ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Tardis Objects

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Tardis Objects

Flying from Sacramento to Newark involves two planes and a transit in the never popular O'Hare airport.

It strikes you immediately that inside a plane or an airport there are countless objects--people, clothes, food, conversations, all milling about differently.

In a flattish ontology where we don't discriminate against medium-sized objects in the name of the tiny (undermining) or the vast (overmining) we have to accept a truth that Levi refers to as strange mereology: there are more parts than wholes.

Or to put it another way, the inside of an object is bigger than its outside.

This startling intuition is just one way in which OOO escapes correlationism, reductionism and holism in one fell swoop. If you like it means that a feature of the Kantian sublime--inner space is bigger than outer space--is extended to all entities.

1 comment:

daz hastings said...: Two days ago I had good fortune to go "in" Wookey Hole, underneath/inside the Mendips, yeah? Big underground river. Caverns of interior space. They've added mucho amusements since "our" day: dinosaurs, fake snow, old coin slots and a circus (tis true tis true!) as well as great reconstruction of the first mobile entertainment Wagon 1768 by Philip Astley first circus seen (apparently) in Waterloo Station). Enourmous objects everywhere, plump inside with a view of the Tor. Like this blog, it comes highly recommended as a place in which to think; February 24, 2011 at 2:25 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

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Tardis Objects

1 comment:

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