ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Mammals in Space, Continued

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Mammals in Space, Continued

Levi Bryant puts a rabbit in a vacuum in his terrific new essay:

if a sadistic mad scientist places a fuzzy friendly rabbit in a vacuum sealed box, that rabbit will die, thereby indicating the internality of relations. Insofar as the rabbit can only live in and through its relations to the earth, the argument runs, relations must ontologically be internal. Yet this conflates distinct issues. The rabbit clearly changes (significantly and unfortunately) when it is placed in the vacuum. Yet does the rabbit cease to exist? No. The rabbit loses a quality or set of qualities (being alive) yet still exists. What is conflated here are the qualities of the rabbit and the rabbit in its existence. The rabbit, of course, can be destroyed as in those instances where it is torn to pieces or explodes. And these qualities or phases through which the rabbit passes will, in many respects, be a function of the external relations into which the rabbit enters. Yet these qualitative changes are distinct from the existence of the rabbit as a rabbit. If we hold that being is difference and thereby affirm the existence of individual substances, then the externality of relations necessarily follows as a consequence.

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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

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Mammals in Space, Continued

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