Timothy MortonEcology without Nature

Chapter 2

Since all texts coordinate relationships between inside and outside,ambience, and in particular the function of the re-mark, its fundamental component, is an aspect of every text.

None of this gets rid of the need to trace precise historical determinations and emphases, genealogies, and lineages. Ideological determination depends not just upon the content and form of an artwork or rhetorical device, but also upon the subject position that it establishes. The artwork hails us, establishing a certain range of attitudes.

"Empty" space-space that capitalism has left relatively undeveloped-is intrinsic to capitalism, since the laws of capital may dictate that a vacant lot is more profitable over a certain span of time than one that has been developed. Plot is a potential space, a limbo waiting to generate value.

The suburban garden lawn's flat, almost opaque surface-so like high abstract expressionism-obscures in plain view the work that goes into it) Just like the lawn, but for a more limited audience, abstract expressionism turned the dissolution of lyrical distance into a profitable enterprise. The lawn expresses the disappearing of the worker that resulted in picturesque landscape, the production of distance, of simulated fusions of tameness and wildness, and fascinating points of view. In the early modern period lawns were used for sport, as relieffrom smoke and other people, and as power on display. Modern American lawns emerged in the Romantic period

A common view is that Romantic culture rejected the fantasy of capitalist enjoyment. Romanticist ecocriticism, for example, assumes that it is recapitulating the resistance of Romantic poetry to the technologies of capitalism. But the reverse was the case. What if we widened the lensto encompass an expanded view that did not take the oikas of ecology in the sense of home or dwelling as its center? In the Romantic period,capitalism moved from its colonialist to its imperialist phase.

world, state, system, field, and body

World

Nationalism, a quintessentially Romantic ideology, continues to motivate environmental art seeking to re-enchant the world. The nation state remains a real yet fantastic thing. As the idea of world (Welt) became popular in German Romantic idealism, so the nation-state was imagined as a surrounding environment. so The idea of the nation as "homeland," as in American Homeland Security or the German Heimat demanded a poetic rendering as an ambient realm of swaying corn, shining seas, or stately forests

State

Static art and static philosophy arose as the nation state, and beyond its borders, the environment gradually " dissolved" into view. Can progressive ecological thinking rescue the ecological Thing, fantasy object of the nation-state, and always somewhat in excess of nationalism, from the place of its birth? Ecological reality, produced in part by the industrializing processes of nation-states themselves, has eclipsed national boundaries. Only an ecological language opposed to the phantasmagorical positivities of nation-speak is anywhere near legitimate, and only if it does not prove to be just another "new and improved" version of the same thing.

System

System has the virtue of seeming less Romantic and misty than world. But it merely updates Romanticism for an age of cybernetics. Deep ecology, the most Romantic of all ecological forms of politics, is curiously enough the one most devoted to systems thinking. System can generate its own forms of mysticism.... the idea of the encounter of a (little lsi) self with a (big lSI) Self... Similarly, a person is a part of nature to the extent that he or she is a relational j unction within the total field. The process of identification is a process in which the relations which define the junction expand to comprise more and more.The 'self' grows towards the "Self"

Field

One sense of field is of a flat surface, notably the undecorated ground of a picture, a flag, or a coin? The field is the margin, the blank part of the page, or, more recently, a placeholder for data in a database. The rich, spatial quality of field in phenomenology is simply the holographic hallucination of reading or scanning, turned into a philosophic system.

The Body

In the Romantic period the aesthetic stood between reason and passion, subject and object, fact and value. Nowadays, that task falls to the body. The body is the aesthetic, with all the disgusting things that the aesthetic normally edits out put back in. The body is the anti-aesthetic, and its virtue (or vice ) is that it is both entirely different from, and just an alternative version of, the aesthetic.

The body stands in for what we think we've lost, a little world, a floating island. But it is easy to deconstruct this body: where does it start and stop ? Is a tennis racket an "extension" of my body? What about the tennis ball ? The tennis court? When does this body stop being "my" body? Freud called the telephone a "prosthetic" ear. Donna Haraway has written persuasively and influentially that cybernetics and prosthetics have reconfigured our sense of human being. How about when we subtract things from the body? Is it still my body when I lose the hand, the arm ?

Beautiful Souls / Consumerism

To be a consumerist, you don't have to consume anything, just contemplate the idea of consuming. Consumerism raised to the highest power is free-floating identity, or identity in process. This is a specifically Romantic consumerism. Transformative experiences are valued, such as those derived from drugs, or from intense experiences, such as Wordsworth's " spots of time," traumas that nudge the self out of its circularity and force it to circulate around something new.... " sitting back, relaxing and taking it all in." A fusion of identity and nonidentity is strictly impossible.

Romantic consumerism produced subjective states that eventually became technically reproducible commodities. But it also influenced the construction and maintenance of actually existing environments. Consider how Wordsworth's Lake District became the National Trust's Lake District, or the American wilderness, places you go to on holiday from an administered world. Environments were ca ught in the logic of Romantic consumerism. Wilderness can only exist as a reserve of unex ploited capital, as constant tensions and struggles make evident.

theory itself becomes an aesthetic pose,evoking an idea of "listening " quizzically, quasi-contemplatively; talking about Zen, referencing meditation while not actually going to the trouble of doing any, with all the irritation and pain it might cause.

Boycotting and protesting are ironical, reflexive forms of consumerism. By refusing to buy certain products, by questioning oppressive social they forms such as corporations or globalization, point toward possibilities ofchanging the current state of affairs, without actually changing it. They are a cry of the heart in a heartless world, a spanner in the works...They thus have not only a practical, but also a religious aspect.

Many interpret the beautiful soul as existing in a realm of pure non action, as a form of quietism. What, then, of "monkeywrenching " andother forms of ecological activism ? Both quietism and activism are two sides of the same beautiful coin. The beautiful soul fuses the aestheticand the moral. The aestheticization has a moral dimension, the result of an achieved distance. The beautiful soul maintains a split between self and world, an irresolvable chasm created by the call of conscience "consciousness raising," as an activist might put it. Yet the beautiful soul also yearns to close the gap.

The problem resides not so much in the beautiful soul's noble ideas, but in the form of its relationship to them. The beautiful soul dis tinguishes between theory and practice so sharply that reflection and hesitation are seen as inane cloud-castle building, and "pure " action becomes solidly material and absolutely, guilt-inducingly vital. Or it comes to the same conclusion in reverse: reflection becomes ethereal transcendence, action a rather grimy thing that other, less enlightened people do.

The ambient sound of jet engines "destroys the actuality of nature as . . . an object of poetic celebration." Nature writing often excludesthis negative ambience. When it does include it, it distinguishes it from the positive ambient of rustling trees or quiet ripples on a lake. It goeswithout saying that modernity is full of these sounds...

Nature writing partly militates against ecology rather than for it. By setting up nature as an object "over there "-a pristine wilderness be yond all trace of human contact-it re-establishes the very separation it seeks to abolish. We could address this problem by considering the role of subjectivity in nature writing. What kinds of subject position does nature writing evoke ? Instead of looking at the trees, look at the person who looks at the trees.

The first sections of this chapter concluded that numerous ideas a bout nature are inadequate, ideological constructions created in an age of machines and capitalism. We then saw how the ecological subject position was identical with consumerism. And then we found out that any attempt to tear off this skin would only reproduce existing conditions. Like Alice at the Looking Glass House, we are stuck, especially when we try to get away. Let us see if we can get any smarter, stuck as we are.