Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence

by Timothy Morton

Overview

Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are.

The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231177535
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Series:	The Wellek Library Lectures
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	657,842
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. His books include Ecology Without Nature (2007); The Ecological Thought (2010); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013); and Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013); and he has published more than 150 essays on ecology, philosophy, art, literature, music, architecture, and food. He has collaborated with several artists, including Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Olafur Eliasson, Haim Steinbach, Emilija Škarnulytė, and Pharrell Williams, and blogs regularly at ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Beginning After the End
The First Thread
The Second Thread
The Third Thread
Ending Before the Beginning
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Morton is a master of philosophical enigma. In Dark Ecology he treats us to an obscure ecognosis, the essentially unsolvable riddle of ecological being. Prepare to be endarkened!

Michael Marder

Timothy Morton's new work by turns fascinates, mystifies, stuns, confuses, and excites...Readers who seek new vocabularies for thinking about the Anthropocene and the vexed relation between human society and biological life will find a lot to work with.

British Society for Literature and Science

05/16/2016
Morton (Hyperobjects), a philosopher and professor of English at Rice University, attempts—with mixed results—to poetically jump-start a searching reevaluation of philosophy, politics, and art in light of the current ecological crisis. The book is strange, and some may find it decidedly uncanny. In and through its looping prose, he argues that there are strata of acclimatizations that must be made in mind, body, and soul for humans to come to "ecognosis": the knowledge that our very conception of nature might be what is destroying it. In a stream-of-consciousness style, Morton weaves together scientific and humanistic perspectives to craft a text that argues that the current ecological crisis is linked to a "logistical ‘program' " that has been present in human systems since the Stone Age. "Dark ecology" is the recognition that the changes that must be made involve melancholy, irony, unsettling joy, and ultimately radical transformations in the ways humans conceive of, and live in, the universe. Morton commands readers' attention with his free-form style, but some may find it as repellent as it is compelling. Morton extends his previous work to offer a seismically different vision of the future of ecology and humankind. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] radical vision of what ecological thought can be.

Los Angeles Review of Books

A playful, poetic parsing of our era's environmental crisis.

Rice Magazine

Dark Ecology is a brave, brilliant interrogation of the presumptions that have driven our approach to the ecological and environmental challenges of our era. Anyone who is willing to ride the rollercoaster of ideas on which Morton takes us will reach the end brimming with new conceptual and intellectual energies with which to face up to our present limits and failures and to shape an alive and joyful future.

Imre Szeman

Morton’s provocative book urges the reader to braid, to twist, or to play cat’s cradle with its looping logic.

Critical Inquiry

In often witty and humorous language, Timothy Morton provides a kind of affective atlas for the human era. The book calls for scholars to recognize the structures of entwinement between (the human) species and ecological phenomena and to develop modes of thought for accommodating them.

Kate Marshall

With touches of humor, bits of information drawn from literature (ancient Latin and Greek), and plenty of philosophy, Morton takes readers on a strongly philosophical and semantic tour of 'the darkness and light' of human interrelatedness with the biosphere.

Choice

Morton disrupts the customary assumption that industrialization is the root cause of ecological crisis, such crisis being already contained in the agrilogistic drawing of a sharp boundary between human and nonhuman worlds.

The Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy - Charlene Elsby

03/15/2016
Morton (Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice Univ.; Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World) doesn't reject the notion that the Earth is in an Anthropocene geologic epoch, when the planet is geologically profoundly impacted by human activity. Yet he focuses on its continuity with the Holocene, or as he calls it, the agrilogistic, epoch—differing from the present only in matters of degree—when, some 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers became farmers and settled into the tilling and gouging of the earth. Morton spells out an "ecognosis," or ecological awareness that is not only dark depressing, but dark uncanny, and—working through multiple stages of depression—dark sweet, like chocolate. He advises taking the long view, but in a surprisingly hopeful concluding thread advocates playful subversive politics in the present. VERDICT The journey through this book is philosophically dense, weaving the teachings of Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Charles Baudelaire, to name but a few, and best approached by readers with a rich background of the subject. For readers with the chops to take them through the undergrowth, this is a rewarding hike.—Steve Young, McHenry Cty. Coll., Crystal Lake, IL

Library Journal