1 And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction
Exactly what is the current state of play, ecologically speaking? Let’s explore this first. When I’ve told some people about the title of this chapter, they have accused me of being weak. That’s right: this chapter is really lame. Some people wanted me to say “You ARE Living in an Age of Mass Extinction,” as if the “You may” was the same as “You are not.”
This in itself is interesting, this understanding of “may” as “not.” It has to do with the logical “Law” of the Excluded Middle. It affects all kinds of areas of life. The normal rule for voting interprets abstaining as saying “No” when it comes to counting up the votes. You can’t interpret it to mean “Maybe yes, maybe no.” We live in an indicative age, an active one indeed, where a word processing program is prone to punish you with a little wavy green line for using the passive voice; heaven forbid we use the subjunctive, as in “you might.”
Not being able to be in the middle is a big problem for ecological thinking.
But not being able to be in the subjunctive is also a big problem for ecological thinking. Not being able to be in “may” mode. It’s all so black and white. And it edits out something vital to our experience of ecology, something we can’t actually get rid of: the hesitation quality, feelings of unreality or of distorted or altered reality, feelings of the uncanny: feeling weird.
The feeling of not-quite-reality is exactly the feeling of being in a catastrophe. If you’ve ever been in a car crash, or in that minor catastrophe called jet lag, you probably know what I mean.
Indeed, editing out “may” edit out experience as such. “You ARE” means that if you don’t feel like it, if you don’t feel something officially sanctioned about ecology, there’s something wrong with you. It should be transparent. It should be obvious. We should deliver this obviousness in an obvious way, like a slap upside the head. “You may find yourself in” includes experience. In a sense, it’s actually much stronger than a simple assertion. Because you can’t get rid of yourself. You can agree or disagree with all kinds of things—there you are, agreeing or disagreeing. In the words of that great phenomenologist Buckaroo Banzai, Wherever you go, there you are.1
Philo-sophy
There is something rough and ready about truth, just as there is something rough and ready about philosophy. Philosophy means the love of wisdom, not wisdom as such. It’s definitely a style of philosophy to delete the philos part. There are too many philosophers to mention, and I blush to name them, but you know the type: the kind of person who knows they are right and that you are talking nonsense unless you agree with them. Needless to say, this is a style I don’t like at all. Love means you can’t and don’t grasp the beloved—that’s what you feel, that’s what you realize when you love someone or something. “I can’t quite put my finger on it … I just love that painting … ”
Throughout this book, we’ll be seeing how the experience of art provides a model for the kind of coexistence ecological ethics and politics wants to achieve between humans and nonhumans. Why is that?
In the late eighteenth century the great philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between things and thing-data, as we have begun to see. One reason why you can tell there is a sharp distinction here, argued Kant, is beauty, which he explored as an experience, the kind of moment in which we exclaim “Wow, that’s so beautiful!” (What I’m going to be calling “the beauty experience.”) That’s because beauty gives you a fantastic, “impossible” access to the inaccessible, to the withdrawn, open qualities of things, their mysterious reality.
Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept. You don’t eat a painting of an apple; you don’t find it morally good; instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves. Beauty doesn’t have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of “pretty.” It’s strange, this feeling. It’s like the feeling of having a thought, without actually having one. In food marketing there is a category that developed in the last two decades or so called mouthfeel. It’s a rather disgusting term for the texture of food, how it interacts with your teeth and your palate and your tongue. In a way, Kantian beauty is thinkfeel. It’s the sensation of having an idea, and since we are so committed to a dualism of mind and body—so was Kant—we can’t help thinking this is a bit psychotic: ideas shouldn’t make a sound, should they? But we do talk all the time about the sound of an idea: That sounds good. Is it possible that there is some kind of truth in this colloquial phrase?
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger is a controversial figure, because for some of his career he was a member of the Nazi party. This very dark cloud is a big shame, because it prevents many people from engaging with him seriously. And this is despite the fact that Heidegger, like it or not, wrote the manual on how thinking should proceed in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I hope I’ll be able to demonstrate this as I go along, and in addition I hope I can show that Heidegger’s Nazism is a big mistake—obviously, but also from the point of view of his very own thought.
Heidegger argues that there are no such things as truth and untruth, rigidly distinguished like black and white. You are always in the truth. You are always in some kind of more or less low resolution, low dpi jpeg version of the truth, some kind of common, public version, truthiness (we first met Stephen Colbert’s handy term in the Introduction). I know the jpeg analogy doesn’t work properly. No analogy works properly. The analogy of truth as more or less pixelated is itself more or less pixelated.
And beauty is truthy. Actually, since I’m not Kant I’m going to say that beauty isn’t thinkfeel, it’s truthfeel. If you want to use the language scientists now use you can say truth-like. So if you think about it, we are now at a point where we must acknowledge a subtle flip in our argument. We’ve been criticizing factoids as misleading, but why can they be misleading at all? It’s because somehow we don’t always recognize false things as false. Which means that there isn’t a thin or rigid true versus false distinction. In a strange way, all true statements are sort of truthy. There is not a sudden point or rigid boundary at which the truthy becomes actually true. Things are always a bit fumbly and stumbly. We are feeling our way around. Ideas sound good. Truthfeel. And you may find yourself living in an age of mass extinction.
The Phenomenon of the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is the name given to a geological period in which human-made stuff has created a layer in Earth’s crust: all kinds of plastics, concretes, and nucleotides, for example, have formed a discrete and obvious stratum. The Anthropocene has now officially been dated as starting in 1945. This is an astounding fact. Can you think of another geological period that has such a specific start date? And can you think of anything more uncanny than realizing that you are in a whole new geological period, one marked by humans becoming a geophysical force on a planetary scale?2
There have been five mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth. The most recent one, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, was caused by an asteroid. The one before that, the End Permian Extinction, was caused by global warming, and it wiped out all but a few lifeforms. Extinctions look like points on a time line when you look them up on Wikipedia—but they are actually spread out over time, so that while they are happening it would be very hard to discern them. They are like invisible nuclear explosions that last for thousands of years. It’s our turn to be the asteroid, because the global warming that we cause is now bringing about the Sixth Mass Extinction. Maybe it would make it more obvious if we stopped calling it “global warming” (and definitely stopped calling it “climate change,” which is really weak) and started calling it “mass extinction,” which is the net effect.
Now it may sound strange, but something about the vagueness of kinda sorta finding yourself in the Anthropocene, which is the reason why the Sixth Mass Extinction event on planet Earth is now ongoing—something about that vagueness is in fact essential and intrinsic to the fact of being in such an age. This is like saying that jet lag tells you something true about how things are. When you arrive in a very distant strange place, everything seems a little uncanny: strange, yet familiar, yet familiarly strange—yet strangely familiar. The light switch seems a little closer than normal, a little differently placed on the wall. The bed is oddly thin and the pillow isn’t quite what you’re used to—I’m describing how it feels whenever I arrive in Norway, by the way. Day begins about 10 a.m. during winter. It’s pitch dark at 9 a.m. It’s still the day, but not quite as you have become habituated to it.
Heidegger’s word for how light switches seem to peer out at you like minor characters in an Expressionist painting is vorhanden, which means present-at-hand. Normally things kind of disappear as you concentrate on your tasks. The light switch is just part of your daily routine, you flick it on, you want to boil the kettle for some coffee—you are stumbling around, in other words, stumbling around your kitchen in the early morning light of truthiness. Things kind of disappear—they are merely there; they don’t stick out. It’s not that they don’t exist at all. It’s that they are less weird, less oppressively obvious versions of themselves. This quality of how things seemingly just happen around us, without our paying much attention, is telling us something about how things are: things aren’t directly, constantly present. They only appear to be when they malfunction or are different versions of the same thing than we’re used to. According to this, you go about your business in the Norwegian hotel room, you go to sleep, and when you wake up, everything is back to normal—and that’s how things actually are; they are, as Heidegger says, zuhanden, ready-to-hand or handy.3 You have a grip on them, as in the phrase Get a grip! Or the slightly more amusing English version, Keep your hair on! (Implying before you quite notice that you are wearing a wig …)
Things are present to us when they stick out, when they are malfunctioning. You’re running through the supermarket hell bent on finishing your shopping trip, when you slip on a slick part of the floor (someone used too much polish). As you slip embarrassingly toward the ground, you notice the floor for the first time, the color, the pattern, the material composition—even though it was supporting you the whole time you were on your grocery mission. Being present is secondary to just sort of happening, which means, argues Heidegger, that being isn’t present, which is why he calls his philosophy deconstruction or destructuring.4 What he is destructuring is the metaphysics of presence, which is saying that some things are more real than others, and the way they are more real is that they are more constantly present.
Normal for Some, Disaster for Others
This normalization is true—it happens, maybe it does have something to do with sleeping in a place. But is that really because things being handy, zuhanden, is the normal state of affairs? Object-oriented ontology is arguing that this ready-to-hand-ness of things is sitting on top of something much deeper and much stranger. There is a weird dislocation between readiness to hand and presence at hand. Stuff happens without us paying much attention (readiness to hand), yet the same stuff looks peculiar when it malfunctions (presence at hand). This is because things in themselves are ungraspable, totally and completely—irreducibly as they say. Things can’t be accessed fully by anything, including themselves. You can flick a light switch, lick it, ignore it, think about it, melt it, fire its protons around a particle accelerator, write a poem about it, meditate upon it until you become Buddha. None of these will exhaust the reality of the switch. The switch could become sentient and develop the power of speech and go on a talk show. What it says on the show wouldn’t be the switch—it would be switch autobiography. “Well, I found myself in the fingers of this philosophy guy, he had jet lag, it was really weird … I had a difficult birth.”
Even the light switch would probably say something like the singer David Byrne in “Once in a Lifetime” if it ever went on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show: “This is not my beautiful house … ”5 And this is because things are mysterious, in a radical and irreducible way. Mysterious comes from the Greek muein, which means to close the lips. Things are unspeakable. And you discover this aspect of things, as if you could somehow feel that un-feelability, in the beauty experience, or as Keats puts it, the feel of not to feel it.6 This “and you may find yourself” tentative hesitant subjunctive quality isn’t just a temporary blip and it certainly isn’t just a phenomenon that only occurs to sentient beings, let alone conscious ones, let alone human ones. It’s sort of everywhere, because being isn’t presence.
Kant showed that there’s a difference between the real and reality. It’s like the difference between a musical score—a bunch of dots and lines on a page—and the “realization” of that score by a musician and the audience who showed up to hear it. Reality is, if you like, the feeling that it’s real: the music is what it is—this is a Bach violin sonata, not a piece of electronic dance music—but it doesn’t really “exist” until you play it or listen to it.
Kant suggests that this “realizer” is the “transcendental subject,” a rather abstract, universal being that’s different from little me, but which seems to follow me around like an invisible balloon, “positing” things as large or small, fast or slow (it’s a pretty boring balloon, only in charge of extension in time and space). Since Kant, a number of other candidates for the “realizer” have been suggested. Hegel argues that the “realizer” was what he calls “Spirit,” the grand march of Western human history. Marx argues that it’s human economic relations: sure, there are potatoes, but they don’t really exist until I’ve dug one up and turned it into French fries. Nietzsche asserts that it’s “will to power”: things are real because you say they are, and you’re holding a rifle, so I’m not going to argue.
And Heidegger argues that it’s a mysterious being called Dasein. The word is German for “being there,” and it’s deliberately vague. Heidegger argues that more specific things (such as Kant’s “subject” or the concept of a human or of “economic relations”) are “modes” of Dasein, a bit like musical key signatures. Ancient Mesopotamia is Dasein in the key of agricultural “civilization,” while the Aborigines are Dasein in the key of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Humans don’t “have” Dasein, because Dasein produces or realizes the human, in the same way that our violinist realizes the Bach sonata. And while there’s nothing to suggest that Dasein can’t be exclusively human, this is exactly the assertion that Heidegger blunders into. Dasein isn’t quite there, constantly—it’s a flickering lamplight. But for Heidegger it’s exclusively human, and German flickering light is much more authentic than other kinds of flickering light. None of this makes sense. None of it makes sense on Heidegger’s own terms. This is what OOO is arguing. De-Nazifying Heidegger doesn’t mean ignoring him or bypassing him. De-Nazifying Heidegger actually means being more Heideggerian than Heidegger.
So if the truthfeel of beauty is telling you something true about anything at all—anything at all is called objects in OOO, and these sorts of object are sharply different from objectified things, because they are radically mysterious—what truthfeel is telling you is that things are open. Also, the beauty experience is telling you that this thing, this thing I can see right here, is ungraspable. It’s totally vivid, yet I can’t get a grip on it … I can’t keep my hair on at all. It’s like what an American car side mirror is telling you, out of the corner of your eye: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. Or it’s like objects on a shelf by the artist Haim Steinbach. Things are intrinsically kinky, kooky, out of place—this out of place-ness isn’t just a function of things breaking and malfunctioning and becoming vorhanden. What you experience in jet lag or inside a Haim Steinbach installation is precisely about exactly how things are.
What all this amounts to is that it’s the normalization of things that is the distortion. A distortion of distortion. Being in a place, being in an era, for instance an era of mass extinction, is intrinsically uncanny. We haven’t been paying much attention, and this lack of attention has been going on for about twelve thousand years, since the start of agriculture, which eventually required industrial processes to maintain themselves, hence fossil fuels, hence global warming, hence mass extinction.
Love, Not Efficiency
Restructuring or destructuring this logistics of the world that has grown out of agriculture, which elsewhere I’ve called agrilogistics, is the one thing that would end global warming, but it is usually considered out of bounds, because it implies accepting a non-“modern” view.7 Agrilogistics means the logistics of the dominant mode of agriculture that started in Mesopotamia and other parts of the world (Africa, Asia, the Americas) around 10,000 BCE. Agrilogistics has an underlying logic to do with survival: Neolithic humans needed to survive (mild) global warming, and so they settled in fixed communities that became cities, in order to store grain and plan for the future. They began to draw distinctions between the human and the nonhuman realms—what fits inside the boundary, and what exists outside of it—that continue to this day. They also drew distinctions between themselves (the caste system). Very soon after the agrilogistical program began, all kinds of phenomena we associate with life in general showed up, in particular patriarchy and social stratification, various kinds of class systems. It’s important to remember that these are constructs of history, the consequence of nomads and hunter-gatherers settling down and establishing cities based on a certain form of survival mode.
The modern view was established on (although it thinks itself as a further disenchantment of) now ancient and obviously violent monotheisms, which in turn find their origin in the privatization of enchantment in the Neolithic with its “civilization.”
Ecological awareness is awareness of unintended consequences. Some ecological politics is about trying to light everything up in a totally nonflickery way, to make sure that there are no unintended consequences. But this is impossible, because things are intrinsically mysterious. So an ecological politics like that would be a monstrous situation, a “control society,” a useful term invented by philosopher Gilles Deleuze to describe our contemporary world. An ecological control society would make the current state of affairs, where kids get tested every five seconds for their ability to resemble a rather slow computation device, look like an anarchist picnic. Even more predictability, even more efficiency. If that’s what the ecological society to come will look like, then I really don’t want to live in it. And it wouldn’t even really be ecological. It would just be this same world, version 9.0.
The ecological society to come, then, must be a bit haphazard, broken, lame, twisted, ironic, silly, sad. Yes, sad, in the sense meant by a character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who: sad is happy for deep people.8 Beauty is sad like that. Sadness means there’s something you can’t quite put your finger on. You can’t quite grasp it. You have no idea who your boyfriend really is. This is not my beautiful wife. Which means in turn that beauty isn’t graspable either, beauty as such—which means that beauty must be fringed with some kind of slight disgust, something that normative aesthetic theories are constantly trying to wipe off. There needs to be this ambiguous space between art and kitsch, beauty and disgust. A shifting world, a world of love, of philos. A world of seduction and repulsion rather than authority. Of truthiness rather than rigid true versus rigid false. Truth is just a 1000 dpi kind of truthiness. This isn’t the same at all as saying everything is a lie. That’s a statement that’s trying not to be truthy, which is why it ends up contradicting itself. If everything is a lie, then the sentence everything is a lie must also be a lie … and so on.
Art That Talks about Its Substances
So we aren’t talking about a traditional concept of postmodernity here. In a way, postmodern art, and I’d put Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” in that category, is in fact the beginning of ecological art, which is to say, art that includes its environment(s) in its very form. Of course, all art is ecological, just as all art talks in various ways about race, class, and gender, even when it’s not doing so explicitly. But ecological art is more explicit. Postmodernism may not have known it consciously at the time, but the ambient openness and strange distortedness of many of its forms talk about the Earth out of which they are ultimately made. Something real is happening. Extreme postmodern thought argues that nothing exists because everything is a construct. This idea, now known as correlationism, has been popular in Western philosophy for about two centuries. We just encountered it in our exploration of different kinds of “realizer.” Again, the idea is that things in themselves don’t exist until they have been “realized,” rather like the way a conductor might “interpret” a piece of music or a producer might “realize” a screenplay in a movie.
But something funny has happened to this idea. For reality to be correlationist, there has to be a correlatee as well as a correlator: there is a violin sonata, not just a violinist. It’s like two faders on a mixing desk. Over time, the correlator fader has been turned way up, while the correlatee fader has been turned all the way down. And this has given rise to the actually rather boring (and definitely anthropocentric) idea that the world is exactly how humans make it, with the correlatee turned all the way down, so down that it sounds like the correlator is doing a solo, not a duet.
The lineage of correlationism starts with Kant, as we saw, who stabilized the explosive idea that causality can’t be directly seen, only statistically inferred, the idea with which David Hume blew up pre-modern theories of cause and effect. Kant stabilized the explosion by saying that although causality can’t be seen to be running forward, it can be posited backward with 20–20 hindsight by the correlator. Again, for Kant the correlator is what he calls the transcendental subject, and since Kant a number of alternatives have been suggested, as I mentioned earlier: the spirit of history (Hegel), human economic relations (Marx), will to power (Nietzsche), libidinal processes (Freud), Dasein (Heidegger), to name a few.
Correlationism is true: you can’t grasp things in themselves, facts are different from data, and data is different from things. But that doesn’t mean that what gets to decide what’s real—the correlator, the decider—is more real than those things, whether the decider is the Kantian subject, Hegelian history, Marxist relations of human production, Nietzschean will to power, or Heidegger’s flickering lamplight of Dasein. So while “traditional” postmodernism, informed by Kant, still relies on this correlationalism, what I’m talking about here, and what underlies OOO, is the idea that this very relationship may not be what we think it is. It may not exist at all.
Dark Ecology
Things are open. Open also in the sense of potential—things can happen in an OOO world, because things aren’t totally keyed to human lamplight, they aren’t totally meshed together, because in that world nothing could happen, there would just be this completely locked together jigsaw that you could never take apart or put back together. Something happening in one specific place (say a feather falling on pavement) would mean the whole universe changes everywhere. Things are connected but in a kinda sorta subjunctive way. There’s room for stuff to happen. Or, as the anarchist composer John Cage put it, “The world is teeming. Anything could happen.”9
So, the strangeness with which we encounter the fact that we are responsible for a mass extinction event is an intrinsic part of it, and not to be deleted. Yelling at people that we are making lifeforms go extinct isn’t nice, because it deletes the strangeness. And saying conversely “Who cares? Everything goes extinct anyway,” which is sort of what the right wing often says, and also what some extreme forms of supposedly environmentalist stance say, such as ecological thinker Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain project, isn’t nice either, because that also tries to delete the strangeness. This kind of bleak certainty misses how things are.
My approach to ecological thought can be characterized as something I call “dark ecology.” Dark ecology doesn’t mean the absolute absence of light. It’s more like Norway in the winter, or the summer for that matter, the way that light in the Arctic reveals something slippery and evanescent about itself, the long summer shadows, the night that lasts for fifteen minutes in Helsinki in June, the dimness. Light as such isn’t directly present, you can’t pin it down and you can’t fully illuminate it: what illuminates the illuminator? Light is splashy and blobby, as quantum theory tells us. And it can’t reach everywhere all at once, as relativity theory tells us.
It’s like when you die in Tibetan Buddhism. When you die, you see the light—but unlike in some other religions, it’s not an obvious light and it’s not at the end of a tunnel, and you aren’t heading toward it and it isn’t the end. In fact, you probably don’t notice it at all. It just sort of flickers on, in an incidentally by-the-way sort of a way, and you delete that experience of the nature of mind, then you find yourself being reincarnated. In the traditional literature it lasts for about three seconds, or as the esoteric manuals put it, as long as it takes you to stick your arm into a sleeve three times. You are not deleting some constantly present logos and falling into blurry confusion. In a way you are deleting a wonderful blurry confusion and falling into a fatal certainty.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the time between one life and the next is called the bardo, the “between.” All kinds of haunting images appear to the consciousness in that state, images based on past actions (karma). We feel that things are different now, that we are in a bardo-like transition space regarding ecological awareness. But really what we are noticing is that things just don’t stay put, they don’t stay the same. Trying to get over this bardo-like quality results in damage to lifeforms, damage to thinking, damage to experience. The impulse behind racism, for example, is also what empowers a thin and rigid distinction between humans and nonhumans. The violence has already occurred, in the form of the abjection and dehumanizing of some humans. We humans contain nonhuman symbionts as part of the way in which we are human; we couldn’t live without them. We are not human all the way through. We and all other lifeforms exist in an ambiguous space in between rigid categories.
If ecological action means not doing as much damage, rather than doing things more efficiently, then it’s not ecological to insist or slap upside the head or the other similar current modes of supposedly ecological data delivery in general. These kinds of action are like trying to wake us up from this bardo-like dream—but the dreamlike quality is precisely what is most real about ecological reality, so in effect, information dump mode is making ecological experience, ecological politics, and ecological philosophy utterly impossible.
Thinking about Groups
Humans have started mass extinction, but me, little me, Tim Morton, and little you, didn’t do anything. Once again, nothing, nothing that you did, such as starting your car, has had a statistically meaningful effect. Yet billions of car startings and burstings of coal into flame and so on totally have had an effect. There is an uncanny gap between little me and me as a member of what is called species. The human species caused global warming, not the octopus species, let’s be very clear about that. But species is exactly what you can’t point to. I find that I am and I am not a human, insofar as I did and did not contribute to global warming, depending on what scale you think I’m on, so these scales don’t have a smooth transition point between being one human and being part of the total population of humans—suddenly we find ourselves on one scale or another. It’s that paradox again. And it seems absurd. Surely seven billion (the current human population) is just one human times seven billion? In computational terms, there is total smoothness between one and seven billion. Yet there is a weird gap.
If you think metaphysically, you can apply a sorites logic to global warming. The sorites paradox is the logical paradox concerning heaps. It’s about how vague heaps are—when does a collection of things become a heap? If you take a single rock away from a heap of rocks, does that mean it is no longer a heap? What if you take ten rocks away? Where does the heap start, and where does it end? This quandary suggests a great deal of vagueness, and some philosophers don’t like vagueness, so they don’t believe heaps exist at all. The trouble is, ecological things such as populations (for example human ones) and ecosystems are very well described as heaps of things. So we had better allow heaps to exist if we’re going to be ecological, because addressing global warming and mass extinction can only be done at a massive, collective scale.
If you think about it, global warming is a heap of actions. Let’s analyze it using the logic that results in the sorites paradox. One car ignition firing doesn’t cause global warming. Two? No. Three? No. You can work your way all the way to one billion and the same logic will hold. So there is no global warming. Or—drum roll—your logic sucks. How does it suck? It sucks by having no time for things that are in between true and false, black and white. Ecological beings such as lifeforms and global warming require modal and paraconsistent logics. These logics allow for some degree of ambiguity and flexibility. Sentences can be kind of true, slightly false, almost right.
Heidegger argues that “true” and “false” aren’t so rigidly different as you might think. You can’t delete truthiness without getting into trouble, as I showed a bit earlier, because “true” applies to the things that Dasein is concerned with, and Dasein is mysterious and slippery. So we are always in the truth, because Dasein is the truth we keep trying to seek outside of Dasein. We’re always entangled in a thicket of prefabricated concepts that might not apply so well, because of the slippery quality of being. Perhaps this is why social media can be so violent: on Twitter, for example, everyone is trying to be right in one hundred and forty characters or less. Anxieties about “fake news” exist because in some ways, all news is “fake.” Everyone is trying to contain or erase the truthiness. But if entities are open, they are not completely nothing, nor are they constantly present, nor are they reducible to other things such as their parts or some access mode such as discourse or economic relations or Dasein. If entities are open, they are truthy through and through. And this actually implies that you can’t say just anything you want about entities. You can’t say an octopus is a toaster, or that global warming isn’t real, or that it wasn’t caused by humans, precisely because things are open and truthy. Things are exactly what they are, yet never how they appear, yet appearance is inseparable from being, so a thing is a twisted loop like a Möbius strip, in which the twist is everywhere, it has no starting or ending point. Appearance is the intrinsic twist in being.
An agricultural person—aka us—realizing that she is in a twisted historical or ethical or philosophical space experiences what is called tragedy, which is an agricultural-age way of computing the damage caused by an agricultural age. I’m caught in a twisted loop in which my attempt to escape the web of fate has been but a further entwining of that web. Tragedy supposes that looping is evil and that despite the fact that you find you can’t escape fate, especially when you try, there is this forlorn hope that in the end, or in some better world over yonder that we can never reach, we might be able to slip those bonds once and for all, hence the ultimately religious horizon of tragedy, where for instance the chorus tells you that there is nothing here that is not Zeus (in ancient Greek playwright Euripides’ play Heracles).
Tragedy is in fact a small region of comedy space, which is twisted all the way through. Right now, ecological awareness presents itself as tragedy. But sooner or later, we will start to smile, which is maybe how we get to cry for real. Since there is no beyond in which things are indeed totally straight, totally untwisted, it’s funny to watch us as a species acting as if there was such a beyond, and constantly slipping into the web of fate, like a slapstick character whose attempt to get from A to B keeps being hampered by his very style of trying to get from A to B. This is why art, which disables getting from A to B by causing the illusion of smooth functioning to malfunction, so as to reveal the spooky openness of things, is in the end joyful and funny, though we need to traverse and respect and not delete a realm of exquisite pain to get there. We really are making this Earth unlivable for ourselves and other lifeforms. I’m not suggesting we just sit back and laugh at that.
Several realms, in fact. Realms of truthfeel. Ecologically speaking, I think the pathway is likely to lead us from guilt down into shame, and from there down into disgust, whence to horror; from there begins ridicule, which dies out in melancholia, whose enabling chemistry is sadness; in turn, sadness is conditioned by longing, which implies joy.10 At present, the ways in which we talk to ourselves about ecology are stuck in horror mode: disgust, shame, guilt. Eventually things get so horrifying that someone goes “You gotta be fucking kidding,” like that character in John Carpenter’s film The Thing, looking at the latest mutation of the feminized simulation monster. A ridiculous, absurd laughter breaks out.11 We aren’t quite there yet—we’re almost there, which is why some really progressive ecological art, such as the work of the American artist Marina Zurkow, plays with a sardonic kind of eco-humor. We are beginning to trust the tactic of not waking ourselves up from the nightmare, but allowing ourselves to fall further into it, beyond horror. Underneath ridicule space is a melancholy region where things become less horrifying and more uncertain, all kinds of fantasy beings float around like mermaids among the seaweed and submarines. A realm of unspeakable, nonhuman beauty not confined to normative anthropocentric parameters begins to open up.
Another way of saying the same thing is that we are starting to trust that we are in a catastrophe, which literally means a space of downward-turning. It’s much better to think you are in a catastrophe than to think you are in a disaster. There are no witnesses in disaster. Disasters are what you witness from the outside. Catastrophes involve you, so you can do something about them.
Think about it. This whole “world without us” fantasy is very suspicious from that point of view. In the last two decades, philosophers and television producers and artists have taken an interest in imagining an Earth without humans. I’m not sure exactly why it started, but I’m pretty sure of the general reason: the media is tuning in to global warming and mass extinction. The paradox is that as you imagine a future in which humans have gone extinct, there you are, imagining that. It’s a vicarious thrill, like rubbernecking a car accident, and it might be just as obnoxious and dangerous. In the real world, given how entangled we have become with earth systems, if we go extinct it means that many, many lifeforms have also gone extinct or are about to. Opposing anthropocentrism doesn’t mean that we hate humans and want ourselves to go extinct. What it means is seeing how we humans are included in the biosphere as one being among others.
This brings up a deep philosophical insight about the fact that we simply can’t be on the outside looking in. Scientists call this fact “confirmation bias” and philosophers call it “the hermeneutic circle” and “phenomenological style.” There is no way to escape such things. How I interpret data will depend on what I think I want to find. How I see myself depends on the kind of person I am. How I interpret things is entangled with prefabricated concepts about what interpreting means. This gives rise to a strange insight, which is that living in a scientific age doesn’t mean you are living in a cold world of objectivity. It means that you realize you can’t achieve escape velocity from your phenomenological style or embeddedness in data interpretation or confirmation bias (three different ways of saying the same thing). We cannot get out.
Funnily enough, living in a scientific age means we have stopped believing in authoritative truth. That kind of truth is pretty medieval, always backed up by the threat of violence because it can’t be proved: you just have to believe it. Instead, our modern age is a truthiness domain. Science means we still might be wrong, and we may find ourselves holding on to a bunch of weird assumptions that don’t quite make sense, but this is better than firmly believing we are right because the Pope ordered us to believe whatever.
Mass extinction is so awful, so incomprehensible, so horrible—and at present it’s so invisible. We hardly know where to start, apart from either ignoring it or electroshocking ourselves about it. One of the recent mass extinctions, the End Permian Extinction, also involved global warming. It happened about 252 million years ago, and at that time, plants were to blame. Unlike plants, we can choose not to emit excessive amounts of carbon, so it’s not inevitable this time.
When I say recent, I’m alluding again to the fact there have only been five previous mass extinctions in the four-billion-year history of life on this planet. That fact alone, that fact of deep time, is horrifically disturbing. It was disturbing in the early nineteenth century, when geologists began to figure it out, and it’s disturbing now. We used to tell ourselves that it was disturbing to the poor dumb Victorians because it shook their faith in God. In exactly what is it shaking our faith now?
Ecology without Nature
Ecological awareness is shaking our faith in the anthropocentric idea that there is one scale to rule them all—the human one. Nietzsche announced that God was dead in the nineteenth century, and this is often taken to imply that humans face a meaningless existence. But this isn’t true. It’s the opposite. The death of God isn’t some empty, desolate wilderness, it’s a scary jungle swarming with creatures—literally. It’s thousands of equally legitimate spatiotemporal scales that have suddenly become available and significant to humans. We are so habituated to living and thinking on a very small range of timescales that students who train as geologists say that they have to go through a process of acclimatizing to much vaster tracts of time.
Now we know that ecological awareness means thinking and acting ethically and politically on a lot of scales, not just one. It’s not true, however, that this will feel like the kind of powerful thrill you get from playing with one of those online scale tools that zoom you in and out from the Planck length (the smallest currently measurable one) to the scale of the entire universe, or those humbling-yet-empowering clock faces on which humans appear at the last second before midnight; or those floor diagrams some scientist presenter walks across to show how we appear at the last sliver on the bottom right-hand corner. The scale in all of those is smooth and consistent—it’s a sort of hollowed-out, blown-up version of the good old anthropocentric scaling, only now we are in a privileged godlike position of omnipresence outside the universe, where every scale is just a toggle away. But it isn’t like that at all. That kind of thing confuses time with the measurement of time, and further it confuses the measurement of time with just a few kinds of measurement—the kinds that are convenient for humans. It’s not just true that there is a time for everything, as it says in Ecclesiastes (“a time to reap and a time to sow … ”); it’s the case that from grasses to gorillas to gargantuan black holes, everything has its own time, its own temporality.
Psychological research has shown that we are good at narrating the correct sequence of geological events: Earth emerges from a cloud of dust and gas, microbes evolve, followed by sponges, fish, butterflies, primates … But very few of us are able to imagine the right durations of geological time without special training. And being able to understand durations is particularly important for us right now, because global warming’s effects may last up to 100,000 years. What does that actually mean? We tend to have only two vague temporal categories in our heads: ancient and recent. We use these as a template to conceptualize what we call “prehistory” (the pre-“civilization” human stuff, and the nonhuman stuff) and “history” (the “civilization” stuff). It would be better, more logical, and requiring fewer beliefs to see everything—even now—as history and to see history as not exclusively human.
I think we have more in common with the Victorians than we’d sometimes like to admit. Indeed, the decisive emergence of what I call hyperobjects on our radar makes the sensibility of our contemporary moment extremely Victorian. Mary Anning discovered a dinosaur skeleton in an English cliff face, and the abyss of deep time opened up. The vast distributed processes of evolution were discovered. The gigantic Pacific weather system El Niño was discovered later in the nineteenth century. Marx traced the invisible workings of capitalism. Freud discovered the unconscious. And once again we stand in awe of gigantic entities massively distributed in time and space, in such a way that we can only point to tiny slices of them at a time. Once again we find our faith shaken, and now it has clearer contours: it’s not about the disappearance of an agricultural-age god. It’s much, much worse. It’s about the flip side, the unconscious, the unintended consequences of our faith in progress, which far precedes agricultural-age gods, as a matter of fact, and is their condition of possibility. A 12,500-year-long social, philosophical, and psychic logistics is now showing its colors, and they are disastrous.
And for the longest time these logistics were called Nature. Nature is just agricultural logistics in slow motion, the nice-seeming buildup to the Anthropocene, the gentle slope of the upwardly moving roller coaster that you don’t even suspect to be a roller coaster. Agricultural society coincided with the Holocene (our current geological period, which started over 10,000 years ago, marked by the retreat of the glaciers), which was remarkably stable and cyclic as far as Earth systems such as the nitrogen and carbon cycles went. It’s controversial, but some geologists actually think that the periodic, smoothly cycling form of the Holocene was in fact a product of the functioning of a certain agricultural mode. This mode began in Mesopotamia and elsewhere on Earth at the start of the Holocene. If it’s true that agriculture contributed to the stability of Earth systems, it makes things even more disturbing. Like when someone has a seizure, and their brain waves become beautifully regular just beforehand. Or before an earthquake, when the same thing happens to the tectonic plates. On this view, what is called Nature—the smooth cycling represented so nicely in feudal symbolic systems—is directly the Anthropocene in its less obvious mode. Then comes the huge Earth systems data spike we see in former US Vice President Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, the spike that starts around 1945, evidence of runaway carbon emissions.12 Everything starts to go haywire.
The inner logic of the smoothly functioning system—right up until the moment at which it wasn’t smoothly functioning, aka now—consists of logical axioms that have to do with survival no matter what. Existence no matter what. Existing overriding any quality of existing—human existing that is, and to hell with the lifeforms that aren’t our cattle (a term from which we get chattels, as in women in many forms of patriarchy, and the root of the word capital). Existence above and beyond qualities. This supremacy of existing is a default ontology and a default utilitarianism, and before any of it was philosophically formalized, it was built into social space, which now means pretty much the entire surface of Earth.
You can see it in the gigantic fields where automated farm equipment spins in its lonely efficient way. You can feel it in the field analogs such as huge meaningless lawns, massive parking lots, supersized meals. You can sense it in the general feeling of numbness or shock that greets the fact of mass extinction. Quite a while ago humans severed their social, philosophical, and psychic ties with nonhumans. We confront a blank-seeming wall in every dimension of our experience—social space, psychic space, philosophy space.
Uncannily we begin to realize that we are somewhere. Not nowhere. And we may find ourselves living in an age of mass extinction. I’m all for letting us linger in the strange openness of this uncanny discovery that space was just a convenient white Western anthropocentric construct for navigating your way around Africa to reach the Spice Islands, and so on. Because strangely, this feeling of openness, this uncanny sensation of finding ourselves somewhere and not recognizing it, is exactly a glimpse of living less definitively, in a world comprised almost entirely not of ourselves.
What then can we say about this world? How do we talk about it? What does the fact of ecological interconnection mean? We’re going to find out in the next chapter.
Notes
1. W. D. Richter, dir., The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension (20th Century Fox, 1984).
2. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter, 2009), 197–222.
3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 59–80.
4. Heidegger, Being and Time, 17.
5. Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime,” Remain in Light (Sire Records, 1980).
6. John Keats, “In Drear-Nighted December,” in The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1987), line 21.
7. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
8. Doctor Who, “Blink,” dir. Hettie MacDonald, written by Steven Moffat (BBC, 2007).
9. John Cage, “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 96–97 (96).
10. For a full discussion of this, see the end of Morton, Dark Ecology, 111–174.
11. John Carpenter, dir., The Thing (Universal Studios, 1982).
12. Davis Guggenheim, dir., An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Classics, 2006).