Unsustaining
[pdf]
Timothy Morton
“Sustainable
capitalism” might be one of those contradictions in terms along the lines of “military
intelligence.” Capital must keep on producing more of itself in order to
continue to be itself. This strange paradox is fundamentally, structurally
imbalanced. Let’s consider the unit of capitalism: the turning of raw materials
into products. Now for a capitalist, the raw materials are not strictly
natural. They simply pre-exist whatever labor process the capitalist is going
to exert on them. Surely here we see the problem. Whatever pre-exists the
specific labor process is a kind of lump that only achieves definition as
valuable product once the labor has been exerted on it.
What capitalism makes is some kind of stuff
called capital. The very definition of “raw materials” in economic theory is
also “stuff that comes in through the factory door.” Again, it doesn’t matter
what it is. It could be sharks or steel bolts. At either end of the process we
have featureless chunks of stuff—one of those featureless chunks being human
labor. The point is to convert the stuff that comes in to money. Industrial
capitalism is philosophy incarnate in stocks, girders and human sweat. What
kind of philosophy? If you want a “realism of the remainder,” just look around
you. “Realism of the remainder” means that yes, for sure, there is something
real outside of our (human) access to it—but we can only classify it as a kind
of inert resistance to our probing, a grey goo. (I’m using a term suggested by
thinking about nanotechnology—tiny machines eating everything until it becomes
said goo.)
It’s no wonder that industrial capitalism has
turned the Earth into a dangerous desert. It doesn’t really care what comes
through the factory door, just as long as it generates more capital. Do we want
to sustain a world based on a philosophy of grey goo?
Nature is the featureless remainder at either
end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added
stuff. Whatever: it’s basically featureless, abstract, grey. It has nothing to
do with nematode worms and orangutans, organic chemicals in comets and rock
strata. You can scour the Earth from mountaintop to Marianas Trench. You will
never find Nature. That’s why I put it in capitals. I want the reader to see
that it’s an empty category looking for something to fill it. Grey goo.
Capitalism did away with feudal and pre-feudal myths such as the divine hierarchy between classes of people. In so doing, however, it substituted one heck of a giant myth of its own: Nature. Nature is precisely the lump that pre-exists the capitalist labor process. Martin Heidegger has the best term for it: standing reserve, bestand.
Bestand means “stuff,” as in the old ad from the
1990s, “Drink Pepsi: Get Stuff.” There is an ontology implicit in capitalist
production, then, which is strictly materialism as defined by Aristotle.1Funnily enough, however, this materialism is not fascinated with material
objects in all their manifold specificity. It’s just stuff. This viewpoint is
the basis of Aristotle’s problem with materialism. Have you ever seen or
handled matter? Have you ever held a piece of “stuff”? Sure, I’ve seen lots of
objects: Santa Claus in a department store, snowflakes and photographs of
atoms. But have I ever seen matter or stuff as such? Aristotle says it’s a bit
like searching through a zoo to find the “animal” rather than the various
species such as monkeys and mynah birds.2 Marx says exactly the same thing regarding capital. “The ‘expanded’ form [of
the commodity] passes into the ‘general’ form when some commodity is excluded,
exempted from the collection of commodities, and thus appears as the general
equivalent of all commodities, as the immediate embodiment of Commodity as
such, as if, by the side of all real animals, there existed the Animal, the individual incarnation
of the entire animal kingdom—or as if, to use an example from commercial
capitalism, by the side of all real spices, there existed the spice.”3 As Nature goes, so goes matter. The two most progressive physical
theories of our age, ecology and quantum theory, need have nothing to do with
it.
What is Bestand? Bestand is stockpiling. Gallon after
gallon of oil waiting to be tapped. Row upon row of big box houses waiting to
be inhabited. Terabyte after terabyte of memory waiting to be filled.
Stockpiling is the art of the zeugma—the yoking of things you hear in phrases
such as “wave upon wave” or “bumper to bumper.” Stockpiling is the dominant
mode of social existence. Giant parking lots empty of cars, huge tables in
restaurants across which you can’t hold hands, vast empty lawns. Nature is
stockpiling. Range upon range of mountains, receding into the distance. Rocky
Flats nuclear bomb trigger factory was sited precisely to evoke this kind of
mountainous stockpile. The eerie strangeness of this fact confronts us with the
ways in which we still believe that Nature is “over there”—that it exists apart
from technology, apart from history. Far from it. Nature is the stockpile of
stockpiles.
So again, I ask, what exactly are we sustaining
when we talk about sustainability? An intrinsically out of control system that
sucks in grey goo at one end and pushes out grey value at the other. It’s
Natural goo, Natural value. Result? Mountain ranges of inertia, piling higher
every year, while humans boil away in the agony of uncertainty. Just take a
look at Manufactured Landscapes: the
ocean of telephone dials, dials as far as the eye can see, somewhere in China.
A real ocean—it lies there at this very moment.
Societies embody philosophies. Actually, what
we have in modernity is much, much worse than just instrumentality. Here we
must depart from Heidegger. What’s worse is the location of essence in some beyond, away from any specific
existence. To this extent, capitalism is itself Heideggerian! Whether we call
it scientism, deconstruction, relationism or just good old-fashioned Platonic
forms, there is no essence in what exists. Either the beyond is itself
nonexistent (deconstruction, nihilism), or it’s some kind of real away from “here.”
The problem, then, is not essentialism but this
very notion of a beyond. Think of what Tony Hayward said. He said that the
Gulf of Mexico was a huge ocean, and that the spill was tiny by comparison.
Nature would absorb the industrial accident. I don’t want to quibble about the
relative size of ocean and spill, as if an even larger spill would somehow have
gotten it into Hayward’s thick head that it was bad news. I simply want to
point out the metaphysics involved in Hayward’s assertion, which we could call
capitalist essentialism. The essence of reality is capital and Nature. Both
exist in an ethereal beyond. Over here, where we live, is an oil spill. But don’t
worry. The beyond will take care of it.
Meanwhile, despite Nature, despite grey goo,
real things writhe and smack into one another. Some leap out because industry
malfunctions, or functions only too well. Oil bursts out of its ancient
sinkhole and floods the Gulf of Mexico. Gamma rays shoot out of plutonium for twenty-four
thousand years. Hurricanes congeal out of massive storm systems, fed by the
heat from the burning of fossil fuels. The ocean of telephone dials mounts ever
higher. Paradoxically, capitalism has unleashed myriad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling splendor.
Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred years of seeing humans at the center
of existence, and now the objects take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient,
long-lived, threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body.
Modern life presents us
with a choice:
1) The essence of
things is elsewhere (in the deep structure of capital, the unconscious, Being).
2) There is no essence.
At present I believe
that the restriction of rightness and coolness to this choice is one reason why
planet Earth is in big trouble right now. And I believe that the choice
resembles a choice between grayish brown and brownish gray.
That’s why I believe in
a third choice:
3) There is an essence,
and it’s right here, in the object resplendent with its sensual qualities yet
withdrawn.
And that’s why I believe we are entering a new
era of academic work, where the point will not be to one-up each other by
appealing to the trace of the givenness of the openness of the clearing of the
lighting of the being of the pencil. Thinking past “meta mode” will at least
bring us up to speed with the weirdness of things, a weirdness that evolution,
ecology, relativity and quantum theory all speak about. This weirdness resides
on the side of objects themselves, not our interpretation of them.
When we flush the toilet, we imagine that the
U-bend takes the waste away into some ontologically alien realm. Ecology is now
beginning to tell us of something very different: a flattened world without
ontological U-bends. A world in which there is no “away.” Marx was partly
wrong, then, when in The Communist
Manifesto he claimed that in capitalism all that is solid melts into air.
He didn’t see how a kind of hypersolidity oozes back in to the emptied out
space of capitalism, a hypersolidity I call here hyperobjects. This oozing real comes back and can no longer be
ignored, so that even when the spill is supposedly “gone and forgotten,” there,
look! There it is, mile upon mile of strands of oil just below the surface,
square mile upon square mile of ooze floating at the bottom of the ocean.4 The cosmic U-bend is no more. It can’t be gone and forgotten—even ABC News
knows that now.
When I hear the word “sustainability” I reach
for my sunscreen.
The End of the World
When Neo touches a mirror in The Matrix it adheres to his hand,
instantly changing from reflective surface to viscous substance. The very thing
that we use to reflect becomes an object in its own right, liquid and dark like
oil in the dim light of the room in which Neo has taken the red pill. The usual
reading of this scene is that Neo’s reality is dissolving. If we stay on the
level of the sticky, oily mirror, however, we obtain an equally powerful
reading. It’s not reality that dissolves, but the subject, the very capacity to
“mirror” things, to be separate from the world like someone looking at a
reflection in a mirror—removed from it by an ontological sheet of reflective
glass. The sticky mirror demonstrates the truth of what phenomenology calls ingenuousness or sincerity (I’m thinking here of the work of Ortega y Gasset,
Levinas and Graham Harman). Objects are what they are, in the sense that no
matter what we are aware of, or how, there is, impossible to shake off. In the
midst of irony, there you are, being ironic. Even mirrors are what they are, no
matter what they reflect.5 In
its ingenuous sincerity, reality envelops us like a film of oil. The mirror
becomes a substance, an object.
Hyperobjects push the reset button on sincerity, just as Neo discovers that the
mirror no longer distances his image from him in a nice, aesthetically
manageable way, but sticks to him.
The beautiful reversibility of the oily,
melting mirror speaks to something that is happening in a global warming age,
precisely because of hyperobjects: the simultaneous dissolution of reality and
the overwhelming presence of hyperobjects, which stick to us, which are us. The
Greeks called it miasma, the way
blood-guilt sticks to you.
Why objects, why now? The philosopher Graham
Harman writes that, because they withdraw irreducibly, you can’t even get
closer to objects.6 This becomes clearer as we enter the ecological crisis—”How far in are we?”
This anxiety is a symptom of the emergence of hyperobjects. When you approach
them, more and more objects emerge. It’s like being in a dream written by Zeno.
This strange paradox becomes clearer as we enter the age of ecological crisis—“Has
it started yet? How far in are we?” is the question on all our lips, precisely
because we are in it, precisely
because it has started.
It’s November 2010. You are waiting at a bus
stop. Someone else ambles up. “Nice weather, isn’t it?” she asks.
You pause for a moment. You wonder whether she
is only saying that to distract you from the latest news about global warming.
You decide she isn’t.
“Yes,” you say. But your reply holds something
back—the awareness that for you it’s not a particularly nice day, because you’re
concerned that the heat and the moisture have to do with global warming. This
holding back may or may not be reflected in your tone.
“Mind you,” she says. “Oh, here it comes,” you
think. “Funny weather last week, wasn’t it? I blame global warming.”
We all have conversations that are more or less like that now. Just as after 9/11 objects to which we may have paid attention—an Exact-O-Knife, some white powder—suddenly gained a terrible significance, so in an age of global warming the weather—that nice neutral backdrop that you can talk about with a stranger, in that nice neutral backdrop-y way we might call phatic (after Roman Jakobson)—has taken on a menacing air.7
In any weather conversation, one of you is
going to mention global warming at some point. Or you both decide not to
mention it but it looms over the conversation like a dark cloud, brooding off
the edge of an ellipsis.
This failure of the normal rhetorical routine,
these remnants of shattered conversation lying around like broken hammers (they
must take place everywhere), is a symptom of a much larger and deeper
ontological shift in human awareness. Which in turn is a symptom of a profound
upgrade of our ontological tools. As anyone who has waited while the little
rainbow circle goes around and around on a Mac, these upgrades are not
necessarily pleasant. It is very much the job of humanists such as ourselves to
attune ourselves to the upgrading process and to help explain it.
What is the upgrading process? In a word, the
notion that we are living “in” a world—one that for instance we can call
Nature—no longer exists in any meaningful sense, except as nostalgia or in the
temporarily useful local language of pleas and petitions. We don’t want a
certain species to be farmed to extinction, so we use the language of Nature to
convince a legislative body. We have a general feeling of ennui and malaise and
create nostalgic visions of Hobbit-like worlds to inhabit. These syndromes have
been going on now since as long as the Industrial Revolution began to take
effect.
As a consequence of that Revolution, however,
something far bigger and more threatening is now looming on our horizon—looming
so as to abolish our horizon, or any horizon, in fact. Global warming, the
consequence of runaway fossil fuel burning (as we all know ad nauseam), has
performed a radical shift in the status of the weather. Why? Because the world as such—not just a certain
idea of world but world in its
entirety—has evaporated. Or rather, we are realizing that we never had it in
the first place.
We could explain this in terms of the good
old-fashioned Aristotelian view of substance and accidence. I’m sure you are
familiar with the idea that for Aristotle, a realist, there are substances that
happen to have various qualities or accidents that are not intrinsic to their substantiality. In
section Epsilon 2 of the Metaphysics Aristotle outlines the differences between substances and accidents. What
climate change has done is shift the weather from accidental to substantial.
Here’s Aristotle:
Suppose, for instance, that in the season of the Cynosure [the Dog Days of summer] arctic cold were to prevail, this we would regard as an accident, whereas, if there were a sweltering heatwave, we would not. And this is because the latter, unlike the former, is always or for the most part the case.8
But these sorts of violent changes are exactly
what global warming predicts. So every accident of the weather becomes a
potential symptom of a substance, global warming. So all of a sudden this wet
stuff falling on my head is a mere feature of some much more sinister
phenomenon that I can’t see with my naked human eyes. I need terabytes of RAM
processing speed to model it in real time (they were just able to do this in
spring 2008).
There is an even spookier problem with
Aristotle’s arctic summer. If those Arctic summers continue in any way, and if
we can model them as symptoms of global warming, it is the case that there never was a genuine, meaningful (for us
humans) sweltering summer, just a long period of sweltering that seemed real
because it kept on repeating for say two or three millennia. Global warming, in
other words, plays a very mean trick. It reveals that what we took to be a
reliable world was actually just a habitual pattern—a collusion between forces
such as sunshine and moisture and us humans expecting such things at certain
regular intervals and giving them names, such as Dog Days. We took weather to
be real. But in an age of global warming we see it as an accident, a simulation
of something darker, more withdrawn—climate. As Harman argues, “world” is
always presence-at-hand—a mere caricature of some real object.9 What Ben Franklin and others in the Romantic period discovered was not really
weather, but rather a toy version of this real object, a toy that ironically
started to unlock the door to the real thing.
Strange weather patterns and carbon emissions
acted on scientists to start monitoring things that at first only appeared
locally significant. That’s the old school definition of climate: there’s the
climate in Peru, the climate on Long Island, but climate in general, climate as
the totality of derivatives of weather events—in much the same way as inertia
is a derivative of velocity—climate as such is a beast newly recognized via the
collaboration of weather, scientists, satellites, government agencies and so
on. This beast includes the Sun since it’s infrared heat from the Sun that is
trapped by the greenhouse effect of gases such as CO2. So global
warming is a colossal entity that includes entities that exist way beyond Earth’s
atmosphere and yet it affects us intimately, right here and now. Global warming
is a prime example of what I am calling a hyperobject,
an object that is massively distributed in space-time, and radically transforms
our ideas of what an object is. It covers the entire surface of Earth and most
of the effects extend forwards up to 500 years into the future. Remember what
life was like in 1510?
You are walking on top of lifeforms. Your car
drove here on lifeforms. The iron in Earth’s crust is distributed bacterial
excrement. The oxygen in our lungs is bacterial out-gassing. Oil is the result
of some dark secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and
millions of years in the past. When you look at oil you’re looking at the past.
Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost
impossible to hold in mind. And they are intricately bound up with lifeforms.
The spooky thing is, we discover global warming
precisely when it’s already here. It is like realizing that for some time you
had been conducting your business in the expanding sphere of a slow motion
nuclear bomb. You have a few seconds for amazement as the fantasy that you
inhabited a neat, seamless little world melts away. All those apocalyptic
narratives of doom about the “end of the world” are, from this point of view,
part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some
hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object
that has intruded into ecological, social and psychic space.
If there is no background—no neutral, peripheral stage set of weather, but a very visible, highly monitored, publicly debated climate—then there is no foreground. Foregrounds need backgrounds to exist. So the strange effect of dragging weather phenomena into the foreground as part of our awareness of global warming has been the gradual realization that there is no foreground! The idea that we are embedded in a phenomenological lifeworld, for instance, tucked up like little hobbits into the safety of our burrow, has been exposed as a fiction. The specialness we granted ourselves as unravelers of cosmic meaning (Heideggerian Da-sein for instance) falls apart since there is no meaningfulness possible in a world without a foreground–background distinction. Worlds need horizons and horizons need backgrounds, which need foregrounds. When we can see everywhere—when I can Google Earth the fish in my mom’s pond in her garden in London—the world—as a significant, bounded, horizoning entity—disappears. We have no world because the objects that functioned as invisible scenery for us, as backdrops, have dissolved.10
World turns out to
be an aesthetic effect based on a kind of blurriness and aesthetic distance.
This blurriness derives from an entity’s ignorance concerning objects. Only in
ignorance can objects act like blank screens for the projection of meaning. “Red
sky at night, shepherd’s delight” is a charming old saw that evokes days when
shepherds lived in worlds, worlds bounded by horizons on which things occurred
such as red sunsets. The sun goes down, the sun comes up—of course now we know
it doesn’t, so Galileo and Copernicus tore big holes in that particular notion
of world. Likewise, as soon as humans know about climate, weather becomes a
flimsy, superficial appearance that is a mere local representation of some much
larger phenomenon that is strictly invisible. You can’t see or smell climate.
Given our brains’ processing power, we can’t even really think about it all
that concretely. You could say then that we still live in a world, only massively
upgraded. True, but now world means
significantly less than it used to—it doesn’t mean “significant for humans” or
even “significant for conscious entities.”
A simple experiment demonstrates plainly that world is an aesthetic phenomenon. I call
it The Lord of
the Rings vs. The Ball Popper Test. For this
experiment you will need a copy of the second part of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You will
also require a Playskool Busy Ball Popper, made by Hasbro.
Now play the
scene that I consider to be the absolute nadir of horror, when Frodo, captured by
Faramir, is staggering around the bombed-out city Osgiliath when a Nazgul (a
ringwraith) attacks on a “fell beast,” a terrifying winged dragon-like
creature.
Switch on the ball popper. You will notice the
inane tunes that the popper plays instantly undermine the coherence of Peter
Jackson’s narrative world.
The idea of world depends upon all kinds of mood lighting and mood music, aesthetic effects that
by definition contain a kernel of sheer ridiculous meaninglessness. It’s the
job of serious Wagnerian worlding to erase the trace of this meaninglessness.
Jackson’s trilogy surely is Wagnerian, a total work of art or Gesamkunstwerk in which elves, dwarves
and men have their own languages, their own tools, their own architecture—this
is done to fascist excess as if they were different sports teams. But it’s easy
to recover the trace of meaninglessness from this seamless world—absurdly easy,
as the toy experiment proves.
Stupid Kids’ Toy 5, Wagnerian Tolkien movie
Nil. What can we learn from this? “World,” a key concept in ecophenomenology,
is an illusion. And objects for sure have a hidden weirdness. In effect, the
Stupid Kids’ Toy “translated” the movie, clashing with it and altering it in its
own limited and unique way.
In Lakewood, Colorado, residents objected to
the building of a solar array in a park in 2008 because it didn’t look “natural.” 11 Objections to wind farms are similar—not because of
the risk to birds, but because they “spoil the view.” A 2008 plan to put a wind
farm near a remote Scottish island was, well, scotched, because residents of
the island complained that their view would be destroyed. This is truly a case
of the aesthetics of Nature impeding ecology, and a good argument for why
ecology must be without Nature. How come a wind turbine is less beautiful than
an oil pipe? How come it “spoils the view” any more than pipes and roads?
You could see turbines as
environmental art. Wind chimes play in the wind; some environmental sculptures
sway and rock in the breeze. Wind farms have a slightly frightening size and
magnificence. One could easily read them as embodying the aesthetics of the
sublime (rather than the beautiful). But it’s an ethical sublime, that says, “We
humans choose not to use carbon”—a choice visible in gigantic turbines. Perhaps
it’s this very visibility of choice that makes wind farms disturbing: visible
choice, rather than secret pipes, running under an apparently undisturbed “landscape”
(a word for a painting, not actual trees and water). (And now of course there
are wind spires, which do reproduce a kind of aesthetic distance common in
landscape painting.) As a poster in the office of Mulder in The X-Files used to say, “The Truth is
Out There.” Ideology is not just in your head. It’s in the shape of a Coke
bottle. It’s in the way some things appear “natural” — rolling hills and
greenery — as if the Industrial Revolution had never occurred. These fake
landscapes are the original greenwashing. What the Scots are saying, in
objecting to wind farms, is not “Save the environment!” but “Leave our dreams
undisturbed!” World is an aesthetic construct that depends on things like
underground oil and gas pipes. A profound political act would be to choose
another aesthetic construct, one that doesn’t require smoothness and distance
and coolness.
Standard
ecological criticism depends upon different concepts of “world.” Indeed, it
derives this concept from philosophical thinking about climate, for instance in
the proto-nationalist thinking of Humboldt and Herder, or from biological
racism that says that I’m white because I was born in a northern climate. This
concept is by no means doing what it should to help ecological criticism.
Indeed, the more we see and know about ecology, as is inevitable in an era of
ecological crisis, the more of that sheer meaninglessness we have. What an
irony: the more data we have, the less it signifies a coherent world.
It’s
Heidegger, more than anyone else, that generates the concept of world for
contemporary ecological philosophy and cultural analysis. In particular, in “The
Question Concerning Technology” and “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” world is what is created or “enframed”
by equipment. This definition has given rise to the now pervasive doctrine of “worlding,”
whereby cultural artifacts embody the world in various ways: to a hammer,
everything looks like a nail, as they say.
Now for a
kick off, there are many reasons why, even if world were a valid concept
altogether, it shouldn’t be used as the basis for ethics. Consider only this:
witch-ducking stools constitute a world just as much as hammers. There was a
wonderful world of witch-ducking in the Middle Ages. Witch-ducking stools
constituted a world for their users in every meaningful sense. There is for
sure a world of Nazi regalia. Just because the Nazis had a world, doesn’t mean
we should be preserving it. So the argument that “It’s good because it
constitutes a world” is, to use the technical term, bogus. The reasoning that
one should not interfere with the environment because doing so interferes with
someone’s or something’s world is nowhere near a good enough reason. It might
even have pernicious consequences. So I’m afraid we must part with Donna
Haraway, whose ethics insists that nonhumans are worthy of our care and respect
because they constitute worlds, they are in the worlding business. I part
company with Haraway here, just as she parts with me, since she thinks that
what I’m proposing by contrast is “exterminism”—getting entities oven-ready for
destruction. To which I reply, how can you get an entity that doesn’t exist
ready for destruction?
The second area of concern is historical, namely the way in which current ecological crises such as global warming and the Sixth Mass Extinction Event have thrown into sharp relief the notion of world. It is as if humans are losing their world, and their idea of world (including the idea that they ever had one), at one and the same time. This is at best highly disorientating. In this historical moment, the concept world is thrown into sharp relief by circumstances demanding conscious human intervention. Working to transcend our notion of world is important at this moment. Like a mannerist painting that stretches the rules of classicism to breaking point, global warming has stretched our world to breaking point. Human beings lack a world for a very good reason. This is simply because no entity at all has a world, or as Graham Harman puts it, “there is no such thing as a ‘horizon’.”12
Let’s think about one way in which global
warming abolishes the idea of a horizon. This would be the timescales
involved—yes, timescales in the plural. There are three of them. We could call
these, in turn, the frightening, the horrifying, and the petrifying.
1) Frightening
timescale. It will take several hundred years for cold ocean waters (assuming
there are any) to absorb about 75% of the excess CO2.
2) Horrifying
timescale. It will then take another 30,000 years or so for most of the
remaining 25% to be absorbed by igneous rocks. The half-life of plutonium is 24,100
years.
3) Petrifying
timescale. The final 7% will be around 100,000 years from now.
There is a real sense in which “forever” is far
easier on the mind than these very large timescales, what I call very large
finitude. Hyperobjects produce very large finitude, scales of time and space
that are finite and for that reason humiliatingly difficult for humans to
visualize. Forever makes you feel important. 100,000 years makes you wonder whether
you can imagine 100,000 anything. It seems rather abstract to imagine that a
book, for instance, is 100,000 words long.
The “world”
as the significant totality of what is the case is strictly unimaginable, and
for a good reason: it doesn’t exist.
What is left
if we aren’t the world? Intimacy. We have lost the world but gained a soul, as
it were—the entities that coexist with us obtrude on our awareness with greater
and greater urgency. Our era is witness to the emergence of a renewed
Aristotelianism, an object-oriented
ontology that thinks essence as right here, not in some beyond. It’s
precisely the magical amazement of things like stones, beetles, doors, red hot
chili peppers, Nirvana, Bob Geldof, quasars and cartoon characters in the shape
of Richard Nixon’s head that truly has to be explained, not explained away.
Three cheers for the so-called end of the
world, then, since this moment is the beginning of history, the end of the
human dream that reality is significant for humans alone—the prospect of
forging new alliances between humans and nonhumans alike, now that we have
stepped out of the cocoon of world.
Timothy
Morton is Professor of Literature and the Environment in the English Department
at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), seven other books and over
sixty essays.
Notes
1 Aristotle, Metaphysics, tr. Hugh Lawson-Hughes
(Lodnon: Penguin, 2004), 45–47.
2 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 213, 217.
3 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 124.
4 http://abcnews.go.com/WN/oil-bp-spill-found-bottom-gulf/story?id=11618039
5 Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the
Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 135-6.
6 Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics, 86.
7 Roman Jakobson, “Closing
Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style
in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 350–377.
8 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 158–159.
9 Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of
Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002), 127.
10 Harman, Tool-Being, 21–22.
11 Lakewood Sentinel (July 31, 2008), http://www.milehighnews.com/Articles-i-2008-07-31-207468.114125_Residents_upset_about_park_proposal.html;
Lakewood Sentinel (August 7, 2008),
http://www.milehighnews.com/Articles-i-2008-08-07-207541.114125_Solar_foes_focus_in_the_dark.html;
Lakewood Sentinel (August 14, 2008),
1, 4.
12 Harman, Tool-Being, 155.