The Ecological Thought

by Timothy Morton

  Notes

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AT Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (London: Phoenix, 2005).

  DDI Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

  DM Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, intro. by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004).

  EP Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  EwN Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

  OB Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998).

  OED Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, dictionary.oed.com.

  OS Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  PAI Margaret A. Boden, ed., The Philosophy of Artifi cial Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  TI Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

  INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL THINKING

  1 Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 530.

  2 For example, see the Church of Deep Ecology: churchofdeepecology.org.

  3 A ndrew Stanton, dir., Wall•E (Pixar Animation Studios, 2008).

  4 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 535.

  5 OS, 248–251.

  6 TI, 25.

  7 EwN, 204–205.

  8 Alexander Pope, Essay on Man 1.294, in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A OneVolume Edition of the Twickenham Text, with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge, 1989).

  9 Paul McCartney (and Martin Heidegger), “Let It Be,” Let It Be (Apple Records, 1970).

  10 John Donne, Meditation 17, in Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 344.

  11 See EwN, 14, 18–19, 83–92.

  12 See Steven Vogel, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

  13 John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); and The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  14 EwN, 20–21, 22, 52–53, 67, 80–81, 105–106, 114–115, 142, 155, 168. In refraining from using “web” I’m trying to follow my own rules, though “mesh” may be a poor substitute (see EwN, 81).

  15 Pall Skulason, Reflections at the Edge of Askja: On Man’s Relation to Nature (Reykjavik: University of Iceland Press, 2006), 11. See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 444.

  16 TI, 46.

  17 René Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. with an intro. by Desmond M. Clarke (London: Penguin, 2000), 19.

  18 EwN, 4–5, 63–64, 80–81, 124–125, 129, 128–135, 164, 168.

  19 I borrow “restrictive economy” from Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 1:19–26 (25).

  20 The “cyborg” represents personhood in an age of digital and ecological interconnectedness: see Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), 149–181.

  21 See, for example, Timothy Morton, “John Clare and the Question of Place,” in Romanticism’s Debatable Lands, ed. Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington (London: Palgrave, 2007), 105–117.

  22 See Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (London: Continuum, 2007), 75.

  23 See Elizabeth Royte, “A Tall, Cool Drink of . . . Sewage?” New York Times Magazine, August 10, 2008, 30–33.

  24 Ryan Parker, “Residents Upset about Park Proposal,” Lakewood Sentinel, July 31, 2008, milehighnews.com/Articles-i-2008–07–31–207468.114125_Residents _upset_about_park_proposal.html; “Solar Foes Focus in the Dark,” Editorial, August 7, 2008, milehighnews.com/Articles-i-2008–08–07–207541.114125_ Solar_foes_focus_in_the_dark.html; and August 14, 2008, 1, 4.

  25 See, for example, Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); and Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). See also Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004); Kevin Hutchings, Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); Ralph Pite, “How Green Were the Romantics?” Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 357–373; Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in British Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004); Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

  26 See EwN, 73–76, 194–195.

  27 For the analysis of environmental form, see Timothy Morton, “Of Matter and Meter: Environmental Form in Coleridge’s ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp,’ ” Literature Compass Romanticism 5 (January 2008), blackwell-compass.com/ subject /literature/section_home?section=lico-romanticism.

  28 DDI, 115, n. 10.

  29 The word sometimes used is “continuism,” from Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 30. The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean. Derrida is also responsible for “asinane” (18, 31). Derrida finds himself in company with Luc Ferry, “Neither Man nor Stone,” in Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, eds., Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity (London: Continuum, 2007), 147–156 (155). For a different view, see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? A Brief History of Humankind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 37.

  30 Peter Atterton, “Ethical Cynicism,” in Atterton and Calarco, eds., Animal Philosophy, 51–61 (61). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari assert that they are beyond evolution in proposing the codevelopment of all beings in “alliance”: “Becoming-Animal,” in Atterton and Calarco, eds., Animal Philosophy, 87–100 (88). On the contrary, symbiosis, far from being the opposite of evolution, is deeply entrenched in it.

  31 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 162.

  32 William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D. V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 667.

  33 By “attitude” I mean what Lacanian ideology theory calls “subject position.”

  34 See, for instance, Slavoj Žižek, “Ecology without Nature,” talk given at Panteion University, Athens, youtube.com/watch?v=CTYrCbDeut8&feature=related.

  35 Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA (2010) (forthcoming); “Thinking Ecology: The Mesh and the Strange Stranger,” Collapse 6 (2010), 265–293; “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” SubStance 37, no. 3 (2008): 37–61.

  36 Timothy Morton, “Of Matter and Meter,” “John Clare and the Question of Place,” and “Shelley, Nature and Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Timothy Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 185–207; “Wordsworth Digs the Lawn,” European Romantic Review 15, no. 2 (March 2004): 317–327; “Why Ambient Poetics?” The Wordsworth Circle 33, no.
1 (Winter 2002): 52–56.

  37 Richard Karban and Mikaela Huntzinger, How to Do Ecology: A Concise Handbook (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 46.

  38 See Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 369.

  39 I develop the concept of the strange stranger from Derrida’s arrivant, the ultimate arrival to whom one must extend ultimate hospitality. Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” in Acts of Religion, ed., trans., and intro. by Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 356–420.

  40 Harve Foster and Wilfred Jackson, dirs., Song of the South (Disney, 1946).

  41 Ross Robertson, “A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century,” What Is Enlightenment? 38 (2008), wie.org/j38/bright-green.asp?page=3.

  42 Coastlines have a fractal geometry. See James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988) 84–89.

  43 OS, 395–396.

  1. THINKING BIG

  1 E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971). Vegetarianism may become more necessary as human needs outstrip our capacity to feed livestock.

  2 See Robert Kaufman, “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000): 682–724.

  3 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003).

  4 See TI, 197–198.

  5 See Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Englewood, CO: Roberts, 2004), 33, 35, 83–84, 140–144, 250–255, 264–268.

  6 TI, 62.

  7 Milton, Preface, Paradise Lost, 1.

  8 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Poems of Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1989–).

  9 Roman Kroitor and Colin Low, Universe (National Film Board of Canada, 1960); Carl Sagan, Contact: A Novel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); Robert Zemeckis, dir., Contact (Warner Brothers, 1997).

  10 See Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  11 See Elizabeth Mitchell, “Cows Shown to Align North-South,” BBC News, August 25, 2008, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7575459.stm. Heise discusses how John Klima’s installation Earth is a “database art” that works with forms of global knowledge in an environmental era (Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 65–67).

  12 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992). See Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 146–151, 154–159.

  13 Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, As It Is (Boudhanath: Rangjung Yeshe, 1999), 103–104.

  14 See Rebecca French, The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

  15 Martin Heidegger, “Being Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 141–160.

  16 Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Arista, 1997).

  17 Today, BBC Radio 4, May 6, 2008.

  18 OED, “mesh,” n.1.a–c.

  19 OED, “mesh,” n.2.

  20 OS, 105–106.

  21 OS, 107.

  22 OS, 100, 141.

  23 OS, 68, 79.

  24 OS, 161.

  25 William Wordsworth, “Prospectus to Home at Grasmere,” 1002–1011, in The Major Works: Including the Prelude, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 198.

  26 William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D. V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 667.

  27 OS, 151.

  28 EP, 179–180 (and 179–194 in general).

  29 See Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989). See OS, 67, 69, 70, 79.

  30 OS, 62–63.

  31 narsad.org/news/newsletter/profiles/profile2003–06–25c.html.

  32 Roland Emmerich, dir., The Day after Tomorrow (20th Century Fox, 2004).

  33 H. P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” in The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 191–192.

  34 See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 35–39; In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 420–461.

  35 See, for example, Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (London: Continuum, 2007), 140.

  36 “How He Did It,” Newsweek, November 17, 2008, 41, 44, newsweek.com/id/167582/page/2.

  37 Jacques Lacan, address given at MIT, quoted in Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 238. As Darwin observes, animals such as dogs and cats have developed behaviors for burying excrements: Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, intro., afterword, and commentary by Paul Erkman (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 50, 51–52. Darwin remarks that dogs retain this habit from a remote common ancestor (50). Doesn’t this make canine disposal at least as interesting as human disposal? Besides, if Lacan based his remark on settled agricultural societies (rather than, say, nomadic ones), then the “problem” isn’t general to humankind.

  38 Richard Scarry, Busy, Busy, Town (New York: Golden Books, 2000), 17.

  39 See Timothy Clark, “Towards a Deconstructive Environmental Criticism,” Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 1 (2008), 45–68 (48–52).

  40 Theodor Adorno: “there is [a universal history] leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb,” Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 320.

  41 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 95.

  42 EP, 159.

  43 AT, 490, 500–501, 504, 513–514, 515, 517, 543–544, 546–548, 550–551.

  44 EP, 178.

  45 This is an inversion of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs,” an image of the mind. See EP, 159; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and H. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 1–8. Both Lynn Margulis and Slavoj Žižek have used the Cheshire cat’s grin to similar effect: see EP, 223; Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2003).

  46 Richard Karban and Mikaela Huntzinger, How to Do Ecology: A Concise Handbook (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 39.

  47 EP, 200–223, 226.

  48 Mark T. Boyd, Christopher M. R. Bax, Bridget E. Bax, David L. Bloxam, and Robin A. Weiss, “The Human Endogenous Retrovirus ERV-3 Is Upregu-lated in Differentiating Placental Trophoblast Cells,” Virology 196 (1993): 905–909.

  49 K. W. Jeon and J. F. Danielli, “Micrurgical Studies with Large Free-Living Amebas,” International Reviews of Cytology, 30 (1971): 49–89, quoted in EP, 160.

  50 EP, 234–239, 239.

  51 AT, 216–218.

  52 See AT, 375.

  53 See EP, 159. This fact has major implications. For example, systems theory explains living organisms as distinguishing an inside from an outside. The inside–outside distinction founds metaphysical systems. See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 79–153 (151–152); “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63–171.

  54 For a study of the philosophical and cultural implications of nanoscale objects, see Colin Milburn, Nanovision: Engineering the Future (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

  55 Eduardo Kac, GFP Bunny (2000), ekac.org/gfpbunny.html.

  56 Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population influenced both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theories of evolution. But does this mean Darwin himself was a “social Darwinist”? See DDI, 393,
461–463.

  57 See Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion (London: Routledge, 2002).

  58 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 1.638.

  59 In particular, see George Miller, dir., Happy Feet (Kingdom Feature Productions, 2006).

  60 Sesame Street, “We Are All Earthlings,” Sesame Street Platinum All-Time Favorites (Sony, 1995).

  61 OS, 64.

  62 Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: Freeman, 1979); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).

  63 Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 151–152.

  64 I am using structuralist terminology derived from Ferdinand De Saussure’s System of General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983).

  65 Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret of Science and Happiness (New York: Harmony Books, 2007), 174–175.

  66 The classic instance is Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 2 vols. (New York: Verso, 2009).

  67 See Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 222–223.

  68 See TI, 137, 274.

  69 TI, 173.

  70 TI, 292, 294, 298, 302, 305.

  71 Quoted in Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1994), 124.

  72 The “strange stranger” is my translation of Jacques Derrida’s arrivant. “Hostipitality,” in Acts of Religion, ed., trans., and intro. by Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 356–420.