schaffer_morton

"That is the disturbing thing about 'animals'--they are vegetables. (Movie monsters such as zombies often resemble animated plants.)" (4)

// The value of just any term is accordingly determined by its environment; it is impossible to fix even the value of the word signifying “sun” without first considering its surroundings: in some languages it is not possible to say“sit in the sun” //

Tim Morton, quoting Saussure on page two of "EaT,TaE," gave me a strange flashback to a Nature that I knew well in my childhood. I don't think the lines between Saussure and the Monkey Island™ memories he brought up are easy to trace, but some engram got activated and somehow convinced me it was germane. Thank you, Google image search, for obliging me when I am drawn back into the world of LucasArts point-and-click adventure games. Guybrush Threepwood, in his quest to become a mighty pirate, finds himself stranded on the mysterious, eponymous Monkey Island. Like in every other part of the game, he wanders the island, walking to places, picking up things, pushing things, pulling things, opening things, closing things, looking at things, talking to people, and using things with other things. In the confusion of prepubescent, pre-walkthrough clicking around, it becomes simply natural to tell Guybrush to try out every action on every object. Use banana with q-tip. Open river. Push monkey head. Nothing seems to work. Guybrush simply gives his stock "I don't think that will work" and you move on, stymied by the limitations of the interface.

There's one moment where the writers decided to get snippy, though--In a certain screen where the sun is rendered as object, and not simply background (so that it can be used with a telescope to start a fire, if I'm not mistaken), if you tell Guybrush to walk to the sun he will turn to you and say "Oh sure, Walk to the sun." The effect on my young mind was startling, gleeful. Not only had Guybrush Threepwood, previously my puppet, talked back to me, but he treated my nonsensical command half-seriously. Not just a bland "that won't work," but a sarcastic repetition of the command, which allows him and me to share an apprehension of the real absurdity of walking to the sun.

The switch that went off here, while I struggled to help Guybrush escape this made-up environment (though //any// environment is made up...) was one that extended an imaginary, pixelated bridge across that pernicious Blochian chasm between observer and landscape. The most unreachable background, for a brief moment, was rendered conceivable as foreground. My already 2D world became flatter.

BACK TO THE TEXT

Tim Morton shares this flattening instinct with Guybrush Threepwood: he works to take away the possibility of a background that is separate from human activity:

"Moreover, 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. Deconstruction that precisely articulates how distinctions along such lines are metaphysical will prove beneficial in navigating our way through the madness that is the recognition that there is no 'Big Other'--no world as such." (EatTaE, 5)

And to critique the insistence of capitalism on creating Nature as a formless standing reserve--

"Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever: it’s basically featureless, abstract, grey. It has nothing to do with nematode worms and orangutans, organic chemicals in comets and rock strata." (U)

--or as a repository capable of reabsorbing wastes--

"Think of what Tony Hayward said. He said that the Gulf of Mexico is a huge ocean, and that the spill was tiny by comparison. Nature would absorb the industrial accident. I don't want to quibble about the relative size of ocean and spill, as if an even larger spill would have somehow gotten it into Hayward's thick head that it was bad news. I simply want to point out the metaphysics involved in Hayward's assertion, which we could call capitalist essentialism. The essence of reality is capital and Nature. Both exist in an ethereal beyond. Over here, where we live, is an oil spill. But don't worry. The beyond will take care of it." (U)

"When we flush the toilet, we imagine the U-bend takes the waste away into some ontologically alien realm. Ecology is now beginning to tell us of something very different: a flattened world without ontological U-bends. A world in which there is no "away." Marx was partly wrong, then, when in //The Communist Manifesto// he claimed that in capitalism all that is solid melts into air. He didn't see how a kind of hyper solidity oozes back into the emptied out space of capitalism, a hypersolidity I call here //hyperobjects….//The cosmic U-bend is no more." (U)

(This last one is especially exciting to me as a trash person, though I'm not sure it's particularly new; of course the creation of an undifferentiated, other, unreachable AWAY is necessary for the processes of pollution and waste-generation. You can see this in fracking discourse, where ground is rendered mysterious and thirsty in order to avoid consideration of residual frac fluids. The chasm is maybe even more pernicious in waste exportation, where developing nations are turned into a formless, featureless landscapes in the process of paying to dump dangerous substances on the world's poor. To think about: what does Morton bring to the game here?)

Morton is not commanding us to walk to the sun, of course. That would be unthinkable. Instead, he incites us to treat the sun, [insert Latourian Litany] as strange, weird objects with which we co-exist. Not as parts of worlds, but as things. Yes?

"Darwinism frees the mind for an ethics and politics based not on soulless authoritarianism, but on intimacy with coexisting strange others (//Autrui//), because Darwinism shows how utterly flimsy and contingent and non-teleological the biosphere is." (EaTTaE, 9)

In objecting to worlding--objecting worlding, maybe, or objecting in place of worlding--Morton makes one of these classic moves in which I can't tell if anything happened. Worlding, for Morton, is where distance is created, where things are rendered outside of the self. But other objects--aren't they outside of the self?

Perhaps the genotext provides a way out of this, a rejection of abjection, a recognition that bodies are always permeable, are always made of other forms of life.

"The boundary is not nonexistent but not thin--it is thick, permeable, folded into itself, fragile, teeming with parasites. Like skin." (EatTaE, 2)

But why are objects better than worlds for describing this? Why does the rejection of the world gain us intimacy?

As might be expected, I choose to cite at length:


 * EaTTaE**
 * "One thing that modernity has damaged, along with the environment, has been thinking. To bring thinking to a point at which the damage can be assessed will require use to use the broken tools at hand. One damaged concept is 'Nature'--I capitalize it to denature it--damaged and damaging, almost useless for developing ecological culture." (1)
 * "The text-context distinction is only an interpretive convenience. 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. Text dismantles distinctions between a 'within' and a 'without'." (2)
 * "'Text' is precisely the word for this fractal weaving of boundaries that open onto the unbounded: it is not the case that nothing at all exists. Nothingness would at any rate provide a firm epistemological foothold--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." (2)
 * "Texts have environments. These environments are made of signs, yet the matter-sign distinction breaks down at a certain point, because one of these environments is //the// environment." (3)
 * "The trouble with fractals, the trouble that hippie kitsch obscures, is that they elegantly show how nature is not natural, not outside artifice." (4)
 * "An algorithm is a script--a text--that automates a function, or functions, and in this case the script id encoded directly into matter. The matter-information boundary is permeable." (4)
 * "If an algorithm can produce a rose by plotting a set of equations, surely the thing itself is a map of its genome, a 'plot' of an algorithm's unfolding?" (5)
 * "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)
 * "Material organization turns out to be sets of formal relationships, not palpable stuff." (5)
 * "Moreover, 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. Deconstruction that precisely articulates how distinctions along such lines are metaphysical will prove beneficial in navigating our way through the madness that is the recognition that there is no 'Big Other'--no world as such." (5)
 * "All the way down, there //is// no rabbit, no rabbit flavored DNA. And all the way up: rabbits //act// like rabbits, and thus pass on their genome. This is called 'satisficing', a form of performativity." (5-6)
 * "Many cell walls (membranes?) are double, hinting at some ancient symbiotic coupling. Likewise, texts consist of other texts: there is no text as such--textuality is shot through with otherness--and every text, at the very same time, is utterly unique, a unicity that transcends independent singular isolation." (7)
 * "This is the view of the 'extended phenotype': DNA is not limited to the physical boundaries of life forms, but rather expresses itself in and as what we call 'the environment.'…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// organism, but only relatively extended and non-exteneded phenotypes." (8)
 * "As microbiologists Kwang W. Jeon and James F. Danielli state, 'Organisms and genomes may…be regarded as compartments of the biosphere through which genes in general circulate' such that 'the whole of the gene pool of the biosphere is available to all organisms'." (8)
 * "Darwinism frees the mind for an ethics and politics based not on soulless authoritarianism, but on intimacy with coexisting strange others (//Autrui//), because Darwinism shows how utterly flimsy and contingent and non-teleological the biosphere is." (9)
 * "The gratifying illusion of immersion in a lifeworld provides yet another way to hold out against the truth of global warming: it has been put to me on more than one occasion that only internally poor white Westerners, lacking a lifeworld, could think such a thing as global warming, whereas the Third World peasant, immersed in her lifeworld like a pair of Van Gogh shoes, has no need for such concepts." (10)
 * "All poems are environmental, because they include the blank spaces in which they are written and read--blank space around and between words, silence within the sound." (11)
 * "If it ever existed 'before' the power pointed it out, the blank page is never totally blank. Space is already distorted. Significance is already taking place." (12)
 * "There is an infinite regress potential here, since a minimal mark that '//pings//' to echo the functionality of a system depends on an already functioning system of meaning, an already inscribed surface." (13)
 * "We cannot tell whether Bernstein's is a poem until after we read 'this…'. We are unable to tell whether there is a life form until after it has mutated. We cannot call it a species until it looks like one. To be aware of the trace as such is to coexist with the radically unknowable: Derrida's //arrivant//, opening a realm of the infinitely other, an otherness that is intimately 'here', under our skin--it is our skin, teeming with symbionts--even as it evaporates 'here' into an infinite network of traces…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." (14-15)


 * U**
 * ""Realism of the remainder" means that yes, for sure, there is something real outside of our (human) access to it--but we can only classify it as a kind of inert resistance to our probing, a grey goo."
 * "You can scour the Earth from mountaintop to Marianas Trench. You will never find Nature. That's why I put it in capitals. I want the reader to see that it's an empty category looking for something to fill it. Grey goo."
 * "Think of what Tony Hayward said. He said that the Gulf of Mexico is a high ocean, and that the spill was tiny by comparison. Nature would absorb the industrial accident. I don't want to quibble about the relative size of ocean and spill, as if an even larger spill would have somehow gotten it into Hayward's thick head that it was bad news. I simply want to point out the metaphysics involved in Hayward's assertion, which we could call capitalist essentialism. The essence of reality is capital and Nature. Both exist in an ethereal beyond. Over here, where we live, is an oil spill. But don't worry. The beyond will take care of it."
 * "There was an essence, and it's right here, in the object resplendent with its sensual qualities yet withdrawn."
 * "This weirdness resides on the side of objects themselves, not our interpretation of them."
 * "When we flush the toilet, we imagine the U-bend takes the waste away into some ontologically alien realm. Ecology is now beginning to tell us of something very different: a flattened world without ontological U-bends. A world in which there is no "away." Marx was partly wrong, then, when in //The Communist Manifesto// he claimed that in capitalism all that is solid melts into air. He didn't see how a kind of hyper solidity oozes back into the emptied out space of capitalism, a hypersolidity I call here //hyperobjects….//The cosmic U-bend is no more."
 * "The beautiful reversibility of the oily, melting mirror speaks to something that is happening in a global warming age, precisely because of hyper objects: the simultaneous dissolution of reality and the overwhelming presence of hyper objects, which stick to us, which are us."
 * "What is the upgrading process? In a word, the notion that we are living "in" a world--one that for instance we can call Nature--no longer exists in any meaningful sense, except as nostalgia or int eh temporarily useful local language of pleas and petitions. We don't want a certain species to be farmed to extinction, so we use the language of Nature to convince a legislative body. We have a general feeling of ennui and malaise and create nostalgic visions of Hobbit-like worlds to inhabit. These syndromes have been going on now since as long as the Industrial Revolution began to take effect."
 * "Global warming, in other words, plays a very mean trick. It reveals that what we took to be a reliable world was actually just a habitual pattern--a collusion between forces such as sunshine and moisture and us humans expecting such things at certain regular intervals and giving them names, such as Dog Days. We took weather to be real. But in an age of global warming we see it as an accident, a simulation of something darker, more withdrawn--climate. As Harman argues, "world" is always presence-at-hand--a mere caricature of some real object. What Ben Franklin and others int he Romantic period discovered was not really weather, but rather a toy version of this real object, a toy that ironically started to unlock the door to the real thing."
 * "Global warming is a prime example of what I am calling a //hyper object//, an object that is massively distributed in space-time, and radically transforms our ideas of what an object is."
 * "All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the "end of the world" are, from this point of view, part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space."
 * "//World// turns out to be an aesthetic effect based on a kind of blurriness and aesthetic distance. This blurriness derives from an entity's ignorance concerning objects."
 * "The idea of //world// depends on all kinds of mood lighting and mood music, aesthetic effects that by definition contain a kernel of sheer ridiculous meaninglessness. It's the job of serious Wagnerian wording the erase the trace of this meaninglessness."
 * "So I'm afraid we must part with Donna Haraway, whose ethics insists that nonhumans are worthy of our care and respect because they constitute worlds, they are in the worlding business."
 * "Human beings lack a world for a very good reason. This is simply because no entity at all has a world, or as Graham Harman puts it, "there is no such thing as a 'horizon'."
 * "The "world" as the significant totality of what is the case is strictly unimaginable, and for a good reason: it doesn't exist."
 * "What is left if we aren't the world? Intimacy."