
partly because I’m not a philosopher, but also because I’m interested in this
subject, the book sent me on another delightful “down the rabbit hole” moment.
In part because there were sections where I had to bulwark basic knowledge
before I could go forward. And then there are other things that I know are
received by my conscious mind, but my subconscious is working on breaking them
down and reinventing them for future fiction. I always go through this process
in which I have to trust my subconscious first, and I then have to understand
what it was that I did, and then my fiction is informed by all of that; your
book really helped me with that, which is really important in this context
where I’m fairly sure there isn’t going to be a novel I write going forward
that doesn’t deal with ecological themes in some way.
TM: No, no. Wow.
JVM: It’s like you forget that in writing fiction you’re just transcribing reality to some degree.
TM: Yeah.
JVM: I think the thing that I find fascinating too, at least here in north Florida, is that the distinction between inside and outside becomes corrupted, which is a really fascinating thing about Florida. We have this invasion of these little tiny pink geckos that coat the outside of the house now. They get inside the house; you don’t know how. You get insects inside the house no matter what you do, no matter how careful you are. If you really think about it, there’s this porous quality. Our bodies are porous first of all, we have tons of microbes on top of us and whatnot. Then our actual houses are porous in ways that we don’t always want to recognize. I find that also speaks to this whole issue of complexity and how we view the world that I think feeds into hyperobjects, too.
TM: It so does. I love this idea of porosity actually. I’ve tried to argue in the last half year that the worlds we live in, whether we’re humans or cats or possibly even cups of coffee — I’m just referring to the things around me Jeff, I have no other reference point!
JVM: I have a cup of coffee here too which is aiding me right now.
TM: These worlds are actually perforated, which is why we can communicate with each other; and yet there’s this idea that we all live in these totally shrink-wrapped worlds with this very strong inside/outside distinction. It’s obviously ecologically quite toxic, and I think in contemporary philosophy, there’s generally a trend where the distinction between inside and outside has become very thin and very rigid. One way you could think about it would be the difference between what some people call reality, which is your feeling that “it’s real” kind of thing — the experience feels real to me — and the actual real, without the -ity bit, which is the sort of inaccessible quality.
What I love about Area X, for example, is that it does have this porosity. Things can leak through either way and the boundary isn’t thin or rigid. It’s not completely nonexistent, because there are things that we don’t know, and then maybe there are things that we can’t know. We can’t really establish in advance the tightness and impermeability of that boundary unless we’re being very anthropocentric.
JVM: I think that speaks also to what I’m patient with in fiction in general, and interested in fixing in my own fiction these days, and what I’m not. Because it’s the fiction that doesn’t allow for that quality you’re talking about, that wants to keep the boundaries that I don’t respond to. It begins to seem fairly simplistic to me, so it’s almost a texture or a feel of the sentence or paragraph — it’s either embedded there or it isn’t. If it isn’t, no matter how concrete the text, there’s a kind of useless abstract quality to it, as if its receding slowly in slow motion down into a dark well, beyond recovery. This is one reason Lovecraft doesn’t speak to me — his images are inert, without resonance. To some extent it’s an innate quality in a particular writer. But it’s also self-awareness: how do I try to approach the world, how do I receive the world? Because without the right input, the output is a kind of lie.
TM: Totally it is, it gets granular. I’ve been rediscovering this French guy.
JVM: This French guy?
TM: Jean-François Lyotard. He’s got this thing where he’s basically saying something similar, he calls it figure versus discourse. Discourse is like how we think things are meaningful, and figure is, I don’t know, kind of physical in a very expanded sense — qualities of words and sentences and whatever kind of leaks through all the time. The boundary there is very spongy. And it is on a sentence level. You have to let sentences do that. Otherwise, what’s the point? From a certain point of view, in my line of work, why would I want to write about something that I already think I totally know?
JVM:
It’s quite fascinating because there’s also a further translation process going
on. I mention this because it’s interesting aesthetically that Alex Garland, on
the movie of Annihilation, is trying visually to translate that same kind of
ambiguity at the sentence level into visual terms.
In some ways, the film will be more surreal visually than the novel. And in talking about hyperobjects and trying to anchor something or nail something down, the film has this challenge that’s very much about the physicality of the settings conveying the ecological message even more than the script, the dialogue. One fascinating thing the filmmakers told me is that getting depth perception onto the screen in North Florida was impossible. The camera, no matter what they did, registered a flat wall of vegetation, because it’s all so dense and overwhelming — that, in fact, Area X was already there in a sense, subverting and contaminating the camera lens. So they filmed it in English marshes, in part because they had to find an artificial way to recreate the vastness of plant empires in North Florida by taking a place that was sparser and dressing it up with Spanish moss and various layers. The result is spectacularly Floridian, but I love that Florida itself actively resisted being interpreted as itself. Somehow, that thought is in the back of my head for future Southern Reach material, in combination with the idea of the resistance of hyperobjects to be cataloged.
TM: Yeah, totally.
I sort of feel like a lot of the issues we have today in contemporary politics and so on have to do with not just awareness of globalization, but with actual planetary awareness and how disturbing that is, and how maybe if you’re an artist — I’m looking to my left, and there’s the most gigantic pile of fur from this cat. I’m expecting it to be spelling out some kind of cryptic sentence. I’ve never seen such a large pile of fur. We are talking about the master shedder of the whole universe here. When you talk about inside/outside, I do think about cats, because I recently decided that where I live at least, outside isn’t outside, it’s sort of Iraq for cats.
In some ways, the film will be more surreal visually than the novel. And in talking about hyperobjects and trying to anchor something or nail something down, the film has this challenge that’s very much about the physicality of the settings conveying the ecological message even more than the script, the dialogue. One fascinating thing the filmmakers told me is that getting depth perception onto the screen in North Florida was impossible. The camera, no matter what they did, registered a flat wall of vegetation, because it’s all so dense and overwhelming — that, in fact, Area X was already there in a sense, subverting and contaminating the camera lens. So they filmed it in English marshes, in part because they had to find an artificial way to recreate the vastness of plant empires in North Florida by taking a place that was sparser and dressing it up with Spanish moss and various layers. The result is spectacularly Floridian, but I love that Florida itself actively resisted being interpreted as itself. Somehow, that thought is in the back of my head for future Southern Reach material, in combination with the idea of the resistance of hyperobjects to be cataloged.
TM: Yeah, totally.
I sort of feel like a lot of the issues we have today in contemporary politics and so on have to do with not just awareness of globalization, but with actual planetary awareness and how disturbing that is, and how maybe if you’re an artist — I’m looking to my left, and there’s the most gigantic pile of fur from this cat. I’m expecting it to be spelling out some kind of cryptic sentence. I’ve never seen such a large pile of fur. We are talking about the master shedder of the whole universe here. When you talk about inside/outside, I do think about cats, because I recently decided that where I live at least, outside isn’t outside, it’s sort of Iraq for cats.
This
idea that there is a definite outside as opposed to the inside is almost
something that I wanted my cat to prove to me, despite the fact that I know
intellectually that this distinction is extremely tenuous, if not very violent.
It’s odd as well because cats kind of showed up on the boundary of agricultural
civilization. They were there to eat the rats that ate the corn in the house
that Jack built, if you see what I mean. Somehow they’ve got this weird,
ambiguous status: we didn’t invite them, but somehow they’re helping us to
clean up our world. No wonder we feel a bit disturbed by them, even if they
don’t shed great mountains of fur, which this cat is now playing with like a
sort of toy …
JVM: There’s a big 20 pound one who keeps me honest, kind of a Maine Coon type, but he always does this, staring off to spaces that seem blank, reminding me that there might be something there.
TM: These Maine Coon characters are so dense that they almost have a gravitational pull. There was one Maine Coon that I used to have in Oxford, and he would regularly come through the door, not with little birds and stuff but with rabbits.
JVM: One of ours used to stalk the neighborhood Chihuahua, so that was —
TM: Oh my giddy aunt.
JVM: I wanted to say something about the globalization thing, because I think that there’s another kind of contamination, not a good kind, with regard to ecological issues: I feel like the world wants to merely commodify all of this. It seems especially deadly on this particular subject. It would be fine if it was some innocuous thing like cats, maybe. I always feel, even when I talk about this stuff online, I’m conscious of the fact that I could be kind of commodifying and mainstreaming something that shouldn’t be commodified in this particular way; I think other people feel this way, too. You see authors who I think begin to become bourgeois in the way they talk about their own books, even if their own books are much stranger. Sometimes that’s the only message that readers get. How you talk about your books, how you have to simplify them — it doesn’t even address the topic.
TM: I know; it’s super ambiguous. I like to argue that there are sort of ecological, experiential, phenomenological, ecological chemicals in consumerism. That’s like the last place anybody who’s into ecology thinks they should be looking, right? Into the experience of reaching for a Coke bottle. Because Coca-Cola has hypnotized you, cue the sinister music, to reach out for that bottle. The thing is, though, that the way we think about commodities is kind of old school. It’s this idea that we get to impose our will on stuff, and that’s intrinsically a little bit evil.
What about the other idea, which is that, as I think to myself, “Where do I want to go today?” (in my Bill Gatesian freedom that I think I have) the Coke bottle is kind of seducing me. It’s got that Alice in Wonderland “Eat me, Drink me” feeling about it. Part of the commodity world is a little bit of a weird, distorted kind of echo from a world where we — and I say we provocatively meaning us lot, called humans as opposed to bunny rabbits or whatever — sort of decided that things that aren’t us also have the same kind of status or maybe even some kind of agency or maybe even some kind of something like, I don’t know what to say, consciousness, sentience. Or maybe we don’t have it! Who knows which way we want to go on that kind of thing.
My point is that the experience of consumerism has got this slightly weird futuristic aspect to it along with this not-so-great aspect. The trouble is we keep on deleting the really interesting bit, and then we keep trying to sort of hear it again. Think about a novel. It’s a product that somebody wants to buy in a store, but this particular product is like on the kind of top level, the VIP lounge of consumerism, where you’re basically thinking about experience itself as a consumer thing, right?
I’m writing this book for Penguin right now, and I’m writing it for somebody who doesn’t care at all about ecology and doesn’t know why she should be caring. Visualizing this woman, she’s walking through the Frankfurt Airport, and she sees my book in the bookstore, and she thinks, “Oh, do you know what? I won’t buy those dumplings. I think I’m going to buy Tim’s book instead. Because why? Because I want to go on a journey. But why do I want to go on a journey? I don’t know. In fact, I don’t even know why I should care. Why should I care?” I’m trying not to delete that feeling, because part of the trouble with a lot of ecological writing in my neck of the woods is that it’s very, very, very preachy and it’s preaching to the same people, it’s preaching to the choir.
How do you talk to people without doing that, even without stealth doing that? That’s my challenge.
It’s coming out of this idea that if my book is actually a consumer product, in a way that’s more sophisticated than what I used to do with my cut-and-dry academic books. Those books are based on authority, which is more like a medieval vibe. It’s sort of like, “I, the Pope, have rubber stamped TM’s sentence because it contains all the correct citations of all the other authority-people that have also been rubber stamped and so therefore, if you don’t agree with him, then I’m going to torture you until you do” kind of thing. It’s like none of that is the point, with a product. It’s more about seducing you rather than threatening to kill you if you don’t believe it. Right?
JVM: On the fiction side, I have been happy about the fact that the books have led to me being able to talk more directly, almost in a nonfictional sense, about this stuff. I go back and forth on whether a work of fiction can actually do things; it can observe, but can it convince? Also, if you try too hard to convince, then you get to the point where you become didactic, which I never, ever want to do in my fiction. I think you lose all ambiguity, and you become kind of shrill and shouty.
I like how you say there’s also this kind of entry point for readers that has to do with how the book is packaged. In some sense, the content of the book becomes inseparable from the way it’s presented to the audience. That’s interesting. I still don’t know if most people read the Southern Reach and think, “Oh, this was an interesting story about a strange zone,” and they misinterpret it, or if it makes them think more about the environment. What I find interesting is how many people put aside the idea of it being firsthand experience and want to find some echo or mimic in some other work of fiction rather than being willing to accept that, well, 90 percent of it comes from me going out into the world and seeing small, southern towns. I don’t quite know why that is but …
¤
This is an edited excerpt from a larger conversation that can be found in Paradoxa 28 (2016), a special issue on “Global Weirding” that explores intersections between climate change phenomena and weird fiction. Kind thanks to Jeff and Ann VanderMeer for underwriting the initial transcription of this conversation, and thanks as well to the contributors and Paradoxa editors for their permission to publish the excerpt here.
A Conversation Between Timothy Morton and Jeff VanderMeer. By Andrew Hageman. Los Angeles Review of Books, December 24, 2016.
JVM: There’s a big 20 pound one who keeps me honest, kind of a Maine Coon type, but he always does this, staring off to spaces that seem blank, reminding me that there might be something there.
TM: These Maine Coon characters are so dense that they almost have a gravitational pull. There was one Maine Coon that I used to have in Oxford, and he would regularly come through the door, not with little birds and stuff but with rabbits.
JVM: One of ours used to stalk the neighborhood Chihuahua, so that was —
TM: Oh my giddy aunt.
JVM: I wanted to say something about the globalization thing, because I think that there’s another kind of contamination, not a good kind, with regard to ecological issues: I feel like the world wants to merely commodify all of this. It seems especially deadly on this particular subject. It would be fine if it was some innocuous thing like cats, maybe. I always feel, even when I talk about this stuff online, I’m conscious of the fact that I could be kind of commodifying and mainstreaming something that shouldn’t be commodified in this particular way; I think other people feel this way, too. You see authors who I think begin to become bourgeois in the way they talk about their own books, even if their own books are much stranger. Sometimes that’s the only message that readers get. How you talk about your books, how you have to simplify them — it doesn’t even address the topic.
TM: I know; it’s super ambiguous. I like to argue that there are sort of ecological, experiential, phenomenological, ecological chemicals in consumerism. That’s like the last place anybody who’s into ecology thinks they should be looking, right? Into the experience of reaching for a Coke bottle. Because Coca-Cola has hypnotized you, cue the sinister music, to reach out for that bottle. The thing is, though, that the way we think about commodities is kind of old school. It’s this idea that we get to impose our will on stuff, and that’s intrinsically a little bit evil.
What about the other idea, which is that, as I think to myself, “Where do I want to go today?” (in my Bill Gatesian freedom that I think I have) the Coke bottle is kind of seducing me. It’s got that Alice in Wonderland “Eat me, Drink me” feeling about it. Part of the commodity world is a little bit of a weird, distorted kind of echo from a world where we — and I say we provocatively meaning us lot, called humans as opposed to bunny rabbits or whatever — sort of decided that things that aren’t us also have the same kind of status or maybe even some kind of agency or maybe even some kind of something like, I don’t know what to say, consciousness, sentience. Or maybe we don’t have it! Who knows which way we want to go on that kind of thing.
My point is that the experience of consumerism has got this slightly weird futuristic aspect to it along with this not-so-great aspect. The trouble is we keep on deleting the really interesting bit, and then we keep trying to sort of hear it again. Think about a novel. It’s a product that somebody wants to buy in a store, but this particular product is like on the kind of top level, the VIP lounge of consumerism, where you’re basically thinking about experience itself as a consumer thing, right?
I’m writing this book for Penguin right now, and I’m writing it for somebody who doesn’t care at all about ecology and doesn’t know why she should be caring. Visualizing this woman, she’s walking through the Frankfurt Airport, and she sees my book in the bookstore, and she thinks, “Oh, do you know what? I won’t buy those dumplings. I think I’m going to buy Tim’s book instead. Because why? Because I want to go on a journey. But why do I want to go on a journey? I don’t know. In fact, I don’t even know why I should care. Why should I care?” I’m trying not to delete that feeling, because part of the trouble with a lot of ecological writing in my neck of the woods is that it’s very, very, very preachy and it’s preaching to the same people, it’s preaching to the choir.
How do you talk to people without doing that, even without stealth doing that? That’s my challenge.
It’s coming out of this idea that if my book is actually a consumer product, in a way that’s more sophisticated than what I used to do with my cut-and-dry academic books. Those books are based on authority, which is more like a medieval vibe. It’s sort of like, “I, the Pope, have rubber stamped TM’s sentence because it contains all the correct citations of all the other authority-people that have also been rubber stamped and so therefore, if you don’t agree with him, then I’m going to torture you until you do” kind of thing. It’s like none of that is the point, with a product. It’s more about seducing you rather than threatening to kill you if you don’t believe it. Right?
JVM: On the fiction side, I have been happy about the fact that the books have led to me being able to talk more directly, almost in a nonfictional sense, about this stuff. I go back and forth on whether a work of fiction can actually do things; it can observe, but can it convince? Also, if you try too hard to convince, then you get to the point where you become didactic, which I never, ever want to do in my fiction. I think you lose all ambiguity, and you become kind of shrill and shouty.
I like how you say there’s also this kind of entry point for readers that has to do with how the book is packaged. In some sense, the content of the book becomes inseparable from the way it’s presented to the audience. That’s interesting. I still don’t know if most people read the Southern Reach and think, “Oh, this was an interesting story about a strange zone,” and they misinterpret it, or if it makes them think more about the environment. What I find interesting is how many people put aside the idea of it being firsthand experience and want to find some echo or mimic in some other work of fiction rather than being willing to accept that, well, 90 percent of it comes from me going out into the world and seeing small, southern towns. I don’t quite know why that is but …
¤
This is an edited excerpt from a larger conversation that can be found in Paradoxa 28 (2016), a special issue on “Global Weirding” that explores intersections between climate change phenomena and weird fiction. Kind thanks to Jeff and Ann VanderMeer for underwriting the initial transcription of this conversation, and thanks as well to the contributors and Paradoxa editors for their permission to publish the excerpt here.
A Conversation Between Timothy Morton and Jeff VanderMeer. By Andrew Hageman. Los Angeles Review of Books, December 24, 2016.
A person
of many parts, Morton maintains a menagerie of interests, populated by the likes
of Percy Shelley and the atom bomb, Bjork and the Spice Trade, Martin Heidegger
and climate change – among myriad other diverse “objects”. His ecocriticism is
as accessible as it is challenging; it wields an increasing influence on a
range of disciplines, from philosophy to ecology, art, and architecture.
Morton participates in object-oriented ontology (OOO), a popular movement in contemporary philosophy characterized by a rejection of anthropocentrism (the privileging of the human over the nonhuman), and "correlationism", the post-Kantian assumption that reality is a product of human thinking.
His notion of “hyperobjects” – objects of such massive scale and temporality that they exceed the perceptive capacities of humans – enables a profound and radical way to think about, and learn to live with, global warming and the ecological “mesh”, more broadly.
Morton has written before on architecture, and will be giving a talk on March 14 at SCI-Arc, which has been prefaced by the unequivocal statement: “Every house is a haunted house.” I talked with Morton about some of the ghosts that haunt this strange object called architecture – from exterminated pests to dead philosophers – as well as a few of the primary concepts of his work and their relevance to architectural discourse.
You’re a strong voice in object-oriented ontology, a strand of philosophy that began with the work of Graham Harman (who has just joined the SCI-Arc faculty). For those still unaware, how would you describe OOO, and how does it depart from traditional metaphysics? How could an OOO perspective change the way we relate to “architecture” – a word that is itself something of a messy object, representing at once a discourse, profession, discipline, industry, and field of individual objects?
“Well, I’m very glad you asked me that question,” as they say. You know, I actually really like to think about OOO in architectural terms. You know Doctor Who, the British TV series? You know Doctor Who, this time traveling, free wheeling deus ex machina, and his machina is called the TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimensions in Space. The TARDIS is famous for being “bigger on the inside”. His companions, when they first encounter it, run around the TARDIS trying to figure out why it’s so different on the inside than the way it appears on the outside. And in fact, they go on to discover that it’s infinite on the inside. On the outside, it’s a police call box from the 1950s. On the inside, it’s rooms and corridors and doors and closets and power generators and...
Well, at the beginning of modernity (late 18th century), European philosophy was beginning to show that human beings are TARDISes. They contain infinities that make them qualitatively (not quantitatively) bigger than the entire universe. All OOO does is argue that this isn’t a specially human trait. Everything is like that. To exist is to be a TARDIS – and that includes sentences, poems, ideas, hallucinations, dreams… That’s our motto, in a way. “If it exists, it’s a TARDIS.”
That doesn’t mean that everything is like a human or a subject or whatever. That means that what we thought was special about humans is actually incredibly cheap, this wondrous TARDIS quality is everywhere, at a bargain price that doesn’t mean you need to prove you have a really good credit card called selfhood or self concept or consciousness or thought or (human) destiny or (human) economic relations or (human) will to be admitted into the TARDIS club.
Actually our motto, in Latin, should be omnia occultantur: everything is hiding, or as Graham Harman likes to say, withdrawn. It doesn’t mean “shrunken back in measurable space”. Everything is encrypted. There are endless pockets and corners and rooms you never knew about in the TARDIS, so that you can never get tired of exploring it, because nothing you do (looking, stroking, ignoring, biting, running your fingers around, painting, doing an interview about, dancing on) will exhaust it. Who knows what the meaning of this poem really is? Who is this person I just woke up next to? I’ve known her for decades, and precisely because of that, I have no clue who she is. “This is not my beautiful wife!” We’ve all had that kind of experience right?
Morton participates in object-oriented ontology (OOO), a popular movement in contemporary philosophy characterized by a rejection of anthropocentrism (the privileging of the human over the nonhuman), and "correlationism", the post-Kantian assumption that reality is a product of human thinking.
His notion of “hyperobjects” – objects of such massive scale and temporality that they exceed the perceptive capacities of humans – enables a profound and radical way to think about, and learn to live with, global warming and the ecological “mesh”, more broadly.
Morton has written before on architecture, and will be giving a talk on March 14 at SCI-Arc, which has been prefaced by the unequivocal statement: “Every house is a haunted house.” I talked with Morton about some of the ghosts that haunt this strange object called architecture – from exterminated pests to dead philosophers – as well as a few of the primary concepts of his work and their relevance to architectural discourse.
You’re a strong voice in object-oriented ontology, a strand of philosophy that began with the work of Graham Harman (who has just joined the SCI-Arc faculty). For those still unaware, how would you describe OOO, and how does it depart from traditional metaphysics? How could an OOO perspective change the way we relate to “architecture” – a word that is itself something of a messy object, representing at once a discourse, profession, discipline, industry, and field of individual objects?
“Well, I’m very glad you asked me that question,” as they say. You know, I actually really like to think about OOO in architectural terms. You know Doctor Who, the British TV series? You know Doctor Who, this time traveling, free wheeling deus ex machina, and his machina is called the TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimensions in Space. The TARDIS is famous for being “bigger on the inside”. His companions, when they first encounter it, run around the TARDIS trying to figure out why it’s so different on the inside than the way it appears on the outside. And in fact, they go on to discover that it’s infinite on the inside. On the outside, it’s a police call box from the 1950s. On the inside, it’s rooms and corridors and doors and closets and power generators and...
Well, at the beginning of modernity (late 18th century), European philosophy was beginning to show that human beings are TARDISes. They contain infinities that make them qualitatively (not quantitatively) bigger than the entire universe. All OOO does is argue that this isn’t a specially human trait. Everything is like that. To exist is to be a TARDIS – and that includes sentences, poems, ideas, hallucinations, dreams… That’s our motto, in a way. “If it exists, it’s a TARDIS.”
That doesn’t mean that everything is like a human or a subject or whatever. That means that what we thought was special about humans is actually incredibly cheap, this wondrous TARDIS quality is everywhere, at a bargain price that doesn’t mean you need to prove you have a really good credit card called selfhood or self concept or consciousness or thought or (human) destiny or (human) economic relations or (human) will to be admitted into the TARDIS club.
Actually our motto, in Latin, should be omnia occultantur: everything is hiding, or as Graham Harman likes to say, withdrawn. It doesn’t mean “shrunken back in measurable space”. Everything is encrypted. There are endless pockets and corners and rooms you never knew about in the TARDIS, so that you can never get tired of exploring it, because nothing you do (looking, stroking, ignoring, biting, running your fingers around, painting, doing an interview about, dancing on) will exhaust it. Who knows what the meaning of this poem really is? Who is this person I just woke up next to? I’ve known her for decades, and precisely because of that, I have no clue who she is. “This is not my beautiful wife!” We’ve all had that kind of experience right?
So this is all to do with a radical gap between what things are and how they appear. And for me, it’s deliciously paradoxical, because while things are never as they seem, they are exactly what they are. Raindrops give you raindrop data, not gumdrop data (what a shame). Nevertheless, raindrop data is just data, not actual raindrops. See what I mean? If this doesn’t amaze or slightly scare you, you might want to think about it some more.
One conclusion is that things aren’t just lumps of extensional stuff decorated with accidents. How things appear is deeply intertwined with what they are. We’ve been doing real ecological violence to lifeforms on Earth on the basis of this default lump ontology, which I believe was hardwired into a certain kind of agricultural social space long before formal philosophy put it into sentences.
One of the major concerns of your work involves a critique of “Nature” as a historical construction that establishes an illusory division between humans and nonhuman beings, ie. plants, animals, but also dust and air conditioning units, microbacteria and radiation etc. But for many of us, nature seems like a given. How is nature unnatural, so to speak? And why do you put so much emphasis (and urgency) on moving away from the concept?
Well, nature only seems like a given because we use it as a synonym for “everything”. But really, nature is a normative concept: it tells you how to discriminate between (say) good and bad. Natural ingredients versus unnatural (there’s a reason why they use that fake language on products). If everything is nature, then nothing can be nature – it’s a useless concept. And if nature is normative, then not everything can be nature. Some things have to be unnatural.
But this unnaturalness is just something we humans think for whatever reason about whatever it is. Being gay is unnatural, according to default homophobia. That’s something we are thinking and believing and hardwiring into social space.
What we call nature in the largest sense, like mountains and rivers or whatever, is exactly like that!
Now the trouble is, this kind of nature has also been hardwired into social space! It’s not just a concept in our heads. We think of this kind of nature as a nice harmonious, periodic cycling. There’s a physical reason for that. We started our settled mode of existence (the Neolithic) at the start of the Holocene, which was characterized by nice periodic cycling Earth systems (you know, the carbon cycle and so on). The funny thing is, we might have even caused that cycling ourselves through farming and hunting and so on! But even if we didn’t, so-called civilization was (dangerously) coincident with a nice harmonious cycling biosphere that was able therefore to run in the background like a smoothly functioning OS and thus massively contributed to this idea of humans-and-their-cattle-over-here, nature-over-there.
Lulled by that myth of smooth functioning, we kept on and on running the logistical program that started in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere, until it required fossil fuels to keep going. And we know what happens next…
So the really extreme way of putting it is, nature is the Anthropocene in its less obvious, seemingly smooth (for humans) mode.
Now can you see why I don’t like this concept?
There’s a default lump ontology going on here. Nature is what I find when I peel the appearances away. Underneath me, or in my DNA, or underneath the street, or over there in the mountains outside human built space, is something untouched, something given as you say. This ontology is directly responsible for the ecological catastrophe in which we now find ourselves.
The house acts as one of the major sites for both the ideological articulation of “Nature” – through opposition as well as enframement – and the physical practice of it. We desire our homes to be antiseptic, isolated, and exclusively human zones. So we filter our air, spray chemicals, set out rat poison – often inadvertently poisoning ourselves in the process, like some autoimmune disorder that we’ve decided to call dwelling. In fact, this dynamic is very much at play in haunted houses of horror fiction, where pests and ghosts rebel against the imposition of domesticity. Can you speak to this?
Wow, I love that phrase, “like some autoimmune disorder that we’ve decided to call dwelling”. I love it! That’s precisely it. In order to maintain smooth functioning (for humans), and to maintain the smooth functioning of this very myth of smooth functioning, a whole of violence is required behind the scenes on every level, social, psychic and philosophical. In every respect we’ve been trying to sever ourselves from other lifeforms—remember, you have them inside you and you couldn’t exist if you didn’t, and there’s more of them inside you than there is of you, so this is a major deal, this violence. But this is impossible. For instance, you mention how architecture has since about 1900 been based on vectors of pollution flow—gotta keep the bad air out, for instance, so you need air conditioning. But when you think about things at Earth magnitude, at that scale, where does it go? It doesn’t go “away,” it just goes somewhere else in the system. Nature, if you like, is a sort of fourth wall concept (you know theater?) by which we try to separate the human from everything else, and it functions in house design at every level. So yes horror fiction — I think also that the ennui poems of Baudelaire are fantastic on this. Feeling like you are covered in all kinds of spooky stuff as you sit in your flat...that’s real ecological awareness, that is.
Humans also exhibit symptoms of this autoimmune response on a more macro level. From the “Four Pest Campaign” of Maoist-era China to contemporary conversations about eradicating mosquitoes, modern history has many examples of attempts at “pest extermination” at a grand scale, which often had devastating effects. Chief among those, I think, would be the current and ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction event that you’ve written about quite extensively. Can you talk about this, and what it implies for the way humans understand what it means to dwell on the planetary scale?
The struggle against racism is exactly the struggle against speciesism, which is one of the ways this stage set maintenance works. Totalitarian and fascist societies can be weirdly ecological, in ways that disturb us about ecology: like eugenics, or animal rights (the Nazis were all over that), reforestation, Lenin talking about putting loads of fertilizer in the soil… Those social systems get the disgust level of ecological awareness, the Baudelaire level. But they get stuck there, and they try to peel the disgust off of themselves. That’s a way to describe the Holocaust, no? But truly, you can’t peel everything off, because its being-stuck-to-you is a possibility condition for you existing. So someone like Baudelaire with his moody ennui is showing you how to tunnel down into deeper ecological awareness underneath fascism. I’m sorry but we have to go down underneath it to discover less violent ecological modes.
We make beings extermination-ready by designating them as uncanny, disturbingly not-unlike-us-enough beings inhabiting the uncanny valley [...] R2D2 and Hitler’s dog Blondi are “over there” on the peak opposite us, the good fascist “healthy human beings”. We try to forget the abject valley that enables this nice me-versus-nature, human-versus-nonhuman, subject-versus-object setup to work. But as you think about biology and so on, you realize that these peaks are illusions, and there is no uncanny valley, because everything is uncanny, because we can’t say for sure whether it’s alive or not alive, sentient or not sentient, conscious or not conscious, and so on. Everything becomes spectral, undead, in all kinds of unique and different ways.
So the struggle to have solidarity with lifeforms is the struggle to include specters and spectrality, strangely enough. Without this, ecological philosophy falls into a gravity well where it becomes part of the autoimmunity machination you just described. I so don’t want to live in that kind of ecological society...
There’s another sense of architecture as “haunted”, in terms of something like what Jacques Derrida calls the “architecture of architecture”, a historical concatenation of thinkers and buildings and social norms that together constitute an a priori set of rules and configurations for what we think when we think about architecture, even if those thoughts are oppositional. And then, on an additional level, we come into a world already built and absolutely saturated with the physical and immaterial traces of those who came before us.
Totally. This hermeneutical spider web around architecture, this architecture of architecture, isn’t a special human-scale feature of how things are. For OOO everything is like that. Everything is haunted by its very own spider web, in fact, without any spiders, and especially not human thought, needing to be involved. To be a thing is to be haunted. The only question is, to what extent are you going to allow yourself in your process to be haunted by this spider-webby quality of how things appear?
[…]Buildings are haunted, not just by their past, but also by their future. What does the Large Hadron Collider look like 10,000 years from now? Why don’t we include that kind of thought in design? Wouldn’t including that kind of thing – which implies a spectral, un-pin-downable future happening at all kinds of overlapping temporal scale – be exactly an ecological architectural practice? Houses are already not just for humans, right? What happens when the squirrel needs to get from A to B on your balcony?
For this reason, I don’t actually believe in the present! I think what we have—and it’s very obvious in a large, long-term structure such as a building—is a sliding of past over future without touching. The word for this sliding is nowness and it’s a kind of relative motion that the concept of present and presence (and the metaphysics of presence) is trying to delete. Lots of Western philosophy is horribly kinephobic, terrified of motion. It seems to want to get rid of it, to explain it away, to make it incidental to how things are. I am a huge motion freak.
You’re a noted scholar of Romanticism and Romantic literature. In architecture and landscape architecture, this is also a period that saw the emergence of picturesque gardens, greenhouses, and other forms of landscape architecture that seem to typify our idea of the “natural” as constructed, paradoxically, through artifice. Can you speak to this?
Well, that was before Romanticism per se. Romanticism per se is about smashing the picturesque, totally breaking through the false aesthetic frame that establishes a distance between me and nature, so that it appears nice and natural. When you get up close to a mountain with a magnifying glass, rather than trying to take the eighteenth-century equivalent of a snapshot with your Claude glass, that mountain starts to lose its human-scaled obviousness and naturalness, and it starts to exhibit all kinds of TARDIS qualities. You see all kinds of crystals and inserts and stories in the rockface. So you start to wonder what’s real. This feeling of unreality and the scientific up-closeness actually go together. A Romantic poem has both of those ingredients.
We haven’t actually advanced any further than that, in art world terms, and one symptom is that we keep desperately asserting that we’ve found an even better -ism, an even better access mode. Romanticism is the first -ism, you know, and postmodernism, which thinks all kinds of inaccurate things about Romanticism [...] is just Romanticism 6.0 or whatever.
We’re just trying to rearrange the deckchairs of the -isms on the Titanic of anthropocentric functioning, in that sense. Ecological architecture and art means: no more -isms! Otherwise our mountain poem becomes a me-poem mediated through mountains. We need to get at the dark underside of this -ism stuff, which is coming up close to nonhuman entities without the condom of the human-scaled fourth wall aesthetic screen. By no means does this imply that we’ll be outside of aesthetics then. It actually means that we’ve noticed that aesthetic space isn’t totally human or human-scaled.
The dominant, mainstream attempts to incorporate ecology into architecture have been so-called “sustainability” and “green architecture”, both of which you’ve critiqued in the past. Sustainability, you’ve argued, relies on the assumption of a metaphysical “away” or bestand for all our waste and dust and messy human excess. But when you zoom out a bit, you see that the U-bend of our toilets leads to the ocean, our air conditioners produce “dirty air” as much as “filter it”, the contents of our trash bin end up in the front yard of our great great grandchildren. It’s a process of managing flows, rather than banishing matter – the “oikonomia” of the “oikos”, so to speak. Likewise, “green architecture,” besides often serving as a mechanism of greenwashing, presents an image of a cheery, tree-lined, and domesticated ecology. You’ve written a lot about “dark ecology” contra such “light green” ideologies. Can you explain your aversion to these terms, and what a “dark ecological” architecture might look like?
Totally. Things are intrinsically fragile. They collapse all by themselves, because they are different from how they appear. So you can’t ever have a nice perfect neat, tree-lined setup, as you put it. And you can’t have a nice tree-lined one-size-fits-all social structure, either, because social structures are also “objects.” You have to design with the inner fragility of things in mind. At some point, your wooden beams may be crawling with insects. Do you want to try to make something that will withstand everything, for ever? Do you understand the extreme violence that would take, precisely because it’s radically impossible? Wouldn’t it be better to make a place that was inviting for all the specters I was just talking about? And wouldn’t that look or feel a bit like a kind of “goth” sensibility, not that it has to have Scooby Doo crenelations or whatever.
I have a reaction against affirmative stuff. I’m like Adorno in that respect. Another reason for dark ecology is, why can’t we have an ecology for the rest of us, the ones who don’t want to jump into a pair of shorts and hike up a mountain yodeling? An ecology for the ones who want to pull the bedclothes over their heads and listen to weird moody drum and bass?
Dark ecology is definitely not despair ecology. That’s the way some have appropriated it, such as Paul Kingsnorth. That’s absolutely not true. It’s about how do you actually coexist nonviolently with as many beings as possible? What does that look like? To me, the guiding image is a charnel ground or, if you prefer a contemporary version, an emergency room. How do you restart hope, actually, knowing what you know about how things are? How do you start to smile once you know how entangled everything is, including all those hermeneutical spider webs? How do you smile for real, which means how do you get to cry for real? About all this truly horrible frightening stuff? Ecological facts are frightening, no? We are currently talking to ourselves about them in PTSD mode, which isn’t helping at all. Dark ecology helps you to move past that without deleting the pain.
One of your most influential ideas is that of the “hyperobject,” something that exceeds, in scale or temporality, human apprehension: global warming, styrofoam, radiation, etc. I’ve read this as suggesting a radical revision of interiority – we find we’re inside these massive objects (and that they’re inside us as well), which makes all our walls, our efforts to insulate the inside against the outside, seem very silly – or at least casts these practices, which are at the heart of architecture, into a different light. Can you speak to this?
Yeah. It’s not a contrast between specific and general, or empirical and universal, or whatever. What we’re dealing with now is reality at a bewildering, possibly infinite variety of different scales. There are simply things existing on different scales. Thing 1 is specifically X on Scale Alpha, but it’s specifically Y on Scale Beta.
This also means, we’re not dealing a contrast between space and place. There is no such thing as space. It’s just that place is no longer a nice human-scaled cozy concept. Everything has place. The biosphere is a place—just not a for-us place that’s scaled to human destiny projects. The Solar System is a place. Things are not “in” space. Things are things-plus-places. That’s another way they are haunted.
We are not sinners in the hands of some universal invisible sadist with a beard who wants to kill you. We are humans existing in a number of specific, finite entities. These are also TARDISes! There are so many more parts of them—us, for example—than there are of them. Hyperobjects are physically massive yet ontologically tiny. So this story we keep telling ourselves, that wholes are bigger than the sum of their parts, is just a story. It’s part of a monotheistic religious setup, a setup that contributes directly to the Anthropocene because it’s an agricultural-age setup. Hyperobjects begin to show you that the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. This weird idea is actually childishly simple to think. If things exist they exist in the same way. A megacity is ontologically one. So are its streets, hibiscus flowers and power lines. There are always more of those things. So that’s why we can’t think megacities so well!
Hyperobjects mean: there are these truly big, bad, scary things, such as global warming and neoliberalism. There are these wholes. We can’t just reduce them to little bits or deny them. But being inside them doesn’t mean you are totally exhausted by them. Weather does so much more than just being what it is, which is a symptom of climate. It’s a bath for this little bird. It’s a pool for these tadpoles. It’s this warm damp patch on my sleeve. Hyperobjects are big but we have the controls, we can do something about them. They don’t just swallow all of human built space, they are inside me! I contain radiation and all that. So you can’t fight them off, as you point out. But that doesn’t mean we are screwed. That would be cynical reason based on never-proved explosive holism, which is a monotheism retweet.
Timothy Morton on haunted architecture, dark ecology, and other objects. By Nicholas Korody. Archinect , March 11, 2016
Timothy
Morton spoke with artist and Art Books in Review Editor Greg Lindquist to
discuss his new book Hyperobjects (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Their
discussion about ecology and art resonated with the particular New York
meteorological spirit approaching the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy.
Greg
Lindquist (Rail): How did the idea of Hyperobjects come about?
Timothy
Morton: I was writing this book The Ecological Thought (Harvard University
Press, 2010), and developing the concept of the mesh—everything is interconnected
in some sense. And this idea of strange, stranger: that despite the
interconnection, there are at every scale weird, uncanny entities. Then I
started to realize that some of these weird, uncanny entities were actually not
just life forms. I’d been thinking about them in terms of frogs, worms,
viruses, and humans.
I
developed this term hyperobjects to describe things that you can’t see or touch
but are real, and have an effect on your world. I was thinking in terms of
things like pollution or Styrofoam or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They
seem to be massively distributed in time and space in a peculiar way. This was
the final section of The Ecological Thought, and as soon as I invented the word
hyperobjects I thought, oh, that’s important—I need to think more carefully
about what those are.
Over the
next couple of years, after the book came out, I kept being invited to do these
talks about the hyperobjects, because people started to get very interested in
them. Maybe this is connected to global warming, which has been on everyone’s
mind. What is this strange thing that we’re on the inside of?
I think
the reason why it worked quite well is the reason why Dark Side of the Moon is
a really good album—not that I’m comparing myself with Pink Floyd, necessarily.
Pink Floyd basically gigged the material for about two or three years before
they actually went into the studio and recorded it. I did this as a series of
talks—in Taiwan, Australia, all over North America—about hyperobjects. Finally,
I just sat down in my student union coffee shop and wrote it in 15 days.
I
learned more and more things about them by thinking them through. They have
these weird properties: you can’t see or touch them, but they’re downwardly
causal on things you can see and touch. We’re not just talking about things
like pollution and radiation. We’re talking about things like evolution,
biosphere, Earth. And it’s not only huge things like that—you realize that
rolling pins and granite countertops have those weird properties inside of
them.
Rail: An
object is not really a discrete object as we think of it.
Morton:
It’s discrete, but not your grandpa’s discreteness. From these points of view,
evolution is evolution in the same way a frog is a frog. A frog is not a cat,
right? A frog is a discrete thing. This actual frog here—I’m gonna call him
Thomas. Thomas the frog is a discrete thing and he’s not a pencil. There’s this
sort of popular ideology by which everything is everything. You find it in the
advertising of Chevron and some thinking of the New Materialism. It’s almost
the opposite of what I’m saying, which is that everything is discrete and yet
weirdly related to everything. There’s a kind of way in which a frog isn’t
really a frog. When you look for the frogness everywhere in it, as we all know
from Darwin, you don’t find frogs; what you find are also the things that
aren’t frogs, like DNA—and some of that DNA is not frog DNA. It’s viral code
insertions and proto-frog DNA. Yet they are frogs, right? They’re not
dragonflies. So things are discrete, but weirdly discrete.
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