Dark Ecology Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

What Lies Beyond the Darkness investigates how a creative sound and land-based art practice can position humans as an active part of any given ecological system; equal to ‘other’ natural and non-human co-habitants. This practice-based research aims to discover how to frame or heighten natural environments to facilitate a focused mode of listening and perceiving that can encourage audiences to emotionally respond to an environment. This will be achieved through the use of; existing natural environments such as nature reserves, public parks, and national parks; aesthetic interventions including outlined paths, mirrored partitions, sheer partitions, and contemplative signage; written guides; and audience surveying. This research contributes to a community of practice including sound and land artists that consider investigations into and creative work regarding environmental conservation and rehabilitation a major and timely concern.

- by
- •
- Posthumanism, Public Art, Critical Posthumanism, Environmental Art

My MLitt dissertation is concerned with how connections between human and nonhuman objects, hyperobjects and temporality are represented in contemporary anthropocene literature, namely Ben Lerner's novel 10:04 and Tom McCarthy's Satin Island. Through an ethical and aesthetic framework, I ask: how can the novel explore the ecological thought and how is narrative form uniquely capable of synthesising other artistic and textual practices in a way that conveys and embodies the feedback loops of irony, aesthetic causality and ‘deep time’ characteristic of hyperobjects, ecological disaster and object encounters within the anthropocene?

- by Maria Sledmere
- •
- Future Studies, Contemporary Literature, Ecological Art, Dark Ecology
- by Sofia Roberg
- •
- Ecocriticism, Dark Ecology, Ecopoetics, Human-Animal Studies

This pandemic is more than certainly - together with the giant fires in California and Australia, the staggering melting of the Arctic and West Antarctic ice caps, the destruction of the Amazonian forest, etc. - one of the warning signs of a potential dislocation of our world to materialist and capitalist practices (B. Latour). This state of affairs does not require recourse to the sometimes anxiety-provoking statements of collapsology (P. Servigne, R. Stevens, etc.) or even to others that are more reasonable but no less frightening (IPCC, D. Bourg). The emergence of this pandemic is not an isolated singular fact but an emerging phenomenon linked to a global systemic dynamic where multiple factors act in an infinite number of interactions. This pandemic, as it presents itself, is undoubtedly specific to the anthropocene era. The economic, productive and institutional worlds, as we know, have not recognised the gravity of the situation for obvious reasons. However, the President of the Republic, E. Macron, himself, in his last public speech, seems to think that our models must be replaced by others. The old reductionist and productivist paradigm for systematic growth must be replaced by that of a search for a balance between human ecumene and living environments (A. Berque, P. Descola). In his latest paper on BFM, N. Hulot, does not say otherwise.

- by Patrice / Patrizio Ceccarini-Cappuccini
- •
- Architecture, Science Education, Ecology, Deep Ecology

Call me wolfing. I was murdered in Lancashire (now a part of Cumbria) in 1390CE, by some pre-enlightened gentlemen. It was just before the perceptual turning point from Theos to Mechanos; from a transcendent God to little ghosts in your... more

- by Jamie Mcphie
- •
- Poetry, Gilles Deleuze, Dark Ecology, Victorian poetry

The evidence that we face a catalogue of environmental crises caused by human activities, which pose a threat to planetary, social and personal continuity, is communicated in increasingly sophisticated ways. Despite increased knowledge, the populaces of wealthy nations appear to be outwardly ignoring such risks, continuing their consumption patterns unabated, and failing to mount a significant public response. Interventions aimed at encouraging more sustainable behaviours have largely drawn on individualistic psychology, and to date they have been largely unsuccessful. This paper is a call to deepen and widen our understanding of the psychosocial processes involved in not responding to the issues at stake. It does so by drawing on narrative approaches in the social sciences, psychoanalytic conceptualisations of defence mechanisms, and recent work addressing the social organisation of denial. The potential of these developments for informing social movements and political action is briefly considered in the light of an example, the Dark Mountain Project.

- by Matthew Adams
- •
- Social Psychology, Environmental Education, Climate Change, Sociology of Emotion
- by Hikikomori Feral
- •
- Dark Ecology, Object Oriented Ontology, Filosofía, Timothy Morton

The history of electronic dance music is a long and colourful continuum. Since its inception in the underground house, garage and disco scenes of Chicago and New York, it has developed an ever-increasing matrix of techno-tools and cultural manifestos. It has inspired competing and collaborating worlds of gadgets, gizmos and garments; circuit boards, synthesisers and electronic drum patterns. Rave, its enfant terrible, now stands as a global phenomenon. Born in colloquial terms in the United Kingdom during the Second Summer of Love (1988 – 1989), the cultural significance of rave has oscillated from counter-cultural ekstasis to humdrum corporate leisure-activity. Yet, despite its pre-88 genealogy and current state of techno-globalism, it was specifically the UK Rave scene of the late 80s and early 90s which fuelled the tsunami of electronic dance music that soon swept the world. Attuned to these brief and emphatic years (1988 – 1994), the purpose of this dissertation will be to critically analyse the social and experiential history of UK Rave through the current ecological discourse of Dark Ecology. Published in 2016 by philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology is a bold manifesto for a new form of ecological awareness—or ecognosis—heralded by the urgency of our contemporary geological era – The Anthropocene. Faced with objects so far beyond the limits of human epistemology, the primary task of this new ecognosis is the ontological restructuring of human and non-human relations, or the radicalisation of post-Kantian philosophy toward a weird metaphysical realism. Moving beyond straightforward environmentalism to the corollary proposition of an 'Ecology without Nature', I will look to the work of Morton, supported by further engagement and comparison with the writings Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to argue that the heyday of UK Rave culture is in many aspects better understood through the concept of Dark Ecology: as the dismantling of post-Kantian correlationism and the opening up of human experience to a truly symbiotic ecological awareness. Furthermore, I will argue that the countercultural phenomenon of UK Rave is thus less a question of social escapism and rather a positive drive towards this new ecognosis. A will to both access and be accessed.

- by Charlie Mills
- •
- Cultural Studies, Music Theory, Art Theory, British History

Grzyby w krótkim czasie – głównie za sprawą Anny Tsing – stały się niezwykle interesującym przedmiotem badań w obrębie humanistyki środowiskowej. Amerykańska badaczka zwraca przede wszystkim uwagę na ich krnąbrność, rozumianą jako skuteczne opieranie się ludzkim sposobom uprawy, a także wymykanie się znanym modelom wzrostu i produkcji, rozpoznawanym od lat w gospodarce kapitalistycznej. Grzyby są dzisiaj również źródłem inspiracji dla nowomaterialistycznych myślicielek, które zwracają uwagę przede wszystkim na ich symbiotyczność (mikoryza) oraz relacyjność tych tajemniczych i wciąż jeszcze nierozpoznanych do końca organizmów. Chciałbym odejść od relacyjnych rozważań i raczej zwrócić uwagę na to, co możemy powiedzieć o grzybach samych w sobie, korzystając z kategorii wypracowanych na gruncie realizmu spekulatywnego. Dlatego wyeksponowana przez Tsing istotna kategoria krnąbrności będzie przeze mnie odczytywana ontologicznie. Zostanie związana nie tylko z niedostępnością, lecz także z ogromną niezależnością grzybów, istniejących autonomicznie, całkowicie niezależnie od ludzkiego rozpoznania. Spoglądając na nie przez pryzmat ontologii zwróconej ku przedmiotom Grahama Harmana, będę posługiwał się przede wszystkim jego kategorią wycofania (withdrawal), która bardzo dobrze opisuje sekretne, podziemne i często niedostrzegalne życie dyskretnych leśnych mieszkańców. Chciałbym również sprawdzić, czy grzyby – często nazywane superorganizmami – można opisywać poprzez kategorię hiperobiektu Timothy’ego Mortona.

- by Andrzej Marzec
- •
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Posthumanism, Martin Heidegger

Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, takes global warming as the starting point for a philosophical investigation our current moment. The world as we’d conceived it is over; the world we’re now living in is a strange one. Time and space aren’t empty containers and objects aren’t simple. We aren’t separate from the universe, nor it from us. Quantum mechanics, relativity, climate modeling, phase spaces, environmental art, nuclear waste, Morton covers them all.

- by Bill Benzon
- •
- Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ecology, Ecocriticism

Shelley's still-baffling masterpiece Alastor unfolds layer upon layer of ecological significance as long as we are prepared to drop normative concepts of Nature and accept that the narrator(s) is/are part of the poem (a very potent... more

- by Timothy Morton
- •
- Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, English Literature, Romanticism

This article deals with the generally underestimated importance of horror fiction for eco-critical thinking about place. It looks at three major horror writers, Poe, Lovecraft, and VanderMeer, exploring the ways that each plays with and deepens our understanding of what it means to be in a place. Contrary to popular opinion, which would claim that horror writers both use stock backgrounds, and in any case deal only with fictions, I argue that horror fiction is in many ways more realist than other forms of writing, and as such deserving of far more critical attention that it has thus far been accorded by eco-critics.

This paper investigates and compares language and imagery used by contemporary ecocritics in order to argue that the Anthropocene discourse contains significant parallels to cosmic horror discourse and (new) weird literature. While monsters from the traditional, Lovecraftian weird lend themselves well to Anthropocene allegory due to the coinciding fear affect in both discourses, the new weird genre experiments with ways to move beyond cosmic fear, thereby reimagining the human position in the context of the Anthropocene. Jeff VanderMeer's trilogy The Southern Reach (2014) presents an alien system of assimilation and ecological mutation into which the characters are launched. It does this in a manner that brings into question human hierarchical coexistence with nonhumans while also exposing the ineffectiveness of current existential norms. This paper argues that new weird stories such as VanderMeer's are able to rework and dispel the fearful paralysis of cosmic horror found in Lovecraft's literature and of Anthropocene monsters in ecocritical debate. The Southern Reach and the new weird welcome the monstrous as kin rather than enemy.

- by Gry Ulstein
- •
- Ecology, Dark Ecology, H.P. Lovecraft, Horror Literature
- by Tim Matts
- •
- Violence, Slavoj Žižek, Ecology, Ecocriticism

Korzystając z filozoficznych narzędzi wypracowanych przez Grahama Harmana, autor pragnie uwypuklić mroczne oblicze antropocenu, którego nie można już dłużej opisywać jako epoki zdominowanej przez ludzką aktywność (Crutzen 2002). Spogląda na nią poprzez pryzmat dziwnego realizmu (Harman 2012). Dzięki przyjęciu tej perspektywy może dostrzec skrywane do tej pory, niepokojące, nieznane i jednocześnie zupełnie niespodziewane oblicza nie-ludzi.

- by Andrzej Marzec
- •
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Speculative Realism, Dark Ecology

This paper was first presented at the Promises of Monsters conference, 28-29 April, 2016, Stavanger, Norway.

- by Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
- •
- Monster Theory, Ecocriticism, Dark Ecology, Object Oriented Ontology

This article examines depictions of animals in films by the contemporary Czech surrealist artist Jan Švankmajer. Švankmajer works in extension of a rich surrealist tradition of questioning anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Through intermedial comparisons with his creation of imaginary animals in collage and assemblage, the article argues that Švankmajer’s animation of natural history specimens, pieces of animal flesh, and imaginary animal assemblages unsettle ingrained conceptions of taxonomy and animal agency. Creating new connections across the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms, Švankmajer’s films evoke Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology with its assertion that ecological interconnectedness is a decidedly weird phenomenon.

- by Kristoffer Noheden
- •
- Animation, Animal Studies, Surrealism, Dark Ecology

This paper develops a novel theory of the ‘ecomonstrous’ by which it performs an ecocritical reading of the fiction of R. A. Lafferty and Cormac McCarthy. In chapter one I draw on Morton’s ‘dark ecology’ and the monster theory of Cohen and Beal to sketch a developing theory of the ecomonstrous as an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy that performs an apocalyptic, grotesque, uncanny, and bloody ‘antiecomimesis’ by which the non-human environment is contacted as ‘strange stranger’, thus enabling ‘intimacy with an alien presence’. In chapter two I survey the ecomonstrously evoked landscape in Chapter IV of McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, tracking its bookended themes of deathscape, bonescape, and bloodscape, its cosmic nightscapes, and the land’s erasure of the filibusters that travel through it, concluding that these macabre evocations of landscape create rapport with an otherwise ignored environmental background. This is followed by tracing the theme of being eaten alive by the land in Lafferty’s story ‘Narrow Valley’ and blending into the land in Lafferty’s story ‘Smoe and the Implicit Clay’, the latter analysis drawing on Graham Harman’s discussion of Alphonso Lingis’s theory of ‘faces’ in non-human things. In the third and final chapter of this dissertation, I consider two attacks from biota in Blood Meridian and (very briefly) one such attack in Lafferty’s story ‘Snuffles’, arguing that, on an ecomonstrous reading, such bloody assaults on humans by biotic representatives of the environment are yet another dark and grotesque form of not only displacing anthropocentrism, but of recovering an ecologically embedded anthropology. As the conclusion of the dissertation, I briefly suggest that, while Lafferty’s urgency toward eco-redemption is explicit, McCarthy’s is highly implicit but present nonetheless.

Um desconcertante paradoxo assombra a situação actual do Homem na Terra: o momento em que se percebe que a acção humana sobre o planeta e sobre os seus ecossistemas se transformou na sua principal força de constituição – artificial – e inaugurou uma nova época geológica – o Antropoceno – é também o momento em que se percebe que – apesar de nos parecer reforçada a nossa posição antropocêntrica no controlo do planeta – se está perante uma circunstância de extrema precariedade ecológica do mundo.
Em causa estão não apenas as condições de sustentabilidade do meio natural, como também um repensar do conceito de natureza, a qual, ora eufórica ora tragicamente, tem sido vaticinada a um fim precoce. Por um lado, declara-se o fim da natureza porque, como que perdendo a sua causalidade própria, terá deixado de ser o plano de fundo, o meio envolvente e autónomo contra o qual exercemos a nossa actividade enquanto humanos. Por outro, o fim da natureza significa a entrada numa fase histórica em que, como se o processo de modernização estivesse completo, se pode instaurar uma segunda natureza, uma natureza híbrida, humanizada, artificializada. Perante o alarme da falência do planeta, responde uma mitologia geo-construtivista: a Terra como um novo planeta pós-natural que pode ser reconstruído e pilotado através dos potenciais de uma engenharia absoluta.
Em suma, o invocado fim da natureza não significa o seu desaparecimento, mas a consciência de que na era geológica do Antropoceno, a natureza, numa espécie de ciclo vicioso, não pode mais ser vista sem que seja em colapso e/ou em reconstituição.
Reduzindo à escala urbana o fenómeno planetário, o movimento das cidades inteligentes exemplifica crise ambivalente. Enquanto complexos de soluções optimizadas para a gestão dos recursos naturais ou para a redução dos efeitos de poluição, as novas cidades ecológicas propõem-se como o principal reduto para inverter a tendência de degradação natural da Terra. Ao mesmo tempo – e sobretudo se tivermos em conta os complexos urbanos construídos de raiz, como Songdo (Coreia do Sul), Dongtan (China) ou Masdar (Abu Dhabi) – as cidades inteligentes reflectem por excelência a concretização de ambientes totalmente computarizados, interligados e sinteticamente controlados, do trânsito à vegetação ou à meteorologia. Regidos por um planeamento técnico ubíquo, são espaços de isolamento e de limites que des-naturalizam as relações, perpetuando e intensificando o projecto moderno científico que, desde Galileu ou Descartes, propunha racionalizar, dominar e possuir a natureza.
Palavras-chave: Antropoceno, geo-construtivismo, natureza, artificial, cidade inteligente.

- by Manuel Bogalheiro
- •
- Speculative Realism, Dark Ecology, Philosophy of Nature, Anthropocene
- by Kristin George Bagdanov
- •
- Dark Ecology, Object Oriented Ontology, Timothy Morton, Anthropocene
- by Timothy Morton
- •
- Philosophy, Poetry, Ecology, Ecocriticism

If we are to consider science fiction as a genre which proposes imaginary solutions to contemporary issues, then it comes as no surprise that many science fiction writers have begun to consider the human condition within a future ravaged by ecological disaster, the ways in which humanity (not just as a society but as a species) may adapt or fall prey to an environment decaying around them. One such writer is Swedish ecopoet, Aase Berg. In her 2013 poetry collection, Dark Matter, Berg imagines grotesque, contaminated mutations of the human body and the erosion of molecular and environmental landscapes, producing a new hybrid form of biological science fiction ecopoetry.

- by Eleonor Botoman
- •
- Dark Matter, The Grotesque Body, Science Fiction, Linguistics

Il Leviatano ‒ personaggio concettuale al centro dell’opera di Thomas Hobbes, prima ancora che creatura biblica ‒ è una delle più rilevanti figure della filosofia politica moderna: un simbolo d’oppressione per l’antangonismo; un esempio di lungimiranza per i teorici reazionari. Lo stesso Hobbes, tuttavia, fu accusato di tramare, tra le pagine della sua opera più celebre, contro il potere costituito. Per quanto tale ipotesi sia storicamente inappropriata, non vi è dubbio che essa sia radicata in diversi luoghi hobbesiani: l’analisi degli snodi e dei punti deboli del potere; la narrazione delle origini mitiche dell’antropologia della sovranità; lo studio delle leggi naturali e del diritto positivo. Nel bel mezzo dell’attuale ciclo pandemico, le tematiche esposte nel Leviatano si sono fatte sempre più attuali, evocando tutta una serie di terminologie e concetti legati alla tradizione hobbesiana ‒ ma anche agendo, retroattivamente, sul discorso attorno ai rischi politici ed ecologici del riscaldamento climatico e della devastazione ecosistemica. Attraverso alcuni passaggi del pensiero di Hobbes, dei suoi critici e dei suoi sostenitori, questo scritto si propone di esplorare, in via speculativa, alcune delle caratteristiche del futuro Leviatano Climatico, alla luce dell’odierno Leviatano Pandemico.

- by Claudio Kulesko
- •
- Thomas Hobbes, Dark Ecology, Climate Change Impacts, Filosofia Politica

Drawing on reflections from a collaborative autoethnography, this article argues that ultramarathon running is defied by a 'dark' ecological sensibility (Morton 2007, 2010, 2016), characterised by moments of pain, disgust, and the macabre. In contrast to existing accounts, we problematise the notion that runners 'use' nature for escape and/or competition, while questioning the aesthetic-causal relationships often evinced within these accounts. With specific reference to the discursive, embodied, spatial and temporal aspects of the sport, we explore the way in which participants begin to appreciate the immense power of nature, while being humbled by the fragile and unstable foundations of human experience. Accordingly this article contributes novel insights into the human-nature complex that seek to move beyond Romantic analyses towards a more sophisticated understanding of the relationships between (nature) sport, people and place.

- by Jack Black
- •
- Environmental Studies, Autoethnography, Ecology, Dark Ecology

This paper considers practice for environmental education from the perspective of the material turn by taking the reader along on an outdoor learning session in a park. We present a fictional walk where we encounter plants, trees, wasp-orchids, stones, walking sticks, plastic bags, people, weather and kites: each of which has a story to tell that demonstrates ontological immanence and the material process of being alive. These stories help suggest some practical ways in which environmental education can be re-oriented from an essentialist paradigm to one of becoming, tackling prevailing conceptions of the human mind as disembodied from the world.

- by Jamie Mcphie
- •
- Environmental Education, Material Culture Studies, Posthumanism, Space and Place

In 2009, Paul Kincaid noted that the New Weird was an ill-defined and mostly British Isles authored genre of fantasist literature inhabited by the likes of China Miéville and Hal Duncan. At the same time, Nalo Hopkinson delivered a critique of the lack of racial diversity in speculative fiction at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts. This question of diversity has been directly addressed by, among others, Miéville who has, in addition, professed his dislike of gardens. Yet
the weird ecologies on show in his Bas-Lag trilogy show a kind of new materialist gardening of human beasts that realises the dangers that heteronomy brings to such diversity, from the punishments of the Re-Made to the social collectives of pirates and political renegades. This discussion offers a reading of how physical and political environments and their affects fold in upon one another in Miéville’s first trilogy.

- by Daniel Hourigan
- •
- Marxism, Dark Ecology, Speculative Fiction, New Weird Fiction
- by Annie Schultz
- •
- Environmental Education, Philosophy of Education, Ecology, Dark Ecology

Mushrooms became an extremely interesting object of study in
the environmental humanities almost overnight, mainly thanks to
Anna Tsing. Indeed, Tsing points out how “unruly” mushrooms
may be, since they effectively oppose human farming methods and
elude the models of growth and production which have been at
the heart of the capitalist economy for years.
Today, mushrooms are also a source of inspiration for new materialist thinkers who focus on the symbiotic (mycorrhizic) and the relational nature of these mysterious and still obscure entities.
I would like to move away from relational considerations and focus instead on what we can say about mushrooms
themselves, referring to the critical categories of speculative realism. Therefore, I shall interpret Tsing’s key notion of mushrooms
as “unruly” in terms of ontology, discussing their inaccessibility
and independence: after all, mushrooms exist autonomously and
completely independently of human perception. I shall analyze
mushrooms through the prism of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, referring primarily to the category of withdrawal,
which describes the secret, underground, and often invisible life
of these withdrawn inhabitants of the forest. I shall also discuss
mushrooms, often called superorganisms, referring to Timothy
Morton’s notion of hyperobjects.

- by Andrzej Marzec
- •
- Philosophy, Posthumanism, Ecology, Critical Posthumanism
- by Mark Horvath
- •
- Contemporary Art, Dark Ecology, Pessimism, Postmodern Aesthetics

How some of my thoughts about ecology overlap with that of Luce Irigaray.

- by Timothy Morton
- •
- Critical Theory, Philosophy, Sexuality, Deconstruction
- by Mark McGurl
- •
- Dark Ecology, Anthropocene studies

Il pessimismo è un pensiero antico, che abitualmente si preferisce ignorare: la verità dei pazzi, degli outsider, dei depressi, dei reietti – perlomeno finché non accade qualcosa che obbliga a rompere questo sigillo oscuro e inquietante.... more

- by Claudio Kulesko and +1
- •
- Dark Ecology, Filosofía, Antinatalismo, Nichilismo
- by Mark McGurl
- •
- Dark Ecology, Anthropocene studies, Culture and the Anthropocene
- by John Mullen
- •
- Environmental Education, Philosophy of Education, Literary Criticism, Dark Ecology
- by Timothy Morton
- •
- Physics, Philosophy, Art History, Indigenous Studies

Poemesis is certainly a far cry from emotion recollected in tranquility, definitely also something different from ecopoetry as it has often been described, namely as a poetry that has been gathered by “the children of Linnaeus,”(Elder and Finch 1990: 19) poets devoted to capturing and cataloguing “small green things”(Street 2013: xl) in verse “field guides,”(Felstiner 2010: xiv) poets intent on proffering poetic reflections on time spent sustainably “rooted”(McKusick 2010: xi) in nature. Unlike these more typical “bright green” forms of ecological writing, which seem to imagine both the poet and reader as figures in full health, the idea of poemesis bespeaks a close connection between poetic writing and sickness that might be better associated with what Timothy Morton, in his recent talks and writings, has taken to calling “dark ecology”(dark as opposed to bright green).(2012: 59) One might perhaps say that poemesis is the form that poetic writing takes when it tries to reckon with the consequences of our ongoing ecological catastrophe.

- by Brad Tabas
- •
- Embodiment, Dark Ecology, Eco-criticism, Ecopoetry & Poetics