Ecology+(BB)

Looking at lifeforms is never looking at the here and now, and never looking in one place; they are palimpsests of displacements and rewritings and iterations. What is here called "looking" disallows a present.

When we zoom into life forms, we discover textuality. What is here called "zooming in" requires a text.

There is no metaphysical harmony between text and ecology: no neutral seeming background against which a Yin and a Yang appear as wedded together, since text and environment include all phenomena in their respective fields. This absence of a backgroun has striking epistemological and ethical-political effects, as anyone should know who has wrestled with someone hostile to "theory". 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.

For Darwin, ‘species’ is entirely specious, just as for a poststructuralist, a ‘work’ is a reiﬁcation of textuality. One cannot rigidly distinguish one species from another; or a species from a variant;or a variant from a monstrosity

Common environmentalist ideology asserts that adaptation means lifeforms fitting environments in nice organic ways. Yet there is no environment as such to ﬁt -- it is a moving target consisting of life forms constantly adapting to other life forms. If environment is thought of in its totality, perhaps it is a moving target. Whatever this "common environmentalist ideology" is, any that I'm familiar with, informed by evolutionary theory, would acknowledge that within this environment are many components that all operate at their own paces conditioned by life expectancy, gestational periods, weaning, time to vitality, etc. But Uncle Morty says the genomics version of ecological interrelatedness requires us to drop the organism–environment duality. meh

Humans keep trying to distinguish rigorously between the living and the machinic. Morton keeps trying to distinguish irrigorously between the fractal and the name.

The expression of beaver DNA does not stop at the ends of beaver whiskers but at the ends of beaver dams. Spider DNA is expressed in spider webs. Is DNA is recursively developmental? Is it the text that has no marks? Capacity to learn, without evidence of its being learned, sufficient? Is a nonexpression an expression of DNA? If the beaver has the capacity to learn to build a dam but never learns to build one and therefore never expresses its dam-making ability, is its lack of having learned to make a dam an expression of his damned DNA?

there is only the genome and the biosphere (can I stop reading now?) <span style="color: #800000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">genome-biosphere <span style="color: #800000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">mode-form?

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16pt;">...forget about <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 1.5;">worlds and surroundings -- this language forces false distinctions between inside and outside... <span style="color: #800000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.5;">I love me some imperative mood...mmmm,mmmm good stuff. I should not only leave behind worlds, but forget them. Because, leaving them behind would maintain their existence as memory. I may once again write about worlds and manifest them back into existence, and then Tim Morton would have to once again reappear and make them no longer exist. We need a language of true distinctions, and then we can save the Biosphere. We merely lack the right language, the one devoid of false distinctions. That's what's really been fucking this thing up.