My current hyper-fixation (long may it last) is one that has flitted in and out of my mind most of my life – the fact that I am of the opinion that we (all living and non living species and non-species on earth, and in the universe) are interconnected. It’s never really a line of thought that I’ve pursued very far or that I’ve researched or read or even talked to others about. Rather, it’s been somewhat of a background thought, a living breathing hypothesis and life philosophy by which I have always governed myself and my actions, intuiting that everything that I do or don’t do, has a knock-on effect on everything else on a universal level.
When discussing this with Caroline Wright during my one-to-one Tutorial session as a potential line of enquiry for this Masters, she suggested that I look into the work of Timothy Morton.
I am therefore currently reading ‘The Ecological Thought’. “Timothy Morton (b. 1968) has been called the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene. Their writing radically reimagines our relationship with the non-human world.” Morton, T (2018)
It would appear that Timothy Morton agrees, and has aptly and succinctly put into words what I have intuitively felt: “The ecological thought realizes that all beings are interconnected. This is the mesh. The ecological thought realizes that the boundaries between, and the identities of, beings are affected by this interconnection.” Morton, T (2010).
I’m thoroughly enjoying this book, but I can’t say it’s easy reading. Instead, it is heavy-going and I am having to use my whole-brain to half understand it! There is a lot of exhaustive and unnecessary waffle and frills – I would guess that this book was not well understood by its editor. However, sifting the wheat from the chaf, there’s a lot of engaging philosophy, and enough that resonates with me to keep me turning the pages.
I am reading this book on my Kindle so am struggling to ascertain which page I’m on, but herewith a list of quotes from the book that I have pulled for possible use in my Contextual Essay.
Quotes from The Ecological Thought by Timothy Morton
“”The ecological thought doesn’t just occur “in the mind.” It’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings-animal, vegetable, or mineral. Ultimately, this includes thinking about democracy. What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be-can we even imagine it?”
“The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the “truly wonderful fact” of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more now about how life forms have shaped Earth (think of oil, of oxygen-the first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural selection implies extinction.22″
“The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was right to assert that panta rhei, “Everything flows.”
“Cantor got into trouble for these thoughts. But his discoveries laid the foundations for set theory, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and Alan Turing’s thinking on artificial intelligence. It was also the basis of fractal geometry, which underlies the geometry of branching and circulatory systems in life forms.”
“The ecological thought might invert the conventional wisdom on virtual reality art, such as transgender artist Micha Cardinal’s simulations of nonhuman existence, as a dragon in the online domain Second Life.”5 It’s not that these simulations demonstrate posthuman platitudes about malleable identity (Cardinas’s own estimation), but rather that identity as such is already a simulation-a performative display.”
This is no journey into the wild but into the mind. Men (mostly men) like Supertramp think that they’re escaping civilization and its discontents, but in fact they occupy the place of its death instincts. Their fantasy is of a world of absolute control and order: “I can make it on my own” is what American boys are taught to think. The “return to Nature” desperately acts out the myth of the self-made man, editing out love, warmth, vulnerability, and ambiguity. Even the aesthetic of the cute is a beginning of affection, so it’s better than nothing. Warmth and vulnerability might not be served well by high art.”
“The ecological thought realizes that all beings are interconnected. This is the mesh. The ecological thought realizes that the boundaries between, and the identities of, beings are affected by this interconnection. This is the strange stranger.”
“What art, literature, music, science, and philosophy are suitable to it? Art can contain utopian energy. As Percy Shelley put it, art is a kind of shadow from the future that looms into our present world.’? Environmental art as we know it will cease to exist at some point in the history of the ecological thought. For one thing, ecological art will exit the elegiac mode.’s Ecological elegies will wither or mutate.”
References:
- Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Morton, T. (2018). All Art is Ecological. England, Penguin Random House UK
Debbie New 