ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Darth Vader Pops Open a Coca Cola

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Darth Vader Pops Open a Coca Cola

I think my undergraduate theory class is going quite well, mostly because people are laughing and paying attention.

I had some insights while I was teaching (this always happens).

1) For Plato the problem with art is not the blatant lies, it's the lies in the form of the truth. So lightsabers and hyperspace are kind of fine, because we know they're lies, but what Star Wars says about how to parent could be suspect.

2) When Aristotle talks about the unities, unity of action has to do with (as you know) probability and necessity. A student asked about realist fiction—wouldn't gritty realism always fall within the category of unity of action?

I replied no, not always. Take Star Wars again. Imagine a scene that broke with the “necessity” part of the equation. Imagine Darth Vader having a moment of exhausted angst, opening a fridge one evening in his inner sanctum on board the star destroyer, popping off his helmet and pressing a nice cold Coke against his boiled-egg brow. And sighing.

It's always good to laugh in class...

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Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Darth Vader Pops Open a Coca Cola

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