LN_Morton

Darwin decenters:

“Like Copernicus and Freud, writes Derrida, 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. Derrida goes so far as to claim that Darwin performs the greatest humiliation.” (3

Hmmmmmm.//  “Julia Kristeva formulates environmental textuality as //genotext //, which like genotype (from which it derives) is the genome of the text, the factors that produce it like an algorithm or recipe produces a set of results” (3)

The Ecological environment is part of what we are -- can't get away from it. Looking deeper and deeper, the more complicated the environment, the text becomes – the more entangled we are – like a fractal

The trouble with fractals, the trouble that hippie kitsch obscures, is that they elegantly show how nature is not natural, not outside artifice.(4)  Zombies make an appearance! Zombie plants, fractaling into oblivion, into a trance state? How do fractals perhaps induce a trance into zombie-land? Giving up the ghost and going with Zombies in the environmentalist realm. We cannot find the ghost, unknown precursor, for we are always in the “always already” state?

“That is the disturbing thing about ‘animals’—they are vegetables. (Movie monsters such as zombies often resemble animated plants.) Our prejudice about vegetables is that they’re beings that only do one thing—grow. 9 The trouble with vegetable growth is that it consists of sets of algorithms—iterated functions, often producing fractal shapes” (4)

Far from being a holistic New Age trip, fractals open up a traumatic dimension of what we cannot call Nature any more, a dimension that is not holistic, but open and strange. (4)

Forests appear ‘natural’, yet they follow the quite logical order of algorithms programmed by tree genomes. An algorithm is a script—a text—that automates a function, or functions, and in this case the script is encoded directly into matter. The matter–information boundary is permeable (4)

Looking at life forms is never looking at the here and now, and never looking in one place; they are palimpsests of displacements and rewritings and iterations (5).

Survival of the Fittest really just means being able to reproduce (there is no perfect adaptability to a constantly changing environment: “It only means ‘happening not to have died before you could reproduce’.” (6)

Now consider how life forms are interrelated—ecology. The theory of symbiosis, for example, explored in depth by Lynn Margulis and others, includes relationships between different life forms at all scales. (7)

Dropping the organism–environment duality is potentially very beneficial—first, it is accurate, and accuracy allows for better decisions. Secondly, as Derrida says of narcissism, there is no //one //<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">organism, but only relatively extended and non-extended phenotypes (8)

<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Just as writing, when it gets going, includes everything around it too, as if things were always already ‘written’ before people started doing things with pens: dispersed, displaced, never self-identical, infinite like a Menger Sponge or a Cantor Set, full of absence and space. Moreover, just as text is texting, space is spacing, absence is absence-ing—endless unfoldings, translations, distortions, misreadings, mutations (9)

SPACE IS SPACING !!

Things being non-teleological…which I like:

<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Darwinism frees the mind for an ethics and politics based not on soulless authoritarianism, but on intimacy with coexisting strange others ( //<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Italic,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Autrui //<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">), because Darwinism shows how utterly flimsy and contingent and non-teleological the biosphere is (9)

<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">HOW MIGHT ENVIRONMENTALITY EXIST?” (10)

<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">“It is as if, like Einstein, Mallarmé discovered that space is curved: always warped, never really ‘blank’” (10) – So is Mallarme a shift in thinking, encompassing a new thought collective?

Poems as environmental, as much the spacing and space as the words themselves – as much an illocutionary force through form

<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">“[…] Works of art have a //<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Italic,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">feeling //<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">of beginning, a feeling of middle, a feeling of ending. We are familiar with closure: loose ends being tied up, plot lines converging, a sense of simplicity and death. So what is aperture?” (11)

From this, this sentience of art of poems, the sentience of worms through intentionality and performativity

<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">APERTURE:

<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">“Ambient art is only sometimes about rabbits and mountains, but is always about aperture, the uncertainty that marks beginning as such” (12) – were Einstein and Picasso also exploring aperture in their work?

<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">Significance is already taking place (12) <span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">“This is how ambient art explores the //<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Italic,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">re-mark //<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">, a term in Derrida’s meditations on whether we can truly discriminate between writing and painting. Can we ensure that an array of squiggles is insignificant? What is the smallest indicator that we are in a zone of meaning?” (12)

<span style="font-family: AGaramond-Regular,serif; font-size: 11.5pt;">“When life, when writing, has begun, we find ourselves unable to draw a thin, rigid line around it. Ecology thinks a limitless system with no center or edge, devoid of intrinsic essence (no ‘Nature’): calligraphy as biology. So does poetry. This is not here” (15)