ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Knowledge Ecology: OOO and Ecology

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Knowledge Ecology: OOO and Ecology

De Chirico knew a thing or two about the strangeness of cities

HT Graham Harman. This is a great post that I shall delve into some more. Adam cites what I say about cities in my talk at Temple.

He begins to push OOO withdrawal towards the ecology discussion, which I'm very happy about. This is the difficult part, because it's counter-intuitive that withdrawal can be of service to ecological thinking.

I firmly believe that it can, precisely because it prevents reductionism and holism (two targets of this post as well). And also because it opens objects to nonhumans so decisively.

Let me just quote his cities part, because the way Adam puts it is very attractive to me:

the city-as-hyperobject, withdraws from our relations to it. There are plenty of subjective relations to a city. There is a city-for-me, a city-for-you, a city-for-the-subway-system, but the complete fullness of the city-in-itself withdraws from these relations, it always emerges in new constellations of activity.

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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

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Knowledge Ecology: OOO and Ecology

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