ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: At the Dénouement

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

At the Dénouement

...you find yourself in a library...Jeffrey Kripal pointed this out to me, how fantastic is that, the way in which hermeneutical uncertainty is keyed into the most mystical part of Interstellar...you find yourself in a library where you have to use code to communicate, where your screams can't be heard by the person on the other side, as if you were communicating from the realm the books point towards (literally). An astronaut in a library--there's a strong allusion to 2001, that final scene with its eighteenth-century weirdness, no?

Like you plummet into the most obscure most dense most frightening part of the universe, at the point of the story when all is supposedly revealed--and you find yourself in your daughter's library, behind the bookshelves...trying to figure out how to use language...

The exchange between the robot TARS (anagram of STAR, clearly a luciferian angel) and Cooper in that scene is just too good. “Cooper, come in Cooper...” “TARS?” “Copy that.” “You survived.” “Somewhere, in their fifth dimension; they saved us.” ... “Do you have the quantum data?” “Roger I have it...”

TARS's voice actor is particularly good. Does anyone else notice how, when Romilly is killed, TARS regresses to a primitive computer voice, not quite Speak and Spell but definitely like the Apple voices? “Romilly did not survive...I could not save him.” An AI regressing because of the intensity. Nice touch.

I like to point out how OOO objects aren't naked, that they are surrounded by hermeneutical clouds of unknowing structural to their being. Like when you are having a mystical or paranormal experience, the idea that you are in a fiction can become overwhelming...thus making it easy to dismiss...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: When he fell into the black hole and that scene manifested, I shook my head in bewilderment and heard myself mutter "Books?" But at the same time I felt like it made more sense than anything else, even before I figured out where he was.; June 16, 2015 at 9:12 PM
Derek Woods said...: It's like the Library of Babel, in Borges.

Or is the infinite library in Interstellar like the recuperative moment of the sublime? Things are really big, but you have the idea of infinity (and time travel, or simultaneity in the fifth dimension)?

Maybe denouement is a good form for understanding ecology. It's about what happens to chemicals and waste after the climax of a pest-killing or consumption narrative. And ecology can now work on the assumption that the climax moment for "reversing" climate change is in the past, so we're living in the denouement of an earth scale narrative about fossil fuels.

I like the end of The Graduate, when the denouement goes on for a bit too long.; June 17, 2015 at 12:59 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

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

At the Dénouement

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