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Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology - Timothy Morton

The further scholarship delves into texts (deconstruction) the less they too can be said to have a single, independent and lasting identity.

Life forms cannot be said to differ in a rigorous way from texts. Signs are inter-dependent. The existence of a sign implies coexistence with other signs.

It is not that texts refer to other texts, or coexist with them—rather, texts are other texts: texting is the differential process by which and as which texts exist as such, as strangers to themselves.

one error that prevents ecological criticism from embracing deconstruction is the misperception of deconstruction as nihilism. The boundary is not nonexistent but not thin—it is thick, permeable, folded into itself, fragile, teeming with parasites. Like skin.

Darwin forced a great humiliation upon humans—literally,a bringing closer to the earth—by calling to mind the displacement from an ontological center that constitutes the human as such.

nature is not natural, not outside artiﬁce.
 * What is the difference between a statement such as this and one that turns this one on its head, such as “artifice is not artificial, not outside nature.”

forms we used to see as ‘natural,’ inhabiting a realm ‘outside’ culture, a realm that is chaotic or unstructured, are in fact highly ordered when considered as iterations of fractal algorithms.
 * Seems to be conflating ordered with artificial and thus disordered with natural

When we zoom into life forms, we discover textuality.

The globally warming Earth is similarly disturbing: there is no longer any background (‘environment’, ‘weather,’ Nature and so on) against which human activity may differentiate itself.

there is no ‘Big Other’—no world as such.

The textuality of life forms is the genome—DNA and other replicator molecules.

There is no essence called race, or gender, or species. The Origin of Species really argues that there is no origin, just as there is no origin of text.

The category of ‘race’ is itself racist. Racism is precisely acting as if race were a foundational category.

Common environmentalist ideology asserts that adaptation means life forms ﬁtting environments in nice organic ways. Yet there is no environment as such to ﬁt—it is a moving target consisting of lifeforms constantly adapting to other life forms.

The hopelessly reactionary version that ‘ﬁttest’ means having six-pack abs is evidently false; nor does ‘ﬁttest’ mean‘being wonderfully adapted to this or that purpose’. It only means‘happening not to have died before you could reproduce’.
 * An error I often see my undergraduates committing

Humans keep trying to distinguish rigorously between the living and the machinic. Countless sci-ﬁ and horror narratives explore the anxiety that this distinction is untenable. Darwinism and genomics are very bad news for this anxiety, since they show that not only is the distinction untenable, but life as such is a machinic,algorithmic functioning, and that what we call ‘life’ and ‘consciousness’ are emergent effects of more fundamental machine-like processes.
 * This feels like it would be very important to astrobiology and SETI, but upon thinking this I lost the thought that made such a connection explicit.

the genomics version of ecological interrelatedness requires us to drop the organism–environment duality.

The extended phenotype view de-aestheticises life forms,
 * A useful concept for arguing for lifeless environments? In other words, could I use this to describe how lifeless space could be considered an environment with the same sorts of values as the environments on Earth?

Yet life forms are also made from their environments, including sunshine and chemicals from exploding stars.

There is no way rigidly to separate the biosphere and the non-biosphere.

the view that starts from the fact of intimacy with coexisting strangers compels us to assume responsibility for global warming, a direct cause of the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Event.