ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Deleuzian Autism

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Deleuzian Autism

I've had this beef with Deleuzian panegyrics to autism. Don't they reproduce the primitivism with which immediacy = who we really are = good versus bad, bad, reflexive loops = artifice = bad bad civilization?

What is avant-garde about this?

And what in this speaks to the immense suffering of autism?

Is autism chosen because it's even more hardwired than schizophrenia, D&G's favorite mode? More "primitive," therefore?

1 comment:

grayam m. said...: Hey, I wasn't aware that "Deleuzian Autism" was a thing, but from your very brief comments it sounds like an avenue that could be relevant to some things I'm working on. Were there any specific papers/articles/etc. that you were thinking of re. your comments?

Incidentally, I've started introducing your work to other artists I know - you may have started to become popular amongst emerging Australian creatives, because I keep seeing vague references to you all over the place.

(long time fan, first time commenter); September 18, 2013 at 3:17 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

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Deleuzian Autism

1 comment:

Counter

ShareThis