Professor Tim at Cultures of Energy

Tim Morton, Rice U

Title: Dark Ecology

Abstract: In this talk I’m going to provide some kind of logical structure for thinking the Anthropocene, the radical intersection of human history and geological time that began (uncanny dating accuracy) in the late eighteenth century. This logical structure is called dark ecology, and it takes the form of thinking about loops. I shall be arguing that ecological awareness assumes a loop form for the deep reason that what is called history, when we include what is called geological time in that concept, is a concentric series of loops. This loopy nature of ecological awareness—its weirdness, as I shall define precisely—has a phenomenological format that is at first glance tragic, but on deeper analysis, is comical.