Timothy Morton
Ecology without Nature
Chapter 2
Since all texts coordinate relationships
between inside and outside,ambience, and in
particular the function of the re-mark, its
fundamental component, is an aspect of every
text.
None of this gets rid of the need to trace
precise historical determinations and
emphases, genealogies, and lineages.
Ideological determination depends not just
upon the content and form of an artwork or
rhetorical device, but also upon the subject
position that it establishes. The artwork hails
us, establishing a certain range of attitudes.
"Empty" space-space that capitalism has left
relatively undeveloped-is intrinsic to capitalism,
since the laws of capital may dictate that a
vacant lot is more profitable over a certain span
of time than one that has been developed. Plot
is a potential space, a limbo waiting to generate
value.
The suburban garden lawn's flat, almost opaque
surface-so like high abstract expressionism-obscures
in plain view the work that goes into it) Just like the
lawn, but for a more limited audience, abstract
expressionism turned the dissolution of lyrical
distance into a profitable enterprise. The lawn
expresses the disappearing of the worker that
resulted in picturesque landscape, the production of
distance, of simulated fusions of tameness and
wildness, and fascinating points of view. In the early
modern period lawns were used for sport, as relief
from smoke and other people, and as power on
display. Modern American lawns emerged in the
Romantic period
A common view is that Romantic culture rejected
the fantasy of capitalist enjoyment. Romanticist
ecocriticism, for example, assumes that it is
recapitulating the resistance of Romantic poetry
to the technologies of capitalism. But the reverse
was the case. What if we widened the lens
to encompass an expanded view that did not
take the oikas of ecology in the sense of home or
dwelling as its center? In the Romantic period,
capitalism moved from its colonialist to its
imperialist phase.
world, state, system, field, and body
World
Nationalism, a quintessentially Romantic ideology,
continues to motivate environmental art seeking to reenchant the world. The nationstate remains a real yet
fantastic thing. As the idea of world (Welt) became
popular in German Romantic idealism, so the nationstate was imagined as a surrounding environment. so
The idea of the nation as "homeland," as in American
Homeland Security or the German Heimat demanded
a poetic rendering as an ambient realm of swaying
corn, shining seas, or stately forests
State
Static art and static philosophy arose as the nation
state, and beyond its borders, the environment
gradually " dissolved" into view. Can progressive
ecological thinking rescue the ecological Thing,
fantasy object of the nation-state, and always
somewhat in excess of nationalism, from the place of
its birth? Ecological reality, produced in part by the
industrializing processes of nation-states themselves,
has eclipsed national boundaries. Only an ecological
language opposed to the phantasmagorical positivities
of nation-speak is anywhere near legitimate, and only
if it does not prove to be just another "new and
improved" version of the same thing.
System
System has the virtue of seeming less Romantic and
misty than world. But it merely updates Romanticism for
an age of cybernetics. Deep ecology, the most
Romantic of all ecological forms of politics, is curiously
enough the one most devoted to systems thinking.
System can generate its own forms of mysticism.... the
idea of the encounter of a (little lsi) self with a (big lSI)
Self... Similarly, a person is a part of nature to the
extent that he or she is a relational j unction within the
total field. The process of identification is a process in
which the relations which define the junction expand to
comprise more and more.The 'self' grows towards the
"Self"
Field
One sense of field is of a flat surface, notably
the undecorated ground of a picture, a flag, or
a coin? The field is the margin, the blank part
of the page, or, more recently, a placeholder
for data in a database. The rich, spatial quality
of field in phenomenology is simply the
holographic hallucination of reading or
scanning, turned into a philosophic system.
The Body
In the Romantic period the aesthetic stood
between reason and passion, subject and
object, fact and value. Nowadays, that task falls
to the body. The body is the aesthetic, with all
the disgusting things that the aesthetic normally
edits out put back in. The body is the antiaesthetic, and its virtue (or vice ) is that it is
both entirely different from, and just an
alternative version of, the aesthetic.
The body stands in for what we think we've
lost, a little world, a floating island. But it is
easy to deconstruct this body: where does it
start and stop ? Is a tennis racket an
"extension" of my body? What about the tennis
ball ? The tennis court? When does this body
stop being "my" body? Freud called the
telephone a "prosthetic" ear. Donna Haraway
has written persuasively and influentially that
cybernetics and prosthetics have reconfigured
our sense of human being. How about when
we subtract things from the body? Is it still my
body when I lose the hand, the arm ?
Beautiful Souls / Consumerism
To be a consumerist, you don't have to consume
anything, just contemplate the idea of consuming.
Consumerism raised to the highest power is freefloating identity, or identity in process. This is a
specifically Romantic consumerism. Transformative
experiences are valued, such as those derived from
drugs, or from intense experiences, such as
Wordsworth's " spots of time," traumas that nudge the
self out of its circularity and force it to circulate around
something new.... " sitting back, relaxing and taking it
all in." A fusion of identity and nonidentity is strictly
impossible.
Romantic consumerism produced subjective
states that eventually became technically
reproducible commodities. But it also influenced
the construction and maintenance of actually
existing environments. Consider how
Wordsworth's Lake District became the National
Trust's Lake District, or the American
wilderness, places you go to on holiday from an
administered world. Environments were ca ught
in the logic of Romantic consumerism.
Wilderness can only exist as a reserve of unex
ploited capital, as constant tensions and
struggles make evident.
theory itself becomes an aesthetic pose,
evoking an idea of "listening " quizzically, quasicontemplatively; talking about Zen, referencing
meditation while not actually going to the
trouble of doing any, with all the irritation and
pain it might cause.
Boycotting and protesting are ironical, reflexive
forms of consumerism. By refusing to buy
certain products, by questioning oppressive
social they forms such as corporations or
globalization, point toward possibilities of
changing the current state of affairs, without
actually changing it. They are a cry of the heart
in a heartless world, a spanner in the
works...They thus have not only a practical, but
also a religious aspect.
Many interpret the beautiful soul as existing in a
realm of pure nonaction, as a form of quietism.
What, then, of "monkeywrenching " and
other forms of ecological activism ? Both
quietism and activism are two sides of the same
beautiful coin. The beautiful soul fuses the
aestheticand the moral. The aestheticization has
a moral dimension, the result of an achieved
distance. The beautiful soul maintains a split
between self and world, an irresolvable chasm
created by the call of conscience
"consciousness raising," as an activist might put
it. Yet the beautiful soul also yearns to close the
gap.
The problem resides not so much in the
beautiful soul's noble ideas, but in the form of
its relationship to them. The beautiful soul dis
tinguishes between theory and practice so
sharply that reflection and hesitation are seen
as inane cloud-castle building, and "pure "
action becomes solidly material and absolutely,
guilt-inducingly vital. Or it comes to the same
conclusion in reverse: reflection becomes
ethereal transcendence, action a rather grimy
thing that other, less enlightened people do.
The ambient sound of jet engines "destroys the
actuality of nature as . . . an object of poetic
celebration." Nature writing often excludes
this negative ambience. When it does include it,
it distinguishes it from the positive ambient of
rustling trees or quiet ripples on a lake. It goes
without saying that modernity is full of these
sounds...
Nature writing partly militates against ecology
rather than for it. By setting up nature as an
object "over there "-a pristine wilderness be
yond all trace of human contact-it re-establishes
the very separation it seeks to abolish. We
could address this problem by considering the
role of subjectivity in nature writing. What kinds
of subject position does nature writing evoke ?
Instead of looking at the trees, look at the
person who looks at the trees.
The first sections of this chapter concluded that
numerous ideas a bout nature are inadequate,
ideological constructions created in an age of
machines and capitalism. We then saw how
the ecological subject position was identical
with consumerism. And then we found out that
any attempt to tear off this skin would only
reproduce existing conditions. Like Alice at the
Looking Glass House, we are stuck, especially
when we try to get away. Let us see if we can
get any smarter, stuck as we are.