The Ecological Thought

by Timothy Morton

  Environmental art as we know it will cease to exist at some point in the history of the ecological thought. For one thing, ecological art will exit the elegiac mode.18 Ecological elegies will wither or mutate. Elegies are about burying the dead.19 They are the grief equivalent of canned laughter: they do the mourning for you, thus providing an outlet for one’s sadistic fantasies against the lost one. Nature elegy is a paradox, as it’s about losing something we never really had: losing a fantasy, not a reality. Perhaps a new form of paradoxical elegy will arise. What ecological art will certainly not be able to get away with for very much longer is happy-happy-joy-joy eco-sincerity.20 This mode will look less and less relevant, and less and less reverent, the further up to our necks we get in our own waste. The ecological thought demonstrates that the aesthetic dimension is full of emptiness—gaps and openness—rather than being a solid, plastic thing. It has no authority. So ecological art is an art of “whateverness.”21 It might be photographic rather than painterly, if by “painterly” we mean objets d’art with their aura of specialness and distance, floating in some museum like products in a shop window.22 Some contemporary environmental art is like an aura without an object. Beyond even this, the art will be about “unworking” rather than about the precious work of art as such.23 This will foreshadow a future society based on the “whateverness” of the strange stranger, a society of hospitality and responsibility.

  There are three directions for ecological art. The first emphasizes automated processes such as evolution. Art that uses algorithms fit into this category: serialism, diastic poetry, even abstract expressionism.24 This is the art of letting be (German: Gelassenheit): “Let the chips fall where they may.” The artist sets up some parameters, starts the process, and watches what happens. The second approach emphasizes consciousness, being caught in the headlights of our awareness of the mesh. The art is ironic, full of darkness and unfathomable depths and deceptive shallows. The third approach is about the ruthless way in which mathematics and other sciences are now able to model so-called Nature: think of modern cinematic special effects. These three approaches could manifest in the same work of art.

  Let’s begin by looking at technical and scientific innovation in art. These innovations, such as zooming, stop motion, time-lapse, and the use of fractal geometry to generate clouds, mountains, explosions (you name it), open up the mesh for inspection. Such techniques can recreate an arty aura that evokes feelings of distance, as any student with a poster of the Mandelbrot set on her wall could tell you. But in the main they serve the admirable purpose of demystifying our planet and our Universe—even that kitschy poster has something nicely uncool about it. We saw that you can write an algorithm that codes for plants and flowers. You can also write algorithms that code for mountains, clouds, and so on. Benoit Mandelbrot discovered that supposedly random patterns in Nature consist of fractals.25 Fractal shapes seem irregular at first, but on closer inspection they reveal a clear structure based on iterating algorithmic processes. These processes map onto themselves with a fractional ratio, creating jagged, complexly folded, crinkly forms that are self-similar—you can cut a little piece out of them, and it will resemble the main shape. This is quite different from the whole being greater than the sum of its parts (holism): it’s all parts, all the way up and all the way down, so that a “higher” level (say, the relative height of trees in a forest) maps onto “lower” levels (say, the relative width of branches in a single tree).

  To have holism, there must be a clear difference between a top level and other, lower, levels of the pattern. No difference means no whole separate from the parts. Fractal geometry denatures Nature. If you can plot the coastline of Britain using well-formed algorithms, or generate a computer graphic of a shower of molten lava from an image of a simple linear jet (as in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith), then Nature, as a solid, comprehension-defying thing “over yonder,” has evaporated.

  Art in an age of fractal geometry strips the aura from Nature. Yet more profound mysteries emerge: the mesh and the strange stranger. Scientific instruments, such as contact microphones placed on a window, can allow us to hear things such as standing waves over the Pacific Ocean: art as a form of data collection.26 This brings us to the art of letting be, since we could imagine technology as bringing phenomena to light. In an age of movies, close-ups and zooming allow us to see inside and around things. In an age of powerful processors, fractal geometry reveals fuzzy, crinkly things that used to seem organic, subject to some mysterious living principle.

  The experimental movies of Stan Brakhage, with their flickering colors induced by painting onto the film stock, are profoundly environmental. Psychogeography, the practice invented by Guy Debord and the Situationists of Paris 1968 fame, reclaims the environment through the dérive, or “drifting,” aimless wandering. Debord explicitly states that psychogeography is ecological. The dérive is “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.”27 Work by David Robertson, Richard Long, and Hamish Fulton falls into this category. In a way, psychogeography is like the indigenous Australian walkabout. Perhaps ecological projects such as installing solar panels are a form of Situationism.

  Virginia Woolf’s narratives are ecological because, unlike Joyce and Lawrence, who also developed “stream of consciousness” techniques, Woolf lets consciousnesses slide into each other: this includes nonhuman as well as human consciousnesses. Consider the extraordinary passage in Mrs. Dalloway where two old women watch a skywriting plane:There’s a fine young feller aboard of it, Mrs. Dempster wagered, and away and away it went, fast and fading, away and away the aeroplane shot; soaring over Greenwich and all the masts; over the little island of grey churches, St. Paul’s and the rest till, on either side of London, fields spread out and dark brown woods where adventurous thrushes hopping boldly, glancing quickly, snatched the snail and tapped him on a stone, once, twice, thrice.28

  Woolf’s control (or, better, careful lack of control) of indirect speech lets us flow in and out of characters’ heads—one of which is surely the thrush. In a single sentence, we go up and away, then out to “either side” of the city (which side?), then, incredibly, into the intense attention of the thrush tapping the shell. It’s as if Woolf’s prose zooms in and out as ruthlessly as a movie camera. In the middle of another novel, To the Lighthouse, Woolf places a chapter called “Time Passes,” which describes the subtle physical shifts and play of light and darkness in and around a house deserted by the novel’s characters.29 The environment as such comes to the forefront. The fact that the reader is made aware of the house and its environs without the characters doesn’t exactly bestow on the reader any power of knowing something the characters don’t know. What this description does, rather, is undermine the idea that the house is a neutral stage set on which the characters act. The existentially vivid presence of the house, its meaningless material inertia, emerges.

  Environmental art must deeply explore materiality. There are poems that, like music, experiment with tones and timbres—the very matter and energy out of which sound is made. Caroline Bergvall’s Goan Atom series is a powerful example.30 La Monte Young experimented with “just intonation,” designing tones that include many more, and more highly varied, sounds (harmonics) than the traditional equal temperament and Christian-derived ones.31 Experiments with pure color in painting are environmental, such as Yves Klein’s luminous blues (the YKB series). Eliane Radigue designs very long synthesizer sounds that open up the space in which they are played.32 Alvin Lucier experiments with the way resonance is about the material out of which sound comes and the material environment in which sounds vibrate.33 John Cage’s 4′ 33” is deliberately environmental, as its four and a half minutes’ silence was written for an open-air amphitheater.

  Happenings and raves are environmental, from London’s 1967 14-Hour Technicolour Dream to the acid house of 1988 on. House music is viral: it’s made of strings of musical code, often sampled, strung together. These strings mutate frequently and ca
n easily be spliced into other house tracks. House tracks are not complete in themselves (also like viruses) but form sections of longer sequences mixed by a DJ. This viral organization repeats at other levels. The music sequences rapidly organized an ever-growing mass of dancing limbs. Utopian combinations of gay and straight, black and white, upper class and working class, made possible the idea of collectivity, the idea of joining hands toward the lasers in the sound factory (as one famous club was called), after a decade in which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher insisted that “society doesn’t exist.” It was situational and, in its way, Situationist. The Mutoid Waste Company recycled materials to create new décor. Music sampling became faster, cheaper, and easier, and DJing is the equivalent of a musical dérive. There were themes of globalism and a new collective dreamtime called virtual reality—what was it? We can tar house music with the brush of hindsight as the vanguard of the new world order, where globalization and the Internet keep everyone slaving away. But as the initial rush of euphoria wears off, there remains utopian energy in the idea of exploring differences in collectivity.

  Improvisation introduces Darwinism into art. Keith Rowe’s “un-intention” takes place when something happens that we conventionally call silence. If all sounds—and nonsounds—are included, everything is “intended.” The practice of improvisation stretches “intention” from its usual connotations of deliberateness, even away from the philosophical assumption that consciousness is “intentional” (it is always “consciousness of ...”). Free jazz is about adaptation, since one instrument depends completely on another, and all instruments depend on the “environment” of “un-intention” around them. This music listens to itself, following the brilliant theory of musical evolution, apocryphally attributed to Miles Davis: “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

  Because of this listening quality, free jazz can be highly contemplative. The guitarist Allan Holdsworth sees the guitar fret board as a field of possibilities like an abacus.34 When he solos, Holdsworth tries out every possibility relating to the key signature of a tune, some closer to the basic harmony, others further away. Improvisation is adaptation plus awareness. Holdsworth is the finest and most virtuosic guitarist of the early twenty-first century, but he is utterly modest and humble, unlike some of his peers.35 So it goes with the contemplative, listening quality of his music. There’s something contemplative about the ecological thought. When you think about adaptation, it is like music that listens to itself. This form of awareness foreshadows a future society in which introversion and passivity have a key role to play. Perhaps the ecological art of the future will deal with passivity and weakness; with lowliness, not loftiness.

  And now for noir. Paul Chaney’s The Lonely Now documents the way our mind can’t tear itself from the mesh but drowns within it, fully conscious: “In Vole—No Pulse [a video work], a small rodent accidentally killed by a lawnmower turns out to be pregnant, giving rise to the kind of horrifically irresolvable moral dilemma common to any agricultural endeavour. ... Install incubators? Open an orphanage ...?”36 The video documents the loving burial of the vole in a special graveyard. Then there’s the lovingly small model of a farmhouse, a little fragment of place in an ocean of space. There’s “Slug-o-Metric,” a device that measures slugs while killing them.

  Comora Tolliver’s “Pod” is an installation about seed banks.37 Many countries store their seeds in banks so that the genomes won’t cease to exist if there is a war or a natural disaster.38 Corporations such as Monsanto have made it almost impossible to rely on age-old methods of saving seeds, having copyrighted the genomes of plants such as soy. Tolliver’s work shows how all beings exist together in a space that is itself a product of their existence. Tolliver lines her installation space with highly reflective, artificial-looking Mylar: its folds and creases induce a hypnotic intensity, the visual equivalent of a wall of guitar feedback. In the center is an egglike structure, also coated with Mylar, inside which is a gravelike space that contains dead flowers in a pool of water. This is dark ecology, indeed.39 Photographs of paint oozing down the mirrorlike Mylar disturb our sense of foreground and background. The trails of paint look almost three-dimensional, as if they are tendrils that grow downward from above the photo frame, some distance in front of the Mylar’s surface. Rather than resolving our disorientation, Tolliver’s work heightens our sense of how the ecological crisis has disrupted our normative sense of foreground and background.

  Remember a suggestion in the Introduction, that what I’m aiming at is an upgraded version of animism. Ancient animisms treat beings as people, without a concept of Nature. I’m going to cross out this word to prevent people from thinking of it as another belief system, in particular a system that implies something about living rather than nonliving things: Is there any art that points the way? Frankenstein and its best modern adaptation, Blade Runner, are perfect examples. So is Solaris, the novel by Stanislav Lem, and movies by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh.40

  Solaris is about falling in love with the strange stranger. Solaris is a distant sentient planet that tries to communicate with the human inhabitants of an orbiting space station. Its communications take the form of simulated, walking, talking versions of the inhabitants’ darkest, guiltiest memories. Most go mad trying to ward off these simulations. But the psychologist Kris decides to do the almost impossible, to commit himself to the planet-mind, fully knowing that the simulation of his suicidal girlfriend is a mere illusion. In Tarkovsky’s adaptation, Kris’s descent onto the planet’s surface isn’t shown directly. The camera pans up and away from a small island on that surface, an island that the planet has made to look like Kris’s childhood home. As the Bach soundtrack fades into organ and synthesizer discords, we see that the island floats in a gigantic, terrifying sea of pulsating colors and lights.41 Kris appears marooned on a little island of psychic consistency in a psychotic ocean. It is also as if Kris has chosen to live on the surface of film itself, that liquid, oceanic medium of throbbing, streaming color and sound.

  It might be impossible to design a machine that uses algorithms to make a choice between things that appear easy to discriminate, like the inside and outside of a set.42 If all conscious beings are machines, do they still have strange strangeness? There is something amiss with the language of individualism: I am not a number; I am a free man!43 The argument that some mental phenomena aren’t reducible to scientifically observable processes seems weak. It would be more effective to make a counterassertion at the level of the scientific real.44 Persons are irreducible aspects of reality. Whether or not machines can think, we will soon confront the question the Korean government faced when it developed ethical rules for robots. Art has already stepped into the breach on this issue. Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) remains astonishing to think with.45 It’s about artificial life, “replicants” who work as slaves in extraterrestrial colonies. Their makers allow them four years of “life” after which they are “retired” (they run down or are killed). Their manufacturers install artificial memories to give them an illusory structure within which to base something like sanity.

  Blade Runner is classic noir detective fiction, in which the detective Deckard finds out he is implicated in the crime. Noir is the mode of dark ecology: in it, we discover that the detective’s personhood ironically contaminates the scene. Although he has been hired to “retire” some renegade replicants, Deckard himself is a replicant. Ecological awareness follows a similar path. Our ideas about having an objective point of view are part of the problem, as are ideological beliefs in immersion in a lifeworld. Deckard discovers something about the fragility and contingency of life when he falls in love with the replicant Rachel, the plaything of the CEO of the corporation that manufactures them. This fragility and contingency becomes even more intensely clear when at the end he is saved from a fall to death by the rebel replicant Roy. Roy gives a powerful,
melancholy speech in which, like the Creature in Frankenstein, he owns his own death, in a moment that is both ethical and tragic: “I’ve ... seen things you people wouldn’t believe ... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion ... I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate ... All those—moments—will be lost in time, like ... tears in rain: time to die” (my transcription). Compare the Creature’s last words: “ ‘But soon,’ he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die’ ... He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”46 The profundity of Blade Runner, and of Frankenstein, isn’t to point out that artificial life and intelligence are possible but that human life already is this artificial intelligence. Descartes tellingly referred to intelligence as the res intellectus, the “thing that thinks.”47

  What makes humans human is not some Natural or essential component of being but a relationship that can never be fulfilled. This asymmetrical relationship is perfectly captured when Roy goads his manufacturers in Blade Runner. Roy picks up a pair of eyes on which a scientist has been working: “If only you could see what I have seen . . . with your eyes” (my transcription). On the one hand, the eyes are physical things belonging to the Corporation; on the other hand, they reflect the mind of the replicant. This is one reason for the pathos of the heart of Frankenstein, in which the Creature narrates what he has seen with Frankenstein’s eyes.