ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Realist Magic Liveblog 13

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Realist Magic Liveblog 13

I had an insight this morning. It was about writing philosophy books. I was surprised to discover myself writing them starting with Ecology without Nature, but I guess it's what I love to do.

Now Realist Magic was a deliberately planned philosophy book from the get go. And what I realized is that your sense of your audience causes you to want to write as rigorously as possible. Of course there has to be rigor and good arguments. But you can easily become defensive. This can lead you to become brittle. Which can lead to your arguments being easier to snap, ironically.

It's living proof that there is no metalanguage. The more you hedge your argument about with defenses, the more enmeshed in a brittle structure you become. I can see how easily it happens and I can see how it works in some of the Analytic books I'm reading right now. Soon there is no breathing room.

1 comment:

Bill Benzon said...: You can't DICTATE your audience's reaction to what you write. You HAVE to trust them. Any attempt to limit their interpretive choices by piling argument upon argument upon meta-argument to show them that you are always already one step ahead of them, will fail. Because it will reveal to them, if not to you, that they can, by an easy act of will, always already be one step ahead of you. Always.

So, yeah, there's no closure by going meta.; September 26, 2011 at 4:11 AM

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, September 25, 2011

Realist Magic Liveblog 13

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