ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Skholiast on the End of (the Illusion of) Modernity

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Skholiast on the End of (the Illusion of) Modernity

Skholiast writes here on my recent post. I am an inveterate flyer of kites. I'm okay when they fall apart and crash so I'm wondering whether and how this one can stay up. My subjective evidence is that I never, ever would have thought this way until a few weeks ago. Surprise as a token of truth.

It was really not even after I'd accepted OOO that it hit me. It was while I was teaching Hegel's aesthetic philosophy to my undergrads last quarter. Jarrod Fowler had just sent me this incredible piece of music (or non-music) about which you'll hear at the Rutgers talk. So I found myself saying that finally Hegel's dialectic of Romanticism, which I hold we've been caught in since 1790 or so, is done.

When postmodernism hit and when ecocriticism hit in my literary neighborhood, I just didn't buy that these were news of a new era. What's uncanny about Jarrod's music is that it comes out of a very dense post-Derridean theoretical view but it's also a hyperobject...

More on this soon.

1 comment:

skholiast said...: thanks for a gracious shout-out, Tim. I get it about flying kites. But my intuition is also that one's surprising turns of thought are very possibly where the energy is the most alive. More to come.; February 13, 2011 at 8:53 PM

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

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Skholiast on the End of (the Illusion of) Modernity

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