BOOK REVIEW www.ecologicalcitizen.net
Damaging thinking: A review of
Timothy Morton’s Being Ecological
“W we know about ecology Adam Dickerson hy is everything we think
About the author wrong?” the back cover
Adam is a philosopher who of this book announces portentously.
has taught at universities in the UK and It is, we are told, written by no less a Australia. personage than the “philosopher prophet
He is the author of Kant on of the Anthropocene.” Turning to the
Representation and Objectivity front cover we see that the designers have
(Cambridge University thought fit to emboss there a vacuous
Press, 2004) and various testimonial from the Icelandic popstar papers in philosophy, Björk, who tells us “I have been reading aesthetics, and cultural
Tim’s books for a while and I like them
history. He is an Associate a lot.” Editor of the Journal.
‘Tim’ is Timothy Morton, a professor
Citation of English at Rice University in Houston, Dickerson A (2019) Damaging Texas, USA, and author of a number of thinking: A review of Timothy books in ‘eco’ inflected aesthetics and
Morton’s Being Ecological. The critique (including Morton [2010] and
Ecological Citizen 2: 198–9.
Morton [2016]). Once upon a time, ‘Tim’ Keywords was a fine analyst of romantic poetry, but then something happened – ‘Tim’
Anthropocentrism; became a celebrity academic. This book
ecological ethics
is both an expression and a result of that unfortunate metamorphosis.
About the book
I will begin with the most obvious feature
Author: Morton T of this book: it does not really contain any Year: 2018
arguments or reasoning at all; instead, it
Publisher: Pelican Books 1 These riffs
consists of “a series of riffs.”
(Penguin Random House) combine name-dropping of high theory
Paperback ISBN:
978-0241274231
and philosophical terms of art, mixed in a jocular way with preposterous verbal sophistries, pop-cultural references and contemporary idioms. It is hard to communicate the full flavour of Morton’s style in a short space, but the book is full of sentences like this: “time is an irreducible property of things, part of the liquid that jets out of a thing, undulating” (p 170). Or this: “Things are connected but in a kinda sorta subjunctive way. There’s room for stuff to happen” (p 54). Or this: “the full-on, twelve-inch remix of Husserl is full-on object-oriented ontology” (p 83).
198
Or this: “Karl Marx thinks of capitalism proper emerging from the collective whirr of enough machines. When enough of them are connected and whirring away, pop! Out comes industrial capitalism” (p 93). To get his profundity on the cheap, Morton is also fond of insisting that straightforwardly comprehensible claims are in fact ‘mysterious’ or ‘uncanny’ or ‘paradoxical’ – for example: “Evolution presents us with a continuum: humans and fish are related, so that if you go back far enough, you’ll find that one of your very, very distant grandmothers was a fish. Yet you are not a fish. Wherever we slice the continuum, we will find paradoxes [sic] like that” (pp 182–3).
The book, in other words, does not position its readers as rational beings, and seek to persuade them via argument and evidence. Instead, the reader is positioned as a witness to a performance – the performance of Tim Morton being Tim Morton. What we have here is something all too familiar in the age of Instagram, ‘personal branding’ and the selfie stick: for all its greenwashed surface, this is the authoring of celebrity.
This explains the insistent reflexivity of the prose. While the book claims to be about the ‘uncanny paradoxical mystery’ (etc., etc.) of the other-than-human, it is in fact about Morton – so much so that it should really have been titled Being Tim Morton. Talking constantly about himself (often – disconcertingly, and rather like Kanye West – in the third person), we hear about Morton’s struggles with jet lag as he flies to speak at prestigious universities across the world; about his friendships with Yoko Ono and musicians with only one name; about the expensive art that hangs on the walls of his rich
www.ecologicalcitizen.net Damaging thinking: A review of Timothy Morton’s Being Ecological
The Ecological Citizen Vol 2 No 2 2019 friends’ expensive houses; about his “ginger reddish” facial hair, and so on and so forth. This is a tale told from the comfortable, cosmopolitan life of the celebrity theorist – a tale told with that expectation (constitutive of celebrity) that the reader will be fascinated by such details.
Can anything of interest be extracted from this commodified simulacrum of philosophy? If we attempt to read through the clouds of dust raised by Morton’s barrage of mock-profundities, then the following would, I think, be a fair summary of this book’s main thesis. Why is everything we think we know about ecology wrong? It is because our very ways of talking and thinking about ecology are mired in anthropocentrism. We do not, Morton claims, need knowledge of more facts, and we do not need more sermons demanding we change our lives. Instead, Morton suggests, what we need to learn is “how to live ecological knowledge” (p 11). We will learn this via a non-anthropocentric awareness of the profound ways we are enmeshed in ecosystems – of our interrelations with the other-than-human. This awareness cannot take the form of knowledge, because that necessarily entails fitting other-than-human things within human conceptual frameworks – it is, for Morton, a kind of Procrustean coercion of the other-than-human. For a genuinely nonanthropocentric awareness of the otherthan-human, what is needed is thus a non-conceptual awareness. Morton finds a model for this awareness in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, and its account of our experience of beauty – a judgment that (according to Kant) is both ‘disinterested’ (non-instrumental) and non-conceptual. Hence, Morton writes, “when I experience beauty, I am coexisting with at least one thing that isn’t me, and doesn’t have to be conscious or alive, in a non-coercive way […] We coexist; we are in solidarity” (p 131). For Morton, then, our experience of art is a glimpse of a non-anthropocentric awareness of, or openness to, the otherthan-human, and thereby provides a model for a genuinely ecological ethics and politics.
So far we have a sketch of an outline of a shadow of a skeleton of a possible position – but this is as far as the book goes. All of the important questions raised by this view are ignored. Most crucially, the book has nothing to say about what ethics and politics might follow from this nonanthropocentric awareness. Morton is systematically evasive when it comes to saying something about ethical principles or resolving ethical problems – let alone addressing questions about political strategy, concrete actions, policies, organizational structures and so forth. Put another way: this book has nothing to say to us in our current predicament, other than to preach a pretentiously greenwashed version of the doctrine of the inward light. Its publication in the Pelican imprint (which, in the past, has published significant works by such figures as Freud, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Erving Goffman and Lewis Mumford) is a morbid symptom of the commodified state of our intellectual life in 21st century capitalism – the capitalism that is destroying the Earth, and which is deeply inscribed in the very form of this work.
Notes
1 The phrase is Nathan Brown’s, from his devastating review (2013: 64) of Morton’s work in the context of the broader metaphysical framework of ‘object oriented ontology’. An assessment of the latter is beyond the scope of this review, but for a systematic (and genuinely witty) demolition of its pretensions, see Wolfendale (2014).
References
Brown N (2013) The nadir of OOO: From Graham Harman’s Tool-Being to Timothy Morton’s Realist Magic: Objects, ontology, causality (Open Humanities Press, 2013). Parrhesia 17: 62–71.
Morton T (2010) The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Morton T (2016) Dark Ecology: For a logic of future coexistence. Columbia University Press, New York, NY, USA.
Wolfendale P (2014) Object-Oriented Philosophy: The noumenon’s new clothes. Urbanomic, Falmouth, UK.
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