ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Here's a Provocative Line from Dark Ecology

Friday, October 30, 2015

Here's a Provocative Line from Dark Ecology

I just got the proofs! Proofs are cool, because you realize that you didn't screw up that badly. There's something about copy editing that makes me panic. But proof reading is sort of mellow. It's like your grave has already been dug, you know you are about to be executed, so a kind of calm reigns.

Anyway. Here's something naughty about Bruno Latour:

“Latour’s suggestion that we call [the Anthropocene] the Capitalocene misses the mark. Capital and capitalism are symptoms of the problem, not its direct causes. If the cause were capitalism, then Soviet and Chinese carbon emissions would have added nothing to global warming. Even the champion of distributed agency balks at calling a distributed spade a distributed spade.”

Discuss.

3 comments:

J. Ahlroth said...: I think your argument is spot on.

As a sidetrack, one could argue that modern China is a state-run capitalist society.; October 31, 2015 at 1:02 AM
ai said...: Tim - Where does Latour propose calling it the Capitalocene? I know others who do that, but I'm surprised by Latour getting the credit for it. (And then I disagree that the Soviets and Chinese examples are exceptions that disprove the rule, but that's another matter.); October 31, 2015 at 4:59 AM
John Muse said...: Like ai, I want the Latour reference. And then I want a suite of distinctions between various anthropoi so as to mark that it's the never-been-moderns and not aboriginals and others who've made this -cene. If as you argue elsewhere that there is no origin and there are no species, then you shouldn't use "anthropos" to name and blame a species, pinning the tale on the human as such but via an elicit metonymy: not all humans but some and not only some humans but their assembled supports. Those who opt for Capitalocene are playing metonymic as well, but I think you're righter to insist reference human animals and their debris. How then to capture in a word these splits, in time and agency?

But perhaps more importantly, I would love for you to retire the spade thing, now a fraught racial trope, even if not "originally" so. See http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763/is-it-racist-to-call-a-spade-a-spade; October 31, 2015 at 7:13 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

Friday, October 30, 2015

Here's a Provocative Line from Dark Ecology

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