Timothy MortonEcology without Nature

Chapter 3

Chapter 2 could leave us in a state of cynicism. ...Remaining in cynicism is a habit of the beautiful soul.

JuxtapositionEcomimesis is above all a practice of juxtaposition. .... But it all very much depends upon what is being juxtaposed with what. If it is to be properly critical, montage must juxtapose the contents with the frame. Why? Simply to juxtapose contents without bringing form and subject position into the mix would leave things as they are. As we have seen, just adding items to a list (such as adding polluting factories to a list of things in "nature") will not entirely do. The most extreme example of "contents " would be the writing quality of writing. The most extreme example of "frame " would be the ideological matrix that makes things meaningful in the first place.

Radical Ecological Kitsch

Kitsch is immersive. It is a labor of love: you have to "get into it." It poses the problem of how the subject relates to the object in a striking manner.

The problem of human beingness, declared Sartre and Lacan, is the problem of what to do with one's slime (one's shit): "The slimy is myself. "So Ultimately, is sliminess not the sacred, the taboo substance of life itself? One word for this is Kristeva's abject, the qualities of the world we slough off in order to maintain subjects and objects. Ecological politics is bound up with what to do with pollution, miasma, slime: things that glisten, schlup, and decay.

Mind the Gap: Place in Question

A left ecology must "get" even further " into" place than bioregionalism and other Romantic localisms. Only then can progressive ecocriticism establish a firm basis for exploring environmental j ustice issues such as environmental racism, colonialism, and imperialism. This basis is a strong theoretical approach.

Dark EcologyEven if "I" could be immersed in nature, and still exist as an I there would remain the I who is telling you this, as opposed to the I who is immersed. If we are even able to achieve ecology without nature, it will be difficult, if not impossible, and even undesirable, to achieve ecology without a subject. If reason, devoid of sadistic instrumentality, is openness to nonidentity, that is still a kind of subjectivity. We cannot come up with a "new and improved " version of identity that will do without the paradoxes and aporias associated with it.

Solidarity, strangely, has become a choice.

The ecological thought, the thinking of interconnectedness, has a dark side em bodied not in a hippie aesthetic of life over death, or a sadistic sentimental Bambification of sentient beings, but in a "goth" assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world: dark ecology. Now is a time for grief to persist, to ring throughout the world. Modern culture has not yet known what to do with grief.

So while we campaign to make our world "cleaner" and less toxic, less harmful to sentient beings, our philosophical adventure should in some ways be quite the reverse. We should be finding ways to stick around with the sticky mess that we're in and that we are, making thinking dirtier, identifying with ugliness, practicing "hauntology" (Derrida'sphrase) rather than ontology. So out with the black clothes, eyeliner, and white makeup, on with the spangly music: dark ecology.

The mechanical process that "is nature" is monstrous. To see this properly would retain the unknown-ness of the unknown, but not as anaesthetlc mystery. It approaches the psychoanalytic idea of drive, the repetitive, cycling processes that operate sentient beings. The ultimate trajectory of the "new and improved" school of revisionary aesthetics would transfer art away from objects of desire and toward objects of the drive. These drives, these cycling processes have a certain right to remain unconscious, unknown.

It gets over the dilemma of the beautiful soul, not by turning the other into the self, but perversely,by leaving things the way they are. In order to be itself, forgiveness would not expect the frog to turn into a prince as soon as we kissed it. To forgive, then, would be a fundamentally ecological act, an act that redefined ecology in excess of all its established concepts, an act of radically being-with the other. And being-here, being literally on this earth (Da-sein), would entail a need for forgiveness, an equally radical assumption that whatever is there is our responsibility, and ultimately, "our fault."

“genuine forgiveness must engage two singularities: the guilty and the victim. As soon as a third party intervenes, one can again speak of amnesty, reconciliation, reparation, etc., but certainly not of forgiveness in the strict sense” - Jacques Derrida