Timothy Morton Dark Ecology
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For a Logic of Future Coexistence TIMOTHY MORTON DARK ECOLOGY the wellek library lectures in critical theory The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory are given annually at the University of California, Irvine, under the auspices of the Critical Theory Institute. The following lectures were given in May 2014 the critical theory institute Gabriele Schwab, Director DARK ECOLOGY For a Logic of Future Coexistence TIMOTHY MORTON Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morton, Timothy, 1968– author. Title: Dark ecology: for a logic of future coexistence / Timothy Morton. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. [ Series: Wellek Library lectures in critical theory [Includes bibliographical references and index Identifiers: LCCN 2015026796 [ISBN 9780231177528 (cloth : alk. paper) [ ISBN 9780231541367 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Nature—Effect of human beings on —Philosophy.[ Human beings—Effect of environment on—Philosophy.[ Human ecology—Philosophy. [Naturalness (Environmental sciences) Classification: LCC GF75 .M685 2016 [DDC.2—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015026796 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design by Julia Kushnirsky Cover illustration by Hannah Stouffer References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. For Allan It was surprising how pure the sense of loss was—in a sense it’s because nonhumans don’t have the same mediation with humans. I mean, you know your grandma or whoever is sick and that there is a hospital, there is a timeline of some kind. That and the fact that the “outside” (I should know this by now) is actually the (human) inside, so it’s strangely like losing a child to war. It’s a war zone against nonhumans. He was hit by the mail truck, the new delivery person having a habit of driving up the driveway. The worst aspect was that he tried to crawl back in with a smashed neck and head, so I found him right outside the cat door, still warm yet with rigor mortis. We buried him like an Egyptian with his favorite things and did a Buddhist death ritual right away. For the next few days we were totally rigid with depression, which slowly liquefied. He wasn’t murdered—though for a moment the obvious blunt force trauma to his neck looked very like it. One of my friends had a cat who was indeed killed by some psychopath who showed her the cat’s body in his freezer. Nevertheless Allan Whiskersworth was killed by humans in a “friendly fire” “collateral damage” sort of way. Cats weirdly symbolize the ambiguous border between agricultural logistics and its (impossible to demarcate) outside. I mean we don’t let dogs just wander about. It’s as if we want to use cats to prove to ourselves that there is a Nature. Allan was very happy bristling among the grasses and talking to his friend, the gray cat. He lived a Neil Young sort of life (burning out) and died at only two years old. I’ve always liked Lennon’s response that he’d much rather fade away (and look what happened to him). Right after his death the Charon-like gray cat came to visit, never before or since. Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by becoming aware of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over nature through which nature continues its mastery. Theodor Adorno Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark. Hélène Cixous CONTENTS Acknowledgments xi Beginning After the End 1 The First Thread 3 The Second Thread 61 The Third Thread 111 Ending Before the Beginning 159 Notes 163 Index 187 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is a version of the Wellek Lectures that I gave in May 2014 at the University of California, Irvine. My thanks go to Georges Van Den Abeele, dean of humanities, for having invited me and for being a huge inspiration on this project. Georges and a host of scholars kindly donated their intellects for three days at UC Irvine, near the set of Conquest of Planet of the Apes, including Ackbar Abbas, Ellen Burt, David Theo Goldberg, Martin Harries, Andrea Henderson, Jayne Lewis, Julia Lupton, Glen Mimura, Beryl Schlossman, Gabriele Schwab, Michael Szalay, and Christopher Tomlins. Thanks so much to my editor at Columbia University Press, Jen- nifer Crewe. Her intellectual generosity and accurate perception were invaluable. And thanks to my dean, Nicholas Shumway, whose unfailing support and encouragement has been such a gift over the last three years. A great deal of the research that went into this book would not have been possible without the steady and generous correspondence of Dirk Felleman, Jarrod Fowler, and Cliff Gerrish. Thank you, friends. And thank you to my tireless research assistants, Jade Hagan and Mallory Pladus. In the fall of 2014 a sound art collective called Sonic Acts started the “Dark Ecology” art project, inspired by my thoughts on the topic at hand since 2004. My thanks to all those who have invited me to talk at numerous events and witness the iron smelter at Nikel in xiiBEGINNING AFTER THE END Arctic Russia.I am particularly grateful to Arie Altena, Lucas van der Velden, and Annette Wolfsberger. For the last three years, Katherine Behar's invitations to participate in the Object-Oriented Feminism panels at the Society for the Study of Literature, Science, and the Arts have been invaluable. A host of artists, curators, and scholars have contributed invaluable things to this project. Thoughts are interactive, and Q&A sessions are my lab. For their incredible help and kindness, my heartfelt thanks also go to Mirna Belina, Klaus Biesenbach, Dominic Boyer, Joseph Cam- pana, Martin Clark, Thomas Claviez, Jeffrey Cohen, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lowell Duckert, Olafur Eli- asson, William Elliott, Ine Gevers, Alejandro Ghersi, Jón and Jøga Gnarr, Rune Graulund, Richard Grossinger, Björk Guðmundsdóttir, Graham Harman, Erich Hörl, Cymene Howe, Serenella Iovino, Chuck Johnson, Toby Kamps, Douglas Kahn, Jeffrey Kripal, Jae Rhim Lee, Charles Long, Frenchy Lunning, Andrea Mellard, James Merry, Hilde Methi, Julia Nuessiein, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Henk Oosterling, Serpil Opperman, John Palmesino, Heather Pesanti, Karen Pinkus, Albert Pope, Ann Sofi Rönnskog, Judith Roof, Nicholas Royle, Mil- john Ruperto, Maria Rusinovskaya, Roy Sellars, Rhoda Seplowitz, Christopher Schaberg, Emilija Škarnulyte, Haim Steinbach, Thom van Dooren, Leslie Uppinghouse, Gediminas Urbonas, Lynn Voskuil, Laura Walls, Cary Wolfe, Carolyn Wyatt, and Marina Zurkow. The cute ouroboros was drawn for me by the magical Ian Bogost. DARK ECOLOGY BEGINNING AFTER THE END There are thoughts we can anticipate, glimpsed in the distance along existing thought pathways. This is a future that is simply the present, stretched out further. There is not-yet-thought that never arrives—yet here we are thinking it in the paradoxical flicker of this very sentence. If we want thought different from the present—if we want to change the present—then thought must be aware of this kind of future. It is not a future into which we can progress. This future is unthinkable. Yet here we are, thinking it. Coexisting, we are thinking future coexistence. Predicting it and more: keeping the unpredictable one open. Yet such a future, the open future, has become taboo. Because it is real, yet beyond concept. Because it is weird. Art is thought from the future. Thought we cannot explicitly think at present. Thought we may not think or speak at all. If we want thought different from the present, then thought must veer toward art. To be a thing at all—a rock, a lizard, a human—is to be in a twist. How thought longs to twist and turn like the serpent poetry! 2BEGINNING AFTER THE END Or is art veering toward thought? Does it ever arrive? The threads of fate have tied our tongues. Tongue twisters inclined towards nonsense. Logic includes nonsense as long as it can tell the truth. The logic of nonsense. The needle skipped the groove of the present. Into this dark forest you have already turned. I take present to mean for the last twelve thousand years. A butterfly kiss of geological time. THE FIRST THREAD Each outcry from the hunted Hare A fibre from the Brain does tear What is happening? The field had already been “opened” . a lane a few feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole cir- cumference of the field for the first passage of the horses and machine. Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn . Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love- making of the grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a mov- ing concatenation of three horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible over the gate.