Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence by Timothy Morton (review) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction "On Dark Ecologies"
"On Dark Ecologies" Performance Research , 2020
Timothy Morton describes dark ecology as ‘ecological awareness, dark-depressing. Yet ecological awareness is also dark-uncanny. And strangely it is dark-sweet.’ The concept of dark ecology represents a crucial intervention in the current moment of political conservatism and climate change denial and enables a focused exploration of a wide range of issues relating to performance and ecology. Human activity on the planet is responsible for a number of ecological and political dilemmas, including (but not limited to) global climate change, pollution, leaking pipelines, fragmentation of ecosystems, diminishing natural resources and nuclear meltdowns. While some may harbour hope and positivity about the future, it is easy to feel overwhelmingly hopeless about these large-scale, complex problems. Morton refers to the awareness of these substantial ecological dilemmas as ‘ecognosis’, which he describes as ‘a riddle… It is something like coexisting. It is like being accustomed to something strange.’ It is this tension between hope and despair, the coexistence between ‘depressing’ and ‘sweet’ — this space of ‘dark ecologies’ in our current political and ecological climate — that we explore in this special issue. The essays in this issue consider dark ecology in relation to performance and explore the ways that performance can intervene in or engage with a plurality of dark ecologies.
Review of Timothy Morton's "Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence" (2018)
Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy (Online), 2018
With this text, Timothy Morton, a leading figure in object-oriented ontology (OOO), continues to explore its implications for rethinking ecology and global climate change. For Morton, the unprecedented scope and complexity of anthropogenic climate change is a key motivating factor in the resurgence of speculative ontologies: "The ecological era we find ourselves inwhether we like it or not and whether we recognize it or notmakes necessary a searching revaluation of philosophy, politics, and art." (159) Such revaluation strikes to the heart of what we take to be true about reality. Indeed, Morton's Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence contends that the possibility of a future peaceful coexistence between human and nonhuman lifeforms challenges assumptions about the nature of objectivity, temporality, and the distinction between life and death. In a reversal of common orthodoxy, he argues that we must give up the notion that ecology requires a clear and determinate distinction between good and bad as a necessary corrective for "thinking future coexistence." (27) Rather, we must pursue a "dark ecology," an ecology that does not recoil before "thinking the truth of death." (161)
"Dark Ecology" and the Works and Days
"Dark Ecology" and the Works and Days, 2018
The ecocritic and philosopher Timothy Morton has recently proposed an aesthetics of "dark ecology" as the appropriate artistic response to difficult environments. Our interactions with such environments encourage us to recognize that we are neither superior to nor entirely separate from the objects and living beings that surround us. Accordingly, dark ecological art explores interpenetrations of human bodies and human psycholo-gies with elements of our environments, including the products of human hands. But it sees no cause for celebration in such insights: rather, it delivers them in a consistently 'dark,' pessimistic tone. In this essay I argue that Morton's ideas can enrich our understanding of the Hesiodic Works and Days, which places emphasis on the difficulty of interacting with the environments of the Greek world. And while some passages seem to accord a privileged status to humans, many others stress the interpenetration of the human and the nonhuman, doing so in the sort of pessimistic tone that Morton associates with his dark ecological aesthetic.
A Mutable Cloud: On DARK ECOLOGY and CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING ENVIRONMENTALIST (review essay)
LA Review of Books, 2017
This is a review of two books that develop the concept of "dark ecology," Timothy Morton's DARK ECOLOGY (2016) and Paul Kingsnorth's CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING ENVIRONMENTALIST(2017). Although these books are very different (one is a work of critical theory, the other is a collection of essays written by a novelist), this review finds useful concepts and limitations in both approaches to thinking about our current state of environmental collapse. Published in LA REVIEW OF BOOKS on 11.4.17.
The discursive analysis of A Dance of the Forests and The Swamp Dwellers has revealed that Wole Soyinka, above all, is writing for an endangered place, the earth that humans have been spoiling since the alive past. He stigmatizes not only human kind’s cunning anthropocentrism but also European “onrushing turbo-capitalism” as being at the basis of the earth’s pollution that affect both humans and non-humans. Soyinka evokes the past not as a dead past but an alive one whose outcomes positive or negative capture the present and influence the future no longer temporal but archetypal. He evokes pastoral images either to condemn given suicidal attitudes or to celebrate the present resisting wilderness, recalls the less anthropocentric past time as a model of less affected environment, and projects a renewable future as a common hope. Soyinka draws his readers and audiences to take up with the soil as the only solution to face an integral and sustainable development. This communion with one’s land at any level – as an expression of humans’ inextricable relationships with it – calls for mindset, love, gratitude and respect towards itself and all its inhabitants. As such, I have demonstrated that the African holistic understanding of the world that imperialists regarded as “savage” has become the worldwide solution to the monster that climate change represents today as a consequence of technological and scientific progress. The situational irony has proven the contrary in the sense that it is rather the holistic understanding of the world that appears salvatory rather than a mere scientific (analythical) and technological approach that cannot achieve to solve the problems it has arrogantly raised. It is not too pious to wonder “who were savage and who were civilized” if the “savage” incriminated African vision of the world has become since then “a worldwide genius” solution to the monster of climate change.
(Re)Insurgent Ecologies: Dwelling Together Between Queasy Worlds
2019
Discourses that construct the “self” as something to be fixed, or made whole, chart a retreat from relational ecosystems back to the individual, reinforcing colonial politics rooted in bounded individualism. This project animates an ontological, relational framework that, in detaching from liberal humanist discourses of healing and “self,” makes affective links from autopoietic frameworks for healing and survival to de-colonial, sympoieitic concerns for expanded kinship. New meanings and attachments are forged within queasy border zones of incommensurability, toggling between the particular and the universal, between desires for solidarity and recognition that colonial violences continue to be unequally distributed and borne. Inhabiting these spaces as a scholar, not disentangling from the thickness of grief, means deploying methods and methodologies that can accommodate ontological disturbance and refusal as they grate against colonial logic. By recording pressure points of friction as they emerge in ordinary life, narratives, terms, and practices emerge to illuminate what it might mean to liberate “healing” from the terms of neoliberal, settler citizenship. The goal is not to resolve paradox, but to confront it by writing within and between the limits of scholarship and conventions that assume bounded self-hood. Aspiring beyond social solutions based in liberal humanist frameworks means subverting all forms of scholarly practices and categories based in Western hegemonies and hierarchies of being. What could a future look like in which co-poietic, sympoietic terms prevail; where the terms of speaking, writing, being, touching, and imagining do not hold allegiance to liberal humanist lineages of colonial selfhood?